In Memoriam: Deaths in the 2000s
A list of famous people who died in the 2000s ranging from 2000 to 2009.
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- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
Fred Rogers was the host of the popular long-running public television children's show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. The show debuted in Pittsburgh in 1967 and was picked up by PBS the next year, becoming a staple of public TV stations around the United States. Rogers' mild manner, cardigan sweaters and soft speaking voice made him both widely beloved and widely parodied. Rogers ended production of the show in 2001, but reruns of the show continued to be aired on many PBS stations. He died in 2003 after a short battle with stomach cancer.- Music Artist
- Actor
- Composer
Michael Joseph Jackson was born on August 29, 1958 in Gary, Indiana, and entertained audiences nearly his entire life. His father, Joe Jackson (no relation to Joe Jackson, also a musician), had been a guitarist, but was forced to give up his musical ambitions following his marriage to Michael's mother Katherine Jackson (née Katherine Esther Scruse). Together, they prodded their growing family's musical interests at home. By the early 1960s, the older boys Jackie, Tito and Jermaine had begun performing around the city; by 1964, Michael and Marlon had joined in.
A musical prodigy, Michael's singing and dancing talents were amazingly mature, and he soon became the dominant voice and focus of the Jackson 5. An opening act for such soul groups as the O-Jays and James Brown, it was Gladys Knight (not Diana Ross) who officially brought the group to Berry Gordy's attention, and by 1969, the boys were producing back-to-back chart-busting hits as Motown artists ("I Want You Back," "ABC," "Never Can Say Goodbye," "Got to Be There," etc.). As a product of the 1970s, the boys emerged as one of the most accomplished black pop / soul vocal groups in music history, successfully evolving from a group like The Temptations to a disco phenomenon.
Solo success for Michael was inevitable, and by the 1980s, he had become infinitely more popular than his brotherly group. Record sales consistently orbited, culminating in the biggest-selling album of all time, "Thriller" in 1982. A TV natural, he ventured rather uneasily into films, such as playing the Scarecrow in The Wiz (1978), but had much better luck with elaborate music videos.
In the 1990s, the downside as an 1980s pop phenomenon began to rear itself. Michael grew terribly child-like and introverted by his peerless celebrity. A rather timorous, androgynous figure to begin with, his physical appearance began to change drastically, and his behavior grew alarmingly bizarre, making him a consistent target for scandal-making, despite his numerous charitable acts. Two brief marriages -- one to Elvis Presley's daughter Lisa Marie Presley -- were forged and two children produced by his second wife during that time, but the purposes behind them appeared image-oriented.
Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. His passion and artistry as a singer, dancer, writer and businessman were unparalleled, and it is these prodigious talents that will ultimately prevail over the extremely negative aspects of his troubled adult life.- Billy Mays was born on 20 July 1958 in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, USA. He was an actor and producer, known for Pitchman: A Tribute to Billy Mays (2009), Pitchmen (2009) and Grip Wrench Commercial (2002). He was married to Deborah Mays and Dolores DiDesiderio. He died on 28 June 2009 in Tampa, Florida, USA.
- Writer
- Actor
- Music Department
Steve Irwin was born in 1962 to parents Lyn and Bob Irwin, who were animal naturalists. He shared the love for animals all his life, stemming from being raised at the Queensland Reptile and Fauna Park. There, he partook in daily duties of animal feeding and care. He quickly established himself with the Queenland's government on the process of the country's Crocodile Relocation Program, in which the reptiles could be transferred and relocated to proper localties in the most absolute humane, non-tranquilizing manner. He frequently implements the non-tranquilizing factor in his televison show The Crocodile Hunter's Croc Files (1999). Steve married fellow naturalist, Terri Irwin (Baines) in 1992. She joined him in his adventures and efforts in almost every episode of his show. They had one daughter, Bindi Sue Irwin, who was born July 24, 1998. He died in September 2006 following an attack by a stingray, off the Great Barrier Reef.- Animation Department
- Director
- Writer
Starting as a cel washer, Chuck Jones worked his way up to animator and then director at the animation division of Warner Bros. He is famous for creating such beloved cartoon characters as Wile E. Coyote, Henery Hawk, Pepé Le Pew, Marvin the Martian, Ralph Wolf, Road Runner, Sam Sheepdog, Sniffles, and many others, as well as adding to the development of Warner favorites such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and countless others.
His most famous cartoons tend to have been created with writer Michael Maltese. Jones' autobiography, published by Simon & Schuster "Chuck Amuck"--a pun on his Daffy Duck short Duck Amuck (1953)--gives a very amusing account of his life. It is liberally sprinkled with hundreds of cartoons with some color plates.- Producer
- Director
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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
- Director
- Writer
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.- Animation Department
- Director
- Art Department
American layout designer Maurice Noble was proudly old-school, a self-proclaimed champion of the 'golden years' of animation. Working in the industry for more than six decades, he reached the peak of his profession with Disney and Warner Brothers and openly rejected the stylised approach to cartoons (spearheaded by UPA) which came into vogue during the 1950's and 60's. As a youth, Noble considered the very idea of drawing cartoons as 'kid's stuff'. He changed his tune somewhat after being hired by Disney in 1934 (for $100 a month -- a step up from his previous job as a department store designer). One of his first assignments was to draw watercolour backgrounds for the popular Silly Symphonies series. Noble served an obligatory probation period, then advanced to drawing sketches and backgrounds for some of Disney's finest animated features, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Bambi (1942) and Dumbo (1941) (he designed the "Pink Elephants on Parade" segment). Supporting the 1941 strike by 300 employees of the Cartoonists Guild cost Noble his job. Like many of his colleagues, he was to spend the war years with the Army Signal Corps helping to produce propaganda material, ranging from cartoons and posters to leaflets and booklets. His work on the "Private Snafu" cartoon series for Warner Brothers brought him into contact with the legendary Dr. Seuss and with his future boss Chuck Jones.
After demobilisation, Noble worked for some time as a freelancer in advertising (including for U.S. Steel). In 1952, he joined Jones at Warner Brothers. For several decades, their collaboration was immensely fruitful, and, according to Jones, "the perfect working relationship" (recent interviews and a biography -- "The Noble Approach: Maurice Noble and the Zen of Animation Design" by Tod Polson -- suggest otherwise: that the two men were often at loggerheads and certainly not friends). Nonetheless, Noble prospered at Warner Brothers. He enjoyed the spontaneity, camaraderie and artistic freedom -- in contrast to the more restrictive atmosphere at Disney, whose output he described as "over-refined". Noble's chief strength lay in adapting his various backgrounds to suit the specific mood of the cartoon, creating dramatic visual impact to enhance that mood. His famous creations include the minimalist desert-scapes of the Road Runner/Coyote cartoons and the futuristic city of Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953), complete with the electronic eyes and the evaporator. Among his personal favorites he cited Duck Amuck (1953) and the Wagnerian spoof What's Opera, Doc? (1957).
When Warners disbanded their animation department in 1964, Noble resumed his association with Jones, first at MGM (as designer and co-director of "Tom & Jerry" cartoons) and, later, with Jones' s own production company (collaborating on animated Dr. Seuss TV specials, including the Grammy Award-winning How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966)). In 1987, he became recipient of an Annie Award for excellence in animation. In 1993, he received a Disney Living Legend Award. By that time, Jones had become one of the oldest people still active in his chosen field.- Actor
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Walter Matthau was best known for starring in many films which included Charade (1963), The Odd Couple (1968), Grumpy Old Men (1993), and Dennis the Menace (1993). He often worked with Jack Lemmon and the two were Hollywood's craziest stars.
He was born Walter Jake Matthow in New York City, New York on October 1, 1920. His mother was an immigrant from Lithuania and his father was a Russian Jewish peddler and electrician from Kiev, Ukraine. As a young boy, Matthau attended a Jewish non-profit sleep-away camp. He also attended Surprise Lake Camp. His high school was Seward Park High School.
During World War II, Matthau served in the U.S. Army Air Forces with the Eighth Air Force in Britain as a Consolidated B-24 Liberator radioman-gunner, in the same 453rd Bombardment Group as James Stewart. He was based at RAF Old Buckenham, Norfolk during this time. He reached the rank of staff sergeant and became interested in acting.
Matthau appeared in the pilot of Mister Peepers (1952) alongside Wally Cox. He later appeared in the Elia Kazan classic, A Face in the Crowd (1957), opposite Patricia Neal and Andy Griffith, and then appeared in Lonely Are the Brave (1962), with Kirk Douglas, a film Douglas has often described as his personal favorite. Matthau then appeared in Charade (1963) with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. In 1968, Matthau made his big screen appearance as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple (1968) alongside Jack Lemmon. The two were also in the sequel (The Odd Couple II (1998)) as well as Grumpy Old Men (1993) and Grumpier Old Men (1995). Matthau was in Dennis the Menace (1993), alongside Mason Gamble. On July 1, 2000, Matthau died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, California. He was 79 years old.- Actor
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Jack Lemmon was born in Newton, Massachusetts, to Mildred Lankford Noel and John Uhler Lemmon, Jr., the president of a doughnut company. His ancestry included Irish (from his paternal grandmother) and English. Jack attended Ward Elementary near his Newton, MA home. At age 9 he was sent to Rivers Country Day School, then located in nearby Brookline. After RCDS, he went to high school at Phillips Andover Academy. Jack was a member of the Harvard class of 1947, where he was in Navy ROTC and the Dramatic Club. After service as a Navy ensign, he worked in a beer hall (playing piano), on radio, off Broadway, TV and Broadway. His movie debut was with Judy Holliday in It Should Happen to You (1954). He won Best Supporting Actor as Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts (1955). He received nominations in comedy (Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960)) and drama (Days of Wine and Roses (1962), The China Syndrome (1979), Tribute (1980) and Missing (1982)). He won the Best Actor Oscar for Save the Tiger (1973) and the Cannes Best Actor award for "Syndrome" and "Missing". He made his debut as a director with Kotch (1971) and in 1985 on Broadway in "Long Day's Journey into Night". In 1988 he received the Life Achievement Award of the American Film Institute.- Actor
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Johnny Carson, the legendary "King of Late Night TV" who dominated the medium's nether hours for three decades, was born in Corning, Iowa, but moved with his family to nearby Norfolk, Nebraska when he was eight years old. He was the son of Ruth E. (Hook) and Homer Lloyd "Kit" Carson, a manager of the Iowa-Nebraska Light & Power Company. It was in Norfolk, where he lived until he was inducted into the U.S. Navy in 1943, that he started his show business career. At age 14, Carson began appearing as the magician "The Great Carsoni" at local venues.
In 1962, Carson was chosen by NBC to succeed the controversial Jack Paar and his The Tonight Show Starring Jack Paar (1957). Paar had decided to quit the show and begin a once-a-week show for NBC in prime time on Friday nights. Carson would never be controversial like Paar, preferring to good-naturedly skewer politicians and celebrities in his opening monologue and staging stunts such as the on-stage marriage of retro-singer Tiny Tim to his "Miss Vicky" in 1969. His popularity with the late-night audience became so great, and the income from advertising on his show so profitable that, in 1967, NBC had to lure Johnny back to The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962)after a walkout with a three-year contract guaranteeing him a minimum of $4 million. In the early 1970s, TV Guide reported that Carson was earning $2 million a year, making him the highest paid TV entertainer ever, a record he repeatedly surpassed, pulling down a then-record $5 million annual salary in the 1980s. Carson created a sense of intimacy with his guests and audiences that made him the unvanquished "King of Nighttime TV". Countless talk shows hosted by the likes of Joey Bishop and Dick Cavett and other non-talk show programs were launched against him year after year only to fail, with the notable exception of ABC News Nightline (1980) halfway through his reign. His tempestuous love-life, which included two high-profile divorces, became the fodder of such celebrity staples as "The National Enquirer" and later "People Magazine", and he was even the subject of a roman a clef pulp novel in the early 1970s. There have been at least seven published biographies of Carson.
After brief stints on radio stations in Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska, his career was exclusively in television, starting with work at Nebraska TV stations in the late 1940s which preceded his 1951-53 skit program Carson's Cellar (1953) on Los Angeles station KNXT-TV. Attracting the attention of the industry, he was hired as a comedy writer for The Red Skelton Hour (1951) which provided him with a career breakthrough when Skelton was injured backstage and Carson substituted for him, delivering his first monologue before a national audience. This led to a stint as the host of the quiz show Earn Your Vacation (1954) and the variety showcase The Johnny Carson Show (1953) in 1955-56. The man who would soon become the most famous late-night TV personality in history hosted the daytime game show Who Do You Trust? (1956) from 1957-62, teaming up with longtime sidekick, Ed McMahon, in 1958.
Before his triumph on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962), Carson tried his hand at dramatic acting, appearing in Three Men on a Horse (1957) (episode # 1.29) during the inaugural season of Playhouse 90 (1956) in 1957. In 1960, he shot a pilot for a prime-time TV series, "Johnny Come Lately", that was not picked up by a network. Carson had sat in for "Tonight Show" host Jack Paar in 1958 and, when Paar left the show four years later, NBC chose Carson as his replacement, taking over the catbird seat on October 2, 1962. The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962). Sidekick McMahon's "Heeeeere's Johnny!!!" introduction of Carson became a cultural catchphrase, memorably reprised by Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), Woody Allen's character in the Best Picture Academy Award-winning Annie Hall (1977), stand-up comic Alvy Singer, is recognized in front of a movie theater by a street tough due to his appearance on "The Tonight Show".
Aside from his banter with celebrities, he amused his audience for 30 years with broadly played skit comedy by his "Mighty Carson Art Players" and his spoof clairvoyant "Carnac the Magnificent". He made memorable put-downs of politicians and celebrities, a format that was used by his successors Jay Leno and David Letterman and legions of comics who came after him. When a joke bombed during his monologues, Carson would do a wounded double-take as the audience jeered, fully aware of the awfulness of the joke he had just unloaded. Following these bombs with a sly, self-deprecating remark engendered a sense of intimacy between Carson and his fans.
A liberal in the increasingly liberal age of the 1960s and 1970s, so powerful were his opening monologues that by the early 1970s, he could actually affect society at large outside of the pop culture realm. A joke about a shortage of industrial grade toilet paper caused a national panic and a run on all grades of t.p., with a resulting shortage of the product about which he had kidded. Playing off current events such as the Watergate crisis, his comic evisceration of President Richard Nixon was credited with some critics as exerting such a drag on Nixon's approval rating that it made his resignation possible, if not inevitable. After Carson's reign, it became increasingly de rigueur for politicians to appear on late-night TV talk shows and bear a host's jibes in order to stump for votes.
Carson's connection with the American culture was so absolute, it contributed to one of his few failures, the rejection of "The Tonight Show" in the early 1980s by British audiences who could not understand the topical references of his monologues. And his audience's identification of Johnny with the "Tonight Show" effectively stopped him from work in other media. In the mid-1960s, Carson's agents wanted to trade on his vast popularity to position him in motion pictures as the "New Jack Lemmon", but Carson never made any forays outside of television. His connection with the movie industry remained his hosting of three generations of stars and his memorable turns as the host of five Academy Awards telecasts from 1979-84. In that role, he generally is regarded as the best successor to long-time Oscar host Bob Hope. He did stretch his wings as a producer, his Carson Productions producing TV pilots and series, TV movies and [error], in addition to his own talk show.
The six-time Emmy-winner considered a follow-up to "The Tonight Show", but nothing caught his interest and he spent the last decade of his life in a quiet retirement in Malibu, California, as befitted his private nature. Thus, it was "The Tonight Show" that remains his creative legacy. Unlike every other TV star, he remained on top until the very end, the show winning its ratings period every year for 30 years. When Carson retired, his last appearance was one of the highest rated late night TV shows ever.
"I have an ego like anybody else", Carson told The Washington Post in 1993, "but I don't need to be stoked by going before the public all the time". Frederick De Cordova, the producer of "The Tonight Show" throughout Carson's 30-year run, believed that Carson never pressured himself to launch a follow-up as he already had achieved unprecedented success on TV. "He is one of a kind, was one of a kind", De Cordova said in 1995. "I don't think there's any reason for him to try something different".
Carson, who was suffering from emphysema and had quadruple bypass surgery in 1999, died peacefully at the age of 79 on January 23, 2005, surrounded by his family and friends. In terms of career longevity, popularity, peer respect and impact on the medium, Carson ranks with Lucille Ball and Jackie Gleason as a television great.- Actor
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Ed McMahon's first appearance before a microphone was as a 15-year-old "caller" at a bingo game in Maine. After that, he spent the next three years touring the state fair and carnival circuit. A Marine fighter pilot during World War II, McMahon sold vegetable slicers on Atlantic City's boardwalk to put himself through Catholic University in Washington, DC. In the 1950s, he hosted a late-night interview show in Philadelphia before working as a clown on the show Big Top (1950). His next assignment was as a fighter pilot during the Korean War. After that, he resumed his career in television. In 1959, he was hired as Johnny Carson's straight man on the daytime quiz show Who Do You Trust? (1956). When Carson succeeded Jack Paar on NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Jack Paar (1957), which became The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962), he took McMahon with him. This job lasted for 30 years and made McMahon wealthy and famous. On the big screen, he played straight roles in the dramatic The Incident (1967) -- for which he got very good reviews -- and in the comic Fun with Dick and Jane (1977). He also appeared in made-for-TV movies and hosted daytime game shows in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, McMahon teamed with Dick Clark on Super Bloopers and Practical Jokes (1984) and hosted his own long-running talent show, Star Search (1983). He also made commercial appearances for a multitude of products. In 1994, he was cast as himself in Love Affair (1994) with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.- Actress
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Brittany Murphy was born Brittany Anne Bertolotti on November 10, 1977 in Atlanta, Georgia, to Sharon Kathleen Murphy and Angelo Joseph Bertolotti. Her father's ancestry is Italian, and her mother is of Irish and Slovak descent. Her father moved the family back to Edison, New Jersey as a native New Yorker and to be closer to other siblings from previous marriages. While dining out one night in the presence of Hollywood royalty, Brittany at the age of 5 approached an adjoining table when Academy Award nominee Burt Reynolds and George Segal were seated. Brittany introduced herself to the Hollywood legends and confidently told them that someday she too would be a star.
She comes from a long line of international musicians and performers with three half-brothers and a sister. Angelo Bertolotti was torn from their tight-knit family as a made-man with the Italian Mafia. The Senior Bertolotti, who coined the nickname of "Britt" for his daughter, was also an entrepreneur and diplomat for organized crime families and one of the first to be subjected to a RICO prosecution. Brittany's interests and well-being were always her father's first goal and objective. To distance his talented daughter from his infamous past, Angelo allowed Sharon to use her maiden name for Brittany's, so that her shining star would not be overshadowed by a father's past, with the couple divorcing thereafter.
Brittany began receiving accolades and applause in regional theater at the early age of 9. At the age of 13, she landed several national commercials. She appeared on television and caught the attention of a personal manager and an agent. Soon, Brittany's mother Sharon turned full-time to being a "Stage Mom" where Angelo provided financial support throughout and their relationship is memorialized with a long and close history in pictures. The hopeful daughter and mother moved to Burbank, CA, where Brittany landed her first television role on Blossom (1990). Hearts and doors opened up for a starring role on Drexell's Class (1991), a short lived TV series.
Brittany's big screen movie debut started with Clueless (1995), where she was co-starring with Alicia Silverstone. Britt soared, demonstrating her musical and artistic talents with dramatic and comedic roles landing a nomination for best leading female performance in the Young Artist Awards for her role in the television film David and Lisa (1998). She garnered tremendous attention for her role in Girl, Interrupted (1999) with Academy Award winner Angelina Jolie. Brittany's band, "Blessed Soul" was growing with her as lead singer and Britt lent her vocal talents to the TV hit, cartoon sensation, King of the Hill (1997) as the voice of Luanne.
She is alleged to have been a witness in the case of the former Department of Homeland Security employee and persecuted whistleblower Julia Davis. According to Davis, Brittany and her fiancée Simon Monjack were then targeted for retaliation that included land and aerial surveillance and a threatened prosecution. Monjack was arrested and detained by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Brittany and Simon confided in Alex Ben Block of the Hollywood Reporter, telling him in an interview that they were under surveillance by helicopters and their telephones have been wiretapped. This information was published by THR posthumously, in an article entitled "The Last Difficult Days of Brittany Murphy."
On December 20, 2009, Brittany Murphy died an untimely death. The LAPD and Los Angeles County Coroner closed the case within one hour, attributing her death to pneumonia and anemia. Five months after Brittany's unexpected demise, her husband Simon Monjack was found dead in the house he shared with Brittany. The chief/spokesperson at the Los Angeles County Dept of Coroner, Craig Harvey, stated that Simon also died from the same exact causes as his wife, namely pneumonia and anemia. Neither Brittany, nor Simon, were given a thorough and complete forensic autopsy for poisons. Brittany's father, Angelo "AJ" Bertolotti, is pursuing the investigation of the true reasons behind Brittany's and Simon's sudden demise, as he believes that the two were murdered. Abnormally high levels of heavy metals and poisons were discovered in Brittany's hair, tested by two other independent forensic labs with famed Pathologist, attorney Cyril Wecht concluded from the appearances, Brittany could have been murdered and should be exhumed. Her father Angelo is preparing court actions to ensure she obtains justice.- Actress
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Farrah Fawcett is a true Hollywood success story. Born in Texas, she was the daughter of Pauline Fawcett (Pauline Alice Evans), a homemaker, and James Fawcett, an oil field contractor. She was a natural athlete, something that her father encouraged, and she attended a high school with a strong arts program. She attended the University of Texas in Austin, graduating with a degree in Microbiology, but only wanted to be an actress.
Winning a campus beauty contest got her noticed by an agent, who encouraged her to pursue acting. After graduating, she moved to Los Angeles and her healthy, all-American blond beauty was immediately noticed. She quickly got roles in various television commercials for such products as Ultra-Brite toothpaste, and Wella Balsam shampoo, and also made appearances in some TV series. In 1968, she met another Southerner, actor Lee Majors, star of the popular TV series The Big Valley (1965), on a blind date set up by their publicists. He became very taken with her and also used his own standing to promote her career. In 1969, she made her film debut in Love Is a Funny Thing (1969). The next year, she appeared in the film adaptation of the Gore Vidal bestselling novel Myra Breckinridge (1970). The shooting was very unpleasant, with much feuding on the set, and Farrah was embarrassed by the finished film, which was a major failure. But Farrah was undamaged and continued to win roles. In 1973, she and Majors married, and the following year, she won a recurring role in the crime series, Harry O (1973). She had her first taste of major success when she won a supporting role in the science fiction film, Logan's Run (1976). She came to the attention of the highly successful producer Aaron Spelling, who was impressed by her beauty and vivacious personality. That won her a role in the TV series, Charlie's Angels (1976). She played a private investigator who works for a wealthy and mysterious businessman, along with two other glamorous female detectives, played by Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith. The show immediately became the most popular series on television, earning record ratings and a huge audience. All three actresses became very popular, but Farrah became, by far, the best known. She won the People's Choice Award for Favorite Female Performer in a New TV program in 1977. Her lush, free-wheeling, wavy blond hair also became a phenomenon, with millions of women begging their hairstylists to give them "The Farrah", as her hairstyle was called. Fawcett was also a savvy businesswoman, and she received 10% profit from the proceeds of her famous poster in a red swimsuit. It sold millions and she became the "It Girl" of the 1970s.
Fawcett was America's sweetheart and found herself on every celebrity magazine and pursued by photographers and fans. While she enjoyed the success and got along well with her co-stars (both of whom were also of Southern origin), she found the material lightweight. Also, the long hours she worked were beginning to take a toll on her marriage to Majors, who found himself eclipsed by her popularity. So the following year, when the show was at its peak, she left to pursue a movie career. Charlie's Angels' producers sued her, and the studios shied away from her, and she lost out on the lead role in the hit feature film Foul Play (1978) to Goldie Hawn. Eventually, she and the Charlie's Angels producers reached a settlement, where she would make guest appearances on the series. As a result of the negative publicity and some poor script choices, her career briefly hit a slow spot. In addition, she and Majors separated in 1979. She had starring roles in Somebody Killed Her Husband (1978), Sunburn (1979), and Saturn 3 (1980) (which she did a topless scene in), but all three failed financially. She appeared in the Burt Reynolds chase comedy The Cannonball Run (1981), which was successful financially, but it was met not only with bad reviews but also with bad publicity when Farrah's stunt double Heidi Von Beltz was involved in a stunt that went horribly wrong and left her a quadriplegic. Farrah's feature film career came to a halt, and she and Majors were drifting apart. In 1981, she met Ryan O'Neal, a friend of her husband's, and they began became friends and spent a great deal of time together. He also encouraged her to go back to television and she received good reviews in the well-received miniseries, Murder in Texas (1981). In 1982, she filed for divorce, which Majors readily agreed to. Soon, she and O'Neal were a couple and moved in together. She set on sights on becoming a serious dramatic actress. She took over for Susan Sarandon in the stage play, "Extremities", where she played a rape victim who turns the tables on her rapist. That, in turn, led her to her major comeback, when she starred in the searing story of a battered wife in The Burning Bed (1984), based on a true story. It garnered a very large audience, and critics gave her the best reviews she had ever received for her heartfelt performance. She was nominated for both an Emmy and Golden Globe and also became involved in helping organizations for battered women. The following year, she and O'Neal became the parents of a son, Redmond O'Neal. She tried to continue her momentum with a starring role in the feature film adaptation of Extremities (1986), and while she garnered a Golden Globe nomination, the film, itself, was not a hit.
She continued to seek out serious roles, appearing mainly on television. She scored success again in Small Sacrifices (1989), again based on a true crime. Portraying an unhappy woman who is so obsessed with the man she loves that she shoots her children to make herself available and disguises it as a carjacking, Farrah again won rave reviews and helped draw a large audience, and was nominated for an Emmy again. Shortly afterwards, she and O'Neal co-starred in Good Sports (1991), playing a couple who co-star in a sports news program, but O'Neal's performance was lambasted and only 9 episodes were aired. In 1995, she surprised her fans by posing for "Playboy" at the age of 48, it became the magazine's best-selling issue of that decade.
Her relationship with O'Neal was deteriorating, however, and in 1997, they broke up. The breakup took a toll, and she posed for Playboy again at the age of 50. To promote it, she appeared on Late Show with David Letterman (1993) and gave a rambling interview, sparking rumors of drug use. That same year, however, she made another comeback in The Apostle (1997), playing the neglected wife of a Pentacostal preacher, played by Robert Duvall. Both stars were praised and the film became a surprise hit. She also began dating James Orr, who had directed her earlier in the feature film, Man of the House (1995). An incident occurred between them in 1998, and Farrah suffered injuries. The scandal drew nationwide headlines, especially after the tabloids published photos of Farrah with her injuries. The authorities compelled Fawcett to testify against Orr in court, and he was found guilty of assault and given a minimum sentence. Embarrassed, she lowered her profile and her career lost momentum, but she continued to work in television and films. She and O'Neal also started seeing each other again, when he was diagnosed with leukemia. The new millennium brought her highs and lows. In 2000, she acted with Richard Gere in Robert Altman's film, Dr. T & the Women (2000). Her son Redmond has had problems with drug abuse and has been in and out of jail. In 2001, she lost her only sister, Diane Fawcett Walls, to cancer. In 2004, she received her third Emmy nomination for her performance in The Guardian (2003), and she starred in her own reality show, titled Chasing Farrah (2005), in 2005 along with Ryan O'Neal, but that ended after only 7 episodes. That same year, she was devastated when her beloved mother, Pauline Fawcett, died. In 2006, producer Aaron Spelling died, and she famously reunited with her Charlie's Angels co-stars, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith, at the Emmys, in a tribute to him. She looked tan and healthy, but soon, she was diagnosed with anal cancer. She asked her friend Alana Stewart to accompany her and videotape her during her doctor's visits. Those video journals resulted in the documentary Farrah's Story (2009), co-executive produced by Fawcett. It aired in 2009, and viewers were shocked to see Farrah with a shaved head and in a continuous state of pain. Ryan O'Neal and Alana Stewart were constantly by her side, and her Charlie's Angels co-stars, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith, also visited her, marking the final time that all three original Angels appeared together on television. The documentary became a ratings success, and it earned a Emmy nomination as Outstanding Nonfiction Special. On June 25, 2009 Farrah lost her battle with cancer and passed away at aged 62. She left the bulk of her estate to her only son Redmond, and her trust fund allowed for the creation of The Farrah Fawcett Foundation, which provides funding for cancer research and prevention. Alana Stewart is the president of the Foundation and Jaclyn Smith's husband Dr. Brad Allen is one of the Board of Directors. Ryan O'Neal and Farrah's nephew, Greg Walls, are also on the Advisory Board, keeping alive her legacy.- Actor
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Milton Berle was an American comedian and actor.
Berle's career as an entertainer spanned over 80 years, first in silent films and on stage as a child actor, then in radio, movies and television. As the host of NBC's Texaco Star Theatre (1948-55), he was the first major American television star and was known to millions of viewers as "Uncle Miltie" and "Mr. Television" during the first Golden Age of Television. He was honored with two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in both radio and TV.
Berle won the Emmy for Most Outstanding Kinescoped Personality in 1950. In 1979, Berle was awarded a special Emmy Award, titled "Mr. Television." He was twice nominated for Emmys for his acting, in 1962 and 1995.
Berle was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1984. On December 5, 2007, Berle was inducted into the California Hall of Fame.- Actor
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Spike was born an 'Army Brat', the son of an Irish Captain in the British Raj in India. Educated in a series of Roman Catholic schools in India and at Lewisham Polytechnic in England, he spent his formative years playing the fool and playing the trumpet in local jazz bands.
He joined the British Army himself (under protest if you believe his auto-biogs) as a conscript at the outbreak of WWII. He served in the Royal Artillery as Gunner Milligan through the North African and Italian campaigns. He got a bit too close to an exploding shell and was hospitalised with shell-shock. On his escape from army life he started his "real" work as an author and humourist.
Most famous for 'The Goon Show' with Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe (and originally Michael Bentine), these radio shows are commonly regarded as re-writing the rules of comedy (even before Monty Python). However under the pressure of writing all the scripts he suffered a breakdown and became a clinical manic-depressive.
He was fondly regarded as the last of the great British eccentrics and had written a wealth of comic poetry mainly for children, a few novels and his multi-volume auto-biography. Spike was also a keen (fanatical?) environmental campaigner.- Actor
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Dudley Moore, the gifted comedian who had at least three distinct career phases that brought him great acclaim and success, actually started out as a musical prodigy as a child. Moore -- born in Dagenham, Essex, England to working class parents in 1935 -- won a music scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, to study the organ. At university, he also studied composition and became a classically trained pianist, though his forte on the piano for public performance was jazz. After graduating from Magdalen College in 1958, Moore was offered a position as organist at King's College, Cambridge, but turned it down in order to go to London and pursue a music and acting career. Fellow Oxonian Alan Bennett (Exter Colelge, B.A., Medieval History, 1957) had already recommended him to John Bassett, who was putting together a satirical comedy revue called "Beyond the Fringe". "Beyond the Fringe" was to be Moore's first brush with fame, along with co-stars Bennett, future theatrical director Jonathan Miller (now Sir Jonathan, who studied Medicine at Cambridge and was a physician), and Peter Cook, who was destined to become Moore's comic partner during the 1960s and '70s.
It was Miller who had recommended Cook for "Beyond the Fringe", in much the same way that Bennett had bird-dogged Moore. Cook, who had studied modern languages at Cambridge, had been part of the famous Cambridge theatrical, the Footlights revue in 1959, had subsequently gone to London to star in a West End revue for Kenneth Williams, "Pieces of Eight". This old-fashioned review was such a success there was a sequel, "One Over the Eight". He was advised by his agent not to star in the Fringe with the three others as he was a professional, whereas they were amateurs. Ironically, the great success of "Beyond the Fringe", which was a new kind of satirical comedy, would doom the very old-fashioned reviews that Cook had just tasted success in. "Beyond the Fringe" not only won great acclaim in the UK, but it was a hit in the U.S.. The four won a special Tony Award in 1963 for their Broadway production of "Beyond the Fringe" and there was a television program made of the revue in 1964.
Moore and Cook were offered the TV show Not Only... But Also (1965) by the BBC in 1965. Peter Cook was on as a guest. Their pairing was so successful, it enjoyed a second season in 1966 and a third in 1970. They were particularly funny as the working-class characters "Pete" and "Dud". The duo then broke into the movies, including The Wrong Box (1966) and Bedazzled (1967). In 1974, the duo won their second Tony Award for their show "Good Night", which was the stage version of their TV series "Not Only... But Also".
In the mid- to late 1970s, they issued three comic albums in the guise of the characters "Derek" and "Clive" (Moore and Cook, respectively), two lavatory attendants that many viewed as reincarnations of their earlier TV characters "Pete" and "Dud". The albums, ad-libbed in a recording studio while the two drank vast quantities of alcohol, were noted at the time for their obscenity. Their typical routine was a stream-of-consciousness fugue by Cook, interspersed with interjections by Moore. With their obscenity-laden, free-formed riffs, Derke and Clive presaged the more free-wheeling shock comedy of the 1980s and '90s.
They subsequently split up as Moore could no longer tolerate Cook's alcoholism. Under the influence, Cook would become abusive towards Moore, whose acting career was undergoing a renaissance in the late '70s while his career has stalled. Ironically, it was playing an alcoholic that brought Moore to the summit of his success as an actor.
After marrying American actress Tuesday Weld in 1975, Moore moved to the U.S. and began a second career as a solo screen comedian, stealing the show from Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn as the horny conductor in the movie comedy, Foul Play (1978). When George Segal dropped out of the movie 10 (1979), director Blake Edwards cast Moore in the lead role as the composer undergoing a mid-life crisis. It was a huge hit, but was surpassed by his Oscar-nominated turn as the dipsomaniac billionaire in Arthur (1981). In the early 1980s, Moore was a top box office attraction. In 1983, the National Alliance of Theater Owners named him the Top Box Office Star-Male of the Year.
His career began petering out after he turned down the lead in Splash (1983), a role that helped establish Tom Hanks as a top movie comedian and position him for his transition into movie drama and super-stardom. As Hanks star waxed, Moore's star waned, and by 1985 he was reduced to playing an elf in Santa Claus: The Movie (1985), one of the all time turkeys. Even a second turn as "Arthur" in Arthur 2: On the Rocks (1988) couldn't revive his box office, the dependent clause of the title all too well describing his career. His TV series Dudley (1993) was a bust, and the 1990s proved a wasteland for the once-honored and prosperous comedian.
Moore was deeply affected by the January 1995 death of Peter Cook by a gastrointestinal hemorrhage at the age of 57. Moore organized a two-day memorial to Cook in Los Angeles that was held in November 1995. Less than four years later, in September 1999, Moore announced that he was afflicted with progressive supra-nuclear palsy, a disease for which there is no treatment.
Dudley Moore was invested as a Commander of the Order of The British Empire (one step below knighthood) in June 2001. Moore personally attended the ceremony at Buckingham Palace to accept his CBE from Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales (later King Charles III), despite being unable to speak and being wheelchair-bound. He died in Watchung, New Jersey on March 27, 2002, a month shy of his 67th birthday, from the pneumonia related to progressive supra-nuclear palsy.
Dudley Moore was married four times, to actresses Suzy Kendall, Tuesday Weld, Brogan Lane and Nicole Rothschild, and had two sons, one with Tuesday Weld and one with Nicole Rothschild.- Actor
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Born Paul Wilchinsky on December 21, 1922, the son of Sol and Clara Wilchinsky, Paul Winchell grew up to be the most beloved ventriloquist of American children. Ironically, as famous as Paul was, his dummy, Jerry Mahoney, was probably more famous. Not since Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy in the previous two decades had a ventriloquist and his dummy known equal celebrity.
Entering the spotlight on the Edward Bowes "Original Amateur Hour" (1948), he began working soon after in a review show in which Major Bowes would showcase the winners of his radio program. He started his television career on the CBS program The Bigelow Show (1948) in 1948; The Paul Winchell Show (1950), originally called "The Spiedel Show," in 1950; and, finally, the best-known of his shows Winchell-Mahoney Time (1965). With a clubhouse premise, his dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff--another of Paul's characters--as the clubhouse leaders, and the music of the bandleader Milton Delugg. A new innovation of Winchell's was to replace the dummy's hands with those of puppeteers who were hidden behind the dummies in a crate. Winch also played many serous dramatic roles on television without his dummy sidekicks.
What may be even more famous is that he created the voice of Tigger for the Walt Disney Company's "Winnie The Pooh" motion-picture series, based on the famous books by A.A. Milne. He played the role behind the scenes until 1999, when he was replaced by Jim Cummings, who also voiced Pooh from the time that Sterling Holloway died. He was also the voice of many other world-famous cartoon characters.
A little-known fact about Winchell is that he was one of the original inventors of an artificial heart--years before the first successful transplant with such of a device--an automobile that runs on battery power, a method for breeding tilapia, and many other inventions that are still around today.- Actor
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Comedic actor Howard ("Howie") Jerome Morris, of Jewish heritage, was born in The Bronx, New York, on September 4, 1919. This short, quicksilver comic of TV's "Golden Age" also went on to possess one of the finest vocal instruments for animation. Classically trained on the Shakespearean stage, he forged his own destiny in an entirely different direction after a chance meeting with Carl Reiner in a radio workshop. Following military service in World War II, in which the two entertained troops together (they appeared in Army productions of "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" directed by none other than Maurice Evans, they returned to the professional entertainment fold and appeared together in a 1946 road company of the stage musical "Call Me Mister." Howie also went on to be featured on Broadway as Rosencrantz in "Hamlet" and in the original production of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." He and Reiner would reconnect when asked to come aboard as part of the acting repertory team on Your Show of Shows (1950) and its successor Caesar's Hour (1954), the classic sketch TV show of the 1950s that starred Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. After years of "second banana" TV success, Howie wished for "top banana" stardom and sought work as such with varying degrees of success.
On the New York stage he co-starred as the leprechaun Og in a 1960 revival of "Finian's Rainbow" and, from the early 1960s on, his mastery of dialects and vocal versatility made him an important staple at the Hanna-Barbera animation studio, offering hundreds upon hundreds of voices for The Flintstones (1960), The Jetsons (1962), Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1971), and other such classic Saturday morning cartoon shows as well as the popular voices of Adam Ant, Gerald McBoing-Boing, Beetle Bailey and Jughead Jones. He would intersperse this work with some catchy offbeat characterizations in front of the camera, usually comedic but occasionally dramatic, on both the big and small screens. He added zest to a host of standard comedy films including Boys' Night Out (1962) with Kim Novak, The Nutty Professor (1963) and Way... Way Out (1966), both with Jerry Lewis, and Mel Brooks' spoofs High Anxiety (1977) and History of the World: Part I (1981). As for television, Howie directed Danny Thomas and Andy Griffith in their respective sitcoms, and made a wonderfully eccentric impression on-camera as the grizzled, bucolic, rock-tossing Ernest T. Bass on Griffith's 60's show. The role became such a popular character that Howie was invited to play it sporadically for three seasons.
Morris also turned to film directing and helmed such fluff as Who's Minding the Mint? (1967), With Six You Get Eggroll (1968) and Don't Drink the Water (1969), the last-mentioned written by Woody Allen. Seen more than heard during his twilight career, he continued on with directing commercials and popped up here and there well into the 1990s in comic cameos and as a vocal artist. Married five times (twice to one woman) with four children in all, Howie suffered from poor health in later years and died of congestive heart failure at age 84, on May 21, 2005. He was buried at Hillside Memorial Park in Los Angeles.- Actor
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Although versatile character actor and voice extraordinary Henry Corden will forever be associated with, and fondly remembered for, providing the bellicose, gravel-toned rasp of cartoon immortal Fred Flintstone, he enjoyed a long and varied career prior to this distinction, which took up most of his later years.
Born in Montreal, Canada, on Tuesday, January 6, 1920, his family moved to New York while he was still a child. Henry received his start on stage and radio before heading off to Hollywood in the 1940s. He made his film debut as a minor heavy in the Danny Kaye vehicle, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), as Boris Karloff's bestial henchman, and continued on along those same lines, often in uncredited/unbilled parts. A master at dialects, he was consistently employed as either an ethnic Middle Eastern villain or some sort of streetwise character (club manager, salesman) in 1950s costumed adventures and crime yarns, both broad and serious.
He seldom made it into the prime support ranks, however, with somewhat insignificant parts in Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion (1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Viva Zapata! (1952), Scaramouche (1952), I Confess (1953), King Richard and the Crusaders (1954), Jupiter's Darling (1955) and The Ten Commandments (1956). On TV, he could regularly be found on both drama ("Perry Mason", "The Untouchables") and light comedy ("My Little Margie," "Mister Ed"). A heightened visibility on TV included playing Barbara Eden's genie father on "I Dream of Jeannie" and as the contentious landlord "Mr. Babbitt" on "The Monkees".
Henry made a highly lucrative move into animation in the 1960s supplying a host of brutish voices on such cartoons as "Johnny Quest", "The Jetsons", "Secret Squirrel", "Atom Ant", "Josie and the Pussycats", and "The Harlem Globetrotters". He inherited the voice of Fred Flintstone after the show's original vocal owner, Alan Reed, passed away in 1977. He went on to give life to Flintstone for nearly three decades on various revamped cartoon series, animated specials and cereal commercials. He was performing as Flintstone, in fact, until about three months prior to his death of emphysema at the age of 85 on Wednesday, May 19, 2005.
Married four times, he was survived by wife Angelina; two daughters (from his first marriage), and three stepchildren (from his last union).- Actor
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Typical of busy character actors, Fiedler made his face (and voice) recognizable to millions. Many know the bald-pated Fiedler as therapy patient "Mr. Peterson" on The Bob Newhart Show (1972); others might first recognize him for the 1968 movie, The Odd Couple (1968), and spin-off TV show, The Odd Couple (1970), or perhaps even from the Broadway play that preceded them. Even kids would know that helium-high voice from animated Disney features like Robin Hood (1973), The Fox and the Hound (1981) and the "Winnie the Pooh" stories, in which he voiced "Piglet". The son of an Irish-German beer salesman, Fiedler knew he wanted to be an actor from his childhood days, when he had a full head of reddish-yellow hair. He made his first professional appearances onstage, branched out into live TV in New York and, then, during the 20 years he lived in Hollywood (1960-80), he turned up in many movies and an ever greater number of popular TV shows.- Actor
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Born in 1914, raised in Norfolk, Nebraska, Thurl Ravenscroft served as a navigator in the US Army Air Transport Command in World War II before settling in Hollywood. An accomplished singer, he performed with The Sportsmen Quartet, The Mellowmen Quartet, The Johnny Mann Singers, The Norman Luboff Choir, and many major stars, including Jim Nabors and Elvis Presley. He was best known, however, for his mellifluous voice-overs, and he voiced Tony the Tiger in countless advertisements for Kellogg's Frosted Flakes in both English and Spanish. In 1996 he and his wife June retired to southern California, although he still did occasional work as Tony. He died in 2005 of prostate cancer.- Actor
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Avery Schreiber's 1960s and 1970s partner on the comedy stage was Jack Burns, the slimmer, chatty, clean-cut, better-looking dunderhead. Avery Schreiber was the Oliver Hardy counterpart who bore the brunt of Burns' verbal drone. This rumpled, gap-toothed, hefty-sized master of the slow boil stood out among the crowd with his huge trademark walrus mustache, thick thatch of curly black hair, slim teddy bear eyes and mischievous grin. Together the pair became a staple of TV variety shows, mainstays on such classic entertainment as "The Ed Sullivan Show," "The Dean Martin Show" and "The Hollywood Palace."
Born in 1935 in Chicago, Illinois, of modest means, Schreiber's father was a common laborer while his mother made do as a secretary. At 17 Schreiber enlisted in the Armed Services and eventually became a part of the All-Army Talent Show. This satisfaction of putting on variety shows and entertaining prompted his move into a career of comedy. Winning a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse, he instead decided to stay closer to home and attend night school at the University of Chicago while studying his craft at the Goodman Theatre. A cabaret show brought him to the attention of the renown improv troupe Second City in 1960, where he remained for five years developing sketches and characters.
It was at Second City that Schreiber met Jack Burns, a former Boston news anchorman, in 1962. The Irish/Jewish duo began performing together on cruise ships and elsewhere. Jack Paar first introduced "Burns & Schreiber" to TV on his "Tonight Show" program in 1964. The duo's most identifiable skit was the "taxi cab" routine with Avery as a beleaguered cabbie at the mercy of Burns' relentlessly gabby and nonsensical customer, with Burns punctuating every conversation with a repeated "Huh?...Huh?...Huh?" Political satire was also a strong, popular platform for Schreiber both with Burns (the album "The Watergate Comedy Hour") and without. Schreiber was at his very best skewering politicos.
Both trained actors, they also gave each other the freedom to work solo. Burns would repeat as Deputy Warren Ferguson on The Andy Griffith Show (1960) for a time and Schreiber was a regular as the broadly villainous Captain Mancini on My Mother the Car (1965), now better known as the Edsel of 60s TV shows.
At their peak, the duo appeared as regulars on the summer replacement musical variety series Our Place (1967), then earned the right to front their own summer series with The Burns and Schreiber Comedy Hour (1973). It was hard to figure out who in this duo was the funnyman and who was the straightman although Avery was considered the more reactive of the two.
Breaking up once in 1968 because they felt stale, they reteamed for a time in 1972, but split again later when Burns decided to leave the limelight and devote himself exclusively to writing. Schreiber continued providing guest comedy relief on "Alice," "The Rockford Files" and "The Dukes of Hazzard" and sitting on game show panels.
He also kept close ties to the stage throughout his career. Directing a Broadway revue entitled "How to Be a Jewish Mother" in 1967, he performed in (Second City) Paul Sills' production of "Ovid's Metamorphosis." Schreiber also performed in productions of "Hamlet," "Showboat" and "Fiddler on the Roof." He last appeared on Broadway in "Welcome to the Club" in 1989, which was a short-lived Cy Coleman musical.
Households knew him best for his various Doritos corn chip ads in a sundry of disguises (chef, sultan, pilot), all of them perturbed by people loudly crunching on the popular snack. In addition to acting, Schreiber taught improv theater in and out of his L.A.-based area.
In 1994, Schreiber suffered a heart attack, aggravated by his diabetes. Although he survived triple by-pass surgery, he never fully recovered. He died at age 66 in Los Angeles of a heart attack and was survived by his wife of 40 years, Rochelle Isaacs, and their two children, Jenny and Joshua.- Actor
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- Producer
Brooklyn-born Buddy Hackett was known mainly as a nightclub comic, especially in Las Vegas, where he first performed in 1952 and wound up being one of the biggest headliners in that city's history. Hackett always referred to himself as a "saloon comic" and preferred the intimacy of his stage act--where he would often bring members of the audience up on stage with him--to films and television. He, along with Lenny Bruce, pioneered "blue" comedy, although Hackett's career did not suffer nearly as much as Bruce's did because of it. Hackett's act was noted for its, at the time, "adult" content, and at one point he was sued by a woman who attended one of his shows and said she was "shocked and offended" at the language (she lost the suit). However, contrary to his nightclub image, Hackett's appearances in films were mostly of the family type, such as his roles in the "Herbie" series of comedies for Disney about a Volkswagen Bug with a mind of its own and as Robert Preston's sidekick in The Music Man (1962). In 1954, Hackett was paired by Universal Pictures with Hugh O'Brian as a potential comedy team to replace the studio's reigning team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, They actually did replace the famous team in the film Fireman Save My Child (1954), due to Costello's illness (Bud and Lou can still be glimpsed in long shots). Hackett took the part that Costello was playing (an eerie coincidence considering that more than 20 years later he would actually play Costello in the movie Bud and Lou (1978)) and O'Brian took Abbott's place, but the film was not successful and Universal dropped its plans to make a team out of the two. Hackett also had a showy part in the ensemble comedy It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), partnered with Mickey Rooney. However, despite his success in movies, he still preferred his nightclub work and played Las Vegas and clubs in other cities whenever possible. He had a reputation among his fellow comics as a brilliant ad-libber and someone who knew exactly how far to take a joke before it ran its course, something not all comedians managed to do.
Buddy Hackett died at age 78 of natural causes at his beach house in Malibu, CA, on June 30, 2003.- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Screen legend, superstar, and the man with the most famous blue eyes in movie history, Paul Leonard Newman was born on January 26, 1925, in Cleveland, Ohio, the second son of Arthur Sigmund Newman (died 1950) and Theresa Fetsko (died 1982). His elder brother was Arthur S. Newman Jr., named for their father, a Jewish businessman who owned a successful sporting goods store and was the son of emigrants from Poland and Hungary. Newman's mother (born Terézia Fecková, daughter of Stefan Fecko and Mária Polenak) was a Roman Catholic Slovak from Homonna, Pticie (former Austro-Hungarian Empire), who became a practicing Christian Scientist. She and her brother, Newman's uncle Joe, had an interest in the creative arts, and it rubbed off on him. He acted in grade school and high school plays. The Newmans were well-to-do and Paul Newman grew up in affluent Shaker Heights. Before he became an actor, Newman ran the family sporting goods store in Cleveland, Ohio.
By 1950, the 25-year-old Newman had been kicked out of Ohio University, where he belonged to the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity, for unruly behavior (denting the college president's car with a beer keg), served three years in the United States Navy during World War II as a radio operator, graduated from Ohio's Kenyon College, married his first wife, Jacqueline "Jackie" Witte (born 1929), and had his first child, Scott. That same year, his father died. When he became successful in later years, Newman said if he had any regrets it would be that his father was not around to witness his success. He brought Jackie back to Shaker Heights and he ran his father's store for a short period. Then, knowing that wasn't the career path he wanted to take, he moved Jackie and Scott to New Haven, Connecticut, where he attended Yale University's School of Drama.
While doing a play there, Newman was spotted by two agents, who invited him to come to New York City to pursue a career as a professional actor. After moving to New York, he acted in guest spots for various television series and in 1953 came a big break. He got the part of understudy of the lead role in the successful Broadway play "Picnic". Through this play, he met actress Joanne Woodward (born 1930), who was also an understudy in the play. While they got on very well and there was a strong attraction, Newman was married and his second child, Susan, was born that year. During this time, Newman was accepted into the much admired and popular New York Actors Studio, although he did not actually audition.
In 1954, a film Newman was very reluctant to do was released, The Silver Chalice (1954). He considered his performance in this costume epic to be so bad that he took out a full-page ad in a trade paper apologizing for it to anyone who might have seen it. He had always been embarrassed about the film and reveled in making fun of it. He immediately wanted to return to the stage, and performed in "The Desperate Hours". In 1956, he got the chance to redeem himself in the film world by portraying boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), and critics praised his performance. In 1957, with a handful of films to his credit, he was cast in The Long, Hot Summer (1958), co-starring Joanne Woodward.
During the shooting of this film, they realized they were meant to be together and by now, so did his then-wife Jackie, who gave Newman a divorce. He and Woodward wed in Las Vegas in January 1958. They went on to have three daughters together and raised them in Westport, Connecticut. In 1959, Newman received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). The 1960s would bring Newman into superstar status, as he became one of the most popular actors of the decade, and garnered three more Best Actor Oscar nominations, for The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963) and Cool Hand Luke (1967). In 1968, his debut directorial effort Rachel, Rachel (1968) was given good marks, and although the film and Woodward were nominated for Oscars, Newman was not nominated for Best Director. However, he did win a Golden Globe Award for his direction.
1969 brought the popular screen duo of Newman and Robert Redford together for the first time when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) was released. It was a box office smash. Through the 1970s, Newman had hits and misses from such popular films as The Sting (1973) and The Towering Inferno (1974) to lesser known films as The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) to a cult classic Slap Shot (1977). After the death of his only son, Scott, in 1978, Newman's personal life and film choices moved in a different direction. His acting work in the 1980s and on is what is often most praised by critics today. He became more at ease with himself and it was evident in The Verdict (1982) for which he received his sixth Best Actor Oscar nomination and, in 1987, finally received his first Oscar for The Color of Money (1986), almost thirty years after Woodward had won hers. Friend and director of Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Robert Wise accepted the award on Newman's behalf as the actor did not attend the ceremony.
Films were not the only thing on his mind during this period. A passionate race car driver since the early 1970s (despite being color-blind), he was co-founder of Newman-Haas racing in 1982, and also founded "Newman's Own", a successful line of food products that has earned in excess of $100 million, every penny of which Newman donated to charity. He also started The Hole in the Wall Gang Camps, an organization for children with serious illness. He was as well known for his philanthropic ways and highly successful business ventures as he was for his legendary actor status.
Newman's marriage to Woodward lasted a half-century. Connecticut was their primary residence after leaving Hollywood and moving East in 1960. Renowned for his sense of humor, in 1998 he quipped that he was a little embarrassed to see his salad dressing grossing more than his movies. During his later years, he still attended races, was much involved in his charitable organizations, and in 2006, he opened a restaurant called Dressing Room, which helps out the Westport Country Playhouse, a place in which Newman took great pride. In 2007, while the public was largely unaware of the serious illness from which he was suffering, Newman made some headlines when he said he was losing his invention and confidence in his acting abilities and that acting was "pretty much a closed book for me". A smoker for many years, Newman died on September 26, 2008, aged 83, from lung cancer.- Actress
- Producer
- Additional Crew
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.- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Alec Guinness was an English actor. He is known for his six collaborations with David Lean: Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations (1946), Fagin in Oliver Twist (1948), Col. Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor), Prince Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), General Yevgraf Zhivago in Doctor Zhivago (1965), and Professor Godbole in A Passage to India (1984).
Guinness is really most remembered for his portrayal of Obi-Wan Kenobi in George Lucas' original Star Wars trilogy for which he receive a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
In 1959, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the arts. In the 1970s, Guinness made regular television appearances in Britain, including the role of George Smiley in the serialisations of two novels by John le Carré: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and Smiley's People (1982). In 1980 he received the Academy Honorary Award for lifetime achievement.
Guinness was also one of three British actors, along with Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, who made the transition from Shakespearean theatre in England to Hollywood blockbusters immediately after the Second World War.
Guinness died on 5 August 2000, from liver cancer, at Midhurst in West Sussex.- Animation Department
- Director
- Writer
Jack Zander was born on 3 May 1908 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA. He was a director and writer, known for Gnomes (1980), The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie (1972) and Saturday Night Live (1975). He was married to Beth Wasem. He died on 17 December 2007 in Pound Ridge, New York, USA.- Animation Department
- Director
- Costume Designer
Norm McCabe was born on 10 February 1911 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, UK. He was a director and costume designer, known for The Transformers: The Movie (1986), The Transformers (1984) and InHumanoids (1986). He died on 17 January 2006 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
James Albert Varney, Jr. was born in Lexington, Kentucky, to Nancy Louise (Howard) and James Albert Varney, Sr. He became interested in theater as a teenager, winning state titles in drama competitions while a student at Lafayette High School in Lexington, Kentucky. At age 15 he played Ebeneezer Scrooge in a local children's theater production of "A Christmas Carol", and by 17 was performing professionally in nightclubs and coffee houses. He chose Nashville rather than New York or Los Angeles as a place to pursue his acting career and, with advertising executive John R. Cherry III, turned "Ernest P. Worrell" into a cash cow, making commercials for clients ranging from soft drinks to food stores and, eventually, Disney. Even though Ernest's catchphrase "KnowhutImean?" became a national craze almost immediately, Jim worked in TV and film for more than a decade before his famous alter-ego hit the big screen in Ernest Goes to Camp (1987).- Music Artist
- Actress
- Soundtrack
An out-of-wedlock child, Eartha Kitt was born in the cotton fields of South Carolina. Kitt's mother was a sharecropper of African-American and Cherokee Native American descent. Her father's identity is unknown. Given away by her mother, she arrived in Harlem at age nine. At 15, she quit high school to work in a Brooklyn factory. As a teenager, Kitt lived in friends' homes and in the subways. However, by the 1950s, she had sung and danced her way out of poverty and into the spotlight: performing with the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe on a European tour, soloing at a Paris nightclub and becoming the toast of the Continent. Orson Welles called her "the most exciting girl in the world". She also spoke out on hard issues. She took over the role of Catwoman for the third and final season of the television series Batman (1966), replacing Julie Newmar. Eartha Kitt died of colon cancer in her home in Weston, Connecticut, on Christmas Day 2008.- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Frank John Gorshin, Jr. was born on April 5, 1933 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was a railroad worker and his mother, Frances (Preseren), was a seamstress. His family was originally from Novo Mesto, Slovenia. While in high school, young Frank worked as an usher at the Sheridan Square Theatre and began doing impressions of some of his screen idols: Al Jolson, James Cagney, Cary Grant and Edward G. Robinson. At age 17, he won a local talent contest. The prize was a one-week engagement at Jackie Heller's Carousel nightclub, where Alan King was headlining. It was young Frank's first paid job as an entertainer and launched his show business career. Frank attended local Catholic schools and, later, Carnegie-Mellon Tech School of Drama. He acted in plays and performed in nightclubs in Pittsburgh in his spare time.
In 1953, at age 19, he was drafted into the United States Army and was posted in Germany. Frank served for two years, 1953-1955, as an entertainer attached to Special Services. In the Army, Frank met Maurice A. Bergman, who would introduce Frank to a Hollywood agent when his hitch with Uncle Sam was up. Frank quickly landed a role in The Proud and Profane (1956) and other roles in television dramas followed.
In 1957, while visiting his family in Pittsburgh, his agent phoned him to rush back to Hollywood for an audition for Run Silent Run Deep (1958). For some odd reason, instead of catching a plane, Frank decided to drive his car to Los Angeles. Driving 39 consecutive hours, he fell asleep at the wheel, crashed, suffered a fractured skull and woke up in the hospital four days later. To add insult to injury, a Los Angeles newspaper reported he was killed, and the plum movie role of Officer Ruby went to Don Rickles.
Frank appeared in a number of lovable B-movies for American-International Pictures: Hot Rod Girl (1956) and Dragstrip Girl (1957), and everybody's favorite, Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957). Frank finally got a substantial role in the A-movie, Bells Are Ringing (1960), with Dean Martin and Judy Holliday. He did a thinly-disguised Marlon Brando impression. he also appeared in Hollywood nightclubs, including the Purple Onion. He did Las Vegas engagements, opening for Bobby Darin at The Flamingo. On television, Frank appeared on The Steve Allen Plymouth Show (1956) and had a dozen guest shots on The Ed Sullivan Show (1948).
In 1966, he gave his breakout performance, performing what has become his best-known role: The Riddler on Batman (1966), for which he received an Emmy nomination. He also played The Riddler in the movie, Batman: The Movie (1966), based on the television series. "I could feel the impact overnight", he recalled later. Because of his nationwide recognition, he was given headliner status in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand, Sahara and Aladdin Hotels. He received more good reviews for his performance in Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (1969).
In 1970, Frank made his Broadway debut as the star of "Jimmy", for which he got rave reviews. He also starred in many touring company productions, such as "Promises, Promises", "Peter Pan", "Prisoner of Second Street" and "Guys and Dolls". In the 1980s, Frank served as Honorary Chairman, Entertainment Division, for the American Heart Association. Perhaps recalling his early AIP films, Frank worked with the legendary Roger Corman, appearing as Clockwise on the television series Black Scorpion (2001) and on Corman's The Phantom Eye (1999). He had appeared in over 70 movies and made over 40 guest appearances in television series.
Gorshin died at age 72 in Burbank, California on May 17, 2005. He had suffered from lung cancer, emphysema and pneumonia.- Music Artist
- Actor
- Producer
In a singing (and sometimes acting) career that spanned over six decades, the name Perry Como has come to mean that warm, smooth, easy-listening, general-audience, slow-flame romance that characterized popular music in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. It has also come to represent an overall good feeling. Telling of the success of the appeal of that good feeling early on in his career, during just a single week in the 1940s, the music industry pressed and sold 4 million Como records. In the 1950s, 11 of his singles sold well over 1 million copies each. In more than six decades of singing, his records sold more than 100 million copies; 27 individual prints reached the million-record mark.
Christened Pierino Como in Canonsburg, Pa., and one of a family of 13 children, Como pursued a career as a barber before he launched his singing career. At 11, he was working after school cutting hair in a barbershop. Before long he had set his sights on owning his own shop -- even making monthly payments toward one. He enjoyed singing, however, and let go of his barbershop ambitions soon after high school and his marriage to his high school sweetheart, Roselle Beline. It didn't take long to prove that he had talent and soon landed a spot in the Freddie Carlone Orchestra, where he made $28 a week touring the Midwest. In 1937, he joined the Ted Weems orchestra and was featured on the band's "Beat the Band" radio program. His career was on the rise. But, with the start of WWII and the eventual breakup of Weems' band, Como found himself back in Canonsburg in a barbershop cutting hair -- not for long, however. CBS radio soon offered him a weekly show at $100 a week and RCA signed him to a recording contract that garnered him in the next 14 years 42 Top 10 hits, a feat bettered only by Bing Crosby. These hits included "Dig You Later (A Hubba-Hubba-Hubba)," "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows," "They Say It's Wonderful," "Surrender" and "Some Enchanted Evening." The 1945 rendition of "Till the End of Time," (a song associated with the movie "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" and based on Chopin's "Polonaise in A-Flat Minor") was perhaps his most memorable hit from this era. Other hits were on the lighter side of romance and included "Hot Diggity" and the forever a favorite "Papa Loves Mambo."
It was also during his singing career in the 1940s that Como appeared in three films for Twentieth Century Fox. His parts were unfortunately less than memorable, partly because of his overpowering screen presence of his co-star Carmen Miranda. But Como did have a screen presence, and he found its niche in the magic of the living room theater when he made his television debut in 1948 with NBC's "The Chesterfield Supper Club." In 1950, he was at the helm of his own show with CBS: "The Perry Como Show," which ran for five years. Back on NBC in 1955 he achieved his greatest success in the medium with an eight-year run. This was the show that featured his theme song: "Sing Along With Me." The show included the talents of the Ray Charles Singers and announcer Frank Gallop. It was also in this show where he developed and honed the image of the cardigan-wearing, relaxed, wholesome nice-guy that has been his trademark ever since. In 1956 and '57 he won Emmy Awards for most outstanding television personality. The show itself won Peabody and Golden Mike awards. During his tenure with this show he also received the Recording Industry Association of America's first ever Gold Disc Award for his rendition of "Catch a Falling Star." He retired from his show in 1963, opting to work only occasionally on t.v. specials. These specials included his traditional Christmas shows. After two decades of just canned music, he returned to live performances in the 1970s, playing Las Vegas and other circuits; he even did a sell-out tour of Australia. The 1970s also gave rise to his million record seller "It's Impossible." In one of his most gratifying moments in his career, President Reagan presented Como with a Kennedy Center award for outstanding achievement in the performing arts.- Actor
- Composer
- Music Department
Barry White first made his mark in the music business in the 1960s as a session musician, even serving for a spell as an A&R man for a small, independent Los Angeles record label. He first hit it big in 1973 with a series of albums and singles emphasizing lush orchestrations and elaborate production values, over which he laid down his big bass voice. In 1973 and 1974 alone, he sold US$16 million worth of records--not only on his own but also as the conductor and composer of instrumental records (as The Love Unlimited Orchestra) and as the primary producer and songwriter of the female vocal trio Love Unlimited (one of whom, Glodean White, became his second wife). 1974 was a prolific year for White, during which he composed the score of Together Brothers (1974) and acted in Coonskin (1974).
After a particularly pronounced fallow period in the 1980s, he rebounded in the 1990s with a series of critically and commercially acclaimed records and he beefed up his presence on TV somewhat with a famous guest appearance on The Simpsons (1989), a recurring role on Ally McBeal (1997), and a series of commercials in which he parodied his image and persona.- Producer
- Writer
- Music Department
Merv Griffin was a singer and band leader, movie actor, television personality and media mogul who in his time hosting The Merv Griffin Show (1962) was second in fame and influence as a talk show host only to Johnny Carson. Griffin was best known for creating the two most popular game shows in television syndication history, Wheel of Fortune (1983) and Jeopardy! (1984), which are watched by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. In the business world, he was identified as the visionary chairman of The Griffin Group.
Born in the San Francisco, California suburb of San Mateo, Griffin "came up through the ranks" in the classic sense, entering talent contests, writing songs, singing on local radio station KFRC-San Francisco, and later touring with Freddy Martin Orchestra. He became increasingly popular with nightclub audiences and his fame soared among the general public when he struck gold in 1950 with "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts", which reached the number one spot on the Hit Parade and sold three million copies.
Continuing to record hits, including "Wilhelmina" and "Never Been Kissed", Griffin made a foray into motion pictures after Doris Day saw his nightclub performance and arranged a screen test for him at Warner Bros. Studios. While under contract at Warner Bros., he appeared in a number of hit movies, including So This Is Love (1953) with Kathryn Grayson and The Boy from Oklahoma (1954) with Will Rogers Jr., and Lon Chaney Jr..
Television then discovered him. As a regular performer on The Arthur Murray Party (1950), The Tonight Show Starring Jack Paar (1957) and others, he was offered the opportunity to host his own television series, Play Your Hunch (1958). It was during this period that he conceived the idea for what was to become one of the most successful game shows in television history, Jeopardy! (1964). But it was in 1962 that his career took its most dramatic turn. He became a substitute host for Jack Paar on The Tonight Show Starring Jack Paar (1957) and scored some of the highest ratings in the show's history. As a result, NBC gave him his own hour-long daytime talk show program, The Merv Griffin Show (1962).
Griffin's name and talk show career will always be seen in the light of that of Johnny Carson, the "King of late night TV", with whom Griffin directly competed on CBS from 1969 to 1972. Griffin's first daytime talk show began on the same day Carson first hosted The Tonight Show (1962). While Carson's style was indebted to his long apprenticeship in Los Angeles in the 1950s, Griffin was based in New York, where he socialized with New York's theater and café crowds. Griffin's approach to television talk was influenced by two New York shows, David Susskind's The David Susskind Show (1958) and Mike Wallace's Probe and Night Beat (1956), and like Susskind and Wallace, he openly embraced controversial subjects. In 1965, Griffin was criticized as a "traitor" when he aired a special from London in which Nobel Prize-winning philosopher Bertrand Russell denounced the Vietnam War.
Despite his success on daytime television, it was late night that was The Holy Grail for talk show hosts. In 1969, CBS hired Griffin to directly compete with Carson in the 11:30 PM to 1:00 AM time slot that had proven a grave yard for other personalities. Not one to shy away from controversy, Griffin began to be harassed by CBS censors who objected to the antiwar statements of his guests and ordered him to feature pro-war guests for balance. "The irony of the situation wasn't wasted on me", Griffin recalls in his autobiography. "In 1965, I'm called a traitor by the press for presenting Bertrand Russell, and, four years later, we are hard-pressed to find anybody to speak in favor of the Vietnam War".
In March 1970, CBS censors pixilated antiwar activist Abbie Hoffman because he was wearing a shirt that resembled an American flag. The resulting blurred image meant that Hoffman's voice emanated from a "jumble of lines". CBS also pressured Griffin into sacking his long-term sidekick Arthur Treacher, who had been his television mentor, because he was too old. The censorship did not boost the ratings for Griffin, who was facing stiff competition from the genial Carson, who himself was criticized during the era for shying away from controversial subjects.
In 1972, a fed-up Griffin negotiated a syndication deal with Metromedia to move his talk show back to the daytime, and in the event he was terminated by CBS. The deal was signed in secret as a penalty clause in his CBS contract gave him $1 million in the event of his being fired. Later that year, CBS terminated Griffin's late-night talk show and Griffin immediately made the transition to Metromedia's syndicated network.
While Griffin may have been a washout in late night television (and he had LOTS of company - EVERYONE who went up against Carson lost the ratings race, and Johnny always came out the victor), Griffin's impact on daytime was immense, specifically through his production of game shows. An avid fan of puzzles since childhood, Griffin first produced a successful game show in 1964, Jeopardy! (1964) for NBC. After 13 seasons as a daytime talk show host, Griffin retired from his talk show in 1986 to devote himself to producing his highly profitable game shows.
Jeopardy! (2002) remains the second highest rated game show in television syndication while Wheel of Fortune (1983) continues to be the longest running game show to hold the number one spot in television syndication history. Other Griffin successes in the game show field included "One in a Million" and Joe Garagiola's Memory Game (1971), both airing on ABC, Let's Play Post Office on NBC, and Reach for the Stars (1967).
In 1986, Griffin sold his production company, Merv Griffin Enterprises, to Coca-Cola's Columbia Pictures Television unit for $250 million as well as a continuing share of the profits of the shows. At that time, the transaction represented the largest acquisition of an entertainment company owned by a single individual. Subsequently, Sony Pictures Entertainment purchased Columbia and he retains the title of executive producer of both "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy!" (for which he still creates puzzles and questions.) He served as Executive Producer of "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" (2000).
After his retirement from daytime chat, Merv became a real estate baron, acquiring the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, which is now the venue of choice for virtually all of the Tinseltown's most high profile events such as The Golden Globe Awards, The Soap Opera Digest Awards, and The American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Awards. He also owns the Hilton Scottsdale Resort and Villas in Arizona, and St. Clerans Manor, an 18th century estate once owned by director John Huston which is located near Galway, the premier resort destination in Ireland.
In January 1998, Griffin opened The Coconut Club, one of the country's hottest swing/dance clubs, at his Beverly Hilton Hotel. This weekend venue, fashioned after Hollywood's famed Coconut Grove (where Griffin headlined as a boy singer with The Freddy Martin Orchestra) features live Big Bands, Swing Orchestras, and Rock Bands amidst a glamorous nightclub setting.
He was honored with the prestigious 1994 Broadcasting and Cable "Hall of Fame" Award, alongside such figures as Diane Sawyer and Dan Rather. Winner of 15 Emmy Awards, Griffin was presented an Outstanding Game/Audience Participation Show Emmy for 1993-1994 as executive producer of Jeopardy! (1984) He had also been the recipient of the coveted Scopus Award from the American Friends of Hebrew University, "The Duke Award" presented by the John Wayne Cancer Institute, and he had been honored by the American Ireland Fund and the SHARE organization. He was Lifetime Honorary Festival Chairman of La Quinta Arts Festival and recently donated his Wickenburg Inn and Dude Ranch to Childhelp USA.
In March 2001, the Gold Label released his new CD, "It's Like a Dream", for which he composed the title song. Among his private passions are his family, son Tony Griffin, daughter-in-law Tricia, and grandchildren Farah and Donovan Mervyn, his long-haired sharpei dog Charlie Chan, his La Quinta ranch near Carmel, where he raises thoroughbred racing horses, and his 135 foot, four-story high ocean going yacht, Griff. Merv Griffin died at age 82 of prostate cancer in Los Angeles, California on August 12, 2007.- Actor
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Robert Gerard Goulet was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to a family of French-Canadian origin. He was the son of Jeanette (Gauthier) and Joseph Georges André Goulet. After hearing his son sing "Lead Kindly Light", in their church hall, his father told him, "I'm proud of you, son". A few weeks later, his father, lying on his death bed, called Robert to his side and told him the Lord had given him a beautiful voice and he must go and sing. His father died when Robert was 13 and he moved to Edmonton, Canada, a year later. Goulet won a singing scholarship to the Royal Conservatory of music in Toronto and, in 1951, made his concert debut at Edmonton in George Frideric Handel's "Messiah". Goulet was also a DJ on Canada's CKUA in Edmonton for two years. In 1960, he landed one of his biggest roles as "Lancelot" in Broadway's "Camelot", opposite Richard Burton and Julie Andrews. He received a Tony award in 1968 for his role in "Happy Time". He and his first wife, Louise Longmore, had one daughter, Nicolette Goulet (aka Nikki). His second wife, actress and singer Carol Lawrence, produced two sons, Christopher and Michael. In 1982, with Glenn Ford giving the bride away, he was married in Las Vegas to Vera Goulet (aka Vera Novak), a Yugoslavian-born writer, photographer and artist. When not living at their home in Las Vegas, they reside on their yacht, "Rogo", in Los Angeles. Goulet has performed at the White House for three presidents, as well as a command performance for Queen Elizabeth II.
On September 30, 2007, he was hospitalized in Las Vegas, where he was diagnosed with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, "a rare but rapidly progressive and potentially fatal condition". On October 13, he was transferred to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after it was determined that he "would not survive without an emergency lung transplant".
Goulet died on October 30, 2007 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, while awaiting a transplant.
He is survived by his wife, Vera Goulet, and three children, sons Christopher and Michael, and daughter Nicolette Goulet, who is the mother of his grandchildren, Jordan Gerard and Solange.- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Don Knotts, the legendary television character actor, was born Jesse Donald Knotts on July 21, 1924 in Morgantown, West Virginia, to William Jesse Knotts and the former Elsie Luzetta Moore. He was the youngest of four sons in a family that had been in America since the 17th century.
His first stint as an entertainer was as a ventriloquist, performing paid gigs at parties and other events in Morgantown. He decided to make a stab at a career in show business, moving to New York City after graduating from high school, but he only lasted in the Big Apple for a few weeks. He decided to go to college, enrolling at West Virginia University but, when World War II engulfed America, he enlisted in the United States Army. The 19-year-old soldier was assigned to the Special Services Branch, where he entertained the troops. It was while in the Army that Don ditched ventriloquism for straight comedy.
Don returned to West Virginia University after being demobilized. After graduating with a degree in theater in 1948, he married and moved back to New York, where connections he had made while in the Special Services Branch helped him break into show business. In addition to doing stand-up comedy at clubs, he appeared on the radio, eventually playing the character "Windy Wales" on "The Bobby Benson Show". From 1953 to 1955, he was a regular on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow (1951). Destiny intervened when he was cast in the small role of the psychiatrist in the Broadway play "No Time for Sergeants", which starred Andy Griffith, who would play a large part in Don's future career. Don also appeared in the film adaption of the play with Griffith.
Don's big break before he hooked up again with Andy Griffith was a regular gig on the The Steve Allen Plymouth Show (1956) hosted by Steve Allen, starting in 1956. He became well-known for his "nervous man" shtick in the "Man-on-the-Street" segments that were a staple of Allen's show. His character in the segments was a very nervous man obviously uptight about being interviewed on camera. He developed this into the fidgety, high-strung persona that he used successfully for the rest of his career.
When "The Tonight Show" moved to Hollywood in 1959 with new host Jack Paar, Don also moved to California as a regular. However, he was soon cast in Andy Griffith's new television series about a small-town sheriff, The Andy Griffith Show (1960), in the role that would make him a legend. For playing "Deputy Barney Fife", Don was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor five times from 1961 to 1967, winning each time. He soon tasted big-screen success, starring in The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964). Don cut back his appearances on The Andy Griffith Show (1960) to concentrate on making movies after signing a five-year contract with Universal Pictures. For Universal, Don appeared in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966), The Reluctant Astronaut (1967), The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968), The Love God? (1969) and How to Frame a Figg (1971). His mid-1960s popularity as a movie comedian began to wane towards the end of the decade, and the contract was not renewed. Don returned to television as the star of his own variety show, but it was quickly canceled.
During the 1970s, Don had a spotty career, appearing in regional theater and making guest appearances on other television series. He eventually made some slapstick movies with Tim Conway for the Walt Disney Company, but it wasn't until the end of the decade that he tasted real success again. He was cast as would-be-swinger landlord "Ralph Furley" on the popular sitcom Three's Company (1976) after the original landlords, "The Ropers", were spun off into their own series. Since the show was canceled in 1984, he appeared as "Barney Fife" for a 1986 reunion of The Andy Griffith Show (1960) and in television guest spots, including a recurring gig as the pesky neighbor "Les Calhoun" on Griffith's Matlock (1986) series until 1992.
He remained busy for the next ten years touring with plays and doing voice-over work for cartoons. In 2005, Don provided the voice of "Mayor Turkey Lurkey" in Disney's animated film Chicken Little (2005). It turned out to be one of his final films. He died at age 81 on February 24, 2006.- Actor
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Tony Jay was a British actor and narrator. He is known for his deep and distinctive British voice. He was well-known for voicing Claude Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Megabyte from ReBoot, Monsieur D'Arque from Beauty and the Beast, Shere Khan from The Jungle Book 2, Magneto in X-Men Legends and the Elder God in the Legacy of Kain. He was considered to portray Obi-Wan in Star Wars before he was turned down by George Lucas.- Animation Department
- Art Department
Ed Benedict was the main character designer for all the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw. Benedict, who worked at MGM, Universal and other studios on short, theatrical cartoons, joined Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera soon after the pair launched their groundbreaking Hanna-Barbera TV animation studio in the late 1950s. Among his many designs for them were the characters for their first series, 1957's "The Ruff & Reddy Show."
For "The Flintstones," the story of a "modern Stone Age family," Benedict not only designed the hapless cavemen Fred and Barney, but also their long-suffering wives, Wilma and Betty, and the show's clever array of Stone Age houses and gadgets, including the characters' foot-powered cars.
"The Flintstones," one of the first cartoon series created for adults as well as children, debuted in 1960 and was an immediate hit. Forty-six years later, Fred and Barney remain squarely in the public consciousness as pitchmen for various products, including Flintstones' vitamins. Without the time and budget that were lavished on classic theatrical cartoons, TV animated comedies had to leave out beautiful backgrounds and lifelike movement in favor of witty dialogue and stories with vivid characters.
Before joining Hanna-Barbera, Benedict worked for another cartoon legend, Tex Avery, at both Universal and MGM studios. At MGM, where Hanna and Barbera also worked, he was the lead layout artist and designer on "Deputy Droopy" and other popular theatrical shorts.
He also worked with "Woody Woodpecker" creator Walter Lantz on several shorts, including "The Dizzy Dwarf" and "Unpopular Mechanic."
He died in August, 2006 at the age of 94. He requested that his ashes be scattered over California's Carmel Bay.- Producer
- Art Department
- Production Designer
Iwao Takamoto had recently graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Iwao, his parents and siblings were interned as enemy aliens in the Manzanar internment camp where he learned the rudiments of drawing and animation from two fellow internees who had worked as art directors at Hollywood film studios. When given a chance to leave the camp to pick fruit in Idaho, Iwao applied to Walt Disney for a job as an animator; he spent the weekend before his appointment drawing and sketching almost everything he saw. He got the job as an assistant illustrator working as an apprentice under the tutelage of Disney's "Nine Old Men", particularly Bob Carlson and Milt Kahl. While at Disney, Takamoto worked on both short films and features. In 1961 he left Disney for Hanna-Barbera where he would have a hand in developing many well-known and beloved cartoon characters such as Scooby Doo, George Jetson's dog Astro, and Penelope Pitstop. He retired as Vice President of Special Prohjects for Warner Brothers.- Animation Department
- Director
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Ward Kimball joined Disney Studios in 1934 as an animator. He eventually became involved in all aspects of animation production, most notably as the designer of Jiminy Cricket for the film "Pinocchio." He was also responsible for the redesign of Mickey Mouse. Walt Disney recognized Kimball's achievements by making him one of the "Nine Old Men", Disney's semi-official group of advisors. Kimball retired from Disney in 1972, but still maintained ties with the studio. He joined other leading Disney animators in 1978 for a whistle-stop tour to promote Mickey Mouse's 50th birthday. In addition to animation, Kimball was both an avid musician and train enthusiast. In 1948 he formed the Firehouse Five Plus Two, a Dixieland jazz band composed of fellow Disney employees. He also maintained a full-sized train and tracks at his home in California, and was a past president of the Train Collectors Association. Not only did his love of trains get him the job of designing the World of Motion display at EPCOT, it also got another train collector started--Walt Disney himself. Kimball received many honors during his lifetime, and in 1989 was named a Disney Legend.- Animation Department
- Writer
- Actor
Frank Thomas was born on 5 September 1912 in Santa Monica, California, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The Iron Giant (1999), The Incredibles (2004) and The Aristocats (1970). He was married to Jeanette A. Thomas. He died on 8 September 2004 in La Cañada Flintridge, California, USA.- Animation Department
- Actor
- Art Department
Oliver Martin "Ollie" Johnston was an American animator from Palo Alto, California. He was one of Disney's Nine Old Men, a group of senior animators which supervised production at the Walt Disney Animation Studios from c. 1945 to 1977. By the time of his death in 2008, Johnston was the last surviving member of the group. Johnston co-wrote the reference book "Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life" (1981), where he explained the twelve basic principles of animation. He helped to both preserve and popularize the knowledge of the techniques that were developed at the Disney studio over several decades.
In 1912, Johnston was born in Palo Alto, California. His father was Oliver Johnston, a professor at Stanford University. The younger Johnston attended Palo Alto High School. He received his college education at Stanford University, where he worked on the campus humor magazine "Stanford Chaparral". He befriended a co-worker at the magazine, the aspiring animator Frank Thomas (1912-2004). The two remained close friends until Thomas' death in the early 2000s.
In his senior year at college, Johnston transferred to the Chouinard Art Institute (1921-1970), a professional art school located in Los Angeles. Johnston was hired by the Walt Disney Animation Studios c. 1934. He served as an uncredited inbetweener in several Mickey Mouse short films, and as an assistant animator in the animated feature film "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937).
After being promoted to a regular animator, Johnston's first major assignment was to animate the sentient puppet Pinocchio in the feature film "Pinocchio" (1940). Johnston animated the Centaurettes (female centaurs) and the Cupids in the "Pastoral Symphony" segment of "Fantasia" (1940).Johnston animated the key scene of the death of Bambi's mother in "Bambi" (1942). He animated "The Flying Gauchito" segment of "The Three Caballeros" (1944). He animated both the "Peter and the Wolf" and the "Casey at the Bat" segments of "Make Mine Music" (1946). Johnston animated Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox, and Br'er Bear in "Song of the South" (1946). He animated Jiminy Cricket in "Fun and Fancy Free" (1947). He animated both Johnny Appleseed and his guardian angel in "Melody Time" (1948).
Johnston served as a directing animator in "The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad" (1949). He also animated most of the film's major characters, including J.Thaddeus Toad, Ichabod Crane, Katrina Von Tassel, and Brom Bones. Johnston again served as a directing animator in "Cinderella" (1950). He was also the supervising animator for Cinderella's bratty stepsisters, Drizella Tremaine and Anastasia Tremaine. Johnston was tasked with animating Alice and the King of Hearts in "Alice in Wonderland" (1951). He animated the inept pirate Mr. Smee in "Peter Pan" (1953), with the character depicted as Captain Hook's first mate and personal assistant. Johnston animated the sentient dogs Lady, Jock and Trusty in "Lady and the Tramp". Johnston animated the heroic fairies Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather in "Sleeping Beauty" (1959).
Jonston served as the directing animator for the sentient dog Perdita "One Hundred and One Dalmatians" (1961). He animated the wizard Merlin, his student Wart/Arthur, and the wizard's familiar Archimedes in "The Sword in the Stone" (1963). Johnston animated the penguins in "Mary Poppins" (1964). He served as the directing animator for Mowgli, Bagheera, Baloo, and Mowgli's unnamed love interest in "The Jungle Book" (1967).
Johnston served as the directing animator for most of the major characters in "The Aristocats" (1970), including Duchess, Thomas O' Malley, and the kittens Marie, Berlioz, and Toulouse. He also served as a directing animating for most of the major characters in "Robin Hood" (1973), including Prince John, Sir Hiss, Maid Marian, and Lady Cluck. Johnston animated Winnie the Pooh and Piglet in "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" (1977). Johnston served as the directing animator for the co-protagonists Bernard and Bianca, and for the orphan girl Penny in "The Rescuers" (1977).
Johnston served as the supervising animator for the younger versions of the co-protagonists Tod and Copper in "The Fox and the Hound" (1981). This was his last involvement in the production of a Disney feature film. Following his retirement from Disney, Johnston started writing non-fiction about animation and its techniques. He served on the advisory board of the National Student Film Institute during the 1980s and the 1990s. In November 2005, Johnston received the prestigious National Medal of Arts by the then President of the United States George Walker Bush (1946-, term 2001-2009).
In April 2008, Johnston died of natural causes. He was 95-years-old at the time of his death, and he had survived many of his colleagues at Disney. Theodore Thomas featured biographical information on Johnston in the documentary films "Frank and Ollie"(1995) and "Growing up with Nine Old Men" (2012). Johnston is still fondly recalled by fans of traditional animation.- Animation Department
Jack Dunham was born on 19 September 1910 in Bismarck, North Dakota, USA. He is known for Duck Hunt (1937), The Country Store (1937) and The Fun House (1936). He died on 15 March 2009 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.- Actor
- Sound Department
- Soundtrack
Wayne Allwine was an American voice actor, sound editor and artist who was well-known for voicing Walt Disney's mascot Mickey Mouse from 1977 until his death from diabetes complications in 2009. He was succeeded by Bret Iwan. He was married to Minnie Mouse voice actress Russi Taylor and had four children. He also did sound editing for Frankenweenie, The Black Cauldron and The Great Mouse Detective.- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Producer
Don LaFontaine was born on 26 August 1940 in Duluth, Minnesota, USA. He was an actor and producer, known for In a World... (2013), The Hitter (1978) and Free Radio (2007). He was married to Joan Studva and Nita Whitaker. He died on 1 September 2008 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
- Producer
- Art Department
Charles Monroe Schulz (nicknamed "Sparky") was an American comic strip writer and artist from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was primarily known for creating the long-running comic strip "Peanuts" (1950-2000), and serving as its sole artist for the strip's entire run. His comic strip was known for its "clean, minimalist drawings", its sarcastic humor, and the emotional honesty of its dialogue. By the time of Schulz's death in 2000, the comic strip had been published in 75 different countries, and had been translated into 21 languages. The comic strip has been adapted into 5 theatrical animated films, over 40 animated television specials, 6 television series, and 2 theatrical musicals. In addition, Schulz is credited with popularizing the format of the "four-panel gag strip". This format was eventually used by several comic strips of the post-World War II period.
In 1922, Schulz was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota,. The city is occupying both banks of the Mississippi River. Schulz was the only child of Carl Schulz and Dena Halverson. His ancestry was German and Norwegian. His favorite comic strip during his childhood was "Barney Google" (1919-) by Billy DeBeck (1890-1942). Schulz was nick-named "Sparky" by his family, named after the race horse Spark Plug (also nicknamed "Sparky") in his favorite comic strip. He kept the nickname throughout his life.
Schulz started drawing as a hobby during his childhood. His favorite subject for drawings was the family dog, Spike. In 1937, Schulz submitted a drawing about Spike's unusual eating habits to the newspaper panel "Ripley's Believe It or Not!". This drawing was the first work by Schulz to be published in his lifetime.
Schulz received his primary education at the Richards Gordon Elementary School, located in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He skipped two half-grades during his elementary school years. He subsequently was always the youngest student in his class while attending Central High School. The school was the oldest high school in the state of Minnesota, established in 1866. Schulz was reportedly a shy and timid adolescent boy.
In February 1943, Dena Halverson (Schultz's mother ) died due to cancer. Schulz was shocked, as he was particularly close to his mother. She had tried to keep her illness a secret, as she did not want her son to worry about her. Shortly after her death, Schulz was drafted for service in World War II. He served as a staff sergeant with the 20th Armored Division in Europe. , He was a squad leader on a .50 caliber machine gun team, but his team only experienced combat at the ending months of the war. At one point, Schulz realized that he had forgot to load his machine gun while noticing that a German soldier was approaching him. Fortunately for Schulz, the German soldier had no intention to fire at him, and voluntarily surrendered to the American unit.
Schulz returned to civilian life in Minnesota in late 1945. He was soon hired as a letterer by the comic magazine "Timeless Topix"'. In July 1946, Schulz was hired by the "Art Instruction Schools", a Minneapolis-based home study correspondence course. His job was to review and grade the work of the students. He continued doing so for several years.
Schulz created his first comic strip for "St. Paul Pioneer Press". It was the short-lived "Li'l Folks" (1947-1950). He introduced several ideas that he would later reuse in "Peanuts". The comic strip used the recurring name "Charlie Brown" for three different characters, featured a Snoopy-like dog called Rover, and introduced a well-dressed young boy who idolized Ludwig van Beethoven (like the "Peanuts" character Schroeder.) Schulz eventually quit working for this newspaper. His editors had repeatedly denied his requests for a pay rise, and had relegated the comic strip into the women's section of the newspaper (rather than publishing it alongside other comic strips). An attempted deal to syndicate the strip through the Newspaper Enterprise Association fell through.
In 1950, Schulz negotiated a deal for a new comic strip with the United Feature Syndicate. The Syndicate was interested in his ideas, but they rejected his proposed title of "Li'l Folks" for legal reasons. There was already a comic strip under the copyrighted title "Little Folks", and its writer Tack Knight had claimed exclusive rights. An executive came up with the idea to name the comic strip "Peanuts". The comic stream was named after the "peanut gallery", the audience of the television series "Howdy Doody" (1947-1960). Schulz agreed to the new name, though he grew to dislike it. He would prefer to name the strip after the name of one of its characters. But the name was kept.
The syndicated comic strip "Peanuts" was introduced on October 2, 1950, initially published by only 7 newspapers.: the "Chicago Tribune", the "Denver Post", the "Evening Chronicle", the "Globe-Times", the "Minneapolis Tribune," the "Seattle Times", and the "Washington Post". The first strip in the series introduced only three characters: the protagonist Charlie Brown and two female acquaintances, Shermy and Patty. The pet dog Snoopy was introduced on October 4, 1950., Most of the strips' regular characters were introduced in its first 25 years: Violet (in February 1951), Schroeder (in May 1951), Lucy (in March 1952), Linus (in September 1952), Pig-Pen (in July 1954), Sally (in August 1959), Frieda (in March 1961), Peppermint Patty (in August 1966), Franklin (in July 1968) Woodstock (introduced in March 1966; officially named in June 1970), Marcie (in July 1971), and Rerun (in March 1973).
Schulz started working on a Sunday version of "Peanuts" in January 1952. He created the religious-themed comic strip "Young Pillars" (1956-1965) for the magazine "Youth Magazine", a publication of the Church of God. Unusually for Scchulz's work, this strip featured adolescents instead of children.
Schulz and Jim Sasseville later co-created the sports-and-game-oriented comic strip "It's Only a Game" (1957-1959) in an art style similar to "Peanuts". The new strip was modestly successful, but Schulz found that in conflicted with his increasingly demanding schedule. He terminated the strip voluntarily.
In 1957, Schulz was hired as an illustrator for a volume of the book "Kids Say the Darndest Things" by Art Linkletter (1912-2010). He illustrated a second volume of the work in 1962. In 1964, Schulz illustrated a collection of letters, "Dear President Johnson" by Bill Adler. These were Schulz's only efforts as a book illustrator.
For most of the 1950s, Schulz and his first wife Joyce Halverson lived primarily in Minnesota and Colorado. He primarily worked from home, or from a rented office room. In 1958, Schulz and his family moved Sebastopol, California. There Schulz built his first artist's studio. That studio burned down in 1966. Schutz later relocated to Santa Rosa, California, where he build a second artist's studio in 1969. He continued working there for the rest of his life.
By the autumn of 1970, Schulz had started contemplating divorce. He had an extramarital affair with Tracey Claudius, a woman who was only 25-years-old and was 23 years younger than him. He eventually received his divorce in 1972, but by then his affair with Claudius had ended In 1973, Schutz married his second wife Jean Forsyth Clyde. She had a daughter from a previous wedding, whom Schulz had already met. Their marriage lasted for 27 years and ended with his death.
In 1981, Schulz underwent heart bypass surgery. His hospitalization was considered newsworthy, and President Ronald Reagan personally phoned him to wish for his recovery. During the 1980s, Schulz found his hands shaking while drawing. He was eventually diagnosed as suffering from "essential tremor", a neurological disorder involving involuntary rhythmic contractions and relaxations of muscle groups. He received medication for his condition, but he insisted on continuing to draw "Peanuts" without assistants. This resulted in changes in his drawing style, with increasingly shakier lines in the comic strip.
In May 1988, Schulz was in the news over his personal life, something unusual in his career. Two masked men had entered his home through an unlocked door and attempted to kidnap his wife Jean. They fled empty-handed when one of Schulz's daughters arrived for a visit. The police suspected that the criminals were interested in ransom money, but no arrests were made.
In November 1999, Schulz experienced several small strokes and a blocked aorta. While undergoing a medical examination, his doctors realized that he was suffering from a previously undiagnosed condition: colon cancer. He started treatment with chemotherapy, but this caused his vision to blur. He was unable to keep drawing, so he announced his retirement on December 14, 1999. United Features retained ownership of the comic strip "Peanuts", but Schulz did not want to be replace on the production of the strip. Based on his insistence, the strip was scheduled to end on February 13, 2000 (the publication date for the last available comic strip).
On February 12, 2000, Schulz died in his sleep at his home in Santa Rosa, California. He was 77-years-old, and his death was caused by colorectal cancer. His comic strip ended on February 13, as scheduled. On May 27, 2000, Schulz was honored with tributes in over 100 different comic strips. Cartoonists devoted the day to homages of Schulz's style or appearances by his famous characters.
Schulz is long gone, but his characters from "Peanuts" have remained popular. Several animated adaptations of the comic strip were created in the first decades of the 21st century, and reprints of his work were still available in various forms. Schulz has been cited as an influence by several younger cartoonists, such as Jim Davis and Matt Groening.- Animation Department
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Bill Melendez was born on 15 November 1916 in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico. He was a producer and actor, known for A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969), A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) and He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown (1968). He was married to Helen Antionette Huhn. He died on 2 September 2008 in Santa Monica, California, USA.- Actor
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Although he appeared in approximately 100 movies or TV shows, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. never really intended to take up acting as a career. However, the environment he was born into and the circumstances naturally led him to be a thespian. Noblesse oblige.
He was born Douglas Elton Fairbanks, Jr. in New York City, New York, to Anna Beth (Sully), daughter of a very wealthy cotton mogul, and actor Douglas Fairbanks (born Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman), then not yet established as the swashbuckling idol he would become. Fairbanks, Jr. had German Jewish (from his paternal grandfather), English, and Scottish ancestry.
He proved a gifted boy early in life. To the end of his life he remained a multi-talented, hyperactive man, not content to appear in the 100 films mentioned above. Handsome, distinguished and extremely bright, he excelled at sports (much like his father), notably during his stay at the Military Academy in 1919 (his role in Claude Autant-Lara's "L'athlète incomplete" illustrated these abilities). He also excelled academically, and attended the Lycéee Janson de Sailly in Paris, where he had followed his divorced mother. Very early in his life he developed a taste for the arts as well and became a painter and sculptor. Not content to limiting himself to just one field, he became involved in business, in fields as varied as mining, hotel management, owning a chain of bowling alleys and a firm that manufactured popcorn. During World War II he headed London's Douglas Voluntary Hospital (an establishment taking care of war refugees), was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's special envoy for the Special Mission to South America in 1940 before becoming a lieutenant in the Navy (he was promoted to the rank of captain in 1954) and taking part in the Allies' landing in Sicily and Elba in 1943. A fervent Anglophile, was knighted in 1949 and often entertained Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip in his London mansion, "The Boltons".
His film career began at the age of 13 when he was signed by Paramount Pictures. He debuted in Stephen Steps Out (1923) but the film flopped and his career stagnated despite a critically acclaimed role in Stella Dallas (1925). Things really picked up when he married Lucille Le Sueur, a young starlet who was soon to become better known as Joan Crawford. The young couple became the toast of the town (one "Screen Snapshots" episode echoes this sudden glory) and good parts and success followed, such as the hapless partner of Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar (1931) a favorably reviewed turn as the villain in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) or more debonair characters in slapstick comedies or adventure yarns. The 1930s were a fruitful period for Fairbanks, his most memorable role probably being that of the British soldier in Gunga Din (1939); although it was somewhat of a "swashbuckling" role, Fairbanks made a point of never imitating his father. After the World War II, his star waned and, despite a moving part in Ghost Story (1981), he did not appear in a major movie. Now a legend himself, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. left this world with the satisfaction of having lived up to the Fairbanks name at the end of a life nobody could call "wasted".- Actor
- Art Department
- Additional Crew
Ed Roth was born on 4 March 1932 in Beverly Hills, California, USA. He was an actor, known for The Glory Stompers (1967), Tales of the Rat Fink (2006) and The New Gidget (1986). He was married to Ilene and Sally Roth. He died on 4 April 2001 in Manti, Utah, USA.- Producer
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- Director
Roy Edward Disney began working for the Walt Disney Company as an assistant film editor on the True-Life Adventure film in 1954. In 1967, he was elected to the Board of Directors of the company. In 1984, he returned to the company as vice chairman of the board, and head of the animation department. On October 16, 1998, in a surprise presentation made at the newly unveiled Disney Legends Plaza at the company's headquarters, Disney Chairman and CEO Michael Eisner presented him with the prestigious Disney Legends Award.- Actor
- Additional Crew
Greg Burson was an American voice actor who is known for voicing Mr. DNA from Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park and for being one of Mel Blanc and Daws Butler's successors for many characters such as Bugs Bunny, Yogi Bear, Foghorn Leghorn and Pepe Le Pew. He also voiced in Samurai Jack and Boss Rugor Nass in Star Wars video games. He passed away in July 2008 due to diabetes complications.- Actor
- Additional Crew
Sid Raymond was born on 21 January 1909 in New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Hot Stuff (1979), Folks! (1992) and Easy Money (1983). He was married to Dorothy Naftel. He died on 1 December 2006 in Aventura, Florida, USA.- Writer
- Art Department
William H. Steig was an American author from Brooklyn, New York who was known for writing the book Shrek, which got adapted into a successful animated film franchise by DreamWorks starring Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz and Antonio Banderas. He passed away at Boston in 2003, 2 years after the first Shrek film came out.- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
- Actor
Born Douglas Noel Adams on March 11, 1952 in Cambridge. From 1959 until 1970 he went to Brentwood school in Essex, and his main interest was science. As a student in Cambridge he decided to hitch-hike through Europe to Istanbul, and in order to raise funds for this he took a lot of small jobs. In 1970 he left school to become a writer, certain that success was just around the corner. But nothing happened. He worked with the late Monty Python member Graham Chapman and John Lloyd, but hardly anything they did was published.
On February 4 1977 he met Simon Brett, who then was doing Radio 4's 'The Burkiss Way'. They agreed to produce a science fiction comedy show on radio. This was the birth of the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Douglas Adams married Jane Belson on November 24 1991 and they have a daughter by the name Polly Jane, born on June 22, 1994. They lived in Islington, but in 1999 they moved to California, USA. In 1997 Douglas signed a deal with Disney to make a feature movie, and he immediately started working on the screenplay. Jay Roach, of Austin Powers fame, was signed as director.
On the morning of May 11 2001, Adams went to the local gym to work out. There he suffered a massive heart attack and all attempts to revive him were unsuccessful. He died, and left his 6 year old daughter Polly, his wife Jane, his mother Jan Thrift, brother James and countless other family members and friends, not to mention thousands and thousands of fans all over the world, in shock and mourning.
Author of the hysterically funny series of books, summarized as "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", which also include a radio series, a TV series, stage play, record albums, computer game, graphic novels and a bath towel.
He also wrote the Dirk Gently novels and a non fiction book, "Last Chance to See", about endangered species. Apart from being a writer, he was also a chicken shed cleaner, bodyguard for an Arab royal family and he actually at one time played guitar for Pink Floyd (42nd birthday gift from David Gilmour, an old friend).
Douglas co-founded the company The Digital Village (now h2g2), producing nearly everything that has to do with media: TV, movies, computer games etc. He was one of the creators of Starship Titanic, a combined book (co-written with Terry Jones of the Monty Python bunch) and computer game.
It was often claimed that P.G. Wodehouse had influence on him and his work, and when once asked about this he replied: "Yes, a huge impact. But not an early impact. I didn't start reading Wodehouse until I was writing 'Restaurant at the end of the universe'. I can see the impact starting almost immediately. I think that Wodehouse, without exaggeration, was a genius on the English language."- Music Artist
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A master musician, a film producer and actor, best known as the lead guitarist and occasionally lead vocalist of The Beatles, George Harrison was born February 25, 1943, in Liverpool, Merseyside, England. He was also the youngest of four children, born to Harold Harrison and Louise Harrison.
Like his future band mates, Harrison was not born into wealth. Louise was largely a stay-at-home mom while her husband Harold drove a school bus for the Liverpool Institute, an acclaimed grammar school that George attended and where he first met a young classmate, Paul McCartney. By his own admission, Harrison was not much of a student and what little interest he did have for his studies washed away with his discovery of the electric guitar and American rock-'n'-roll.
There were a lot of harmonies in the Harrison household. He had a knack of sorts for it by age 12 or 13, while riding a bike around his neighborhood and hearing Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel", playing from a nearby house. By the age of 14 George--who was a fan of such legends as , Harrison, who grew up in the likes of listening to such rock legends Carl Perkins, Little Richard and Buddy Holly--had purchased his first guitar and taught himself a few chords.
McCartney', who had recently joined up with another Liverpool teenager, John Lennon, in a skiffle group known as The Quarrymen, invited Harrison to see the band perform. Harrison and Lennon had a few things in common, such as the fact that they both attended Dovedale Primary School but didn't know each other. Their paths finally crossed in early 1958. McCartney had been egging the 17-year-old Lennon to allow the 14-year-old Harrison to join the band, but Lennon was reluctant; as legend has it, after seeing McCartney and Lennon perform, George was granted an audition on the upper deck of a bus, where he wowed Lennon with his rendition of popular American rock riffs.
The 17-year-old Harrison's music career was in full swing by 1960. Lennon had renamed the band The Beatles and the young group began cutting its rock teeth in the small clubs and bars around Liverpool and Hamburg, Germany. Within two years, the group had a new drummer, Ringo Starr, and a manager, Brian Epstein, a young record store owner who eventually landed the group a record contract with EMI's Parlophone label.
Before the end of 1962, Harrison and The Beatles recorded a song, "Love Me Do", that landed in the UK Top 20 charts. Early that following year, another hit, "Please Please Me," was released, followed by an album by the same name. "Beatlemania" was in full swing across England, and by early 1964, with the release of their album in the US and an American tour, it had swept across the States as well.
Largely referred to as the "Quiet Beatle" Harrison took a back seat to McCartney, Lennon and, to a certain extent, Starr. Still, he could be quick-witted, even edgy. During the middle of one American tour, the group members were asked how they slept at night with long hair.
From the get-go, Lennon-McCartney were primary lead vocalists. While the two spent most of the time writing their own songs, Harrison had shown an early interest in creating his own work. In the summer of 1963 he spearheaded his first song, "Don't Bother Me," which made its way on to the group's second album. From there on out, Harrison's songs were a staple of all Beatle records. In fact, some of the group's more memorable songs--e.g., "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Something," which was the only Beatle song ever recorded by Frank Sinatra--were penned by Harrison.
However, his influence on the group and pop music in general extended beyond just singles. In 1965, while on the set of The Beatles' second film, Help! (1965), Harrison took an interest in some of the Eastern instruments and their musical arrangements that were being used in the film. He soon developed a deep interest in Indian music. He taught himself the sitar, introducing the instrument to many western ears on Lennon's song, "Norwegian Wood"" He soon cultivated a close relationship with renowned sitar player Ravi Shankar. Other groups, including The Rolling Stones, began incorporating the sitar into some of their work. It could be argued that Harrison's experimentation with different kinds of instrumentation helped pave the way for such ground-breaking Beatle albums as "Revolver" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".
Harrison's interest in Indian music soon extended into a yearning to learn more about eastern spiritual practices. In 1968 he led The Beatles on a journey to northern India to study transcendental meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Having grown spiritually and musically since the group first started, Harrison, who wanted to include more of his material on Beatle records, was clearly uneasy with the McCartney-Lennon dominance of the group. During the "Let It Be" recording sessions in 1969, Harrison walked out, staying away for several weeks before he was coaxed to come back with the promise that the band would use more of his songs on its records.
However, tensions in the group were clearly high. Lennon and McCartney had ceased writing together years before, and they, too, were feeling the need to go in a different direction. In January of 1970 the group recorded Harrison's "I Me Mine." It was the last song the four would ever record together. Three months later, McCartney announced he was leaving the band and The Beatles were officially over.
After the breakup of The Beatles, Harrison pursued a solo career. He immediately assembled a studio band consisting of ex-Beatle Starr, guitar legend Eric Clapton, keyboardist Billy Preston and others to record all the songs that had never made it on to The Beatles catalog. The result was a three-disc album, "All Things Must Pass". While one of its signature songs, "My Sweet Lord," was later deemed too similar in style to The Chiffons' 1963 hit "He's So Fine," forcing the guitarist to cough up nearly $600,000, the album as a whole remains Harrison's most acclaimed record.
Not long after the album's release, Harrison combined his charitable work and his continued passion for the east when he put together a series of ground-breaking benefit concerts at New York City's Madison Square Garden to raise money for refugees in Bangladesh. Known as the "Concert for Bangladesh", the shows, which featured Bob Dylan, Leon Russell, and Ravi Shankar, would go on to raise some $15 million for UNICEF, produced a Grammy-winning album, a successful documentary film (The Concert for Bangladesh (1972)) and laid the groundwork for future benefit shows like "Live Aid" and "Farm Aid".
Not everything about post-Beatle life went smoothly for Harrison, though. In 1974, his marriage to Pattie Boyd, whom he'd married eight years before, ended when she left him for Eric Clapton. His studio work struggled, too, from 1973-77, starting with, "Living in the Material World", "Extra Texture," and "33 1/3," all of which failed to meet sales expectations.
Following the release of that last album, Harrison took a short break from music, winding down his own label, Dark Horse Records--which he had started in 1974, and which had released albums by a number of other bands--and started his own film production company, Handmade Films. The company produced the successful Monty Python film Life of Brian (1979) and would go on to make 26 other films before Harrison sold his interest in the company in 1994.
In 1979, he returned to the studio to release his self-titled album. It was followed two years later by, "Somewhere in England," which was still being worked on at the time of John Lennon's assassination in December of 1980. The record eventually included the Lennon tribute track, "All Those Years Ago," a song that reunited ex-Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with ex-Wings members Denny Laine and Linda McCartney. While the song was a hit, the album, its predecessor and its successor, "Gone Troppo," weren't. For Harrison the lack of commercial appeal and the constant battles with music executives proved draining and prompted another studio hiatus.
A comeback of sorts came in November 1987, however, with the release of the album "Cloud Nine," produced by Jeff Lynne (of Electric Light Orchestra). The album turned out several top-charting hits, including "Got My Mind Set On You"-- remake of the 1962 song by Rudy Clark--and "When We Was Fab," a song that reflected on the life of Beatlemania, with Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, who was dressed up as a walrus, but was a camera shy, in February 1988. Later that year Harrison formed The Traveling Wilburys. The group consisted of Harrison, Lynne, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan, and spawned two successful albums. Buoyed by the group's commercial success, Harrison took to the road with his new bandmates in 1992, embarking on his first international tour in 18 years.
Not long afterwards he was reunited with McCartney and Starr for the creation of an exhaustive three-part release of a Beatles anthology--which featured alternative takes, rare tracks and a John Lennon demo called "Free as a Bird," that the three surviving Beatles completed in the studio. The song went on to become the group's 34th Top 10 single. After that, however, Harrison largely became a homebody, keeping himself busy with gardening and his cars at his expansive and restored home in Henley-on-Thames in south Oxfordshire, England.
Still, the ensuing years were not completely stress-free. In 1997, Harrison, a longtime smoker, was successfully treated for throat cancer. Eighteen months later, his life was again put on the line when a deranged 33-year-old Beatles fan somehow managed to circumvent Harrison's intricate security system and broke into his home, attacking the musician and his wife Olivia with a knife. Harrison was treated for a collapsed lung and minor stab wounds. Olivia suffered several cuts and bruises.
In May 2001, Harrison's cancer returned. There was lung surgery, but doctors soon discovered the cancer had spread to his brain. That autumn, he traveled to the US for treatment and was eventually hospitalized at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA. He died November 29, 2001, at ex-bandmate McCartney's house in Los Angeles, at aged 58, with his wife and son at his side.
Just one year after his death, Harrison's final studio album, "Brainwashed," was released. It was produced by Lynne, Harrison's son Dhani Harrison and Harrison himself, and featured a collection of songs he'd been working at the time of his death. Dhani finished putting the album together and it was released in November of 2002.- Writer
- Actor
- Producer
Lorenzo Music was born on 2 May 1937 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Rhoda (1974), Carlton Your Doorman (1980) and Garfield in Paradise (1986). He was married to Henrietta Music. He died on 4 August 2001 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
Ron Taylor was born on 16 October 1952 in Galveston, Texas, USA. He was an actor, known for Trading Places (1983), Matlock (1986) and Twin Peaks (1990). He was married to Deborah Sharpe-Taylor. He died on 16 January 2002 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
- Stunts
Despite being one of the smallest actors in Hollywood at 37 inches, Josh proved quality early on in life. By creating and distributing his own business cards before he was even a teenager, Josh landed a spot on "The Dancing Baby" ice cream commercial, which led to his role in Baby Geniuses (1999), where he played all the babies and did all the dancing. His co-star in that, Peter MacNicol, introduced him to David E. Kelley, who cast him as recurring guest Oren Koolie on Ally McBeal (1997), a child lawyer who gives Ally a hard time. His role on Passions (1999) was his first contract role in a TV series. He also appeared in How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) with Jim Carrey.
His mother added recently: "Perhaps he didn't live many years but he lived a life that was filled with big dreams most of which he lived as a reality rather than only dreaming about. He said the only dream that can't come true is one that no one dares to dream, other than that every dream is possible. I hope that Josh will always be remembered not because he died but because he really lived a life filled with love and laughter and lots and lots of dreams. He made the most out of what he had, he was larger than life and we should all be as wise as the little guy with the big dreams."- Music Artist
- Actress
- Music Department
Peggy Lee was Born Norma Dolores Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota, on May 26, 1920. At age four her mother died. Peggy's father, a railroad station agent, remarried but later left home, leaving Peggy's care entrusted to a stepmother who physically abused her. Peggy later memorialized this in the calypso number "One Beating a Day", one of 22 songs she co-wrote for the autobiographical musical "Peg", in which she made her Broadway debut in 1983 at the age of 62. As a youngster Peggy worked as a milkmaid, later turning to singing for money in her teens. While singing on a local radio station in Fargo, the program director there suggested she change her name to Peggy Lee. Peggy's big break came when Benny Goodman hired her to sing with his band after hearing her perform. Peggy shot to stardom when she and Goodman cut the hit record "Why Don't You Do Right?" and went out on her own to record such classics as "Fever", "Lover", "Golden Earrings", "Big Spender" and "Is That All There Is?" - the latter winning her a Grammy Award in 1969. Peggy's vocal style provided a distinctive imprint to countless swing tunes, ballads and big band numbers. She was considered the type of performer equally capable of interpreting a song as uniquely as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Bessie Smith. Her 1989 album, "Peggy Sings the Blues", was a Grammy Award nominee. Peggy was a prolific songwriter and arranger and her 1990 "The Peggy Lee Songbook" contained four songs she wrote with guitarist John Chiodini. Peggy also wrote for jazz greats Duke Ellington, who called her "The Queen", and Johnny Mercer, and composer Quincy Jones. Also in 1990 Peggy was awarded the coveted Pied Piper Award presented by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). She made her mark in Hollywood as an actress, winning an Academy Award nomination for her role as the hard-drinking singer in the jazz saga, Pete Kelly's Blues (1955) and composed songs for the 1955 Walt Disney animated classic Lady and the Tramp (1955). The animated film featured a character named Peg, a broken-down old showgirl of a dog, whose provocative walk was based on the stage-prowl of Peggy Lee. Later she sued Disney and won a landmark legal judgment for a portion of the profits from the videocassette sale of the film. Peggy's private life was racked by physical ailments, a near-fatal fall in 1976, diabetes and a stroke in 1998. She was married four times, all ending in divorce. She and first husband, guitarist Dave Barbour, had a daughter, Nicki, her only child. Peggy and Dave were on the verge of a reconciliation in 1965, but he died of a heart attack before the couple got back together. Peggy has left a vast legend of music that is constantly finding new generations of fans.- Actor
- Soundtrack
An eloquent character actor who would become a celebrated TV camp icon of the late 1960s, Jonathan Harris was born Jonathan Daniel Charasuchin on November 6, 1914, in the Bronx borough of New York City. The son of impoverished Russian-Jewish émigrés, his father worked in the garment industry and young Jonathan contributed to the family income by working as a box boy in a pharmacy at age 12, which inspired him enough to, after graduating from James Monroe High School, earn a pharmacy degree at Fordham University in 1936.
However, Jonathan's desire to act was quite strong at an early age and it proved overwhelming in the end, forsaking a steady pharmaceutical career for the thoroughly unsteady work in the theater. Self-trained to shake his thick Bronx accent by watching British movies and pursuing interests in Shakespeare and archaeology, Jonathan changed his surname to one much easier to pronounce. After performing in over 100 plays in stock companies nationwide, he finally made an inauspicious debut as a Polish officer in the play "Heart of a City" (1942) and also entertained World War II troops in the South Pacific. Other New York plays during this war-era decade would include "Right Next to Broadway" (1944), "A Flag Is Born" (1946), "The Madwoman of Chaillot (1948) and "The Grass Harp" (1952).
Following his introduction to live television drama in 1948, Jonathan ventured off to Hollywood. After appearing in a number of television anthologies such as "The Chevrolet Tele-Theatre", "Pulitzer Prize Playhouse", "Betty Crocker Star Matinee", "Goodyear Playhouse" and "Hallmark Hall of Fame", he made his film debut as part of a band of potential mutineers in the film Botany Bay (1952) starring doctor hero Alan Ladd and villainous captain James Mason. He wouldn't make another film for another five years, with a supporting role as Lysias in the biblical story of Simon Peter in The Big Fisherman (1959) starring Howard Keel.
However, it was television that would make keep Jonathan working and make a stronger impression. Remaining steadfast on classy anthologies dramas such as "Armstrong Circle Theatre", "Studio One in Hollywood", "Matinee Theatre", "Schlitz Playhouse", "Climax", "Colgate Theatre", "Kraft Theatre", "General Electric Theatre", as well as the role of Exton in a TV-movie version of King Richard II (1954), he began appearing on more popular television series such as Zorro (1957), Father Knows Best (1954), The Law and Mr. Jones (1960), Outlaws (1960), The Twilight Zone (1959), The Lloyd Bridges Show (1962) and Bonanza (1959), Jonathan got his first taste of television success and audiences got to witness the fusty, cowardly, uppity side of Jonathan in two archetypal regular roles: as cowardly assistant Bradley Webster on the crime drama The Third Man (1959) starring Michael Rennie and as persnickety hotel manager Mr. Phillips on the short-lived sitcom The Bill Dana Show (1963) starring the Latin-speaking comic as a bellhop.
This culminated in the television regular role that would make Jonathan a cult icon, as Dr. Zachary Smith, the dastardly, effete spaceship stowaway on Lost in Space (1965). Along with his straight man robot, Harris easily stole the show week after week as he botched and mangled all the good intentions of the Robinson family to get back home to Earth. Jonathan would find himself severely typecast as a plummy villain for the remainder of his career, and was seen usually in cryptic form on such television series as The Ghost & Mrs. Muir (1968), Land of the Giants (1968), Get Smart (1965), Bewitched (1964), McMillan & Wife (1971), Night Gallery (1969), Love, American Style (1969), Sanford and Son (1972), Vega$ (1978), Fantasy Island (1977), etc. He did reappear on the brief sci-fi series Space Academy (1977), as Commander Isaac Gampu, leader of a space academy in the year 3732. However, this character was the polar opposite of Dr. Zachary Smith -- wise, honorable and brave.
Jonathan's crisp, eloquent voice was also used frequently with great relish in commercials and for sci-fi and animated series purposes -- The Banana Splits Adventure Hour (1968), Battlestar Galactica (1978), Foofur (1986), Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light (1987), Problem Child (1993), The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat (1995), Freakazoid! (1995) and Buzz Lightyear of Star Command (2000). His voice was also used for the animated features Happily Ever After (1989), A Bug's Life (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999).
A drama teacher and vocal coach in later years, Harris died of a blood clot to the heart on November 3, 2002, just three days before his 88th birthday. He was survived by his long-time wife (from 1938), Gertrude Bregman, and son Richard (born 1942). He was interred in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
Rodney Dangerfield was born Jacob Cohen on November 22, 1921 in Deer Park, Suffolk County, Long Island, New York. He was the son of Dorothy "Dotty" (Teitelbaum) and Phillip Cohen, who performed in vaudeville under the name Phil Roy. His father was born in New York, to Russian Jewish parents, and his mother was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant. Rodney began writing jokes at the age of fifteen, and started performing before he was 20. He took his act to the road for ten years, his stage name was "Jack Roy". While working as a struggling comedian, Rodney Dangerfield worked as a singing waiter. His first run at comedy was to no avail.
Rodney Dangerfield married Joyce Indig, in 1949 and had two children: Brian and Melanie. During the 1950s, Rodney was an aluminum siding salesman, living in New Jersey. The comedian made another attempt at stand-up comedy, this time as Rodney Dangerfield. In 1961, Rodney divorced from his wife.
When he appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show" (The Ed Sullivan Show (1948)), Rodney Dangerfield made Ed Sullivan laugh. Few people ever provoked any kind of reaction out of the legendary Ed Sullivan. Dangerfield had the image of a lovable disgruntled every-man type that became a hit all across nightclubs in the 1960s. Dangerfield also made many appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962) and The Dean Martin Show (1965) in the 1970s.
Rodney Dangerfield snatched a minor supporting part in the movie, The Projectionist (1970), in 1971. By the mid 1970s, he had cemented his image as a comedian constantly tugging at his red tie, always proclaiming he gets no respect. His big break came with many appearances on Saturday Night Live (1975), bringing himself to a much wider audience and proving hysterical on many occasions. In 1980, Dangerfield became a cornerstone of American comedy with the classic Caddyshack (1980).
Here, he played "Al Czervik", a rich golfer who was a basically nice guy who was extremely outspoken and very obnoxious. His character was often unhappy with the rich snobbery he was around, and he takes on the rich people that are so snobby to him.
The average guy that his character portrayed was an instant hit, and a formula that Dangerfield often stuck with. Also, in 1980, Rodney came out with a popular comedy album, "Rappin Rodney".
The album earned Dangerfield a Grammy for best comedy album. The next movie on Rodney's agenda was Easy Money (1983), a comedy that showed him as an insulting working class person who suddenly becomes a millionaire. The movie was also a big hit. Dangerfield became very sparse in his roles on TV and film about this time. The year 1986 saw the comedy, Back to School (1986), his biggest film to date. The comedy was one of the first to gross over 100 million. In 1994, Dangerfield starred in his first dramatic role in the successful Oliver Stone film, Natural Born Killers (1994).
He played an abusive father who drove one of the killers crazy. His part was critically-acclaimed. In 1995, Dangerfield entered the world of cyberspace, becoming the first entertainer to have a website on the world-wide web. In 1997, he starred in Meet Wally Sparks (1997), a political and talk show satire which was poorly received. In 2000, Dangerfield starred as "the Devil" in Little Nicky (2000). The movie was potentially a huge hit, but was a failure by most accounts. Dangerfield took a very small part, but was top-billed in the direct-to-video The Godson (1998), and starred in the direct-to-video link=tt0216930]. But it has not been all smooth sailing for this comedian. In 1997, he admitted to a lifelong bout with depression and, on his 80th birthday, had a mild heart attack. He has major fans from all kinds of people from all different backgrounds. Dangerfield had made a record 70 appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962), and had discovered many struggling comedians, including Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Carrey, Roseanne Barr, Robert Townsend, Sam Kinison and Tim Allen.
The comedian owned a legendary nightclub in Manhattan called "Dangerfield's". In the 1990s, he made highly-publicized appearances on The Simpsons (1989), In Living Color (1990), Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist (1995), Home Improvement (1991), Suddenly Susan (1996), among others.
In 1993, he married Joan Dangerfield (aka Joan Child), a woman thirty years younger than him, and a Mormon.
He died on October 5, 2004, after falling into a coma following heart surgery.- Actor
- Producer
- Additional Crew
Eldred Gregory Peck was born on April 5, 1916 in La Jolla, California, to Bernice Mae (Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, a chemist and druggist in San Diego. He had Irish (from his paternal grandmother), English, and some German, ancestry. His parents divorced when he was five years old. An only child, he was sent to live with his grandmother. He never felt he had a stable childhood. His fondest memories are of his grandmother taking him to the movies every week and of his dog, which followed him everywhere. He studied pre-med at UC-Berkeley and, while there, got bitten by the acting bug and decided to change the focus of his studies. He enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and debuted on Broadway after graduation. His debut was in Emlyn Williams' play "The Morning Star" (1942). By 1943, he was in Hollywood, where he debuted in the RKO film Days of Glory (1944).
Stardom came with his next film, The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. Peck's screen presence displayed the qualities for which he became well known. He was tall, rugged and heroic, with a basic decency that transcended his roles. He appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) as an amnesia victim accused of murder. In The Yearling (1946), he was again nominated for an Academy Award and won the Golden Globe. He was especially effective in westerns and appeared in such varied fare as David O. Selznick's critically blasted Duel in the Sun (1946), the somewhat better received Yellow Sky (1948) and the acclaimed The Gunfighter (1950). He was nominated again for the Academy Award for his roles in Gentleman's Agreement (1947), which dealt with anti-Semitism, and Twelve O'Clock High (1949), a story of high-level stress in an Air Force bomber unit in World War II.
With a string of hits to his credit, Peck made the decision to only work in films that interested him. He continued to appear as the heroic, larger-than-life figures in such films as Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951) and Moby Dick (1956). He worked with Audrey Hepburn in her debut film, Roman Holiday (1953). Peck finally won the Oscar, after four nominations, for his performance as lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). In the early 1960s, he appeared in two darker films than he usually made, Cape Fear (1962) and Captain Newman, M.D. (1963), which dealt with the way people live. He also gave a powerful performance as Captain Keith Mallory in The Guns of Navarone (1961), one of the biggest box-office hits of that year.
In the early 1970s, he produced two films, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1972) and The Dove (1974), when his film career stalled. He made a comeback playing, somewhat woodenly, Robert Thorn in the horror film The Omen (1976). After that, he returned to the bigger-than-life roles he was best known for, such as MacArthur (1977) and the monstrous Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele in the huge hit The Boys from Brazil (1978). In the 1980s, he moved into television with the miniseries The Blue and the Gray (1982) and The Scarlet and the Black (1983). In 1991, he appeared in the remake of his 1962 film, playing a different role, in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991). He was also cast as the progressive-thinking owner of a wire and cable business in Other People's Money (1991).
In 1967, Peck received the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He was also been awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Always politically progressive, he was active in such causes as anti-war protests, workers' rights and civil rights. In 2003, his Peck's portrayal of Atticus Finch was named the greatest film hero of the past 100 years by the American Film Institute. Gregory Peck died at age 87 on June 12, 2003 in Los Angeles, California.- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
"Straight Shooting" -- whether skeet shooting, or portraying Eliot Ness -- Robert Stack always told it like it was, and shot straight. Born in Los Angeles, California, the younger son of James Langford Stack (1860-1928), the owner of an advertising agency, and Mary Elizabeth Modini Wood (1891-1975), he was originally named Charles Langford Modini Stack at birth by his mother but his father soon changed the name to Robert Langford Stack. (The name Robert reportedly referred to no one in particular.) His elder brother and only sibling was James Langford Stack (1916-2006).
His parents had divorced when he was one-year-old, and his mother took him to Europe when he was three. He did not learn to speak English until he was six years old. His brother, James Langford Stack Jr., stayed in the United States with their father. Young Robert spoke fluent Italian and French, but had to learn English when they returned to Los Angeles. His mother and father remarried in 1928. Robert took drama courses at USC. He was not interested in team sports, so he took up skeet shooting. In 1935, he came in second in the National Skeet Shooting Championship (held in Cleveland) and, in 1936, his 5-man team broke the standing record at the National Skeet Championships (held in St. Louis).
Stack arrived at Universal City Studios in 1939, when the movie studio (once riding high on the successes of movies such as Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931)) was in financial trouble, and looking for a superstar. That superstar was Deanna Durbin (acquired from MGM), and Stack made his screen debut as her lover in First Love (1939). At first, he did not want to listen to the makeup man who had told him, "no blond has ever made it as a leading man", and insisted on dyeing his hair black and uncurling it. That makeup man was genius and Oscar winner, Jack P. Pierce (who had done all the monsters for Universal), and Stack became a matinee idol, overnight. After two more movies, he was teamed with Durbin again, in Nice Girl? (1941). he was now a bona-fide star, but Universal was still only paying him $150 a week. For the next 10 years, Stack did Westerns, war movies and romantic comedies.
Stack had fond memories for Bullfighter and the Lady (1951), a movie produced by his friend, John Wayne, which meant 12 weeks filming in sunny Mexico. The movie had a great script; unfortunately, two bullfighters were gored while filming. There were several weeks of delays, they could not get a crew or a sound stage, until they realized that, in Mexico, it is necessary to bribe the local union; some money was passed and filming started, immediately. There were wild times, and lots of tequila. Robert became a local legend; when some Mexicans asked him what he did in the War, Robert said: "I taught machine gun." The rumor spread: "Roberto teaches chingas!" (that's Spanish for "hookers"). In 1952, he made movie history (much like Al Jolson had done in 1927, being in the first "talkie") -- he starred in Bwana Devil (1952), the first 3-D movie. This gave startling effects to the story, which was based on real-life lion attacks in Africa.
Stack attended the premiere, and recalled people's reactions to the 3-D lion scenes: "People in the audience jumped out of their seats, some even fainted." The movie broke box office records, and immediately started the demand to film more movies in 3-D (such as House of Wax (1953)). Around 1955, Robert (Hollywood's most eligible bachelor) was introduced to Rosemarie Bowe, by mutual agent Bill Shiffrin. Rosemarie had been under contract to MGM and Columbia, making such movies as Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) and The Golden Mistress (1954). The couple wed two years later and had two children: Elizabeth Stack and Charles Stack. The former perennial bachelor found out he liked being married and being a father. His onscreen fame had grown and, for Written on the Wind (1956), he received an Academy Award nomination. Unfortunately, this did not sit well with 20th-Century Fox, which had him under contract, and had lent him to Universal for this picture. His contract with Fox came to an end. Stack made the transition to the new medium that was sweeping the country: television. He delivered breakout performances in his signature role as T-man (Treasury agent) Eliot Ness on The Untouchables (1959) which, after the pilot, ran for four seasons (118 episodes). And there was also the television movie, The Scarface Mob (1959).
There were some funny behind-the-scenes anecdotes, such as this one: there is no scene which stood out more as the most potentially evil, and risky in terms of audience acceptance, as the "bacio di morte" ("kiss of death"), the Sicilian gesture whenever a Capo (Neville Brand) kissed a Mafia soldier (Frank DeKova) to send him out as an executioner. The two actors were nervous enough about this scene (two guys had never kissed on television before), but then some crewman decided to be a prankster and told each star, in private, just before filming, "look out -- your co-star likes kissing guys" (a complete deception, of course). There were some unfortunate anecdotes: Joseph Wiseman was a fine actor, but trained to work on the New York stage with props; he was not accustomed to real Hollywood sets. In a 1960 episode of "The Untouchables", Stack was supposed to take an axe and smash up a brewery. He hit a real pipe, the axe ricocheted off the metal, and cut through his Achilles tendon. "I never felt so sorry for anyone in my life", Stack commented. They wrote a role for Wiseman as a crippled, renegade chemist a few weeks later in "The Antidote", which Stack noted, "was one of our half-dozen top shows". Stack went on to do television series, such as The Name of the Game (1968) alternating lead with Gene Barry and Anthony Franciosa, then later Most Wanted (1976), and he pleasantly surprised everyone with his flair for comedies in movies like 1941 (1979) and Airplane! (1980).
Stack hosted Unsolved Mysteries (1987) and did more zany humor in Caddyshack II (1988), Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996) and BASEketball (1998). He also provided the voice of the character Ultra Magnus in The Transformers: The Movie (1986). He portrayed the no-nonsense G-man Ness again in The Return of Eliot Ness (1991). Stack was being treated for prostate cancer when he died at age 84 on May 14, 2003 at his home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, after suffering a heart attack.- Actor
- Production Designer
- Soundtrack
Born in Japan, Makoto Iwamatsu was living there with his grandparents while his parents studied art in the United States, when Japan and the U.S. went to war in 1941. His parents remained in the U.S., working for the Office of War Information, and, at the cessation of the conflict, were granted U.S. residency by Congress. "Mako", as he became known, joined his parents in New York and studied architecture.
He entered the U.S. Army in the early 1950s and acted in shows for military personnel, discovering a talent and love for the theatre. He abandoned his plans to become an architect and instead enrolled at the famed Pasadena Community Playhouse. Following his studies there, he appeared in many stage productions and on television. In 1966, he won an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his first film role, as the coolie "Po-Han" in The Sand Pebbles (1966). He worked steadily in feature films since.
He appeared on Broadway in the leading role in Stephen Sondheim's "Pacific Overtures", and co-founded and served as artistic director for the highly-acclaimed East-West Players theatre company in Los Angeles.
Following a long battle with cancer, Mako passed away on July 21, 2006, at the age of 72. He was survived by his wife, Shizuko Hoshi (who co-starred in episodes of M*A*S*H (1972)) as well, and his children and grandchildren.- Actor
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Jonathan Southworth Ritter was born in Burbank, California, on September 17, 1948. He was the son of legendary country singer/actor Tex Ritter (born Woodward Maurice Ritter) and his wife, actress Dorothy Fay (née Dorothy Fay Southworth). The couple married in 1941 and had their first child, Tom Ritter, who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. John was destined to follow in his parents footsteps. He was enrolled at Hollywood High School where he was student body president.
After graduation from high school, he attended the University of Southern California where he majored in Psychology and minored in Architecture. His first appearance on TV was in 1966 as a contestant on The Dating Game (1965) where he won a vacation to Lake Havasu, Arizona. After making his very first cameo appearance, he was induced to join an acting class taught by Nina Foch. He changed his major to Theater Arts, graduating in 1971 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Drama. He also studied acting with Stella Adler at the Harvey Lembeck Comedy Workshop. Between 1968 and 1969, he appeared in a series of stage plays in England, Scotland, Holland and in Germany.
His TV debut came playing a campus revolutionary on Dan August (1970) which starred Burt Reynolds and Norman Fell, who later starred with him on Three's Company (1976). Then he appeared as "Reverend Matthew Fordwick" on The Waltons (1972). He continued making more guest appearances on Medical Center (1969), M*A*S*H (1972), The Bob Newhart Show (1972), The Streets of San Francisco (1972), Kojak (1973), Rhoda (1974) and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970). While working on The Waltons (1972), he received word that his legendary father had passed away, just a day after New Year's Day in 1974. The following year, in late 1975, ABC picked up the rights for a new series based on a British sitcom, Man About the House (1973). Ritter beat out 50 people, including a young Billy Crystal, to get a major role. The first pilot was trashed, and in order for it to be improved, Joyce DeWitt, an unknown actress, played the role of "Janet Wood", along with Susan Lanier as the dumb blonde, "Chrissy Snow". It did better than the first pilot, but the producers still needed a change and Suzanne Somers came to the show at the very last minute to play "Chrissy". The series, Three's Company (1976), was born. When it debuted as a mid-season replacement, it became a ratings hit. It focused mainly on his character, "Jack Tripper", a chef who pretended to be gay in order to share an apartment with two attractive ladies.
Before playing "Jack Tripper" on the small screen, he also made his box office debut in the movie Nickelodeon (1976). Two years later, he worked with his close friend, Jenny Sullivan, in Breakfast in Bed (1977), and the following year, played "Pres. Chet Roosevelt" in the movie Americathon (1979). Also in 1977, he and his brother emceed the Annual United Cerebral Palsy Telethon which he continued to support for over 15 years. He also became more popular with movies such as Hero at Large (1980) and They All Laughed (1981). In 1980, when Three's Company (1976) was sold into syndication, the show became a ratings phenomenon. At the height of Ritter's popularity, he won a Golden Globe in 1983 for Best Performance by an Actor after being nominated twice for Best TV Actor in a Musical-Comedy Series and, one year later, he won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor In a Comedy Series after being nominated twice. By its eighth season, the show began to drop in the ratings and was canceled in 1984. After cancellation, he starred in its spin-off, called Three's a Crowd (1984), also starring Mary Cadorette, but it lasted for only one season.
His first animated movie was that of a man turning into a dragon, whose job was to defeat "Ommendon" in The Flight of Dragons (1982). The following year, he came back to series television as "Detective Harry Hooperman" in the comedy/drama, Hooperman (1987) for which he was nominated for both an Emmy and a Golden Globe in 1988 for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. He also won a People's Choice Award for this role. He continued doing more box-office films such as Skin Deep (1989), in which he played a womanizing, alcoholic writer whose life seemed to be falling apart at the seams. In the movies, Problem Child (1990), and Problem Child 2 (1991), he played the surrogate father of a rebellious little boy who wrought havoc on the family. He also worked on Noises Off... (1992) and Stay Tuned (1992) before returning to another TV sitcom called Hearts Afire (1992) that also starred Billy Bob Thornton. The show had well-written scripts but failed to reach a massive audience which led to its cancellation in 1995. While he was working on Hearts Afire (1992), he played "Ward Nelson" on North (1994). Then, he had the opportunity to work with Billy Bob Thornton, in the movie Sling Blade (1996), in which Ritter played the gay manager of a department store. He also provided the voice of "Clifford" in Clifford the Big Red Dog (2000). He was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award 4 times in a row, totaling seven Emmy nominations in his 35-year career. In 1999, he was also nominated for an Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series playing the role of "George Madison" on an episode of Ally McBeal (1997).
Soon afterwards, he landed his last television role in 8 Simple Rules (2002), based on the popular book. On this sitcom he played "Paul Hennessey", a loving, yet rational dad, who laid down the ground rules for his three children and dealt with such topics as curfews, sex, drugs, getting arrested, etc. The show was a ratings winner in its first season and won a People's Choice Award for Best New Comedy and also won for Favorite Comedy Series by the Family Awards. While working on "8 Simple Rules," he also starred in his second-to-last film, Manhood (2003). That same year, he felt ill while rehearsing on set, and was taken across the street to Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, California, where he was mistakenly treated for a heart attack. He died from an undiagnosed aortic dissection which is a tear in the wall of the aorta. He underwent surgery and died on September 11, 2003, just six days shy of his 55th birthday. In the years that he worked, John Ritter was a brilliant comedian and a passionate actor, who wanted to make everybody laugh. Shortly before his death, his eldest son, Jason Ritter, was cast in the role of "Kevin" in the highly-rated drama Joan of Arcadia (2003).- Music Artist
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Johnny Cash was born February 26, 1932, in Kingsland, Arkansas, to Carrie Cash (Rivers) and Raymond Cash. He made his first single, "Hey Porter", for Sun Records in 1955. In 1958 he moved to Columbia Records. He had long periods of drug abuse during the 1960s, but later that decade he successfully fought his addiction with the help of singer June Carter Cash, whom he married in 1968. In 1971 he appeared in the western A Gunfight (1971) with 'Kirk Douglas (I)'. Cash made only a few films, but quite a few appearances on television, both in series and made-for-TV films, and was especially effective as a rural Southern sheriff in the 1930s determined to bring to justice a wealthy landowner who committed murder because he believed he was above the law in Murder in Coweta County (1983), a drama based on a true story. In 1975 Cash wrote his autobiography, "Man In Black", which is now out of print. In the late 1980s he moved from Columbia Records to Mercury, then in the next decade moved again to American Recordings. Amongst his biggest hit records were "I Walk the Line", "Ring of Fire" and "A Boy Named Sue". After several years of ill health, he died of complications from diabetes on 12 September 2003, only a few months after the death of his beloved wife.- Actor
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Bernard Jeffrey McCollough was born in 1957 in Chicago, the son of Mary McCullough and Jeffery Harrison. He grew up in the city, in a rougher neighborhood than most others, with a large family living under one roof. This situation provided him with a great insight into his comedy, as his family, and the situations surrounding them would be what dominated his comedy. Mac worked in the Regal Theater, and performed in Chicago parks in his younger days. He became a professional comedian in 1977, at the age of 19. He refused to change his image for television and films, and therefore was not very well known for most of the eighties. In 1992 he made his film debut with a small part with Mo' Money (1992). This started a plethora of small parts in a string of movies, mostly comedies, including Who's the Man? (1993), House Party 3 (1994) and The Walking Dead (1995). 1995 proved to be a turning point in his career. He did an HBO Special called Midnight Mac (1995), and took a part as Pastor Clever in the Chris Tucker comedy Friday (1995). Bernie Mac developed a cult following due to the film. In 1996. he starred in the memorable Spike Lee movie Get on the Bus (1996), and was very funny in Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood (1996). About this time he had a recurring role in the TV series Moesha (1996). Bernie Mac's star was slowly rising from this point. His next couple of movie parts were more substantial, including How to Be a Player (1997) and The Players Club (1998). In 1999 Bernie Mac got his most high profile part up to that point in the film Life (1999) starring Eddie Murphy.
The new century started a new era for the brash Chicago comedian. He was a featured comedian in The Original Kings of Comedy (2000). This performance made him more of a household name, and led to many more major parts. In 2001 he played Martin Lawrence's uncle in What's the Worst That Could Happen? (2001) and later that year, was in the star studded remake of Ocean's Eleven (2001). However his biggest success was The Bernie Mac Show (2001), which debuted in 2001 to instant acclaim. However, soon after the series ended, Mac's health took a turn for the worse. He developed sarcoidosis, an autoimmune disease which causes inflammation in the lungs. On August 9, 2008, after weeks of unsuccessful treatments, Bernie Mac died at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. He was 50.
Bernie Mac was a comedian who refused to change his image for Hollywood and said that his life in Chicago was who he was, and there was nothing that could change that. He was a mature comedian who was very intelligent and engaging in his television, film and stand-up appearances.- Music Artist
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Isaac Hayes, the second-born child of Eula and Isaac Hayes Sr., was raised by his grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Willie Wade Sr. The child of a poor family, he grew up picking cotton in Covington, Tennessee. He dropped out of high school, but later his former high-school teachers to get his diploma, which he earned when he was 21. Otis Redding, Johnnie Taylor, The Bar-Kays, and Booker T. Jones (later of Booker T. & the M.G.s fame) were some of the "Memphis Sound" musical luminaries Hayes worked with during his early years as a budding musician and vocalist. He was a multi-talented composer, singer, and arranger who played the piano, vibraphone, and saxophone equally well. In 1971 he won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for a Motion Picture for the "Theme from Shaft" (1970) and was nominated for Best Original Dramatic Score for Shaft (1971).- Actress
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Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born on May 12, 1907 in Hartford, Connecticut to a suffragist, Katharine Martha (Houghton), and a doctor, Thomas Norval Hepburn, who both always encouraged her to speak her mind, develop it fully, and exercise her body to its full potential. An athletic tomboy as a child, she was very close to her brother Tom; at 14 she was devastated to find him dead, the apparent result of accidentally hanging himself while practicing a hanging trick their father had taught them. For many years afterward, she used his November 8 birth date as her own. She became shy around girls her age and was largely schooled at home. She did attend Bryn Mawr College, where she decided to become an actress, appearing in many of their productions.
After graduating, she began getting small roles in plays on Broadway and elsewhere. She always attracted attention, especially for her role in "Art and Mrs. Bottle" (1931). She finally broke into stardom when she took the starring role of the Amazon princess Antiope in "A Warrior's Husband" (1932). The inevitable film offers followed; after making a few screen tests, she was cast in A Bill of Divorcement (1932), opposite John Barrymore. The film was a hit, and after agreeing to her salary demands, RKO signed her to a contract. She made five films between 1932 and 1934. For her third, Morning Glory (1933), she won her first Academy Award. Her fourth, Little Women (1933), was the most successful picture of its day.
But stories were beginning to leak out, of her haughty behavior off- screen and her refusal to play the Hollywood Game, always wearing slacks and no makeup, never posing for pictures or giving interviews. Audiences were shocked at her unconventional behavior instead of applauding it, and so when she returned to Broadway in 1934 to star in "The Lake", the critics panned her, and the audiences, who at first bought up tickets, soon deserted her. When she returned to Hollywood, things didn't get much better. From 1935-1938, she had only two hits: Alice Adams (1935), which brought her her second Oscar nomination, and Stage Door (1937); the many flops included Break of Hearts (1935), Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Mary of Scotland (1936), Quality Street (1937), and the now-classic Bringing Up Baby (1938).
With so many flops, she came to be labeled "box-office poison". She decided to go back to Broadway to star in "The Philadelphia Story" (1938) and was rewarded with a smash. She quickly bought the film rights and so was able to negotiate her way back to Hollywood on her own terms, including her choice of director and co-stars. The Philadelphia Story (1940) was a box-office hit, and Hepburn, who won her third Oscar nomination for the film, was bankable again. For her next film, Woman of the Year (1942), she was paired with Spencer Tracy, and the chemistry between them lasted for eight more films, spanning the course of 25 years, and a romance that lasted that long off-screen. (She received her fourth Oscar nomination for the film.) Their films included the very successful Adam's Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952), and Desk Set (1957).
With The African Queen (1951), Hepburn moved into middle-aged spinster roles, receiving her fifth Oscar nomination for the film. She played more of these types of roles throughout the 1950s, and won more Oscar nominations for many of them, including her roles in Summertime (1955), The Rainmaker (1956), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). Her film roles became fewer and farther between in the 1960s, as she devoted her time to the ailing Tracy. For one of her film appearances in this decade, in Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), she received her ninth Oscar nomination. After a five-year absence from films, she then made Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), her last film with Tracy and the last film Tracy ever made; he died just weeks after finishing it. It garnered Hepburn her tenth Oscar nomination and her second win. The next year, she did The Lion in Winter (1968), which brought her her eleventh Oscar nomination and third win.
In the 1970s, she turned to making made-for-TV films, with The Glass Menagerie (1973), Love Among the Ruins (1975), and The Corn Is Green (1979). She still continued to make an occasional appearance in feature films, such as Rooster Cogburn (1975) with John Wayne and On Golden Pond (1981) with Henry Fonda. This last brought her her twelfth Oscar nomination and fourth win - the latter still the record.
She made more TV-films in the 1980s and wrote her autobiography, 'Me', in 1991. Her last feature film was Love Affair (1994), with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, and her last TV- film was One Christmas (1994). With her health declining, she retired from public life in the mid-1990s. She died at 96 at her home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.- Actress
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June Carter Cash was born on 23 June 1929 in Maces Springs, Scott County, Virginia, USA. She was an actress and producer, known for The Johnny Cash Show (1969), The Apostle (1997) and Man of Steel (2013). She was married to Johnny Cash, Edwin Lee (Rip) Nix and Carl Smith. She died on 15 May 2003 in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.- Actor
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Comedian Bob Hope was born Leslie Townes Hope in Eltham, London, England, the fifth of seven sons of Avis (Townes), light opera singer, and William Henry Hope, a stonemason from Weston-super-Mare, Somerset. His maternal grandmother was Welsh. Hope moved to Bristol before emigrating with his parents to the USA in 1908. After some years onstage as a dancer and comedian, he made his first film appearance in The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938) singing "Thanks for the Memory", which became his signature tune.
In partnership with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, he appeared in the highly successful "Road to ..." comedies (1940-52), and in many others until the early 1970s. During World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars he spent much time entertaining the troops in the field. For these activities and for his continued contributions to the industry he received five honorary Academy Awards.- Actress
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Her father was Irish Philadelphian newspaperman, Benny McNulty. He was related to Jim Farley, Roosevelt's campaign manager and later U.S. Postmaster General. As a child, she sang songs at a silent movie theater. After the sixth grade she joined a touring vaudeville act called "The Kiddie Kabaret." Billed as Penny McNulty, she sang and danced with Milton Berle and Gene Raymond. Her first speaking part was in a Jack Benny Broadway show, "Great Temptations".
Moving to Hollywood, she took a new name after marrying dentist Lawrence Singleton. Her first name derived from having saved large amounts of penny coins. She played a tough nightclub dancer in After the Thin Man (1936) and acted/sang/danced in Swing Your Lady (1938), one of the movies Humphrey Bogart regarded as his worst. Though naturally a brunette, she bleached her hair blonde ever since she got the role of Blondie in that long-lived series.- Actor
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Elliott Smith was born on 6 August 1969 in Omaha, Nebraska, USA. He was an actor and composer, known for Good Will Hunting (1997), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and Up in the Air (2009). He died on 21 October 2003 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
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Ronald Reagan had quite a prolific career, having catapulted from a Warner Bros. contract player and television star, into serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild, the governorship of California (1967-1975), and lastly, two terms as President of the United States (1981-1989).
Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, to Nelle Clyde (Wilson) and John Edward "Jack" Reagan, who was a salesman and storyteller. His father was of Irish descent, and his mother was of half Scottish and half English ancestry.
A successful actor beginning in the 1930s, the young Reagan was a staunch admirer of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (even after he evolved into a Republican), and was a Democrat in the 1940s, a self-described 'hemophiliac' liberal. He was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947 and served five years during the most tumultuous times to ever hit Hollywood. A committed anti-communist, Reagan not only fought more-militantly activist movie industry unions that he and others felt had been infiltrated by communists, but had to deal with the investigation into Hollywood's politics launched by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, an inquisition that lasted through the 1950s. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigations of Hollywood (which led to the jailing of the "Hollywood Ten" in the late '40s) sowed the seeds of the McCarthyism that racked Hollywood and America in the 1950s.
In 1950, U.S. Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas (D-CA), the wife of "Dutch" Reagan's friend Melvyn Douglas, ran as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate and was opposed by the Republican nominee, the Red-bating Congressman from Whittier, Richard Nixon. While Nixon did not go so far as to accuse Gahagan Douglas of being a communist herself, he did charge her with being soft on communism due to her opposition to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Nixon tarred her as a "fellow traveler" of communists, a "pinko" who was "pink right down to her underwear." Gahagan Douglas was defeated by the man she was the first to call "Tricky Dicky" because of his unethical behavior and dirty campaign tactics. Reagan was on the Douglases' side during that campaign.
The Douglases, like Reagan and such other prominent actors as Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson, were liberal Democrats, supporters of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, a legacy that increasingly was under attack by the right after World War II. They were NOT fellow-travelers; Melvyn Douglas had actually been an active anti-communist and was someone the communists despised. Melvyn Douglas, Robinson and Henry Fonda - a registered Republican! - wound up "gray-listed." (They weren't explicitly black-listed, they just weren't offered any work.) Reagan, who it was later revealed had been an F.B.I. informant while a union leader (turning in suspected communists), was never hurt that way, as he made S.A.G. an accomplice of the black-listing.
Reagan's career sagged after the late 1940s, and he started appearing in B-movies after he left Warner Bros. to go free-lance. However, he had a eminence grise par excellence in Lew Wasserman, his agent and the head of the Music Corp. of America. Wasserman, later called "The Pope of Hollywood," was the genius who figured out that an actor could make a killing via a tax windfall by turning himself into a corporation. The corporation, which would employ the actor, would own part of a motion picture the actor appeared in, and all monies would accrue to the corporation, which was taxed at a much lower rate than was personal income. Wasserman pioneered this tax avoidance scheme with his client James Stewart, beginning with the Anthony Mann western Winchester '73 (1950) (1950). It made Stewart enormously rich as he became a top box office draw in the 1950s after the success of "Winchester 73" and several more Mann-directed westerns, all of which he had an ownership stake in.
Ironically, Reagan became a poor-man's James Stewart in the early 1950s, appearing in westerns, but they were mostly B-pictures. He did not have the acting chops of the great Stewart, but he did have his agent. Wasserman at M.C.A. was one of the pioneers of television syndication, and this was to benefit Reagan enormously. M.C.A. was the only talent agency that was also allowed to be a producer through an exemption to union rules granted by S.A.G. when Reagan was the union president, and it used the exemption to acquire Universal International Pictures. Talent agents were not permitted to be producers as there was an inherent conflict of interest between the two professions, one of which was committed to acquiring talent at the lowest possible cost and the other whose focus was to get the best possible price for their client. When a talent agent was also a producer, like M.C.A. was, it had a habit of steering its clients to its own productions, where they were employed but at a lower price than their potential free market value. It was a system that made M.C.A. and Lew Wasserman, enormously wealthy.
The ownership of Universal and its entry into the production of television shows that were syndicated to network made M.C.A. the most successful organization in Hollywood of its time, a real cash cow as television overtook the movies as the #1 business of the entertainment industry. Wasserman repaid Ronald Reagan's largess by structuring a deal by which he hosted and owned part of General Electric Theater (1953), a western omnibus showcase that ran from 1954 to 1961. It made Reagan very comfortable financially, though it did not make him rich. That came later.
In 1960, with the election of the Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the black and gray lists went into eclipse. J.F.K. appointed Helen Gahagan Douglas Treasurer of the United States. About this time, as the civil rights movement became stronger and found more support among Democrats and the Kennedy administration, Reagan - fresh from a second stint as S.A.G. president in 1959 - was in the process of undergoing a personal and political metamorphosis into a right-wing Republican, a process that culminated with his endorsing Barry Goldwater for the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. (He narrated a Goldwater campaign film played at the G.O.P. Convention in San Francisco.) Reagan's evolution into a right-wing Republican sundered his friendship with the Douglases. (After Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980, Melvyn Douglas said of his former friend that Reagan turned to the right after he had begun to believe the pro-business speeches he delivered for General Electric when he was the host of the "G.E. Theater.")
In 1959, while Reagan was back as a second go-round as S.A.G. president, M.C.A.'s exemption from S.A.G. regulations that forbade a talent agency from being a producer was renewed. However, in 1962, the U.S. Justice Department under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy successfully forced M.C.A. - known as "The Octopus" in Hollywood for its monopolistic tendencies - to divest itself of its talent agency.
When Reagan was tipped by the California Republican Party to be its standard-bearer in the 1965 gubernatorial election against Democratic Governor Pat Brown, Lew Wasserman went back in action. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and though Wasserman was a liberal Democrat, having an old friend like Reagan who had shown his loyalty as S.A.G. president in the state house was good for business. Wasserman and his partner, M.C.A. Chairman Jules Styne (a Republican), helped ensure that Reagan would be financially secure for the rest of his life so that he could enter politics. (At the time, he was the host of "Death Valley Days" on TV.)
According to the Wall Street Journal, Universal sold Reagan a nice piece of land of many acres north of Santa Barbara that had been used for location shooting. The Reagans sold most of the ranch, then converted the rest of it, about 200 acres, into a magnificent estate overlooking the valley and the Pacific Ocean. The Rancho del Cielo became President Reagan's much needed counterpoint to the buzz of Washington, D.C. There, in a setting both rugged and serene, the Reagans could spend time alone or receive political leaders such as the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, and others.
Reagan was known to the world for his one-liners, the most famous of them was addressed to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. "Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall" said Reagan standing in front of the Berlin Wall. That call made an impact on the course of human history.
Ronald Reagan played many roles in his life's seven acts: radio announcer, movie star, union boss, television actor-cum-host, governor, right-wing critic of big government and President of the United States.- Gerald Rudolph Ford was the 38th President of the United States from August 1974 until January 1977.
Ford was born on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska as Leslie Lynch King, Jr., being the son of Leslie Lynch King and Dorothy Ayer Gardner King. His parents separated two weeks after his birth and his mother took him to Grand Rapids, Michigan to live with her parents. On February 1, 1916, his mother Dorothy married Gerald R. Ford, a paint salesman. The Fords began calling their son Gerald R. Ford, Jr. but the name became legal only on December 3, 1935. Aged 13, Ford knew that Gerald Sr., was not his biological father, but it wasn't until 1930 he met his biological father Leslie King, who had made an unexpected stop in Grand Rapids.
Ford grew up in a family with three younger half-brothers, Thomas, Richard, and James. He attended South High School in Grand Rapids, where he already showed his athletics skills, being named to the honor society and the "All-City" and "All-State" football teams. As a scout he was ranked Eagle Scout in November 1927. He earned money by working in the family paint business and at a local restaurant.
Ford attended The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor from 1931 to 1935. He majored in economics and political science and graduated with a B.A. degree in June 1935. He played on the University's national championship football teams in 1932 and 1933 and was voted MVP of Wolverine in 1934. He also played in All-Star and benefit football games. He denied offers from two professional football teams, (Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers), but chose to become boxing coach and assistant varsity football coach at Yale hoping to attend law school there. Ford earned his law degree in 1941.
After returning to Michigan and passing his bar exam, Ford set up a law partnership in Grand Rapids with Philip Buchen, a University of Michigan fraternity brother (who later served on Ford's White House staff as Counsel to the President).
In April 1942 Ford joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and became a physical fitness instructor at a flight school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In the spring of 1943 he began service in the light aircraft carrier USS Monterey. Ford spent the remainder of the war ashore and was discharged as a lieutenant commander in February 1946. He returned to Grand Rapids to become a partner in the locally prestigious law firm of Butterfield, Keeney, and Amberg.
His first political experience was in the summer of 1940 when he was working in the presidential campaign of Wendell Willkie. Six years later he decided to challenge Bartel Jonkman for the Republican nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1948 election. Ford won the nomination and after that was elected to Congress on November 2, 1948, receiving 61% of the vote.
On October 15 1948, the height of the campaign, Ford married Elizabeth ('Betty') Anne Bloomer Warren, a department store fashion consultant. Betty was born on April 8, 1918 in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up in Grand Rapids. They subsequently had four children: Michael Gerald (March 14, 1950), John Gardner (March 16, 1952), Steven Meigs (May 19, 1956) and Susan Elizabeth (July 6, 1957).
Ford served in the House of Representatives from January 3, 1949 to December 6, 1973. He was re-elected twelve times, winning each time with more than 60% of the vote. As his ambition was to become Speaker of the House already in the early 1950s, he denied offers to run for both the Senate and the Michigan governorship in these years. In 1961 he became chairman of the House Republican Conference. In 1963 President Johnson appointed Ford to the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He was the last living member of the Warren Commission.
In 1965 Ford was chosen as the House minority leader, a post he held until 1973. As minority leader Ford made more than 200 speeches a year all across the country, which made him nationally known. He was not only a close friend of Richard Nixon for many years, but also a loyal supporter in both the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections. As in 1960, Ford was again considered as a vice presidential candidate in 1968. Because the Republicans did not attain a majority in the House, Ford was unable to reach his ultimate political goal, Speaker of the House. Instead, he became President of the Senate.
Late in 1973 Spiro Agnew pleaded no contest to a charge of income tax evasion and resigned as Vice President. President Nixon was empowered by the 25th Amendment to appoint a new vice president and chose Ford. He was sworn in on December 6, 1973.
On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign from the office under the threat of impeachment in the Watergate scandal. The same day Gerald R. Ford took the oath of office as 38th President of the United States on August 9, 1974. Also in August 1974, Ford nominated Nelson Rockefeller for vice president, which nomination was confirmed by Congress on December 19, 1974.
One month after taking office President Ford faced one of the toughest decisions in his career. He decided to grant Nixon a full, free and absolute pardon for all offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in. The public opinion was mostly negative about the pardon and there was even suspicion Ford and Nixon had made a deal to grant a pardon if Nixon would resign. Although this happened on September 8, 1974, it might have cost the re-election of Ford two years later.
On November 24, 1974, in the conference hall of the Okeansky Sanitarium, Vladivostok, USSR, President Ford and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT-treaty, following talks on the limitation of strategic offensive arms.
In March 1975, during the final days of the Vietnam War, Ford ordered the airlift of about 237,000 Vietnamese refugees to the United States. Two months later, on May 14, 1975, Ford ordered U.S. forces to retake the S.S. Mayaguez after its seizure by Cambodia, an action Ford characterized as an "act of piracy." The operation saved the ship's 39-member crew, but sadly 41 Americans were killed and 50 more wounded during the preparation and execution of the rescue.
President Ford was twice the target of assassination attempts. Both took place in on two separate trips to California in September 1975 and both were 'performed' by women. On September 5, 1975 he survived an assassination attempt in Sacramento, California, by Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a member of a cult once led by convicted mass murderer Charles Manson. On September 22, 1975, in San Francisco, California, Sara Jane Moore fired a shot at the president, but a bystander diverted the shot.
Despite his former athletics skills, Gerald Ford tumbled several times during his presidency. No cause was ever communicated. At the Republican National Convention in August 1976, Ford fought off a serious challenge from Californian Governor Ronald Reagan to be nominated as his party's presidential candidate. He chose Senator Robert Dole of Kansas as his running mate.
Although he succeeded in closing in on Democrat Jimmy Carter's large lead in the polls, President Ford finally lost one of the closest elections in history in November 1976. After leaving office, Gerald and Betty Ford returned to private life and moved to California where they built a new house in Rancho Mirage, which became his last residence.
President Ford continued to actively participate in the political process and to speak out on important political issues. He lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities. In 1981, the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, were dedicated.
President Ford was the recipient of numerous awards and honors by many civic organizations, like the recipient of many honorary Doctor of Law degrees from various public and private colleges and universities.
In August 1999, President Bill Clinton presented Ford with the nation's highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom. Two months later, in October 1999, Senate and House leaders presented Ford and his wife, Betty, with the Congressional Gold Medal. Together with former President Carter, he served as honorary Co-Chair of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform in 2001. In May 2001 he was presented with the Profiles in Courage award for his controversial decision to pardon former President Nixon.
In August 2000 Ford suffered a mild stroke while attending the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On May 16, 2003 following fluctuations in blood pressure and hot weather, Ford suffered dizzy spells on the golf course and taken to hospital. He was released the next day.
Although President Ford cut back on his travel and public appearances in recent years, he attended funeral services for President Ronald Reagan at Washington's National Cathedral, sitting with former Presidents Clinton, Bush and Carter, and their wives in June 2004.
In August 2006, he was discharged from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, after doctors tried to reduce or eliminate blockages in his coronary arteries. They also implanted a pacemaker to improve his heart performance. In the fall of 2006 Ford spent several days at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage for medical tests. He was released on October 16.
On November 12, 2006, Ford officially became the longest-lived president, surpassing Ronald Reagan. Ford would extend the record by 45 days.
On December 26, 2006 at 6:45 p.m., President Ford died in his house in Rancho Mirage, California. He was aged 93 years and 165 days old, making him the longest-lived United States President. No cause of death was communicated. A state funeral and memorial services were held at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. on January 2, 2007. President Ford was buried at his presidential museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
President Gerald Ford was survived by his wife Betty, after more than 58 years of marriage, and by their four children, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. He was also survived by his brother, Richard, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. - Actor
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Marlon Brando is widely considered the greatest movie actor of all time, rivaled only by the more theatrically oriented Laurence Olivier in terms of esteem. Unlike Olivier, who preferred the stage to the screen, Brando concentrated his talents on movies after bidding the Broadway stage adieu in 1949, a decision for which he was severely criticized when his star began to dim in the 1960s and he was excoriated for squandering his talents. No actor ever exerted such a profound influence on succeeding generations of actors as did Brando. More than 50 years after he first scorched the screen as Stanley Kowalski in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and a quarter-century after his last great performance as Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), all American actors are still being measured by the yardstick that was Brando. It was if the shadow of John Barrymore, the great American actor closest to Brando in terms of talent and stardom, dominated the acting field up until the 1970s. He did not, nor did any other actor so dominate the public's consciousness of what WAS an actor before or since Brando's 1951 on-screen portrayal of Stanley made him a cultural icon. Brando eclipsed the reputation of other great actors circa 1950, such as Paul Muni and Fredric March. Only the luster of Spencer Tracy's reputation hasn't dimmed when seen in the starlight thrown off by Brando. However, neither Tracy nor Olivier created an entire school of acting just by the force of his personality. Brando did.
Marlon Brando, Jr. was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Marlon Brando, Sr., a calcium carbonate salesman, and his artistically inclined wife, the former Dorothy Julia Pennebaker. "Bud" Brando was one of three children. His ancestry included English, Irish, German, Dutch, French Huguenot, Welsh, and Scottish; his surname originated with a distant German immigrant ancestor named "Brandau." His oldest sister Jocelyn Brando was also an actress, taking after their mother, who engaged in amateur theatricals and mentored a then-unknown Henry Fonda, another Nebraska native, in her role as director of the Omaha Community Playhouse. Frannie, Brando's other sibling, was a visual artist. Both Brando sisters contrived to leave the Midwest for New York City, Jocelyn to study acting and Frannie to study art. Marlon managed to escape the vocational doldrums forecast for him by his cold, distant father and his disapproving schoolteachers by striking out for The Big Apple in 1943, following Jocelyn into the acting profession. Acting was the only thing he was good at, for which he received praise, so he was determined to make it his career - a high-school dropout, he had nothing else to fall back on, having been rejected by the military due to a knee injury he incurred playing football at Shattuck Military Academy, Brando Sr.'s alma mater. The school booted Marlon out as incorrigible before graduation.
Acting was a skill he honed as a child, the lonely son of alcoholic parents. With his father away on the road, and his mother frequently intoxicated to the point of stupefaction, the young Bud would play-act for her to draw her out of her stupor and to attract her attention and love. His mother was exceedingly neglectful, but he loved her, particularly for instilling in him a love of nature, a feeling which informed his character Paul in Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris") when he is recalling his childhood for his young lover Jeanne. "I don't have many good memories," Paul confesses, and neither did Brando of his childhood. Sometimes he had to go down to the town jail to pick up his mother after she had spent the night in the drunk tank and bring her home, events that traumatized the young boy but may have been the grain that irritated the oyster of his talent, producing the pearls of his performances. Anthony Quinn, his Oscar-winning co-star in Viva Zapata! (1952) told Brando's first wife Anna Kashfi, "I admire Marlon's talent, but I don't envy the pain that created it."
Brando enrolled in Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at New York's New School, and was mentored by Stella Adler, a member of a famous Yiddish Theatre acting family. Adler helped introduce to the New York stage the "emotional memory" technique of Russian theatrical actor, director and impresario Konstantin Stanislavski, whose motto was "Think of your own experiences and use them truthfully." The results of this meeting between an actor and the teacher preparing him for a life in the theater would mark a watershed in American acting and culture.
Brando made his debut on the boards of Broadway on October 19, 1944, in "I Remember Mama," a great success. As a young Broadway actor, Brando was invited by talent scouts from several different studios to screen-test for them, but he turned them down because he would not let himself be bound by the then-standard seven-year contract. Brando would make his film debut quite some time later in Fred Zinnemann's The Men (1950) for producer Stanley Kramer. Playing a paraplegic soldier, Brando brought new levels of realism to the screen, expanding on the verisimilitude brought to movies by Group Theatre alumni John Garfield, the predecessor closest to him in the raw power he projected on-screen. Ironically, it was Garfield whom producer Irene Mayer Selznick had chosen to play the lead in a new Tennessee Williams play she was about to produce, but negotiations broke down when Garfield demanded an ownership stake in "A Streetcar Named Desire." Burt Lancaster was next approached, but couldn't get out of a prior film commitment. Then director Elia Kazan suggested Brando, whom he had directed to great effect in Maxwell Anderson's play "Truckline Café," in which Brando co-starred with Karl Malden, who was to remain a close friend for the next 60 years.
During the production of "Truckline Café," Kazan had found that Brando's presence was so magnetic, he had to re-block the play to keep Marlon near other major characters' stage business, as the audience could not take its eyes off of him. For the scene where Brando's character re-enters the stage after killing his wife, Kazan placed him upstage-center, partially obscured by scenery, but where the audience could still see him as Karl Malden and others played out their scene within the café set. When he eventually entered the scene, crying, the effect was electric. A young Pauline Kael, arriving late to the play, had to avert her eyes when Brando made this entrance as she believed the young actor on stage was having a real-life conniption. She did not look back until her escort commented that the young man was a great actor.
The problem with casting Brando as Stanley was that he was much younger than the character as written by Williams. However, after a meeting between Brando and Williams, the playwright eagerly agreed that Brando would make an ideal Stanley. Williams believed that by casting a younger actor, the Neanderthalish Kowalski would evolve from being a vicious older man to someone whose unintentional cruelty can be attributed to his youthful ignorance. Brando ultimately was dissatisfied with his performance, though, saying he never was able to bring out the humor of the character, which was ironic as his characterization often drew laughs from the audience at the expense of Jessica Tandy's Blanche Dubois. During the out-of-town tryouts, Kazan realized that Brando's magnetism was attracting attention and audience sympathy away from Blanche to Stanley, which was not what the playwright intended. The audience's sympathy should be solely with Blanche, but many spectators were identifying with Stanley. Kazan queried Williams on the matter, broaching the idea of a slight rewrite to tip the scales back to more of a balance between Stanley and Blanche, but Williams demurred, smitten as he was by Brando, just like the preview audiences.
For his part, Brando believed that the audience sided with his Stanley because Jessica Tandy was too shrill. He thought Vivien Leigh, who played the part in the movie, was ideal, as she was not only a great beauty but she WAS Blanche Dubois, troubled as she was in her real life by mental illness and nymphomania. Brando's appearance as Stanley on stage and on screen revolutionized American acting by introducing "The Method" into American consciousness and culture. Method acting, rooted in Adler's study at the Moscow Art Theatre of Stanislavsky's theories that she subsequently introduced to the Group Theatre, was a more naturalistic style of performing, as it engendered a close identification of the actor with the character's emotions. Adler took first place among Brando's acting teachers, and socially she helped turn him from an unsophisticated Midwestern farm boy into a knowledgeable and cosmopolitan artist who one day would socialize with presidents.
Brando didn't like the term "The Method," which quickly became the prominent paradigm taught by such acting gurus as Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Brando denounced Strasberg in his autobiography "Songs My Mother Taught Me" (1994), saying that he was a talentless exploiter who claimed he had been Brando's mentor. The Actors Studio had been founded by Strasberg along with Kazan and Stella Adler's husband, Harold Clurman, all Group Theatre alumni, all political progressives deeply committed to the didactic function of the stage. Brando credits his knowledge of the craft to Adler and Kazan, while Kazan in his autobiography "A Life" claimed that Brando's genius thrived due to the thorough training Adler had given him. Adler's method emphasized that authenticity in acting is achieved by drawing on inner reality to expose deep emotional experience
Interestingly, Elia Kazan believed that Brando had ruined two generations of actors, his contemporaries and those who came after him, all wanting to emulate the great Brando by employing The Method. Kazan felt that Brando was never a Method actor, that he had been highly trained by Adler and did not rely on gut instincts for his performances, as was commonly believed. Many a young actor, mistaken about the true roots of Brando's genius, thought that all it took was to find a character's motivation, empathize with the character through sense and memory association, and regurgitate it all on stage to become the character. That's not how the superbly trained Brando did it; he could, for example, play accents, whereas your average American Method actor could not. There was a method to Brando's art, Kazan felt, but it was not The Method.
After A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which he received the first of his eight Academy Award nominations, Brando appeared in a string of Academy Award-nominated performances - in Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953) and the summit of his early career, Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). For his "Waterfront" portrayal of meat-headed longshoreman Terry Malloy, the washed-up pug who "coulda been a contender," Brando won his first Oscar. Along with his iconic performance as the rebel-without-a-cause Johnny in The Wild One (1953) ("What are you rebelling against?" Johnny is asked. "What have ya got?" is his reply), the first wave of his career was, according to Jon Voight, unprecedented in its audacious presentation of such a wide range of great acting. Director John Huston said his performance of Marc Antony was like seeing the door of a furnace opened in a dark room, and co-star John Gielgud, the premier Shakespearean actor of the 20th century, invited Brando to join his repertory company.
It was this period of 1951-54 that revolutionized American acting, spawning such imitators as James Dean - who modeled his acting and even his lifestyle on his hero Brando - the young Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. After Brando, every up-and-coming star with true acting talent and a brooding, alienated quality would be hailed as the "New Brando," such as Warren Beatty in Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961). "We are all Brando's children," Jack Nicholson pointed out in 1972. "He gave us our freedom." He was truly "The Godfather" of American acting - and he was just 30 years old. Though he had a couple of failures, like Désirée (1954) and The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), he was clearly miscast in them and hadn't sought out the parts so largely escaped blame.
In the second period of his career, 1955-62, Brando managed to uniquely establish himself as a great actor who also was a Top 10 movie star, although that star began to dim after the box-office high point of his early career, Sayonara (1957) (for which he received his fifth Best Actor Oscar nomination). Brando tried his hand at directing a film, the well-reviewed One-Eyed Jacks (1961) that he made for his own production company, Pennebaker Productions (after his mother's maiden name). Stanley Kubrick had been hired to direct the film, but after months of script rewrites in which Brando participated, Kubrick and Brando had a falling out and Kubrick was sacked. According to his widow Christiane Kubrick, Stanley believed that Brando had wanted to direct the film himself all along.
Tales proliferated about the profligacy of Brando the director, burning up a million and a half feet of expensive VistaVision film at 50 cents a foot, fully ten times the normal amount of raw stock expended during production of an equivalent motion picture. Brando took so long editing the film that he was never able to present the studio with a cut. Paramount took it away from him and tacked on a re-shot ending that Brando was dissatisfied with, as it made the Oedipal figure of Dad Longworth into a villain. In any normal film Dad would have been the heavy, but Brando believed that no one was innately evil, that it was a matter of an individual responding to, and being molded by, one's environment. It was not a black-and-white world, Brando felt, but a gray world in which once-decent people could do horrible things. This attitude explains his sympathetic portrayal of Nazi officer Christian Diestl in the film he made before shooting One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Edward Dmytryk's filming of Irwin Shaw's novel The Young Lions (1958). Shaw denounced Brando's performance, but audiences obviously disagreed, as the film was a major hit. It would be the last hit movie Brando would have for more than a decade.
One-Eyed Jacks (1961) generated respectable numbers at the box office, but the production costs were exorbitant - a then-staggering $6 million - which made it run a deficit. A film essentially is "made" in the editing room, and Brando found cutting to be a terribly boring process, which was why the studio eventually took the film away from him. Despite his proved talent in handling actors and a large production, Brando never again directed another film, though he would claim that all actors essentially direct themselves during the shooting of a picture.
Between the production and release of One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Brando appeared in Sidney Lumet's film version of Tennessee Williams' play "Orpheus Descending," The Fugitive Kind (1960) which teamed him with fellow Oscar winners Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward. Following in Elizabeth Taylor's trailblazing footsteps, Brando became the second performer to receive a $1-million salary for a motion picture, so high were the expectations for this re-teaming of Kowalski and his creator (in 1961 critic Hollis Alpert had published a book "Brando and the Shadow of Stanley Kowalski"). Critics and audiences waiting for another incendiary display from Brando in a Williams work were disappointed when the renamed The Fugitive Kind (1960) finally released. Though Tennessee was hot, with movie versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) burning up the box office and receiving kudos from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, The Fugitive Kind (1960) was a failure. This was followed by the so-so box-office reception of One-Eyed Jacks (1961) in 1961 and then by a failure of a more monumental kind: Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), a remake of the famed 1935 film.
Brando signed on to Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after turning down the lead in the David Lean classic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) because he didn't want to spend a year in the desert riding around on a camel. He received another $1-million salary, plus $200,000 in overages as the shoot went overtime and over budget. During principal photography, highly respected director Carol Reed (an eventual Academy Award winner) was fired, and his replacement, two-time Oscar winner Lewis Milestone, was shunted aside by Brando as Marlon basically took over the direction of the film himself. The long shoot became so notorious that President John F. Kennedy asked director Billy Wilder at a cocktail party not "when" but "if" the "Bounty" shoot would ever be over. The MGM remake of one of its classic Golden Age films garnered a Best Picture Oscar nomination and was one of the top grossing films of 1962, yet failed to go into the black due to its Brobdingnagian budget estimated at $20 million, which is equivalent to $120 million when adjusted for inflation.
Brando and Taylor, whose Cleopatra (1963) nearly bankrupted 20th Century-Fox due to its huge cost overruns (its final budget was more than twice that of Brando's Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)), were pilloried by the show business press for being the epitome of the pampered, self-indulgent stars who were ruining the industry. Seeking scapegoats, the Hollywood press conveniently ignored the financial pressures on the studios. The studios had been hurt by television and by the antitrust-mandated divestiture of their movie theater chains, causing a large outflow of production to Italy and other countries in the 1950s and 1960s in order to lower costs. The studio bosses, seeking to replicate such blockbuster hits as the remakes of The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959), were the real culprits behind the losses generated by large-budgeted films that found it impossible to recoup their costs despite long lines at the box office.
While Elizabeth Taylor, receiving the unwanted gift of reams of publicity from her adulterous romance with Cleopatra (1963) co-star Richard Burton, remained hot until the tanking of her own Tennessee Williams-renamed debacle Boom! (1968), Brando from 1963 until the end of the decade appeared in one box-office failure after another as he worked out a contract he had signed with Universal Pictures. The industry had grown tired of Brando and his idiosyncrasies, though he continued to be offered prestige projects up through 1968.
Some of the films Brando made in the 1960s were noble failures, such as The Ugly American (1963), The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). For every "Reflections," though, there seemed to be two or three outright debacles, such as Bedtime Story (1964), Morituri (1965), The Chase (1966), A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), Candy (1968), The Night of the Following Day (1969). By the time Brando began making the anti-colonialist picture Burn! (1969) in Colombia with Gillo Pontecorvo in the director's chair, he was box-office poison, despite having worked in the previous five years with such top directors as Arthur Penn, John Huston and the legendary Charles Chaplin, and with such top-drawer co-stars as David Niven, Yul Brynner, Sophia Loren and Taylor.
The rap on Brando in the 1960s was that a great talent had ruined his potential to be America's answer to Laurence Olivier, as his friend William Redfield limned the dilemma in his book "Letters from an Actor" (1967), a memoir about Redfield's appearance in Burton's 1964 theatrical production of "Hamlet." By failing to go back on stage and recharge his artistic batteries, something British actors such as Burton were not afraid to do, Brando had stifled his great talent, by refusing to tackle the classical repertoire and contemporary drama. Actors and critics had yearned for an American response to the high-acting style of the Brits, and while Method actors such as Rod Steiger tried to create an American style, they were hampered in their quest, as their king was lost in a wasteland of Hollywood movies that were beneath his talent. Many of his early supporters now turned on him, claiming he was a crass sellout.
Despite evidence in such films as The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) that Brando was in fact doing some of the best acting of his life, critics, perhaps with an eye on the box office, slammed him for failing to live up to, and nurture, his great gift. Brando's political activism, starting in the early 1960s with his championing of Native Americans' rights, followed by his participation in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's March on Washington in 1963, and followed by his appearance at a Black Panther rally in 1968, did not win him many admirers in the establishment. In fact, there was a de facto embargo on Brando films in the recently segregated (officially, at least) southeastern US in the 1960s. Southern exhibitors simply would not book his films, and producers took notice. After 1968, Brando would not work for three years.
Pauline Kael wrote of Brando that he was Fortune's fool. She drew a parallel with the latter career of John Barrymore, a similarly gifted thespian with talents as prodigious, who seemingly threw them away. Brando, like the late-career Barrymore, had become a great ham, evidenced by his turn as the faux Indian guru in the egregious Candy (1968), seemingly because the material was so beneath his talent. Most observers of Brando in the 1960s believed that he needed to be reunited with his old mentor Elia Kazan, a relationship that had soured due to Kazan's friendly testimony naming names before the notorious House un-American Activities Committee. Perhaps Brando believed this, too, as he originally accepted an offer to appear as the star of Kazan's film adaptation of his own novel, The Arrangement (1969). However, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Brando backed out of the film, telling Kazan that he could not appear in a Hollywood film after this tragedy. Also reportedly turning down a role opposite box-office king Paul Newman in a surefire script, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Brando decided to make Burn! (1969) with Pontecorvo. The film, a searing indictment of racism and colonialism, flopped at the box office but won the esteem of progressive critics and cultural arbiters such as Howard Zinn. He subsequently appeared in the British film The Nightcomers (1971), a prequel to "Turn of the Screw" and another critical and box office failure.
Kazan, after a life in film and the theater, said that, aside from Orson Welles, whose greatness lay in film making, he only met one actor who was a genius: Brando. Richard Burton, an intellectual with a keen eye for observation if not for his own film projects, said that he found Brando to be very bright, unlike the public perception of him as a Terry Malloy-type character that he himself inadvertently promoted through his boorish behavior. Brando's problem, Burton felt, was that he was unique, and that he had gotten too much fame too soon at too early an age. Cut off from being nurtured by normal contact with society, fame had distorted Brando's personality and his ability to cope with the world, as he had not had time to grow up outside the limelight.
Truman Capote, who eviscerated Brando in print in the mid-'50s and had as much to do with the public perception of the dyslexic Brando as a dumbbell, always said that the best actors were ignorant, and that an intelligent person could not be a good actor. However, Brando was highly intelligent, and possessed of a rare genius in a then-deprecated art, acting. The problem that an intelligent performer has in movies is that it is the director, and not the actor, who has the power in his chosen field. Greatness in the other arts is defined by how much control the artist is able to exert over his chosen medium, but in movie acting, the medium is controlled by a person outside the individual artist. It is an axiom of the cinema that a performance, as is a film, is "created" in the cutting room, thus further removing the actor from control over his art. Brando had tried his hand at directing, in controlling the whole artistic enterprise, but he could not abide the cutting room, where a film and the film's performances are made. This lack of control over his art was the root of Brando's discontent with acting, with movies, and, eventually, with the whole wide world that invested so much cachet in movie actors, as long as "they" were at the top of the box-office charts. Hollywood was a matter of "they" and not the work, and Brando became disgusted.
Charlton Heston, who participated in Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington with Brando, believes that Marlon was the great actor of his generation. However, noting a story that Brando had once refused a role in the early 1960s with the excuse "How can I act when people are starving in India?," Heston believes that it was this attitude, the inability to separate one's idealism from one's work, that prevented Brando from reaching his potential. As Rod Steiger once said, Brando had it all, great stardom and a great talent. He could have taken his audience on a trip to the stars, but he simply would not. Steiger, one of Brando's children even though a contemporary, could not understand it. When James Mason' was asked in 1971 who was the best American actor, he had replied that since Brando had let his career go belly-up, it had to be George C. Scott, by default.
Paramount thought that only Laurence Olivier would suffice, but Lord Olivier was ill. The young director believed there was only one actor who could play godfather to the group of Young Turk actors he had assembled for his film, The Godfather of method acting himself - Marlon Brando. Francis Ford Coppola won the fight for Brando, Brando won - and refused - his second Oscar, and Paramount won a pot of gold by producing the then top-grossing film of all-time, The Godfather (1972), a gangster movie most critics now judge one of the greatest American films of all time. Brando followed his iconic portrayal of Don Corleone with his Oscar-nominated turn in the high-grossing and highly scandalous Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris"), the first film dealing explicitly with sexuality in which an actor of Brando's stature had participated. He was now again a top ten box office star and once again heralded as the greatest actor of his generation, an unprecedented comeback that put him on the cover of "Time" magazine and would make him the highest-paid actor in the history of motion pictures by the end of the decade. Little did the world know that Brando, who had struggled through many projects in good faith during the 1960s, delivering some of his best acting, only to be excoriated and ignored as the films did not do well at the box office, essentially was through with the movies.
After reaching the summit of his career, a rarefied atmosphere never reached before or since by any actor, Brando essentially walked away. He would give no more of himself after giving everything as he had done in Last Tango in Paris (1972)," a performance that embarrassed him, according to his autobiography. Brando had come as close to any actor to being the "auteur," or author, of a film, as the English-language scenes of "Tango" were created by encouraging Brando to improvise. The improvisations were written down and turned into a shooting script, and the scripted improvisations were shot the next day. Pauline Kael, the Brando of movie critics in that she was the most influential arbiter of cinematic quality of her generation and spawned a whole legion of Kael wannabes, said Brando's performance in Last Tango in Paris (1972) had revolutionized the art of film. Brando, who had to act to gain his mother's attention; Brando, who believed acting at best was nothing special as everyone in the world engaged in it every day of their lives to get what they wanted from other people; Brando, who believed acting at its worst was a childish charade and that movie stardom was a whorish fraud, would have agreed with Sam Peckinpah's summation of Pauline Kael: "Pauline's a brilliant critic but sometimes she's just cracking walnuts with her ass." He probably would have done so in a simulacrum of those words, too.
After another three-year hiatus, Brando took on just one more major role for the next 20 years, as the bounty hunter after Jack Nicholson in Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks (1976), a western that succeeded neither with the critics or at the box office. Following The Godfather and Tango, Brando's performance was disappointing for some reviewers, who accused him of giving an erratic and inconsistent performance. In 1977, Brando made a rare appearance on television in the miniseries Roots: The Next Generations (1979), portraying George Lincoln Rockwell; he won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for his performance. In 1978, he narrated the English version of Raoni (1978), a French-Belgian documentary film directed by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux and Luiz Carlos Saldanha that focused on the life of Raoni Metuktire and issues surrounding the survival of the indigenous Indian tribes of north central Brazil.
Later in his career, Brando concentrated on extracting the maximum amount of capital for the least amount of work from producers, as when he got the Salkind brothers to pony up a then-record $3.7 million against 10% of the gross for 13 days work on Superman (1978). Factoring in inflation, the straight salary for "Superman" equals or exceeds the new record of $1 million a day Harrison Ford set with K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). He agreed to the role only on assurance that he would be paid a large sum for what amounted to a small part, that he would not have to read the script beforehand, and his lines would be displayed somewhere off-camera. Brando also filmed scenes for the movie's sequel, Superman II, but after producers refused to pay him the same percentage he received for the first movie, he denied them permission to use the footage.
Before cashing his first paycheck for Superman (1978), Brando had picked up $2 million for his extended cameo in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) in a role, that of Col. Kurtz, that he authored on-camera through improvisation while Coppola shot take after take. It was Brando's last bravura star performance. He co-starred with George C. Scott and John Gielgud in The Formula (1980), but the film was another critical and financial failure. Years later though, he did receive an eighth and final Oscar nomination for his supporting role in A Dry White Season (1989) after coming out of a near-decade-long retirement. Contrary to those who claimed he now only was in it for the money, Brando donated his entire seven-figure salary to an anti-apartheid charity. He then did an amusing performance in the comedy The Freshman (1990), winning rave reviews. He portrayed Tomas de Torquemada in the historical drama 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), but his performance was denounced and the film was another box office failure. He made another comeback in the Johnny Depp romantic drama Don Juan DeMarco (1994), which co-starred Faye Dunaway as his wife. He then appeared in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), co-starring Val Kilmer, who he didn't get along with. The filming was an unpleasant experience for Brando, as well as another critical and box office failure.
Brando had first attracted media attention at the age of 24, when "Life" magazine ran a photo of himself and his sister Jocelyn, who were both then appearing on Broadway. The curiosity continued, and snowballed. Playing the paraplegic soldier of The Men (1950), Brando had gone to live at a Veterans Administration hospital with actual disabled veterans, and confined himself to a wheelchair for weeks. It was an acting method, research, that no one in Hollywood had ever heard of before, and that willingness to experience life.- Actor
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Christopher D'Olier Reeve was born September 25, 1952, in New York City, to journalist Barbara Johnson (née Barbara Pitney Lamb) and writer/professor F.D. Reeve (Franklin D'Olier Reeve). He came from an upper-class family; his paternal grandfather was CEO of Prudential Financial, and one of his maternal great-grandfathers was Supreme Court Associate Justice Mahlon Pitney.
When Reeve was four, his parents divorced. His mother moved him and his brother Benjamin to Princeton, New Jersey, and married an investment banker a few years later. After graduating from high school, Reeve studied at Cornell University while at the same time working as a professional actor. In his final year at Cornell, he was one of two students selected (Robin Williams was the other) to study at New York's famous Juilliard School, under the renowned John Houseman. Although Christopher is best known for his role as Superman (1978), a role which he played with both charisma and grace, his acting career spans a much larger ground. Paralyzed after a horse riding accident, he died suddenly at age 52 after several years of living and working with his severe disability.- Music Department
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Born on February 10, 1929, Jerry Goldsmith studied piano with Jakob Gimpel and composition, theory, and counterpoint with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. He also attended classes in film composition given by Miklós Rózsa at the Univeristy of Southern California. In 1950, he was employed as a clerk typist in the music department at CBS. There, he was given his first embryonic assignments as a composer for radio shows such as "Romance" and "CBS Radio Workshop". He wrote one score a week for these shows, which were performed live on transmission. He stayed with CBS until 1960, having already scored The Twilight Zone (1959). He was hired by Revue Studios to score their series Thriller (1960). It was here that he met the influential film composer Alfred Newman who hired Goldsmith to score the film Lonely Are the Brave (1962), his first major feature film score. An experimentalist, Goldsmith constantly pushed forward the bounds of film music: Planet of the Apes (1968) included horns blown without mouthpieces and a bass clarinetist fingering the notes but not blowing. He was unafraid to use the wide variety of electronic sounds and instruments which had become available, although he did not use them for their own sake.
He rose rapidly to the top of his profession in the early to mid-1960s, with scores such as Freud (1962), A Patch of Blue (1965) and The Sand Pebbles (1966). In fact, he received Oscar nominations for all three and another in the 1960s for Planet of the Apes (1968). From then onwards, his career and reputation was secure and he scored an astonishing variety of films during the next 30 years or so, from Patton (1970) to Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and from Chinatown (1974) to The Boys from Brazil (1978). He received 17 Oscar nominations but won only once, for The Omen (1976) in 1977 (Goldsmith himself dismissed the thought of even getting a nomination for work on a "horror show"). He enjoyed giving concerts of his music and performed all over the world, notably in London, where he built up a strong relationship with London Symphony Orchestra.
Jerry Goldsmith died at age 75 on July 21, 2004 after a long battle with cancer.- Music Department
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Elmer Bernstein was educated at the Walden School and New York University. He served in the US Army Air Corps in World War II, writing scores for the service radio unit. He also wrote and arranged musical numbers for Glenn Miller's Army Air Force Band. A prolific and respected film music composer, he was a protégé of Aaron Copland, who studied music with Roger Sessions and Stefan Wolpe. Bernstein worked in various artistic endeavors, including painting and the theatre and also performed as an actor and dancer. Among his early composition work were scores for United Nations radio programs and television and industrial documentaries. His original scores for films range over an enormous variety of styles, with his groundbreaking jazz score for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), light musical comedies such as his Oscar-winning Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) score, and perhaps his most familiar score, for the western The Magnificent Seven (1960). Between 1963 and 1969, Bernstein served as vice president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
A few years before before his death, he acquired something of a cult status among fans of English football when his familiar main theme for The Great Escape (1963) was adopted by them and hummed and played, lustily, during matches.- Writer
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Julia Child was born on 15 August 1912 in Pasadena, California, USA. She was a writer and director, known for The French Chef (1962), Julie & Julia (2009) and We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (1993). She was married to Paul Child. She died on 13 August 2004 in Montecito, California, USA.- Animation Department
- Art Department
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Paul Boyd was born on 30 September 1967 in Pasadena, California, USA. He was an assistant director, known for Aaagh! It's the Mr. Hell Show! (2000), Werner - Das muss kesseln!!! (1996) and Liquid Television (1991). He died on 13 August 2007 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.- Actor
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Abundantly busy and much-loved Asian-American actor who became an on-screen hero to millions of adults and kids alike as the wise and wonderful Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid (1984), the sparkling Noriyuki Morita was back again dishing out Eastern philosophy and martial arts lessons for The Karate Kid Part II (1986) and The Karate Kid Part III (1989), and even for The Next Karate Kid (1994). However, putting all that karate aside, the diminutive Morita actually first started out as a stand-up comedian known as the Hip Nip in nightclubs and bars, and made his first on-screen appearance in Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967). He quickly adapted to the screen and showed up in small parts in such comedy films as The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968), alongside Don Knotts, and in Evil Roy Slade (1972) supporting John Astin. He also appeared in such popular series as Sanford and Son (1972) and M*A*S*H (1972).
Morita got his next break playing the often-perplexed restaurant owner Matsho "Arnold" Takahashi in 26 episodes of the hugely popular sitcom Happy Days (1974) between 1975 and 1976, and again between 1982 and 1983. Morita was quite in demand on the small screen and also scored the lead in his own police drama Ohara (1987), and guest-starred on other high-profile television series including Magnum, P.I. (1980), Murder, She Wrote (1984), Baywatch (1989) and The Hughleys (1998). Although most often used as a minor character actor, he remained consistently busy and occasionally lent his vocal talents to animated features such as Mulan (1998). However, his real strengths lay in portraying slightly oddball or unusual characters in offbeat films. He died at age 73 of natural causes at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas, Nevada on November 24, 2005.- Actor
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Highly influential, and always controversial, African-American actor/comedian who was equally well known for his colorful language during his live comedy shows, as for his fast paced life, multiple marriages and battles with drug addiction. He has been acknowledged by many modern comic artist's as a key influence on their careers, and Pryor's observational humor on African-American life in the USA during the 1970s was razor sharp brilliance.
He was born Richard Franklin Lennox Pryor III on December 1, 1940, in Peoria, Illinois, the son of Gertrude L. (Thomas) and LeRoy "Buck Carter" Pryor. His mother, a prostitute, abandoned him when he was ten years of age, after which he was raised in his grandmother's brothel. Unfortunately, Pryor was molested at the age of six by a teenage neighbor, and later by a neighborhood preacher. To escape this troubled life, the young Pryor was an avid movie fan and a regular visitor to local movie theaters in Peoria. After numerous jobs, including truck driver and meat packer, the young Pryor did a stint in the US Army between 1958 & 1960 in which he performed in amateur theater shows. After he left the services in 1960, Pryor started singing in small clubs, but inadvertently found that humor was his real forte.
Pryor spent time in both New York & Las Vegas, honing his comic craft. However, his unconventional approach to humor sometimes made bookings difficult to come by and this eventually saw Pryor heading to Los Angeles. He first broke into films with minor roles in The Busy Body (1967) and Wild in the Streets (1968). However, his performance as a drug addicted piano player in Lady Sings the Blues (1972), really got the attention of fans and film critics alike.
He made his first appearance with Gene Wilder in the very popular action/comedy Silver Streak (1976), played three different characters in Which Way Is Up? (1977) and portrayed real-life stock-car driver "Wendell Scott" in Greased Lightning (1977). Proving he was more than just a comedian, Pryor wowed audiences as a disenchanted auto worker who is seduced into betraying his friends and easy money in the Paul Schrader working class drama Blue Collar (1978), also starring Yaphet Kotto and Harvey Keitel. Always a strong advocate of African-American talent, Pryor next took a key role in The Wiz (1978), starring an all African-American cast, including Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, retelling the story of The Wizard of Oz (1939). His next four screen roles were primarily cameos in California Suite (1978); The Muppet Movie (1979); Wholly Moses! (1980) and In God We Trust (or Gimme That Prime Time Religion) (1980). However, Pryor teamed up with Gene Wilder once more for the prison comedy Stir Crazy (1980), which did strong box office business.
His next few films were a mixed bag of material, often inhibiting Pryor's talent, with equally mixed returns at the box office. Pryor then scored second billing to Christopher Reeve in the big budget Superman III (1983), and starred alongside fellow funny man John Candy in Brewster's Millions (1985) before revealing his inner self in the autobiographical Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986). Again, Pryor was somewhat hampered by poor material in his following film ventures. However, he did turn up again in See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) with Gene Wilder, but the final product was not as sharp as their previous pairings. Pryor then partnered on-screen with two other very popular African-American comic's. The legendary Redd Foxx and 1980s comic newcomer Eddie Murphy starred with Pryor in the gangster film Harlem Nights (1989) which was also directed by Eddie Murphy. Having contracted multiple sclerosis in 1986, Pryor's remaining film appearances were primarily cameos apart from his fourth and final outing with Gene Wilder in the lukewarm Another You (1991), and his final appearance in a film production was a small role in the David Lynch road flick Lost Highway (1997).
Fans of this outrageous comic genius are encouraged to see his live specials Richard Pryor: Live and Smokin' (1971); the dynamic Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979); Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip (1982) and Richard Pryor... Here and Now (1983). In addition, The Richard Pryor Show (1977) is a must-have for any Richard Pryor fans' DVD collection.
Unknown to many, Pryor was a long time advocate against animal cruelty, and he campaigned against fast food chains and circus shows to address issues of animal welfare. He was married a total of seven times, and fathered eight children.
After long battles with ill health, Richard Pryor passed away on December 10th, 2005.- 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.- Actor
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As might be said for the late and great comedians Harvey Korman and Madeline Kahn, it seems that Mel Brooks was the only director on the planet who knew how to best utilize this funnyman's talents on film. Brooks once remarked that, whenever he cast Dom in one of his films he'd add an extra two days to the shooting schedule because of delays between takes due to the constant laughter from cast and crew at Dom's improvisations.
The lovable, butterball comedian was a mainstay on 1960s and '70s TV variety as a "second banana," or comic-relief player. While his harsher critics believed his schtick would be better served in smaller doses, Dom nevertheless went on to find some range in a few moving, more restrained projects. Those few glimpses behind all the mirth and merriment revealed a dramatic actor waiting to be unleashed. As they say, behind every clown's smile, one finds tears.
He was born Dominick DeLuise on August 1, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, to parents John, a sanitation engineer, and Vicenza (DeStefano) DeLuise, both Italian immigrants. A natural school-class clown, his irrepressible sense of humor helped Dom fit in at school, and he started drawing belly laughs fairly young in his very first school play that had him portraying an inert copper penny! He later attended New York's High School of Performing Arts, but when it came to college, he decided to major in biology at Tufts University, outside Boston. That decision failed to expunge the idea of being a comedian from his head and heart, however, and that determination finally prevailed.
Dom's formative years as an actor were spent apprenticing at the Cleveland Playhouse, where which he gamely played roles in everything from contemporary shows like "Guys and Dolls" and "Stalag 17" to classics like "The School for Scandal" and even "Hamlet." He earned his first professional paycheck playing the titular Bernie the dog in "Bernie's Last Wish." Dom also got a taste of what it was like in front of the camera in Cleveland, appearing on the local TV kiddie's show "Tip Top Clubhouse."
Back in NYC, he took over the lead role of Tinker the toymaker in another children's local program, Tinker's Workshop (1954), for one season in 1958. He also started making noise on the off-Broadway scene. Appearing in the plays "The Jackass" and "All in Love," he became part of the featured ensemble of the 1961 musical revue "An Evening with Harry Stoones," which included 19-year-old Barbra Streisand. More outlandish musical roles came his way in the early 1960s with "Little Mary Sunshine" (as Corporal Billy Jester) and "The Student Gypsy, or the Prince of Liederkrantz" (his Broadway debut as Muffin T. Raggamuffin). While appearing in the lighthearted summer stock spoof "Summer & Smirk" in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Dom met fellow performer Carol Arthur (née Carol Arata). They married on November 23, 1965. Their three sons, Peter DeLuise, Michael DeLuise and David DeLuise all eventually found their way into show business. In 1971, Dom returned successfully to Broadway in a perfectly-suited Neil Simon vehicle, "The Last of the Red Hot Lovers."
Dom was first noticed on the smaller screen, creating the sketch character of Dominick the Great, a magician who tries in vain to mask his inept prestidigitations with feigned dignity on Garry Moore's popular show. The comedian truly thrived in this TV variety atmosphere and soon began popping up seemingly everywhere: (The Hollywood Palace (1964), The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967), The Jackie Gleason Show (1966)). Balding, blushing, dimpled and moon-faced (comparisons to a ripe tomato were not wide of the mark), he was readily equipped with a high-wattage, Cheshire Cat smile that became his trademark. At his best, looking embarrassed or agitated, the laughs usually came at his own expense, whether playing a panic-stricken klutz or squirming nervous-Nelly type. Dom took his magician character to the ensemble comedy show The Entertainers (1964), which also showcased Carol Burnett and Bob Newhart, and found more regular employment as a bumbling private eye in puppeteer Shari Lewis' daytime children's program, and as a foil for Dean Martin on the entertainer's regular and summer replacement shows. Dom again repeated his Dominick the Great character on Martin's show and received great reception. He later found himself part of Martin's "in-crowd" of comedians on his "celebrity roasts."
Dom's obvious comic genius was more readily evident, and succeeded better, in tandem with other performers than it was on its own. Hosting duties for his very first comedy/variety program The Dom DeLuise Show (1968), which featured wife Carol as part of the regular roster, lasted only one summer. The sitcom Lotsa Luck! (1973), which showcased Dom as bachelor Stanley Belmont having to contend with a live-in mother (a harping Kathleen Freeman) and sister (an ungainly Beverly Sanders), was canceled after its first season. He gave it a rest for awhile before trying once again with the sketch-like sitcom The Dom DeLuise Show (1987), but it, too, quickly faded. Another brief stint was as host of a revamped Candid Camera (1991).
While Dom made an unlikely film debut as a high-strung Air Force technician in the gripping nuclear drama Fail Safe (1964) starring Henry Fonda, it was in zany, irreverent comedy that he found his true calling. Appearing in support of others such as Sid Caesar and Mary Tyler Moore, respectively, in the so-so comedies The Busy Body (1967) and What's So Bad About Feeling Good? (1968), he proved a delight as an inept, dim-witted spy in the Doris Day caper The Glass Bottom Boat (1966).
Mel Brooks first cast Dom as the miserly Russian Orthodox priest, Father Fyodor, in his film The Twelve Chairs (1970), and found plenty of room for the comedian after that -- as campy director Buddy Bizarre in Blazing Saddles (1974), the silly-ass director's assistant in Silent Movie (1976), Emperor Nero in History of the World: Part I (1981), the voice of the cheese-oozing Pizza the Hutt in the "Star Wars" parody Spaceballs (1987), and as Sherwood Forest's very own puffy-cheeked Godfather, Don Giovanni, in Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993).
A very close friend of action star Burt Reynolds, Dom romped through a number of Reynolds' freewheeling films as well, including Smokey and the Bandit II (1980), The Cannonball Run (1981) and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982). One of his finest scene-stealing film roles, in fact, was as Reynolds' schizo pal in The End (1978). Dom went on to direct a number of stage productions for his close friend at the Burt Reynolds Theatre in Jupiter, Florida -- among them "Butterflies Are Free," "Same Time, Next Year" (starring Burt and Carol Burnett), "Brighton Beach Memoirs" (starring son Peter), and the musical "Jump" (featuring wife Carol). Still another comic buddy, Gene Wilder, handed Dom the roles of the indulgent opera star in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975) and harassed movie mogul Adolf Zitz in The World's Greatest Lover (1977). Dom later joined Wilder once again, along with Wilder's wife Gilda Radner, in the leaden comedy Haunted Honeymoon (1986), a clumsy haunted-house spoof that even Dom, in full drag, could not salvage.
Change-of-pace roles were few and far between. One that did come Dom's way was the compulsive-eating protagonist in Fatso (1980). Directed by and co-starring Brooks' wife Anne Bancroft, Dom managed to mix comedy with pathos. Obesity was also a chronic, real-life problem for the comedian and, at one point in 1999, it was reported that he had tipped the scales at 325 lbs. On a positive note, this passion for food actually fed into a more lucrative sideline -- as a respected chef and culinary author ("Eat This" and "Eat This Too") in which he appeared all over the tube cooking and demonstrating his favorite recipes. He also found time to write children's books on the side.
Dom tackled broad comedy films with great abandon -- a wallflower he was not -- but they were hit-or-miss. Some of his biggest misses were the Mae West disaster Sextette (1977), the Dudley Moore showcase Wholly Moses! (1980) (although Dom was arguably the best thing in it), Loose Cannons (1990), in which he appeared as portly pornographer Harry "The Hippo" Gutterman, Driving Me Crazy (1991), which filmed far away in Germany, and The Silence of the Hams (1994), a parody on the horror genre in which he played Dr. Animal Cannibal Pizza.
Films could also be a family affair. True to life, Dom played a sympathetic kiddie show host in the moving TV-movie Happy (1983). Also the executive producer, he was joined by wife Carol and all three sons in the cast. In addition, Dom offered a cameo in Between the Sheets (2003), a film written by Peter, directed, edited and executive-produced by Michael, and featuring roles for the rest of the family.
Dom's voiceover skills did not go untapped, either, in films including the animated features The Secret of NIMH (1982), An American Tail (1986) and All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989), plus all of their offshoots. The heavily-bearded DeLuise even displayed scene-stealing antics on the operatic scene, once playing the speaking part of Frosch the Jailer in Johann Srauss II's operetta "Die ," at the Metropolitan Opera.
Suffering from various physical ailments in later years, some of which were exacerbated by his chronic obesity and diabetes, Dom's health declined, and he died in 2009 at age 75. His wife and three children survive him, as do three grandchildren.- Actor
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Harvey Korman was a lanky, popular TV comedy veteran with a flair for broad comic characterizations, who shone for a decade as leading man and second banana par excellence on The Carol Burnett Show (1967).
Harvey Herschel Korman was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Ellen (Blecher) and Cyril Raymond Korman, a salesman. His parents, both immigrants, were from Russian Jewish families. A persistent television presence since the early 1960s, Korman's first break was a stint as a featured performer on The Danny Kaye Show (1963), a lively musical variety series in which Korman began working in the format which he would soon master--providing sturdy support to a multi-talented star in a wide variety of comedy sketches. Boasting large, expressive features and a wonderfully mutable voice, Korman could play a wide assortment of characters. Perhaps his first classic characterization was provided for The Flintstones (1960) wherein he was the distinctively snooty voice of The Great Gazoo, a little helmeted space man from the future consigned to the Earth's past in punishment for his crimes.
Korman garnered four Emmys for his work with Carol Burnett over the years. Ironically Korman would never again find such a successful showcase for his talents though he certainly tried, appearing in several busted pilots and short-lived sitcoms. Almost exclusively a comic actor, he stretched a bit to play straight man Bud Abbott opposite Buddy Hackett's Lou Costello in the disappointing TV biopic Bud and Lou (1978). He directed and/or produced sitcom episodes and TV comedy specials. An occasional actor in films, Korman made his feature debut with a supporting role in The Last of the Secret Agents? (1966). Several film roles followed until he gained his widest exposure with a major supporting role in Mel Brooks' classic Western spoof Blazing Saddles (1974). He fared well in Brooks' High Anxiety (1977) and History of the World: Part I (1981). He acted in two 1994 features: the blockbuster live-action version of The Flintstones (1994) (providing the voice of the Dictabird) and the poorly received but lavishly produced Radioland Murders (1994).- Actor
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Art Carney was an American actor with a lengthy career but is primarily remembered for two roles. In television, Carney played municipal sewer worker Ed Norton in the influential sitcom "The Honeymooners" (1955-1956). In film, Carney played senior citizen Harry Coombes in the road movie "Harry and Tonto" (1974). For this role, Carney won the Academy Award for Best Actor.
In 1918, Carney was born in an Irish American family in Mount Vernon, New York. His father was publicist Edward Michael Carney, and his mother was housewife Helen Farrell. Carney was the youngest of the family's six sons. He was educated at Mount Vernon High School (at the time called "A.B. Davis High School").
In the 1930s, Carney was a singer with the orchestra of big band leader Horace Heidt (1901-1986). They appeared often in radio shows, and were regulars in the pioneering game show Pot o' Gold (1939-1947). Carney had an uncredited cameo in the film adaptation "Pot o' Gold" (1941), which was his film debut.
His career was interrupted when he was drafted for World War II service. He served as an infantryman and machine gun crewman for the duration of the war. He fought in the Invasion of Normandy (1944), where he was wounded in the leg by shrapnel. Following his injury, his right leg was shorter than his left one. He walked with a limp for the rest of his life.
Following the War, Carney appeared regularly on radio as a character actor. He also served as a celebrity impersonator, imitating the voices of (among others) Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Dwight David Eisenhower. He had a recurring role as the Red Lantern in the fantasy adventure series "Land of the Lost" (1943-1948), and another as Charlie the doorman in radio and television version of the sitcom The Morey Amsterdam Show (1948-1950).
Carney was first paired with fellow actor Jackie Gleason (1916-1987) in 1950, in a comedy sketch appearing in the variety series "Cavalcade of Stars" (1949-1952). Gleason appeared as lunchroom loudmouth Charlie Bratten, and Carney as mild-mannered victim Clem Finch. Due to good chemistry between the two actors, Carney became a show regular and appeared in several other comedy sketches with Gleason. "Cavalcade of Stars" was eventually reworked into "The Jackie Gleason Show" (1952-1957), with Gleason as the lead actor and Carney as his sidekick.
The most notable of the recurring sketches was "the Honeymooners", pairing the verbally abusive Ralph Kramden (Gleason) with his optimistic best friend Ed Norton (Carney). The sketch eventually was eventually given its own series, "The Honeymooners" (1955-1956). The series only lasted for 1 season, and a total of 39 episodes. The sitcom was canceled due to low ratings, but found success in syndication. Its depiction of the American working class was popular and influenced several other sitcoms. The popular animated sitcom "The Flintstones" (1960-1966) started as a Honeymooners parody, with the character Barney Rubble based on Ed Norton.
Due to his popularity as Gleason's sidekick, Carney was offered a number of lead roles in television. He starred in the television special "Art Carney Meets Peter and the Wolf" (1958), adapted from the story "Peter and the Wolf" (1936) by Sergei Prokofiev. He was eventually given his own show "Art Carney Special" (1959-1961), which was not particularly successful.
Carney had few notable guest star roles in television during the 1960s. He played an alcoholic department store Santa Claus in the episode "The Night of the Meek" (1960) of The Twilight Zone, and portrayed the villain "The Archer" in two episodes of "Batman". He opened the 1970s by playing both Santa Claus and villain Cosmo Scam in the Christmas television special "The Great Santa Claus Switch" (1970), where he appeared alongside Jim Henson's Muppets.
Carney had suffered a career decline until the 1970s, in part due to his alcoholism. He first found success in film as the leading character "Harry and Tonto" (1974), as a lonely senior citizen who goes on a cross-country journey with his pet cat. His critical success in the role and winning an Academy Award helped revive his career. He was offered many new film roles, though few leading ones.
Among his better-known film roles were the deranged preacher John Wesley Gore in "W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings" (1975), aging detective Ira Wells in "The Late Show" (1977), senile surgeon Dr. Amos Willoughby in "House Calls" (1978), and thrill-seeking bank robber Al in "Going in Style". During this period, Carney won both the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actor and the Pasinetti Award for Best Actor.
Carney had a notable role in the television film "Star Wars Holiday Special" (1978) as Trader Saun Dann, a member of the Rebel Alliance. In the 1980s, Carney was mostly reduced to minor roles again. He is better remembered as the kind-hearted farmer Irv Manders in the horror film "Firestarter" (1984) and theatrical producer Bernard Crawford in the comedy-drama "The Muppets Take Manhattan" (1984). He mostly retired from acting by the late 1980s.
Carney emerged from retirement to play the supporting role of Frank Slater in "Last Action Hero" (1993). Frank is depicted as the "favorite second cousin" of the film's protagonist Jack Slater (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger). Frank's death provided motivation for the revenge-seeking protagonist. Frank's final line in the film was "I'm outta here", and this was indeed Carney's last appearance in a film before his death.
Carney lived in retirement until 2003. He died in his sleep in November 2003, in his home near Westbrook, Connecticut. His death was attributed to unspecified "natural causes". He was 85 years old and had reportedly managed to stay sober since he originally quit drinking in 1974. He is interred at the Riverside Cemetery in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.
Carney was survived by his wife Jean Myers, who died in October 2012. Carney was the grandfather of politician Devin Carney, who served in the Connecticut General Assembly.- Actor
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Gene Pitney has one of the most distinctive voices in music. Whether you like it or not you know when it is Gene. Pitney has often been categorized (quite unfairly) as a teen-idol singer responsible only for melodramatic, angst-ridden ballads. This is to deny the true talent of the man and the extensive range he possesses.
Gene Pitney was born on February 17, 1940 in Rockville, Connecticut, the son of Anna A. (Orlowsky) and Harold F. Pitney, a lathe operator. His maternal grandparents were Polish. Gene had a love of music from an early age. In high school, he was part of the band "Gene Pitney and the Genials". As well as music, Gene was a keen student and, after high school, he began studying electrical engineering. However, his music and studies were coming into increasing conflict and Gene began to move more towards his musical ambitions. Gene's first foray into the music scene was as part of a duet with Ginny Arnell, their first song being 1959's "Classical Rock & Roll."
Gene moved on quickly though and his first solo song came with "Cradle of My Arms" albeit under the name Billy Bryan. With limited success as an artist, Gene began to find more success as a songwriter. The first big breakthrough came when Roy Orbison recorded "Today's Teardrops" as the B-side to "Blue Angel". "Rubber Ball", another Pitney song, became a hit for Bobby Vee in the US and Marty Wilde in the UK. Further success would come with Ricky Nelson recording "Hello Mary Lou" (a Top 5 in the US) and "He's a Rebel" for Phil Spector's group, The Crystals. "He's a Rebel" would eventually reach number 1 in the UK and ironically deny Pitney the chance at a number 1 himself. Gene's career as an artist in his own right began with the self-penned "I Wanna Love My Life Away" which he recorded for $30 at a small recording studio in New York. What was even more amazing is that Gene recorded all 7 vocal tracks as well as playing the piano, guitar and drums on the song. The single made the top 40 in the US and Britain. The real breakthrough for Gene came with the song "Town Without Pity" which was the title song to the movie of the same name. The song received a Golden Globe Award, reached the US top 20 and Gene also performed it at the Academy Awards. He was the first pop singer to ever perform at the Oscar's and it helped to significantly raise his profile in the US.
Following hot on the heels of "Town Without Pity" was "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance". A Burt Bacharach/Hal David song it was originally intended to be the title song to the movie of the same name but it never did appeared in the movie. Despite this the song was well received and it's mix of the pop and country genres worked extremely well. With his popularity now firmly established in the US and growing in the UK Gene began to churn the hits out with amazing regularity. "Only Love Can Break a Heart", "If I Didn't Have a Dime", "Half Heaven, Half Heartache", "Mecca", "It Hurts to be in Love" and "True Love Never Runs Smooth" were all hit records for Gene in the US. "Only Love Can Break a Heart" was denied number 1 in the US charts by Pitney's own composition "He's a Rebel" sung by The Crystals. "Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa" marked a significant shift in Gene's musical direction. It reached number 5 in the UK charts and marked the beginning of his rise in popularity throughout the U.K. and Europe.
Between 1963 and 1966, Gene consistently produced top 10 hits in the UK. The Mick Jagger/Keith Richards song "That Girl Belongs to Yesterday" established his worldwide fame and he followed it up with "I'm Gonna be Strong", "Looking Through the Eyes of Love" (a million seller), "I Must be Seeing Things", "Princess in Rags", "Backstage", "Just One Smile", "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart" and "Nobody Needs Your Love". Gene enjoyed a short lived revival in 1974 with the hits "Trans-Canada Highway" and "Blue Angel". Overall, Gene had 16 top 40 hits in the US and an amazing 40 top 40 songs in the UK. Gene's profile was very good outside of the US and UK as well. Especially in Italy where he came second in the San Remo song contest with the song "Nessuno Mi Puo Giudicare".
He also recorded a number of his hits in Italian. In addition to this Pitney began to make forays into other areas of music once again demonstrating his vocal range. He recorded albums with country greats like George Jones and Melba Montgomery and was quite successful. He also recorded an album of folk songs. At one point he had hits in Europe, the UK, and the US pop and country charts with four different songs simultaneously. Although disappearing in the late seventies he made a successful touring comeback in 1983 with a sell out North American tour. And finally in 1989 achieved what had eluded him at the peak of his popularity, a number 1 single in the UK. Gene teamed up with Marc Almond to cover his sixties hit "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart". The duet outdid the original which could only make number 5 in 1967. Gene has never looked back since then and has toured almost continuously throughout the nineties.
In 2002 he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a fitting honour and a long overdue recognition of his talent.
In April 2006, he was in the middle of a tour of the UK when he died in his hotel room following a concert in Cardiff.- Writer
- Animation Department
As the creator of 'Scrooge McDuck', Carl Barks did more than any other comic book artist to widen the popularity of Donald Duck, bringing in the process a vast array of memorable supporting characters into the Disney universe, among them Uncle Scrooge himself, Gladstone Gander, Gyro Gearloose (and his Little Helper), the Beagle Boys, and the Junior Woodchucks.
Unlike many other artists working (all anonymously) for the Disney company, Barks did not mindlessly churn out condescending, forgettable stories of a childish nature during his 24-year stint on the Disney Ducks. He consistently produced delightful top-quality material, both in his scripts and in his art as well as in his dialogues, which echoed with deep human resonance. "I polished and polished on the scripts and drawings until I had done the best I could in the time available", he said. In both types of stories -- the 10-page comedies and the longer adventure stories -- he produced between 1942 and 1966, he managed to convey the intricacies and subtleties of the full scope of human emotions (from envy and cynicism and alarm and desperation to joy and scorn and triumph and smugness) while capturing the essence of exotic locations from the four corners of the world (from scorching deserts and primal forests to humid jungles and freezing snow-clad mountains through the urban setting of Duckburg).
His mastery at this is witnessed to by, among others, Newsweek's homage to his artistry and by Time's conclusion that "Scrooge and his creator Carl Barks belong in the great mainstream of American Folklore." Beyond that is the plain fact that he was known to his readers simply as "the good artist" (a descriptor necessary during a time when the Disney company didn't identify any of its cartoonists). His publishers tried in the early '50s to replace him on the 10-page comedies in Walt Disney's Comics and Stories so that he could concentrate on the longer adventure epics in Donald Duck and Uncle $crooge (these were the three titles that contained the bulk of Barks' output through the years); they were promptly flooded with a barrage of pleading and irate letters from readers demanding that "the good artist" be brought back.
Among his many fans were George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, who were inspired by the adventure comic books. One South American adventure in particular ("The Prize of Pizarro", Uncle $crooge nr 26, June-August 1959) inspired sequences in all three Indiana Jones films (the booby traps both in the lost temple in the opening pre-credits sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and in the final scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), as well as the flood through the mines of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)). In an homage printed in Uncle Scrooge: His Life & Times (edited by Edward Summer and published by Gary Kurtz), Lucas writes that when he discovered the McDuck character as a kid, he liked him "so much that I immediately went out and bought all the Uncle $crooge comics I could find on the newsstand. My greatest source of enjoyment in Carl Barks' comics is in the imagination of his stories .... The stories are also very cinematic .... these comics are a priceless part of our literary heritage." Indeed, the titles of his adventures (many of which were inspired by the National Geographic) duly resonate with exoticism and adventure: "The Mummy's Ring", "Terror of the River", "Mystery of the Swamp", "Ghost of the Grotto", "Lost in the Andes", "Sheriff of Bullet Valley", "Trail of the Unicorn", "The Golden Helmet", "The Seven Cities of Cibola", etc...
His stories were constantly reproduced in Disney comics across the globe, after his retirement in 1966 (the same year that Walt Disney, who was born nine months after Barks, died). And soon his 6,371 comics pages (according to one count) from some 450 comic books were being reprinted (by then computer-colored) in impressive coffee-table volumes and hand-sewn hardback tomes, not just in the United States, but throughout the western world (Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, etc...).
Certainly the most widely read comic book artist of all time, Barks is also in all probability, what with Disney being the world's largest publisher of children's magazines and books (every year over two billion people around the globe read a Disney book or magazine, the company claims), the most widely-read author of any type of reading material of the 20th century.
Born to a homesteading family in Oregon on March 27, 1901, Carl Barks left school at 15 and spent the next two decades "in grim and demanding jobs" (to quote Michael Barrier's "Carl Barks and the Art of the Comic Book". These included rancher, logger, railroad repairman and printer. During the Depression, he went on to become an illustrator for a humor magazine, eventually becoming its most productive member. He joined the Disney studio in 1935, where he became a story man on the animated cartoons of a character created a year earlier (a duck by the name of Donald) and worked with such people as Harry Reeves, Chuck Couch, Jack Hannah, Homer Brightman and Nick George. Health problems eventually forced Barks to leave the Burbank studio during World War II for the dry air of the California desert, where he made the transition to comic books.
And so, it was after the age of 40, in an era when most people had little more than a third of their lives in front of them, that Carl Barks made the fateful jump of his life, the one that would leave his name an immortal one in the annals of what the French call "le neuvième art" (the ninth art form). And yet, it would not be until after his retirement that his name would, slowly but surely, become known to the mainstream public. It was during the 1960s that persistent fans (among them his official biographer, Michael Barrier) finally managed to identify "the good artist" (also dubbed the Duckman and the comic book king), become his correspondents, and proceed to make his name known to the outside world.
Despite having retired (and as his name was slowly becoming famous), "Unca Carl" did not remain inactive. He turned to painting, specifically signed oil paintings of his Disney Ducks, paintings that today easily fetch thousands of dollars and whose prices have occasionally topped $100,000. Indeed, it is easy to forget that Barks' retirement years lasted far longer than his comic book career and he spent many more years before the canvas than he did over the drawing board. In fact, Barks lived to the ripe old age of 99, and it is somewhat amazing to realize how vast an amount of time this actually means. His life spans such an extensive amount of time that his date of birth is further removed from that of his death than it is to the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the untamed wilderness west of the Mississippi (including Oregon, the region where the Barks family would eventually settle).
He was sprightly and active until the very last. People half his age reported that he could remember events they had long forgotten. His pace was such that during his 1994 trip to Europe (his first outside North America) to celebrate Donald's 60th birthday, young Disney handlers and PR staff (imagine yuppies in their 30s) at Paris' Euro Disneyland had to quicken their pace to keep up with the then-93-year-old man. His philosophy could be summarized in these words: "I worked hard at trying to make something as good as I could possibly make it... I always tried to write a story I wouldn't mind buying myself."- Music Artist
- Music Department
- Actor
A tragic fate may have given this visionary a heightened sensitivity, perception, awareness, even expansion to his obvious musical gifts that he may have never touched upon had he not suffered from his physical affliction. Whatever it was, Ray Charles revolutionized American music and was catapulted to legendary status by the time he died in Beverly Hills at age 73.
Born on September 23, 1930, to Aretha and Baily Robinson, an impoverished Albany, Georgia, family that moved to Greenville, Florida while he was still an infant. It was not a cause for joy and celebration. His father soon abandoned the family and his baby brother, George Robinson, drowned in a freak washtub accident. Ray himself developed glaucoma at the age of five and within two years had lost his sight completely. A singer in a Baptist choir, he developed a love and feel for rhythms and studied music at the State School for Deaf and Blind Children, showing which brought out his talent and ear for playing various instruments, including the piano and clarinet.
An orphan by his early teens, Ray joined a country band at age 16 called The Florida Playboys. He moved to Seattle in 1948 where he and Southern guitarist Gossady McGee formed the McSon Trio. With an emphasis on easy-styled jazz, Ray also played in bebop sessions on the sly. He departed from the McSon Trio and signed with Los Angeles-based Swing Time Records, becoming the pianist for rhythm and blues great Lowell Fulson and his band. Atlantic Records eventually picked him up. Along the road he would add composer, writer and arranger to his formidable list of talents.
Ray's first R&B hit was "Confession Blues" in Los Angeles in 1949. In 1951, he had his first solo chart buster with "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand". His amazing versatility and raw, soulful delivery quickly caught on with audiences and helped put Atlantic Records on the map. Hits like "Mess Around", "Things I Used to Do", "A Fool for You", "I've Got a Woman", "Drown in My Own Tears", and especially "What'd I Say" in 1959, pushed gospel and R&B to a wider crossover audience. He made a move into the country music arena--unheard of for a black singer--in the 1960s, doing soulful spins on Hank Williams and Eddy Arnold tunes. In 1960, he left Atlantic and signed with ABC-Paramount. Under ABC-Paramount, hits poured out during this peak time with "I Can't Stop Loving You", "Hit the Road Jack", "Busted" and his beloved signature song "Georgia On My Mind".
His landmark 1962 album "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music" brought a new swinging style to country music. From there, he traveled a mainstream route--from interpreting songs from The Beatles ("Eleanor Rigby") to appearing in "Diet Pepsi" ads ("You Got the Right One, Baby, Uh-huh!"). He also showed up sporadically in films, playing himself in the movie Ballad in Blue (1965) and guest-starring in The Blues Brothers (1980) with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. A television musical variety favorite with his trademark dark sunglasses and dry humor, he worked alongside such musical legends as Ella Fitzgerald and Barbra Streisand on their very special evenings of song.
It is hard to believe that with everything he accomplished, Ray also had to deal with a longstanding heroin problem. In the mid-1960s, he was arrested for possession of heroin and marijuana and revealed that he had been addicted for nearly two decades. By 1965, he had completely recovered. The man who lived life on the edge was divorced twice and had 12 children both in and outside his marriages.
At the time of his death from liver disease on June 10, 2004, he was working on a recording project of duets with such performers as Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, B.B. King, Elton John and Norah Jones. This collaboration entitled "Genius Loves Company" led to an incisive win at the Grammy Awards--eight posthumous trophies including "Album of the Year" and "Record of the Year".
A few months after his death, the critically-acclaimed feature film biography Ray (2004) was released starring Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx.- Music Artist
- Actor
- Composer
James Joseph Brown (May 3, 1933 - December 25, 2006) was an American singer, dancer, musician, record producer, and bandleader. The central progenitor of funk music and a major figure of 20th century music, he is often referred to by the honorific nicknames "Godfather of Soul", "Mr. Dynamite", and "Soul Brother No. 1". In a career that lasted more than 50 years, he influenced the development of several music genres. Brown was one of the first 10 inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural induction in New York on January 23, 1986.
Brown began his career as a gospel singer in Toccoa, Georgia. He first came to national public attention in the mid-1950s as the lead singer of the Famous Flames, a then-only Rhythm and blues vocal group founded by Bobby Byrd. With the hit ballads "Please, Please, Please" and "Try Me", Brown built a reputation as a dynamic live performer with the Famous Flames and his backing band, sometimes known as the James Brown Band or the James Brown Orchestra. His success peaked in the 1960s with the live album Live at the Apollo and hit singles such as "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", "I Got You (I Feel Good)" and "It's a Man's Man's Man's World".
During the late 1960s, Brown moved from a continuum of blues and gospel-based forms and styles to a profoundly "Africanized" approach to music-making, emphasizing stripped-down interlocking rhythms that influenced the development of funk music. By the early 1970s, Brown had fully established the funk sound after the formation of the J.B.s with records such as "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine" and "The Payback". He also became noted for songs of social commentary, including the 1968 hit "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud". Brown continued to perform and record until his death from pneumonia in 2006.
Brown recorded 17 singles that reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B charts. He also holds the record for the most singles listed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart that did not reach No. 1. Brown was inducted into the first class of the Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2013 as an artist and then in 2017 as a songwriter. He also received honors from several other institutions, including inductions into the Black Music & Entertainment Walk of Fame, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In Joel Whitburn's analysis of the Billboard R&B charts from 1942 to 2010, Brown is ranked No. 1 in The Top 500 Artists. He is ranked seventh on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.- Writer
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Joseph Ranft was an American writer, voice actor, animator, storyboard artist and magician. He worked for Disney and Pixar. He worked on The Lion King, The Brave Little Toaster, Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Cars, Monsters, Inc and Finding Nemo. He voiced in the many films he worked on, notably as Heimlich the Caterpillar from A Bug's Life and the outtakes of Toy Story 2. He passed away in August 2005.- Actress
- Director
- Writer
Anne Bancroft was born on September 17, 1931 in The Bronx, NY, the middle daughter of Michael Italiano (1905-2001), a dress pattern maker, and Mildred DiNapoli (1907-2010), a telephone operator. She made her cinema debut in Don't Bother to Knock (1952) in 1952, and over the next five years appeared in a lot of undistinguished movies such as Gorilla at Large (1954), Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), New York Confidential (1955), Nightfall (1956) and The Girl in Black Stockings (1957). By 1957 she grew dissatisfied with the scripts she was getting, left the film business and spent the next five years doing plays on Broadway. She returned to screens in 1962 with her portrayal of Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker (1962), for which she won an Oscar. Bancroft went on to give acclaimed performances in The Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Slender Thread (1965), Young Winston (1972), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975), The Elephant Man (1980), To Be or Not to Be (1983), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987) and other movies, but her most famous role would be as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (1967). Her status as the "older woman" in the film is iconic, although in real life she was only eight years older than Katharine Ross and just six years older than Dustin Hoffman. Bancroft would later express her frustration over the fact that the film overshadowed her other work. Selective for much of her intermittent career, she appeared onscreen more frequently in the '90s and early '00s, playing a range of characters in such films as Love Potion No. 9 (1992), Point of No Return (1993), Home for the Holidays (1995), G.I. Jane (1997), Great Expectations (1998), Keeping the Faith (2000) and Up at the Villa (2000). She also started to make some TV films, including Deep in My Heart (1999) for which she won an Emmy. Sadly, on June 6, 2005, Bancroft passed away at the age of 73 from uterine cancer. Her death surprised many, as she had not disclosed her illness to the public. Among her survivors was her husband of 41 years, Mel Brooks, and their son Max Brooks, who was born in 1972. Her final film, the animated feature Delgo (2008), was released posthumously in 2008 and dedicated to her memory.- Actor
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- Cinematographer
When hunky, twenty-year-old heart-throb Heath Ledger first came to the attention of the public in 1999, it was all too easy to tag him as a "pretty boy" and an actor of little depth. He spent several years trying desperately to sway this image, but this was a double-edged sword. His work comprised nineteen films, including 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), The Patriot (2000), A Knight's Tale (2001), Monster's Ball (2001), Ned Kelly (2003), The Brothers Grimm (2005), Lords of Dogtown (2005), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Casanova (2005), Candy (2006), I'm Not There (2007), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009). He also produced and directed music videos and aspired to be a film director.
Heath Ledger was born on the fourth of April 1979, in Perth, Western Australia, to Sally (Ramshaw), a teacher of French, and Kim Ledger, a mining engineer who also raced cars. His ancestry was Scottish, English, Irish, and Sephardi Jewish. As the story goes, in junior high school it was compulsory to take one of two electives, either cooking or drama. As Heath could not see himself in a cooking class he tried his hand at drama. Heath was talented, however the rest of the class did not acknowledge his talent. When he was seventeen he and a friend decided to pack up, leave school, take a car and rough it to Sydney. Heath believed Sydney to be the place where dreams were made or, at least, where actors could possibly get their big break. Upon arriving in Sydney with a purported sixty-nine cents to his name, Heath tried everything to get a break.
His first real acting job came in a low-budget movie called Blackrock (1997), a largely unimpressive cliché; an adolescent angst film about one boy's struggle when he learns his best mate raped a girl. He only had a very small role in the film. After that small role Heath auditioned for a role in a T.V. show called Sweat (1996) about a group of young Olympic hopefuls. He was offered one of two roles, one as a swimmer, another as a gay cyclist. Heath accepted the latter because he felt to really stand out as an actor one had to accept unique roles that stood out from the bunch. It got him small notice, but unfortunately the show was quickly axed, forcing him to look for other roles. He was in Home and Away (1988) for a very short period, in which he played a surfer who falls in love with one of the girls of Summer Bay. Then came his very brief role in Paws (1997), a film which existed solely to cash in on guitar prodigy Nathan Cavaleri's brief moment of fame, where he was the hottest thing in Australia. Heath played a student in the film, involved in a stage production of a Shakespeare play, in which he played "Oberon". A very brief role, this offered him a small paycheck but did nothing to advance his career. Then came Two Hands (1999). He went to the U.S. trying to audition for film roles, showcasing his brief role in Roar (1997) opposite then unknown Vera Farmiga.
Then Australian director Gregor Jordan auditioned him for the lead in Two Hands (1999), which he got. An in your face Aussie crime thriller, Two Hands (1999) was outstanding and helped him secure a role in 10 Things I Hate About You (1999). After that, it seemed Heath was being typecast as a young hunk, which he did not like, so he accepted a role in a very serious war drama The Patriot (2000).
What followed was a stark inconsistency of roles, Ledger accepting virtually every single character role, anything to avoid being typecast. Some met with praise, like his short role in Monster's Ball (2001), but his version of Ned Kelly (2003) was an absolute flop, which led distributors hesitant to even release it outside Australia. Heath finally had deserved success with his role in Brokeback Mountain (2005). For his portrayal of Ennis Del Mar in in the film, Ledger won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and Best International Actor from the Australian Film Institute, and was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role and for the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Ledger was found dead on January 22, 2008 in his apartment in the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo, with a bottle of prescription sleeping pills near-by. It was concluded weeks later that he died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs that included pain-killers, sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication. His death occurred during editing of The Dark Knight (2008) and in the midst of filming his last role as Tony in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009).
Posthumously, he shared the 2007 Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award with the rest of the ensemble cast, the director, and the casting director for the film I'm Not There (2007), which was inspired by the life and songs of American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. In the film, Ledger portrayed a fictional actor named Robbie Clark, one of six characters embodying aspects of Dylan's life and persona.
A few months before his death, Ledger had finished filming his performance as the Joker in 'The Dark Knight (2008). His untimely death cast a somber shadow over the subsequent promotion of the $185 million Batman production. Ledger received more than thirty posthumous accolades for his critically acclaimed performance as the Joker, the psychopathic clown prince of crime, in the film, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, a Best Actor International Award at the 2008 Australian Film Institute Awards (for which he is the second actor to win an acting award posthumously after Peter Finch who won an Oscar for Network (Best Actor 1977)), the 2008 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actor, the 2009 Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture, and the 2009 BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor.- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Allan Melvin was born on 18 February 1923 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for Flash Gordon (1979), Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (1981) and Archie Bunker's Place (1979). He was married to Amalia Faustina Sestero. He died on 17 January 2008 in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
A show-stopping comic for decades, the inimitable Arnold Stang, with the trademark Runyonesque voice and thick, black glasses, started out famously on radio before branching out to include Broadway, films and especially TV. Born on September 28, 1918, in New York City (for decades he himself perpetuated the myth of being born in 1925 in Chelsea, Massachusetts), he was the son of a lawyer. Following the 1929 stock market crash, his father was forced to look elsewhere for work and managed a living as a salesman. The scrawny kid from Manhattan grew up in Brooklyn and attended New Utrecht High School.
During his teen years (early 1930s) he auditioned for and won roles on radio's "Horn and Hardart's Children's Hour," a variety show, and the kiddie program "Let's Pretend," which set off a two-decade stint as one of radio's most popular vocal personalities. His squawky, unmistakable voice was heard as Jughead in the "Archie Andrews" series and as neighbor Seymour Fingerhood on the beloved, Bronx-styled Gertrude Berg classic "The Goldbergs," among others. He even appeared in radio soap operas and mysteries on occasion, often providing comedy relief. A reliable and feisty second banana, he traded quips with the best of them: Eddie Cantor; Jack Benny; Fred Allen; Fanny Brice; Milton Berle, you name it.
In between radio work Stang could sometimes be seen on the stage, his first legitimate play being on Broadway with the short-lived "All In Favour" (1942). This was followed by "You'll See Stars" at the end of that same year. He subsequently moved from radio to TV with the help of Milton Berle in the late 1940s and eventually found a very comfortable niche in comedy as a foil to the big stars. On the satirical Henry Morgan's Great Talent Hunt (1951), he was a regular member of Henry Morgan's stock company as a nerdy teen named Gerard. Plain, plucky but rather sad-sack, his puny-looking nerd types (5'3" and not much over 100 pounds) seemed to beg to have sand kicked in their faces. Yet, as much as they could be pushed around, they often displayed stubborn, delinquent-like streaks and could be mighty pesky in nature and irritating to the nth degree.
Stang also lent his vocal talents quite successfully to cartoon voiceovers beginning with Popeye the Sailor's pal Shorty. He later moved into a lengthy hitch as "Hoiman" the mouse in Paramount's popular "Herman and Katnip" series, but his best known animal character, of course, came later with the title role in Joseph Barbera - William Hanna 1961 classic cartoon series Top Cat (1961). His playing of "T.C", the slick, smart-alecky, Brooklynesque mastermind behind a gang of alley cats, was very reminiscent of Phil Silvers' Sgt. Bilko character from The Phil Silvers Show (1955).
Film work for Stang would be very sporadic over the years providing secondary but stalwart support in such escapism as Seven Days' Leave (1942), My Sister Eileen (1942), Let's Go Steady (1945), Two Gals and a Guy (1951) and the all-star epic It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963). Stang's best featured part was a rare dramatic role opposite Frank Sinatra in the then-daring topical movie about drug addiction entitled The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). Here he played Frank Sinatra's seedy but loyal pal Sparrow, a role that easily could have influenced Dustin Hoffman when he created his Ratso Rizzo character a decade and a half later in Midnight Cowboy (1969).
From the 1950s, the bespectacled comedian would be a steadfast TV commercial spokesman pitching such products as Delco, Chunky candy ("Chunky...what a chunk o' chocolate!") and Orkin ("Stop squawkin', call Orkin!") using his own, unique style. As for the stage, a few of his later stints included the 1969 Broadway remake of "The Front Page," the role of Hysterium in a production of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," and a part in Woody Allen's "Play It Again, Sam". The owlish comedian continued acting into the 90s with small roles in such movies as Ghost Dad (1990) and Dennis the Menace (1993).
Long married (since 1949) to wife JoAnn Taggart, a writer, Stang died of pneumonia at age 91 in Newton, Massachusetts, just before Christmas in 2009. He was also survived by his two children, David Donald and Deborah Jane.- Actress
- Writer
Billie Lou Watt was born on 20 June 1924 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. She was an actress and writer, known for Astro Boy (1963), The End of the Road (1998) and SuperBook (1981). She was married to Hal Studer. She died on 7 September 2001 in New York City, New York, USA.- Actor
- Director
- Writer
With features chiseled in stone, and renowned for playing a long list of historical figures, particularly in Biblical epics, the tall, well-built and ruggedly handsome Charlton Heston was one of Hollywood's top leading men of his prime and remained active in front of movie cameras for over sixty years. As a Hollywood star, he appeared in 100 films over the course of 60 years. He played Moses in the epic film, The Ten Commandments (1956) , for which he received his first Golden Globe Award nomination. He also starred in Touch of Evil (1958) with Orson Welles; Ben-Hur, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor (1959); El Cid (1961); and Planet of the Apes (1968). He also starred in the films The Greatest Show on Earth (1952); Secret of the Incas (1954); The Big Country (1958); and The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965). A supporter of Democratic politicians and civil rights in the 1960s, Heston later became a Republican, founding a conservative political action committee and supporting Ronald Reagan. Heston's most famous role in politics came as the five-term president of the National Rifle Association, from 1998 to 2003.
Heston was born John Charles Carter on October 4, 1923, in No Man's Land, Illinois, to Lila (Charlton) and Russell Whitford Carter, who operated a sawmill. He had English and Scottish ancestry, with recent Canadianforebears.
Heston made his feature film debut as the lead character in a 16mm production of Peer Gynt (1941), based on the Henrik Ibsen play. In 1944, Heston enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces. He served for two years as a radio operator and aerial gunner aboard a B-25 Mitchell stationed in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands with the 77th Bombardment Squadron of the Eleventh Air Force. He reached the rank of Staff Sergeant. Heston married Northwestern University student Lydia Marie Clarke, who was six months his senior. That same year he joined the military.
Heston played 'Marc Antony' in Julius Caesar (1950), and firmly stamped himself as genuine leading man material with his performance as circus manager 'Brad Braden' in the Cecil B. DeMille spectacular The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), also starring James Stewart and Cornel Wilde. The now very popular actor remained perpetually busy during the 1950s, both on TV and on the silver screen with audience pleasing performances in the steamy thriller The Naked Jungle (1954), as a treasure hunter in Secret of the Incas (1954) and another barn storming performance for Cecil B. DeMille as "Moses" in the blockbuster The Ten Commandments (1956).
Heston delivered further dynamic performances in the oily film noir thriller Touch of Evil (1958), and then alongside Gregory Peck in the western The Big Country (1958) before scoring the role for which he is arguably best known, that of the wronged Jewish prince who seeks his freedom and revenge in the William Wyler directed Ben-Hur (1959). This mammoth Biblical epic running in excess of three and a half hours became the standard by which other large scale productions would be judged, and its superb cast also including Stephen Boyd as the villainous "Massala", English actor Jack Hawkins as the Roman officer "Quintus Arrius", and Australian actor Frank Thring as "Pontius Pilate", all contributed wonderful performances. Never one to rest on his laurels, steely Heston remained the preferred choice of directors to lead the cast in major historical productions and during the 1960s he starred as Spanish legend "Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar" in El Cid (1961), as a US soldier battling hostile Chinese boxers during 55 Days at Peking (1963),played the ill-fated "John the Baptist" in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), the masterful painter "Michelangelo" battling Pope Julius II in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), and an English general in Khartoum (1966). In 1968, Heston filmed the unusual western Will Penny (1967) about an aging and lonely cowboy befriending a lost woman and her son, which Heston has often referred to as his favorite piece of work on screen. Interestingly, Heston was on the verge of acquiring an entirely new league of fans due to his appearance in four very topical science fiction films (all based on popular novels) painting bleak futures for mankind.
In 1968, Heston starred as time-traveling astronaut "George Taylor", in the terrific Planet of the Apes (1968) with its now legendary conclusion as Heston realizes the true horror of his destination. He returned to reprise the role, albeit primarily as a cameo, alongside fellow astronaut James Franciscus in the slightly inferior sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970). Next up, Heston again found himself facing the apocalypse in The Omega Man (1971) as the survivor of a germ plague that has wiped out humanity leaving only bands of psychotic lunatics roaming the cities who seek to kill the uninfected Heston. And fourthly, taking its inspiration from the Harry Harrison novel "Make Room!, Make Room!", Heston starred alongside screen legend Edward G. Robinson and Chuck Connors in Soylent Green (1973). During the remainder of the 1970s, Heston appeared in two very popular "disaster movies" contributing lead roles in the far-fetched Airport 1975 (1974), plus in the star-laden Earthquake (1974), filmed in "Sensoround" (low-bass speakers were installed in selected theaters to simulate the earthquake rumblings on screen to movie audiences). He played an evil Cardinal in the lively The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge (1974), a mythical US naval officer in the recreation of Midway (1976), also filmed in "Sensoround", an LA cop trying to stop a sniper in Two-Minute Warning (1976) and another US naval officer in the submarine thriller Gray Lady Down (1978). Heston appeared in numerous episodes of the high-rating TV series Dynasty (1981) and The Colbys (1985), before moving onto a mixed bag of projects including TV adaptations of Treasure Island (1990) and A Man for All Seasons (1988), hosting two episodes of the comedy show, Saturday Night Live (1975), starring as the "Good Actor" bringing love struck Mike Myers to tears in Wayne's World 2 (1993), and as the eye patch-wearing boss of intelligence agent Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies (1994). He also narrated numerous TV specials and lent his vocal talents to the animated movie Hercules (1997), the family comedy Cats & Dogs (2001) and an animated version of Ben Hur (2003). Heston made an uncredited appearance in the inferior remake of Planet of the Apes (2001), and his last film appearance to date was in the Holocaust-themed drama of My Father (2003).
Heston narrated for highly classified military and Department of Energy instructional films, particularly relating to nuclear weapons, and "for six years Heston [held] the nation's highest security clearance" or Q clearance. The Q clearance is similar to a DoD or Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) clearance of Top Secret.
Heston was married to Lydia Marie Clark Heston since March 1944, and they have two children. His highly entertaining autobiography was released in 1995, titled appropriately enough "Into The Arena". Although often criticized for his strong conservative beliefs and involvement with the NRA, Heston was a strong advocate for civil right many years before it became fashionable, and was a recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, plus the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2002, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and did appear in a film or TV production after 2003. He died in April 2008, a memorable figure in the history of US cinema.- Actor
- Composer
- Music Department
Ever heard "I Want Candy" or "Not Fade Away" or "Willie & The Hand Jive", Shirley & Company's "Shame, Shame, Shame" or U2's "Desire" or George Michael's "Faith"? If you have, then you've heard the "Bo Diddley beat", the most famous beat in the world! One of the founding fathers of rock 'n' roll, Bo Diddley's innovative pounding and hypnotic, Latin-tinged beat, his vast array of electric custom-built guitars, his use of reverb, tremelo and distortion to make his guitars talk, mumble and roar, his use of female musicians, his wild stage shows, and his on-record and on-stage rapping, pre-date all others. Bo Diddley was born Ellas Bates on Sunday December 30, 1928, on a small farm near the town of McComb, Mississippi, in rural Pike County, close to the Louisiana border, the only child of Ethel Wilson and Eugene Bates, he had three half-brothers and a half-sister. He was adopted by his mother's cousin, Mrs. Gussie McDaniel, along with his cousins Willis, Lucille and Freddie, and adopted the name Ellas McDaniel. In the mid-1'30s the family moved to the south side of Chicago. Soon after, he began to take violin lessons from Professor O.W. Frederick at the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church. He studied the violin for 12 years, composing two concertos for the instrument. For Christmas in 1940, his sister Lucille bought him his first guitar, a cheap Harmony acoustic. It was at this time that he acquired the nickname "Bo Diddley" (" . . . Bo Diddley is me; to tell ya the truth, I don't know what it [the name] really is . . . ") from his fellow pupils at the Foster Vocational High School in Chicago. The newly named Bo Diddley had long been fascinated by the rhythms that he heard coming from the sanctified churches. A frustrated drummer, he tried to translate the sounds that he heard into his own style. Gradually he began to duplicate what he did with his violin bow by rapidly flicking his pick across his guitar strings: "I play the guitar as if I'm playing the drums . . . I play drum licks on the guitar." He continued to practice the guitar through his early teens. Shortly before leaving school he formed his first group, a trio named The Hipsters, later known as The Langley Avenue Jive Cats, after the Chicago street where he lived. Upon graduation he pursued a variety of low-paid occupations including truck driving, building site work and boxing, playing locally with his group to supplement his income. Around this time he married his first wife, Louise Woolingham, but the marriage did not survive. A year later he married Ethel "Tootsie" Smith, a marriage that lasted just over a decade. In 1950 maracas player Jerome Green joined the group, followed a year later by harmonica player Billy Boy Arnold. After more than a decade of playing on street corners and in clubs around Chicago, Bo Diddley finally got the chance to cut a demo of 2 songs that he had written; "Uncle John" and "I'm A Man". After various rejections from local record labels (most notably VeeJay), in the spring of 1955 he took the recordings to brothers Leonard and Phil Chess, owners of Chess Records, with studios located at 4750-2 South Cottage Grove Ave. in Chicago. They suggested that he changed the title and the lyrics of "Uncle John" to more reflect his own unique personality. The twp songs were re-recorded at Bill Putnam's Universal Recording Studio at 111 E. Ontario in Chicago on Wednesday, March 2, 1955, and released as a double A-side disc "Bo Diddley"/"I'm A Man" on the Chess Records subsidiary label Checker Records. It went straight to the top of the R&B charts, establishing him as one of the most exciting and original new talents in American music. With musical influences of his own ranging from Louis Jordan to John Lee Hooker, and from 'Nat 'King' Cole' to Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley was now set to help shape and define the sound and presentation of rock music for all time. From Elvis Presley to George Thorogood, from The Rolling Stones to ZZ Top, from The Doors to The Clash, from Buddy Holly to Prince, and from The Everly Brothers to Run DMC, all acknowledged the unique influences of Bo Diddley upon their styles of music. Now in his early 70s, he is still very much active in the recording studio and in the clubs and the concert halls around the world. He performed a rousing version of his classic song "Who Do You Love" with George Thorogood & The Destroyers in front of a TV audience of millions at the Live Aid Concert in Philadelphia in 1985. A couple of years later he was deservedly an early inductee into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. In 1996 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rhythm 'n' Blues Foundation and in 1998 received another Lifetime Achievement Award, this time from The Recording Academy at that year's annual Grammy Awards Ceremony. In 2000 yet another honor was justifiably awarded to him when he was inducted into The Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame. In the words of one of his many famous eponymous songs, "Bo Diddley Put The Rock in Rock 'n' Roll", and remember . . . Bo Knows!