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- Garry Robbins was a Canadian actor and professional wrestler. As a wrestler, he competed all over the world, including Canada, the U.S., Japan and India. He competed under the names Paul Bunyan and Canadian Giant. He found more success as an actor, appearing in everything from Disney Channel comedies to horror films.
He was known as the tallest man in Canada. He was the uncle of actor Devin Robbins.
He never won a title in wrestling. Despite what Wikipedia and wrestlingdata.com said, he did not compete as Doug Chevalier and he did not train D-Ray 3000 (Dorian Hill), Rhino (Terry Gerin), Scott D'Amore or anyone else. - Actor
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Ted Cassidy was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and raised in Philippi, West Virginia. He was a well respected actor who portrayed many different characters during his film and television career. His most notable role was Lurch, the faithful butler on the television series The Addams Family (1964). His most memorable dialogue as Lurch would be, "You rang?", whenever someone summoned him. Due to his large size, (6ft. 9in.) he portrayed larger than life characters. His deep voice, was used for narrations and for dubbing certain character's voices. His acting career spanned three decades. Ted Cassidy died in 1979 from complications following open-heart surgery. His live-in girlfriend had his remains cremated, then buried in the backyard of their Woodland Hills home.- André René Roussimoff was born in a small farming community in Grenoble, France to Boris and Marian Rouismoff. His parents and four siblings were all of normal size, but André suffered from acromegaly, a hormonal disorder that results when the pituitary gland produces excess growth hormone. As the Giant grew up (very quickly, as he reached the height of 6' 3" by the age of 12) he began to often disagree with his parents. He left home at 14 and obtained a job with a furniture-moving firm and began to play rugby. At 17 he was seen training at a gym by several professional wrestlers. Impressed by his size, they taught him some basic wrestling skills and built a friendship with him. Later, when one of the wrestlers was injured, André stepped in for him. He would wrestle for nearly thirty more years. By his early 20s André had wrestled in Algeria, South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, England, Scotland, and most of non-Communist Europe but had not found fame. In 1971 he came to North America under the name Jean Ferre and was mildly popular in Canada. Then he met a New York based booker by the name of Vincent J. McMahon (often incorrectly referred to as "Vince McMahon Sr") who renamed him "Andre the Giant," and billed him as 7' 4" (Andre was really closer to 7'). Soon Andre the Giant became a national sensation and was a much sought after wrestler. In addition he participated in television, movies, and commercials. With his wealth the Giant bought a ranch in Ellerbe, North Carolina where he would live during his rare time off and after he retired from wrestling in 1990. He died while in France after attending his father's funeral. André was cremated and his ashes were spread across his ranch. He is survived by his one daughter.
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Wilton Norman Chamberlain was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Olivia Ruth (Johnson), a domestic worker, and William Chamberlain, a welder, custodian, and handyman. Wilt didn't come from a race of giants as many thought. Both his parents were no bigger than 5-9, but as a young boy he began a growth spurt which would eventually stop when he reached 7-1. That height made him legendary in sports history as arguably the greatest basketball player ever. Chamberlain played at Overbrook High School in Philadelphia, and collegiately at Kansas University, where he led the Jayhawks to the NCAA finals. Kansas lost in title game to North Carolina and that game haunted Chamberlain throughout his career and gave birth to the unfair image of him as a "loser." He left Kansas as an underclassman to play professionally for the Harlem Globetrotters, and after a year with them, signed to play with his hometown team in the NBA, the then-named Philadelphia Warriors. With the Warriors he performed some astonishing feats that no NBA player before or since accomplished.- Gheorghe, a native of the Transylvania region of Romania, has become one of the top centers in the NBA. A dominant force in Europe, he began his NBA career feeling a little out of place. That quickly changed when he bumped the Bullets regular center and became the starter. He contributed almost immediately with his large powerful arms and towering presence. Gheorghe's height is not due to genetics, but to a pitituary gland condition. His late mother was 5'7" and his father is 5'9". Gheorghe, once regarded as an oddity by many, went on to win the 1995-1996 NBA Most Improved Player award. He has led the NBA in field-goal percentage in both the 95-96 season and the 96-97 season. His presence is sorely missed by the Wizards during the 97-98 season, as he has not played a single minute due to injury. When he returns however, his fans and teammates will certainly be relieved to know that "Big Gheorghe" is back patrolling the paint.
- Like Charles Chaplin's sidekick, Eric Campbell, Harold Lloyd needed his own giant when casting Why Worry? (1923) in 1922. Lloyd first had his eyes on George Auger (Cardiff Giant) who worked at Ringling Brothers sideshow as a giant. But Auger died before the film started, and a search went out for a replacement. The producer Hal Roach heard of a shoemaker who was constructing a pair of shoes for a "Norwegian living in Minnesota", and his name was John Aasen. His mother was Kristi Danielsen (b. 1868) from Numedal, Norway. She emigrated to the US via Liverpool during spring of 1887. It is not 100% certain who Aasen's father was, but while working in Eggedal, Norway, Kristi Danielsen met the Swedish Nils Jansson Bokke who reached a prominent 244 cm (8 ft) in height. It had to have been "The clash of the Titans" when the couple met, as Aasen's mother had her own merit with the height of 220 cm (7 ft 2½ in). But the passenger list on board D/S "Rollo" listed Kristi Danielsen as single. Later that year Aasen was born and it can only be speculated if his father was the Swede. Some sources lists him as 273 cm (nearly 9 ft) tall and with a weight of 251 kilos (553 lbs). Nearly 8 meters (8¾ yds) of material was needed to make him a suit. In other words; impressive! The annual Nummedalslagets yearbook of 1925 wrote: "Apparently the world's tallest human (in the civilized world) with a loving and sympathetic personality who always appears courteous and modest. In Harold Lloyd's film classic, Why Worry? (1923), Aasen plays "Colosso". He is suffering from a toothache and stuck in jail with other prisoners of a revolution in Chile. Lloyd is Harold von Pelham as the rich hypochondriac who ends up in the same prison as Colosso and cures his toothache. Forever grateful, Colosso aids van Palham in his adventures as escapees from the prison. With a cannon on his back and bullets hanging from his neck, the pair become an unusual couple who create comic mayhem. The film became one of the largest box-office attractions of 1923. Aasen was a great success in his first film and appeared in several others, but not with the same impact. It is said he mastered Norwegian fluently and for many years performed as a "Sideshow" attraction for C.A. Wortham Shows. He died on the 1st August 1938 in Mendocino, California.
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is an American retired professional basketball player who played 20 seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers. During his career as a center, Abdul-Jabbar was a record six-time NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP), a record 19-time NBA All-Star, a 15-time All-NBA selection, and an 11-time NBA All-Defensive Team member. A member of six NBA championship teams as a player and two more as an assistant coach, Abdul-Jabbar twice was voted NBA Finals MVP. In 1996, he was honored as one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History.
In 1975, he was traded to the Lakers, with whom he played the final 14 seasons of his career and won five additional NBA championships. Abdul-Jabbar's contributions were a key component in the "Showtime" era of Lakers basketball. Over his 20-year NBA career, his teams succeeded in making the playoffs 18 times and got past the first round 14 times; his teams reached the NBA Finals on 10 occasions.
At the time of his retirement at age 42 in 1989, Abdul-Jabbar was the NBA's all-time leader in points scored (38,387), games played (1,560), minutes played (57,446), field goals made (15,837), field goal attempts (28,307), blocked shots (3,189), defensive rebounds (9,394), career wins (1,074), and personal fouls (4,657). In 2007, ESPN voted him the greatest center of all time, in 2008, they named him the "greatest player in college basketball history", and in 2016, they named him the second best player in NBA history (behind Michael Jordan). Abdul-Jabbar has also been an actor, a basketball coach, and a best-selling author.- Actor
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Peter Mayhew was born on May 19, 1944 in Barnes, London, England, to Constance Elizabeth (Yeates) and Walter Henry Mayhew. Later resident in Texas, this former resident of Yorkshire, England, was working as a hospital attendant at the King's College Hospital in London when film producer Charles H. Schneer saw his photo, literally standing above the crowd around him. Schneer cast him in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), Ray Harryhausen's special effects film.
A year later, he was offered another role. Mayhew was told it was for a big hairy beast. It was the role of Chewbacca, the faithful 200 year-old Wookiee in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) and his life was changed forever. Following the original Star Wars trilogy, he made several television commercials in the Wookiee costume.
In 1997, the 20th-anniversary celebrations of Star Wars were announced with the release of the "Special Edition" and all the conventions started. He was active on the "Star Wars" convention circuit where he signed autographs. He wrote two books, "Growing Up Giant" and "My Favorite Giant", and founded a non-profit 501(c)3 charity organization called "The Peter Mayhew Foundation".- Actor
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This African American actor attended Penn Hills High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He started his junior year at 6' 5" and finished it at 6' 9"! He played basketball throughout his high-school years and won a scholarship. He averaged 18 points a game and 10 rebounds! He played basketball during college, but not when it would interfere with his major at George Washington University in Washington, DC, which was Theatrical Arts. During his college years, he met Jay Fenichel with whom he would later make musical productions. Upon graduation, Fenichel moved to Los Angeles and Hall moved to Venezuela to play basketball.
After a year, Hall lost interest and relocated to Los Angeles, California. Along with Fenichel, the duo put together two night-club acts/musicals. One was a semi-autobiographical two-man musical, "In Five," and the other was a two-man show called "The Worst of Friends," both of which played in night clubs throughout the LA area. They also had a promotional business where they did promotional acts in department stores for new products.
While working on the set of the series 227 (1985), he met his co-star, Alaina Reed-Hall, who played Rose Lee Holloway. They married--both on the set, and in real life. Predator 2 (1990) was released December 1990, and in April 1991, he died of AIDS, which he contracted through a blood transfusion a few months before.- Originally a student of pre-law at Widener University, and later majoring in Criminal Justice at West Chester University, Matthew started his career by making appearances on The Howard Stern Show (1990), The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986), and music videos of Iron Maiden, Marilyn Manson, and Blondie. Matthew would later amass a cult following for memorable roles such as "Tiny" in Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses (2003), and Karl the giant in Tim Burton's Big Fish (2003). In the midst of working on a biopic about André René Roussimoff, Matthew died on August 9, 2005 from natural causes. The Devil's Rejects (2005) (House of 1000 Corpses (2003)'s sequel) was dedicated to him.
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Towering 7' 2" tall actor who cornered the market on playing giants, intimidating henchmen, bayou swamp monsters and steel toothed villains! Kiel worked in numerous jobs including as a night club bouncer and a cemetery plot salesman, before breaking into film & TV in several minor roles in the late 1950s / early 1960s. Noted among these was the alien "Kanamit" in the classic The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "To Serve Man", and terrorizing Arch Hall Jr. while clad in a loincloth in the prehistoric caveman meets virile teenage drama Eegah (1962).
Kiel turned up in two episodes of the classic horror TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974). On one occasion playing a Native American evil spirit with the ability to transform into various animals. On his second appearance, Kiel was unrecognizable as a Spanish moss covered, Louisiana swamp monster brought to life by a patient involved in deep sleep therapy.
However, his biggest break came in 1977 when he was cast as the unstoppable, steel toothed henchman "Jaws" in the finest Roger Moore film of the Bond series The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Such was Kiel's popularity with movie audiences, that his character was brought back for the next Bond outing Moonraker (1979). However, audiences were quite split on opinions when Kiel's "Jaws" character changes sides near the film's conclusion and assists 007, Roger Moore, in saving the Earth.
Over the next few years, Kiel appeared in relatively non-demanding comedy or fantasy type films taking advantage of his physical stature and presence. Kiel then decided to try his hand behind the camera and co-wrote and produced, plus took the lead role, in the well received family movie The Giant of Thunder Mountain (1990). Demand for Kiel's unique attributes dropped very sharply in the 1990's, leading to only a handful of roles including reprising his "Jaws" character in the Matthew Broderick film Inspector Gadget (1999). In 2002, Kiel penned his informative autobiography entitled "Making it BIG in the movies". He passed away in 2014.- Actor
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Shaquille O'Neal is a retired professional American basketball player who is a sports analyst on the television program Inside the NBA on TNT. He is considered one of the greatest players in National Basketball Association (NBA) history. He was one of the tallest and heaviest players ever. O'Neal played for six teams over his 19-year career.
O'Neal's individual accolades include the 1999-2000 MVP award, the 1992-93 NBA Rookie of the Year award, 15 All-Star game selections, three All-Star Game MVP awards, three Finals MVP awards, two scoring titles, 14 All-NBA team selections, and three NBA All-Defensive Team selections. He is one of only three players to win NBA MVP, All-Star game MVP and Finals MVP awards in the same year (2000); the other players are Willis Reed in 1970 and Michael Jordan in 1996 and 1998. Largely due to his ability to dunk the basketball, O'Neal ranks third all-time in field goal percentage (58.2%). O'Neal was elected into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2016. He was elected to the FIBA Hall of Fame in 2017.
In addition to his basketball career, O'Neal has released four rap albums, with his first, Shaq Diesel, going platinum. O'Neal is an electronic music producer, and touring DJ, known as Diesel. He has appeared in numerous films and has starred in his own reality shows.- Retired Canadian professional wrestler turned actor. Trained under Bret Hart, Leo Burke and Stephen Petitpas. Debuted in 1989 as the Acadian Giant for Atlantic Grand Prix Wrestling. Competed for years in Canada, Japan and South Korea, using the name Goliath El Gigante. Arrived in the U.S. in 1997 as the Interrogator of the Truth Commission, a team with the gimmick of a South African white supremacist paramilitary group, with the name being a reference to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Truth Commission (The Interrogator and Recon (Barry Buchanan)) were 3x USWA (United States Wrestling Association in Memphis) World Tag Team Champions. The Truth Commission (Interrogator, Recon, Sniper [Luc Poirier] and manager the Commandant (Robin Smith) debuted in WWE as heels (Smith was replaced by the Jackyl (Don Callis) in September). After the Jackyl took over the group, they evolved into more of a commando cult. Maillet was reintroduced on the December 8, 1997 "WWF Raw Is War" as Kurrgan, a name taken from Highlander (1986). Kurrgan and the Jackyl broke away from the Truth Commission, effectively ending the group. Kurrgan was built up as a monster heel, crushing his opponents with his claw hold the Paralyzer. He entered the 1998 Royal Rumble at #12. He eliminated Headbanger Mosh and Steve Blackman, and it took five guys, 8-Ball, Bradshaw, Ken Shamrock, Phineas I. Godwinn and the Rock, to eliminate him. He disappeared for a few months until he returned as a member of the Jackyl's new stable the Oddities on the June 15th "WWF Raw is War." After the Jackyl was replaced by Sable (Rena Lesnar) and the Insane Clown Posse joined the group, Kurrgan became a face (good guy) for the first time in his U.S. career. The Oddities by the end of 1998 were reduced to Kurrgan, Golga (John Tenta), the Giant Silva (Paulo Silva) and George 'The Animal' Steele and were jobbed out (lost all their matches) on the weekend B-shows "WWF Jakked" and "WWF Sunday Night Heat" and were all released in early 1999. Continued to compete in Canada and elsewhere before retiring and focusing on acting. He is also a former 2x ECCW (Extreme Canadian Championship Wrestling in British Columbia, Canada) Heavyweight Champion.
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Standing 6 feet 9 inches tall, Garrett grew up in Woodland Hills outside of Los Angeles. His father was a hearing aid specialist working in geriatrics and his mother was a housewife. Garrett spent a whopping six weeks at UCLA before going into stand-up comedy full time. He began performing his act at various Los Angeles comedy clubs, getting his start at the Ice House in Pasadena and the Improv in Hollywood. In 1984, he became the first $100,000 grand champion winner in the comedy category of Star Search (1983). This led to his first appearance, at age 23, on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962), making him one of the youngest comedians ever to perform on the show. In 1986, Garrett told a joke the talent booker warned him against and he hasn't been on the show since. Following his "Tonight Show" appearance, Garrett's career took off, garnering him headlining gigs at several national venues as well as opening spots for legends including Diana Ross and Liza Minnelli. He has headlined at Bally's Park Place and co-headlined with The Temptations at Trump Plaza. He has also worked at The Sands Hotel in Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra, Caesar's Palace with David Copperfield, and Smokey Robinson, Harrah's with Sammy Davis Jr. and The Beach Boys, and Radio City Music Hall with Julio Iglesias. In 1989, the Las Vegas Review Journal named him the Best Comedian working on the strip. Changing gears, he made his way into the world of television. He struck gold with Everybody Loves Raymond (1996). Apart from his supporting role in sitcoms, he has also done voice-overs and appeared in a few films. In 1998, Garrett made a real-life proposal to his then real-life girlfriend, Jill Diven, on the set of Everybody Loves Raymond (1996). Garrett currently resides in Hollywood, California with his two Labradors Retrievers, Gus and Mabel.- Actor
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Charles Richard Moll was an American actor. He is perhaps best known for playing the role of Aristotle Nostradamus "Bull" Shannon, the bailiff on the NBC sitcom Night Court from 1984 to 1992. He has also done extensive work as a voice actor, typically using his deep voice to portray villainous characters in animation and video games, most notably the voice of Two-Face in Batman: The Animated Series and Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Moll passed away on October 26, 2023 at the age of 80.- Actor
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Born in Los Angeles but raised in Manhattan and educated at Middlebury College and Carnegie-Mellon University, James Cromwell is the son of film director John Cromwell and actress Kay Johnson. He studied acting at Carnegie-Mellon, and went into the theatre (like his parents) doing everything from Shakespeare to experimental plays. He started appearing on television in 1974, gaining some notice in a recurring role as Archie Bunker's friend Stretch Cunningham on All in the Family (1971), made his film debut in 1976, and goes back to the stage periodically. Some of his more noted film roles have been in Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Star Trek: First Contact (1996) and the surprise classic about a charming pig, Babe (1995). He garnered some of the best reviews of his career (many of which said he should have received an Oscar) for his role as a corrupt, conniving police captain in L.A. Confidential (1997).- Jessie Lawrence Ferguson was born on 8 June 1942 in The Bronx, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Darkman (1990), Prince of Darkness (1987) and Boyz n the Hood (1991). He died on 26 April 2019 in Palmdale, California, USA.
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Michael Clarke Duncan was born on December 10, 1957 in Chicago, Illinois. Raised on Chicago's South Side by his single mother, Jean, a house cleaner, Duncan grew up resisting drugs and alcohol, instead concentrating on school. He wanted to play football in high school, but his mother wouldn't let him, afraid that he would get hurt. He then turned to acting and dreamed of becoming a famous actor.
After graduating from high school and attending community college, he worked digging ditches at People's Gas Company in Chicago. When he quit his job and headed to Hollywood, he landed small roles while working as a bodyguard. Duncan's role in the movie Armageddon (1998) led to his breakthrough performance in The Green Mile (1999), when his Armageddon co-star Bruce Willis called director Frank Darabont, suggesting Duncan for the part of convict John Coffey. He landed the role and won critical acclaim as well as many other Awards and Nominations, including an Academy Award Nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
After suffering a heart attack on July 13, 2012, he was taken to a Los Angeles hospital, in which his girlfriend Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth tried to save his life with CPR. Unfortunately, on September 3, 2012, Michael Clarke Duncan died at age 54 from respiratory failure.- Actor
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Javier Botet was born on 30 July 1977 in Ciudad Real, Spain. He is an actor and writer, known for It (2017), Amigo (2019) and The Mummy (2017).- Actor
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Gunner Willis is an actor/director based out of Greenville SC.
As a director, he's known for his unconventional comedic short films and music videos. Most recently, he received the South Carolina Indie Grant for his latest short film "The Wages of Sin is Death." A comedy about life, death, and choice.
As an actor, he's been featured on FOX, Netflix, and HBO acting opposite of the likes of Danny McBride, Laura Linney, and Brian Baumgartner. As a person, he's tall and jolly, like a prequel Santa Claus.- Actor
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Dennis Rodman is an American retired professional basketball player who played for the Detroit Pistons, San Antonio Spurs, Chicago Bulls, Los Angeles Lakers, and Dallas Mavericks in the National Basketball Association (NBA). He was nicknamed "The Worm" and is famous for his fierce defensive and rebounding abilities.
Rodman played at the small forward position in his early years before becoming a power forward. He earned NBA All-Defensive First Team honors seven times and won the NBA Defensive Player of the Year Award twice. He also led the NBA in rebounds per game for a record seven consecutive years and won five NBA championships. His biography at NBA.com states that he is "arguably the best rebounding forward in NBA history". On April 1, 2011, the Pistons retired Rodman's No. 10 jersey, and he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame later that year.
In addition to being a retired professional basketball player, Rodman is a retired part-time professional wrestler and actor. He was a member of the nWo and fought alongside Hulk Hogan at two Bash at the Beach events. In professional wrestling, Rodman was the first ever winner of the Celebrity Championship Wrestling tournament. He had his own TV show, The Rodman World Tour (1996), and had lead roles in the action films Double Team (1997) and Simon Sez (1999). He also appeared in several reality TV series.- Actor
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John Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison in Iowa, to Mary Alberta (Brown) and Clyde Leonard Morrison, a pharmacist. He was of English, Scottish, Ulster-Scots, and Irish ancestry.
Clyde developed a lung condition that required him to move his family from Iowa to the warmer climate of southern California, where they tried ranching in the Mojave Desert. Until the ranch failed, Marion and his younger brother Robert E. Morrison swam in an irrigation ditch and rode a horse to school. When the ranch failed, the family moved to Glendale, California, where Marion delivered medicines for his father, sold newspapers and had an Airedale dog named "Duke" (the source of his own nickname). He did well at school both academically and in football. When he narrowly failed admission to Annapolis he went to USC on a football scholarship 1925-7. Tom Mix got him a summer job as a prop man in exchange for football tickets. On the set he became close friends with director John Ford for whom, among others, he began doing bit parts, some billed as John Wayne. His first featured film was Men Without Women (1930). After more than 70 low-budget westerns and adventures, mostly routine, Wayne's career was stuck in a rut until Ford cast him in Stagecoach (1939), the movie that made him a star. He appeared in nearly 250 movies, many of epic proportions. From 1942-43 he was in a radio series, "The Three Sheets to the Wind", and in 1944 he helped found the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a Conservative political organization, later becoming its President. His conservative political stance was also reflected in The Alamo (1960), which he produced, directed and starred in. His patriotic stand was enshrined in The Green Berets (1968) which he co-directed and starred in. Over the years Wayne was beset with health problems. In September 1964 he had a cancerous left lung removed; in 1977 when Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope was being made, John Waynes archive voice was used for the character Garindan ezz Zavor, later in March 1978 there was heart valve replacement surgery; and in January 1979 his stomach was removed. He received the Best Actor nomination for Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and finally got the Oscar for his role as one-eyed Rooster Cogburn in True Grit (1969). A Congressional Gold Medal was struck in his honor in 1979. He is perhaps best remembered for his parts in Ford's cavalry trilogy - Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950).- Actor
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David Michael Bautista, Jr. was born on January 18, 1969 in Washington, D.C., to Donna Raye (Mullins) and David Michael Bautista, a hairdresser. He has Filipino and Greek ancestry.
When WCW officials told him he'd never make it in sports entertainment, Bautista pushed himself to achieve his dream of being a Superstar. In May 2002, he made his debut on SmackDown using the ring name Batista, but it wasn't until a move to Raw and two victories over Kane that "The Animal" began to make noise in the WWE Universe. The wins impressed Ric Flair and Triple H, who were looking to align themselves with the industry's brightest new stars. After a lengthy search, they identified Randy Orton and Batista. Collectively the four Superstars became known as Evolution.
Batista earned his first championship alongside "The Nature Boy" when the duo captured the WWE Tag Team Championships in December 2003. As Evolution dominated WWE, Batista started to emerge from the shadows of Triple H and Ric Flair. By the time Batista won the 2005 Royal Rumble Match, World Heavyweight Champion Triple H viewed him as a serious threat to his title.
After a triceps injury at the hands of Mark Henry forced Batista to relinquish the title in January 2006, he vowed to return. Batista successfully regained the World Heavyweight Championship at Survivor Series in 2006. Four months into his second reign, Batista faced the Undertaker at WrestleMania 23. "The Animal" took Undertaker to the limit, but was unable to stop the streak of "The Deadman" at WrestleMania. Though disappointed, Batista stayed hungry and always managed to keep himself in the championship hunt for the rest of his career.
At Bragging Rights in 2009, Batista shocked the world when he blamed Rey Mysterio for a loss to Undertaker, then attacked his former tag team partner. "The Animal" then became locked in a tense rivalry with another former friend, John Cena, over the WWE Championship. The grueling match at Over the Limit led to a wheelchair-bound Batista declaring "I quit!" the following night on Raw before fading from the WWE Universe in May 2010. Following his departure from WWE, Bautista appeared opposite Vin Diesel in the Universal film Riddick (2013) and RZA's feature directorial debut The Man with the Iron Fists (2012), in which he played the villainous Brass Body and starred opposite Russell Crowe and Lucy Liu. His other film credits include The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption (2012), where he played Argomael; the action film House of the Rising Sun (2011); and Wrong Side of Town (2010) opposite rapper Ja Rule.
Two years later, he joined MMA and won his first professional MMA fight. In January 2014, he made his long awaited return to the WWE, before quitting a second time in June of that same year. He did this in order to promote Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), which was released on August 1, 2014, and starred Chris Pratt, Benicio Del Toro, Zoe Saldana, and Djimon Hounsou, alongside Bautista.
He will shoot Kickboxer: Vengeance (2016), directed by John Stockwell, and co-starring martial artist Alain Moussi and UFC fighter Georges St-Pierre. The remake of the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme film, Kickboxer (1989) is about two brothers David and Kurt Sloan; When David wins the Karate World Championship, a promoter lures him to Hong Kong, despite his brother's protestations that the man is a crook. When Kurt travels to Thailand to meet his brother, he discovers he has died and seeks his revenge.
After starring in films such as, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Hotel Artemis (2018), Escape Plan 2: Hades (2018), and Final Score (2018), he made a special guest appearance on WWE Smackdown! (1999) for it's 1000 episode reuniting with his former Evolution members Triple H, Randy Orton, and Ric Flair on October 16, 2018. The following year on February 25, 2019, he made his return to WWE Raw (1993) when he attacked Ric Flair on his 70th birthday at the end of the episode sending a message to Triple H that would ultimately lead to a No Holds Barred match for WrestleMania 35 (2019). Batista added the stipulation that if he wins the match, Triple H will have to retire from in-ring competition. As a result, Triple H was finally able to beat Batista for the first time and won the match, which ultimately led to Batista announcing his official retirement from wrestling in the WWE. Following his retirement, he will continue with his career as an actor in Hollywood.
His next films scheduled for release will be; Stuber (2019), Avengers: Endgame (2019), Escape Plan: The Extractors (2019), and My Spy (2020). He is one of many professional wrestlers to make the smooth transition from wrestling into the entertainment world.- Actor
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William Lucking was born on 17 June 1941 in Vicksburg, Michigan, USA. He was an actor and director, known for Red Dragon (2002), The World's Fastest Indian (2005) and Contraband (2012). He was married to Sigrid Insull and Mary Carolyn Linda Elizabeth "MiMi" Hawkins. He died on 18 October 2021 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.- Actor
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David Morse, a 6' 4" tall blue-eyed blond who performed on stage for 10 years before breaking into film, has become established as a respected supporting, character actor and second lead.
He was born the first of four children of Charles, a sales manager, and Jacquelyn Morse, a schoolteacher, on October 11, 1953, in Beverly, Massachusetts. He grew up with three younger sisters. After graduating from high school, Morse studied acting at the William Esper Studio. In 1971, he began his professional acting career appearing in over 30 productions with the Boston Repertory Company from 1971 to 1977. In the late 1970s, Morse continued his stage career with the Circle Repertory Company in New York before moving into television and film. In the late 1990s, he returned to the Off-Broadway stage starring in Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize winning drama, "How I Learned to Drive" (1997), for which he won the Drama Desk Award and the Obie.
Morse made his big screen debut in 1980 co-starring as "Jerry Maxwell", a cheerful bartender turned basketball player, opposite John Savage and Diana Scarwid in Inside Moves (1980), written by Barry Levinson and directed by Richard Donner. Although Inside Moves (1980) was nominated for an Oscar, Morse had to wait a few years until his career took off. His big break came in 1982 when he was cast as Dr. Jack "Boomer" Morrison, a young doctor who struggles as a single parent after the death of his wife, in St. Elsewhere (1982), a medical drama that ran for six seasons. He co-starred as opposite Jodie Foster and young Jena Malone in the Oscar nominated Sci-Fi drama Contact (1997). In 1999, he appeared in Stephen King's The Green Mile (1999), with Tom Hanks. A year later, he played a supporting role as a kidnapped husband of Meg Ryan in Proof of Life (2000). In 2002, Morse became the first English-speaking actor nominated for the Golden Horse Award, the Chinese equivalent of the Oscars, for his superb performance as FBI expert "Kevin Richter" in Double Vision (2002). From 2002 to 2004, Morse had a regular gig starring as "Mike Olshansky", an ex-Philadelphia policeman turned cab driver, in the TV series Hack (2002) which ran three seasons and was filmed in Philadelphia, close to his home. In 2006-2007, he has a recurring role on season 3 of an Emmy award-winning medical drama House (2004).
David Morse has been married to fellow actress Susan Wheeler Duff since 1982. They have three children, one daughter and twin sons. In 1994, after the the Northridge earthquake destroyed his home in Sherman Oaks, Morse moved from LA to Philadelphia with his family, and resides in his wife's hometown.- Actor
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Tyler Mane is a Canadian professional wrestler and actor from Saskatoon. He is known for playing Sabretooth in X-Men and a 2006 video game, Michael Myers in Rob Zombie's Halloween film duology and Ajax from Troy. He also acted in Joe Dirt, The Scorpion King, Playing with Fire, Doom Patrol and The Devil's Rejects. He is married to Renae Geerlings.- Actor
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If "born to the theater" has meaning in determining a person's life path, then John Lithgow is a prime example of this truth. He was born in Rochester, New York, to Sarah Jane (Price), an actress, and Arthur Washington Lithgow III, who was both a theatrical producer and director. John's father was born in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, where the Anglo-American Lithgow family had lived for several generations.
John moved frequently as a child, while his father founded and managed local and college theaters and Shakespeare festivals throughout the Midwest of the United States. Not until he was 16, and his father became head of the McCarter Theater in Princeton New Jersey, did the family settle down. But for John, the theater was still not a career. He won a scholarship to Harvard University, where he finally caught the acting bug (as well as found a wife). Harvard was followed by a Fulbright scholarship to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Returning from London, his rigorous dramatic training stood him in good stead, and a distinguished career on Broadway gave him one Tony Award for "The Changing Room", a second nomination in 1985 for "Requiem For a Heavyweight", and a third in 1988 for "M. Butterfly". But with critical acclaim came personal confusion, and in the mid 1970s, he and his wife divorced. He entered therapy, and in 1982, his life started in a new direction, the movies - he received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp (1982). A second Oscar nomination followed for Terms of Endearment (1983), and he met a UCLA economics professor who became his second wife. As the decade of the 1990s came around, he found that he was spending too much time on location, and another career move brought him to television in the hugely successful series 3rd Rock from the Sun (1996).
This production also played a role in bringing him back together with the son from his first marriage, Ian Lithgow, who has a regular role in the series as a dimwitted student.- Actor
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Clinton Eastwood Jr. was born May 31, 1930 in San Francisco, to Clinton Eastwood Sr., a bond salesman and later manufacturing executive for Georgia-Pacific Corporation, and Ruth Wood (née Margret Ruth Runner), a housewife turned IBM clerk. He grew up in nearby Piedmont. At school Clint took interest in music and mechanics, but was an otherwise bored student; this resulted in being held back a grade. In 1949, the year he is said to have graduated from high school, his parents and younger sister Jeanne moved to Seattle. Clint spent a couple years in the Pacific Northwest himself, operating log broncs in Springfield, Oregon, with summer gigs life-guarding in Renton, Washington. Returning to California in 1951, he did a two-year stint at Fort Ord Military Reservation and later enrolled at L.A. City College, but dropped out to pursue acting.
During the mid-1950s he landed uncredited bit parts in such B-films as Revenge of the Creature (1955) and Tarantula (1955) while digging swimming pools and driving a garbage truck to supplement his income. In 1958, he landed his first consequential acting role in the long-running TV show Rawhide (1959) with Eric Fleming. Although only a secondary player the first seven seasons, he was promoted to series star when Fleming departed--both literally and figuratively--in its final year, along the way becoming a recognizable face to television viewers around the country.
Eastwood's big-screen breakthrough came as The Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's trilogy of excellent spaghetti westerns: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The movies were shown exclusively in Italy during their respective copyright years with Enrico Maria Salerno providing the voice of Eastwood's character, finally getting American distribution in 1967-68. As the last film racked up respectable grosses, Eastwood, 37, rose from a barely registering actor to sought-after commodity in just a matter of months. Again a success was the late-blooming star's first U.S.-made western, Hang 'Em High (1968). He followed that up with the lead role in Coogan's Bluff (1968) (the loose inspiration for the TV series McCloud (1970)), before playing second fiddle to Richard Burton in the World War II epic Where Eagles Dare (1968) and Lee Marvin in the bizarre musical Paint Your Wagon (1969). In Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) and Kelly's Heroes (1970), Eastwood leaned in an experimental direction by combining tough-guy action with offbeat humor.
1971 proved to be his busiest year in film. He starred as a sleazy Union soldier in The Beguiled (1971) to critical acclaim, and made his directorial debut with the classic erotic thriller Play Misty for Me (1971). His role as the hard edge police inspector in Dirty Harry (1971), meanwhile, boosted him to cultural icon status and helped popularize the loose-cannon cop genre. Eastwood put out a steady stream of entertaining movies thereafter: the westerns Joe Kidd (1972), High Plains Drifter (1973) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) (his first of six onscreen collaborations with then live-in love Sondra Locke), the Dirty Harry sequels Magnum Force (1973) and The Enforcer (1976), the action-packed road adventures Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) and The Gauntlet (1977), and the prison film Escape from Alcatraz (1979). He branched out into the comedy genre in 1978 with Every Which Way But Loose (1978), which became the biggest hit of his career up to that time; taking inflation into account, it still is. In short, The Eiger Sanction (1975) notwithstanding, the 1970s were nonstop success for Eastwood.
Eastwood kicked off the 1980s with Any Which Way You Can (1980), the blockbuster sequel to Every Which Way but Loose. The fourth Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact (1983), was the highest-grossing film of the franchise and spawned his trademark catchphrase: "Make my day." He also starred in Bronco Billy (1980), Firefox (1982), Tightrope (1984), City Heat (1984), Pale Rider (1985) and Heartbreak Ridge (1986), all of which were solid hits, with Honkytonk Man (1982) being his only commercial failure of the period. In 1988, he did his fifth and final Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool (1988). Although it was a success overall, it did not have the box office punch the previous films had. About this time, with outright bombs like Pink Cadillac (1989) and The Rookie (1990), it seemed Eastwood's star was declining as it never had before. He then started taking on low-key projects, directing Bird (1988), a biopic of Charlie Parker that earned him a Golden Globe, and starring in and directing White Hunter Black Heart (1990), an uneven, loose biopic of John Huston (both films had a limited release).
Eastwood bounced back big time with his dark western Unforgiven (1992), which garnered the then 62-year-old his first ever Academy Award nomination (Best Actor), and an Oscar win for Best Director. Churning out a quick follow-up hit, he took on the secret service in In the Line of Fire (1993), then accepted second billing for the first time since 1970 in the interesting but poorly received A Perfect World (1993) with Kevin Costner. Next was a love story, The Bridges of Madison County (1995), where Eastwood surprised audiences with a sensitive performance alongside none other than Meryl Streep. But it soon became apparent he was going backwards after his brief revival. Subsequent films were credible, but nothing really stuck out. Absolute Power (1997) and Space Cowboys (2000) did well enough, while True Crime (1999) and Blood Work (2002) were received badly, as was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), which he directed but didn't appear in.
Eastwood surprised again in the mid-2000s, returning to the top of the A-list with Million Dollar Baby (2004). Also starring Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman, the hugely successful drama won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Eastwood. He scored his second Best Actor nomination, too. His next starring vehicle, Gran Torino (2008), earned almost $30 million in its opening weekend and was his highest grosser unadjusted for inflation. 2012 saw him in a rare lighthearted movie, Trouble with the Curve (2012), as well as a reality show, Mrs. Eastwood & Company (2012).
Between acting jobs, he chalked up an impressive list of credits behind the camera. He directed Mystic River (2003) (in which Sean Penn and Tim Robbins gave Oscar-winning performances), Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) (nominated for the Best Picture Oscar), Changeling (2008) (a vehicle for Angelina Jolie), Invictus (2009) (again with Freeman), Hereafter (2010), J. Edgar (2011), Jersey Boys (2014), American Sniper (2014) (2014's top box office champ), Sully (2016) (starring Tom Hanks as hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger) and The 15:17 to Paris (2018). Back on screens after a considerable absence, he played an unlikely drug courier in The Mule (2018), which reached the top of the box office with a nine-figure gross, then directed Richard Jewell (2019). At age 91, Eastwood made history as the oldest actor to star above the title in a movie with the release of Cry Macho (2021).
Away from the limelight, Eastwood has led an aberrant existence and is described by biographer Patrick McGilligan as a cunning manipulator of the media. His convoluted slew of partners and children are now somewhat factually acknowledged, but for the first three decades of his celebrity, his personal life was kept top secret, and several of his families were left out of the official narrative. The actor refuses to disclose his exact number of offspring even to this day. He had a longtime relationship with similarly abstruse co-star Locke (who died aged 74 in 2018, though for her entire public life she masqueraded about being younger), and has fathered at least eight children by at least six different women in an unending string of liaisons, many of which overlapped. He has been married only twice, however, with a mere three of his progeny coming from those unions.
His known children are: Laurie Murray (b. 1954), whose mother is unidentified; Kimber Eastwood (b. 1964) with stuntwoman Roxanne Tunis; Kyle Eastwood (b. 1968) and Alison Eastwood (b. 1972) with his first ex-wife, Margaret Neville Johnson; Scott Eastwood (b. 1986) and Kathryn Eastwood (b. 1988) with stewardess Jacelyn Reeves; Francesca Eastwood (b. 1993) with actress Frances Fisher; and Morgan Eastwood (b. 1996) with his second ex-wife, Dina Eastwood. The entire time that he lived with Locke she was legally married to sculptor Gordon Anderson.
Eastwood has real estate holdings in Bel-Air, La Quinta, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Cassel (in remote northern California), Idaho's Sun Valley and Kihei, Hawaii.- Much of Good's wrestling persona is based on his own real-life upbringing in Cincinnati's East End, where he spent much of his childhood in public housing. An avid wrestling fan who idolized Bret Hart as a child, he used wrestling as an escape from his rough upbringing by immersing himself in wrestling videotapes and reading stories about wrestling's earlier days. A year after beginning to train as a wrestler, he dropped out of high school.
In March 2015, WWE broadcaster Renee Paquette, better known by her ring name Renee Young, confirmed that she is in a relationship with Good.
In August 2014, Good began filming the Lionsgate-WWE Studios co-production Lockdown. The film is due to be released in 2015. - Born in Vancouver and raised in Squamish, British Columbia, Daniel grew up in an athletic household. The middle of three boys, Daniel excelled at a number of different sports including ski racing, snowboarding, football and rugby. However, in addition to his vast interest in athletics, Daniel always had a passion for the arts. He took drama classes and performed in school and local theatre productions while his athleticism earned him a Football Scholarship to Gannon University. Unfortunately, his sports career was cut short due to a devastating injury while on the field. It was at this crucial crossroad that Daniel decided to move back to Vancouver and focus his attention on his other passion, acting. Daniel's breakout role came shortly after he made the transition from college star to actor, when Bryan Singer cast him alongside Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Sir Ian McKellen, and Halle Berry in the superhero film X2 (2003), as Colossus, the strongest member of the X-Men team. Daniel's character was brought back in the film's sequel X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). He has since showcased his extraordinary talents on numerous television shows including Stargate SG-1 (1997), Supernatural (2005), and Psych (2006). However, it is Daniel's role as Felix in the popular Summit Entertainment film franchise The Twilight Saga that has given this actor international recognition. Off screen, Daniel has the same strength and physicality as his well-known characters. A glorified outdoorsman, this 6'6'' actor spends a great deal of time enjoying recreational activities including skiing, snowboarding, riding motor bikes and motor cycles, mountain biking and is a huge supporter of the Canadian National Rugby team, where his brother Jaime plays as a forward.
Daniel has appeared in blockbuster films from hit series: The Twilight Saga and X-Men. Next up, see him reprise his role as Felix, the all-powerful Volturi guard in The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010), as he is once again bringing the larger than life character to the big screen in the last two installments of the Saga, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (2011) and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 (2012). Additionally, Daniel has a leading role in the independent thriller Rites of Passage (2012). He shares the screen with seasoned actors Christian Slater, Stephen Dorff and Wes Bentley in the film about a young anthropology student seeking a traditional ceremony to mark his entry into manhood. He also has a role in the highly anticipated drama The Baytown Outlaws (2012) alongside Billy Bob Thornton, Paul Wesley and Eva Longoria. The movie, which was on the 2009 "Black List" of Hollywood's best unproduced movie projects, is about a federal agent who comes into a small Southern town to investigate the Oodies - three redneck brothers who get more than they bargained for after agreeing to help a woman get her son back from his seemingly abusive father. - David Akeman, the country musician known as "Stringbean," was a legend at the Grand Ole Opry and one of the stars of television's Hee Haw (1969). Along with his long-time partner and Hee Haw (1969) co-star Grandpa Jones, he was one of the premier traditional-style banjo players in country music. Though Stringbean primarily performed as either a sideman or as part of a comedy duet, he began recording his own records in the 1960s and had achieved superstar status by the time the decade of the '60s closed.
Born on June 17, 1915, to a farm family in Annville in Kentucky's Jackson County, it was natural for Akeman to become a musical prodigy as his family loved and lived music. His father was a banjoist who played at local dances, but more importantly, Annville was full of talented musicians possessed of considerable skill, all of whom, including his father, helped the young David him master the instrument. When he was seven years old, David Akeman reputedly crafted his first banjo out of a shoe box strung with thread. Five years later, he bartered a pair of chickens for a real banjo, with which he began playing gigs at local dances, earning himself a reputation as a virtuoso on the instrument, which was an adaptation of a gourd-based string instrument introduced to America in pre-colonial times by African slaves. The banjo, as adapted and played by white folk, became one of the central instruments of country music before the 20th century.
During the Depression, when money was scarce and jobs were hard to come by, Akeman joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, where he was engaged in road-building and tree-planting. As a musician, he was discovered by country singer-guitarist Asa Martin, who was the judge at a talent contest Akeman had entered. Martin awarded the contest to Akeman, who thereupon joined Martin's band. It was Martin who gave Akeman his moniker, when during one performance, he forgot the banjoist's name and introduced him as "String Beans," a reference to his lanky, 6'5" physique. The name stuck.
Akeman went from a sideman who only played banjo to a leading performer, doubling as a singer and engaging in comic repartee. His comedic shtick became popular and he began dividing his time between musicianship and comedy. He also played some semi-pro baseball player in sandlots throughout the South, which he toured with various bands throughout 1930s. Akeman also was broadcast over the radio. "Stringbeans" and his future partner Grandpa Jones were two of the relatively few banjo players in mainstream country music during the '30s, as the instrument by that time had virtually disappeared from the repertoire.
It was Stringbean's association with country legend Bill Monroe that made his reputation. Monroe, who fielded his own semi-pro baseball team, discovered Stringbean on the playing field, and the banjo player became a member of Monroe's band in 1943. Stringbean stayed with the band for two years as Monroe's first banjo player, playing in the traditional claw-hammer style, as well as engaging in two-finger picking. It was with Bill Monroe who he first appeared on records. In this period, Akeman had additional gigs, teaming up with Willie Egbert Westbrook as "String Beans and Cousin Wilbur," a comedy duo that worked on the same bills with Monroe's band. He also played on one recording session as a Blue Grass Boy, laying down eight tracks in February 1945.
Stringbeans left Monroe's band in the fall and was replaced by another legendary banjo player, the great Earl Scruggs, who had a radically different technique than the old-style favored by Akeman and Grandpa Jones. Stringbean, who married Estelle Stanfill in 1945, first began working with Grandpa Jones, another comic-banjo player, in 1946. He later teamed up with Lew Childre to create a comedy-musical duo act in the late 1940s, and they became regulars at the Grand Old Opry. At the Opry, Akeman became a protégé of Uncle Dave Macon, a fellow banjo-player/comic who was well-loved by Opry audiences. After Macon's death in 1952, Stringbean as he now was known, became one of the Opry's biggest stars.
By the early 1960s, Earl Scruggs had become the most influential and popular banjo player in country music, and it was at this time that Stringbean first decided to record on his own, signing with the Starday label. There was still an audience for his traditional style of banjo playing and his admixture of comedy and song, best exemplified by the title of his first album: "Old Time Pickin' and Grinnin' with Stringbean," which was released in 1961. The album featured folk songs, particularly humorous ditties about animals, and jokes and tall tales. He would release a total of seven albums all together from the early 60s through 1972, and had country hits with "Chewing Gum" and "I Wonder Where Wanda Went."
In 1969, Stringbean and Grandpa Jones became part of the original cast of the country-flavored TV show _"Hee Haw" (1979)_ which made him famous outside of the country music niche. Just like at the Grand Old Opry, Stringbean became one of the most beloved of the show's stars.
Dave Akeman lived an extremely modest, simple life. Remembering the hard times of the Depression, Stringbean and his wife lived in a tiny cabin near Ridgetop, Tennessee, approximately 20 miles outside of Nashville, near his friend Grandpa Jones. Their only luxury was a Cadillac.
Stringbean did not trust banks due to the multiple bank failures of the Hoover years, and he kept thousands of dollars on his person, which he was known to flash around. It was rumored in nearby Nashville that Stringbean had a fortune in cash stashed at his house. It was these rumors that led two cousins, John and Marvin Brown, on the night of November 10, 1973, to break into the Akemans' cabin.
Returning from a performance at the Grand Old Opry, the burglars shot Stringbean dead after he entered his house, then ran down and killed Estelle. By immediately murdering Stringbean, they had no chance to question him on the whereabouts of any hidden monies, which they were unable to find. They managed to steal some firearms and a chainsaw, all at the cost of two lives. Stringbean and Estelle's neighbor Grandpa Jones discovered his slain friends the next morning, a Sunday.
The murders of the beloved Stringbean and his wife shocked the Nashville music community. Some of the less ethical members of the press tried to implicate Grandpa Jones in the slayings, intimating that he had been having an affair with Estelle. The charges were preposterous and hurtful towards Jones, who had lost his dear friends, but they helped sell papers.
Police work finally led to the capture of John and Marvin Brown. During the trial, Grandpa Jones identified one of the firearms the cousins had stolen from the Akeman cabin as one he had given Stringbean as a gift. The cousins, it was revealed, had ransacked the cabin and ambushed Stringbean and Estelle when they returned home. They were convicted of the double homicide and burglary and sentenced to life-in prison. (Ironically, a decomposed wad of about $20,000 in cash was discovered behind a brick in the cabin's chimney nearly a quarter century later, in 1996.)
David "Stringbean" Akeman and his wife Estelle were buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. The Stringbean Memorial Bluegrass Festival is held annually in Jackson County, Kentucky. The festival raises funds for Stringbean Memorial, Inc., a non-profit corporation that organizes, plans and hosts traditional music and heritage festivals in Jackson County to honor the memory of Stringbean and to preserve and promote traditional bluegrass and mountain music as well as support musical education and opportunities for area youth. - Actor
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Born in West Covina, California, but raised in New York City, Tim Robbins is the son of former The Highwaymen singer Gil Robbins and actress Mary Robbins (née Bledsoe). Robbins studied drama at UCLA, where he graduated with honors in 1981. That same year, he formed the Actors' Gang theater group, an experimental ensemble that expressed radical political observations through the European avant-garde form of theater. He started film work in television movies in 1983, but hit the big time in 1988 with his portrayal of dimwitted fastball pitcher "Nuke" Laloosh in Bull Durham (1988). Tall with baby-faced looks, he has the ability to play naive and obtuse (Cadillac Man (1990) and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)) or slick and shrewd (The Player (1992) and Bob Roberts (1992)).- Actor
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Fred Gwynne was an enormously talented character actor most famous for starring in the television situation comedies Car 54, Where Are You? (1961) (as Officer Francis Muldoon) and The Munsters (1964) (as the Frankenstein clone Herman Munster). He was very tall at 6'5" and had a resonant, baritone voice that he put to good use in Broadway musicals.
Born Frederick Hubbard Gwynne in New York City, the son of Dorothy (Ficken) and Frederick Walker Gwynne, a wealthy stockbroker and partner in the securities firm Gwynne Brothers. His grandfathers emigrated from Northern Ireland and England, respectively, and his grandmothers were native-born New Yorkers. Fred attended the exclusive prep school Groton, where he first appeared on stage in a student production of William Shakespeare's "Henry V". After serving in the United States Navy as a radioman during World War II, he went on to Harvard, where he majored in English and was on the staff of the "Harvard Lampoon". At Harvard, he studied drawing with artist R.S. Merryman and was active in dramatics. A member of the Hasty Pudding Club, he performed in the dining club's theatricals, appearing in the drag revues of 1949 and 1950. After graduating from Harvard with the class of 1951, Gwynne acted in Shakespeare with a Cambridge, Massachusetts repertory company before heading to New York City, where he supported himself as a musician and copywriter. His principal source of income for many years came from his work as a book illustrator and as a commercial artist. His first book, "The Best in Show", was published in 1958.
On February 20, 1952, he made his Broadway debut as the character "Stinker", in support of Helen Hayes, in the comic fantasy "Mrs. McThing". The play, written by "Harvey (1950)" author Mary Chase, had a cast featuring Ernest Borgnine, the future "Professor" Irwin Corey and Brandon De Wilde, the young son of the play's stage manager, Frederick DeWilde. The play ran for 320 performances and closed on January 10, 1953. He next appeared on Broadway in Burgess Meredith's staging of Nathaniel Benchley's comedy "The Frogs of Spring", which opened at the Broadhurst Theatre on October 21, 1953. The play flopped, closing on Halloween Day after but 15 performances. He did not appear on Broadway again for almost seven years.
Gwynne made his movie debut, unbilled, as one of Johnny Friendly's gang of thugs who menace Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan's classic On the Waterfront (1954). From 1956 - 1963, he appeared on the television dramatic showcases Studio One (1948), The Kaiser Aluminum Hour (1956), Kraft Theatre (1947), The DuPont Show of the Month (1957), The DuPont Show of the Week (1961) and The United States Steel Hour (1953). But it was in situation comedies that he made his name and his fame.
In 1955, he made a memorable guest appearance as Private Honigan on The Phil Silvers Show (1955). He played a soldier with an enormous appetite that Phil Silvers' Sgt. Bilko entered into a pie-eating contest, only to discover he could only eat like a trencherman when he was depressed. The spot led to him coming back as a guest in more episodes. While appearing on Broadway as the pimp Polyte-Le-Mou in the Peter Brook-directed hit "Irma La Douce" (winner of the 1961 Tony Award for Best Musical), "Bilko" producer-writer Nat Hiken cast him in one of the lead roles in the situation comedy Car 54, Where Are You? (1961). The series, in which he revealed his wonderful flair for comedy, had Gwynne appearing as New York City police officer Francis Muldoon, who served in a patrol car in the Bronx with the dimwitted Officer Gunther Toody, played by co-star Joe E. Ross ("Oooh! Oooh!"). Car 54, Where Are You? (1961) lasted only two seasons, but it was so fondly remembered by Baby Boomers, it inspired a feature film version in 1994. He also served as Lamb Chop's doctor on another Baby Boomer classic, The Shari Lewis Show (1960).
Another one of his "Car 54, Where Are You?" co-stars, Al Lewis, not only became a lifelong friend, he appeared as Gwynne's father-n-law in his next situation comedy. Gwynne was cast as the Frankenstein's monster-like paterfamilias in The Munsters (1964), which also lasted two seasons. In addition to wearing heavy boots with four-inch lifts on them, Gwynne had to wear 40 - 50 lbs of padding and makeup for the role and he reportedly lost ten pounds in one day of filming under the hot lights. He made guest appearances as Herman Munster, most notably on The Red Skelton Hour (1951), appearing on April 27, 1965, along with Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, a pop band from The Beatles' native Liverpool. Gwynne appeared in character as Herman Munster in a "Freddie the Freeloader" comedy sketch.
When "The Munsters" was canceled after the 1965-1966 season, Gwynne returned to the theatre to escape television typecasting, although he did return for a featured appearance in the televised version of Arsenic and Old Lace (1969), playing the psychotic Jonathan Brewster in an all-star cast, including with his "Mrs. McThing" co-star Helen Hayes, Lillian Gish, Bob Crane, Sue Lyon, Jack Gilford and David Wayne. He appeared twice on television in Mary Chase's "Harvey" (1950), the first time in 1958 on the "Dupont Show of the Month" version broadcast by CBS, in which he appeared in support of Art Carney as Elwood P. Dodd. Others in the cast included Elizabeth Montgomery, Jack Weston and Larry Blyden. He appeared as the cab driver in the 1972 version, Harvey (1972), in which James Stewart reprised his role as Elwood P. Dodd, in which he was reunited with his Broadway co-star Helen Hayes.
In 1968, he made a television series pilot for Screen Gems, "Guess What I Did Today?", co-starring Bridget Hanley, who later played Candy Pruit on Here Come the Brides (1968). The pilot, which was made for NBC, was not picked up by the network. Gwynne had trouble making producers forget his character Herman Munster and he started refusing to have anything to do with or even to speak of the show. One of the few visual productions to utilize his beautiful singing voice was The Littlest Angel (1969), a musical produced as part of the Hallmark Hall of Fame (1951).
His movie and television appearances were sporadic throughout the 1970s as he worked on- and off-Broadway. He had used his singing voice again to great effect in Meredith Wilson's musical "Here's Love", which opened at the Shubert Theatre on October 20, 1963 and played for 334 performances, closing on July 25, 1964. Exactly nine years from the "Here's Love" opening, he appeared at the Plymouth as "Abraham Lincoln" in the Broadway play "The Lincoln Mask", a flop that lasted but one week of eight performances.
His most distinguished performance on Broadway (and the favourite of all of his theatrical roles, was as Big Daddy in the 1974 Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof". Though not as cutting as Burl Ives had been in the original production, his Big Daddy was lyrical and powerful, so much so that he overpowered Keir Dullea in the role of "Brick". However, Elizabeth Ashley won a Tony Award for playing Maggie the Cat in the production, which gave Tennessee Williams his first big success in a decade, albeit in a revival.
Gwynne also was memorable as the elderly Klansman in the first two parts of "The Texas Trilogy" in 1977 season. His last appearance on Broadway was in Anthony Shaffer's "Whodunnit", which opened at the Biltmore Theatre on December 30, 1983 and closed May 15, 1983 after 157 total performances. Before saying goodbye to the Broadway stage in a hit, he had appeared on the Great White Way in two flops in 1978: "Angel", the musical version of Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel" (which lasted but five performances) and the Australian professional football club drama "Players" (which lasted 23 performances). For the Joseph Papp Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival, he had appeared in Off-Broadway in "More Than You Deserve" in the 1973-1974 season and, in "Grand Magic", during the 1978-1979 season, for which he won an Obie Award. On the radio, Gwynne appeared in 79 episodes of "The CBS Radio Mystery Theatre" between 1975 and 1982.
With time, his characterization of Herman Munster began to fade and he began establishing himself as a film character actor of note in the 1980s with well-reviewed appearances in The Cotton Club (1984), Ironweed (1987), Disorganized Crime (1989) and Pet Sematary (1989), in which his character, Jud Crandall, was based on author Stephen King, who himself is quite tall. Gwynne also made a memorable turn as the judge who battles with the eponymous My Cousin Vinny (1992), his last film. Critic and cinema historian Mick LaSalle cited Gwynne's performance as Judge Chamberlain Haller in his August 2003 article "Role call of overlooked performances is long", writing: "Half of what made Joe Pesci funny in this comedy was the stream of reactions of Gwynne, as the Southern Judge, a Great Dane to Joe Pesci's yapping terrier."
Gwynne sang professionally, painted, sculpted, wrote & illustrated children's books, including: "The King Who Rained" (1970); "A Chocolate Moose for Dinner" (1976); "A Little Pigeon Toad" (1988) and "Pondlarker" (1990). He wrote 10 books in all and "The King Who Rained", "A Chocolate Moose for Dinner" and "A Little Pigeon Toad", which all were published by the prestigious house Simon & Schuster, are still in print. In the first part of his professional life, Gwynne lived a quiet life in suburban Bedford, New York and avoided the Hollywood and Broadway social scenes. He married his first wife Foxy in 1952. They had five children and divorced in 1980. He and his second wife Deb, whom he married in 1981, lived in a renovated farmhouse in rural Taneytown, Maryland. His neighbors described him as a good friend and neighbor who kept his personal and professional lives separate.
Fred Gwynne died on July 2, 1993, in Taneytown, Maryland, after a battle with cancer of the pancreas. He was just eight days shy of turning 67 years old. He is sorely missed by those that who grew up delighted by his Officer Francis Muldoon and Herman Munster and were gratified by his late-career renaissance on film.- Alexander Crichlow Barker Jr. was a direct descendant of the founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, and of Sir William Henry Crichlow, historical Governor-General of Barbados. Barker attended the Fessenden School and Phillips-Exeter Academy, where he excelled in football and track. He went to Princeton, but left to become an actor. A year later he was spotted while working in summer stock theatre, and received a contract offer from 20th Century Fox. World War II intervened; he enlisted as an infantry private, and rose to the rank of major.
Although later signed by Fox and then Warner Bros, he was too tall for supporting parts and too unknown for leads. Tarzan's Magic Fountain (1949) (RKO) provided his first starring role. After five Tarzan films, he went into other adventure films. After 16 non-Tarzan films, mostly westerns, he went to Europe in 1957 (he spoke French, Spanish, Italian, and German). He went on to make more than 50 more films worldwide: Brazil, Germany, Spain, Yugoslavia, Italy, Lebanon, France, as well as the USA. He became very popular in Germany owing to his roles as "Old Shatterhand", "Kara Ben Nemsi", and "Dr. Karl Sternau", in films based on books written by Karl May, a popular German writer of adventure literature. Barker won Germany's Bambi Award as Best Foreign Actor of 1966. - Actor
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Born into a prominent Boston family of bankers whose patriarch was said to have arrived in America from England in 1683, Sonny Tufts would end his career as a Hollywood "bad boy," immersed in drink and scandal.
Tufts was graduated from Yale in 1935 and began pursuing a career in opera, eventually auditioning with the Metropolitan Opera in New York. But he drifted into the world of pop music and soon found himself on the Broadway stage. He went to Hollywood in 1942 and for most of the 1940's appeared in supporting roles or as second leads in light comedies produced by Paramount Pictures. An old college football injury had disqualified him for military duty, and so, with many of Hollywood's younger leading men serving overseas in World War II, this tall, blond, blue-eyed actor became something of a star, if only by default. But by the turn of the decade he had found his name in print on account of his off-screen activities. In 1949 he had been found drunk on a Hollywood sidewalk. In 1950 he was sued by two women for allegedly biting each of them in the thigh. In 1951 his wife had him jailed for drunkenness. The name Sonny Tufts itself became a joke. Thereafter he made few films, but could be found in occasional guest appearances on inconsequential TV shows. He died of pneumonia at age 58.- Writer
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Grandson of famed humorist and actor Robert Benchley and the son of highly respected children's books author Nathaniel Benchley, novelist Peter Benchley's book were decidedly more dramatic in their content and style than his father's, and usually centered on the world's oceans as a backdrop to his vigorous plots.
Benchley is of course best remembered for penning the multi-million selling thriller Jaws, which was eventually filmed by director Steven Spielberg starring Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw. Jaws (1975) was a box office sensation, becoming one of the seminal films of the 1970s, spawning several inferior sequels, numerous low budget copycat films starring hammerheads, tiger and mako sharks. Plus generations of swimmers chose backyard pools over the mysterious ocean surf for cooling off in summer.
Benchley also wrote The Deep and The Island which were also both brought to the screen, but with much less fanfare and box office return than the Jaws venture. Interestingly, after the enormous hysteria created over the great white shark and their alleged man-eating habits, Benchley became a dedicated environmentalist committed to learning all he could about one of the world's most amazing apex predators. In the ensuing years, Benchley became one of the great white shark's greatest defenders and publicly admitted on numerous occasions that with what he now knew about the fragility of the species, he would have never written a book like Jaws which demonised the great white.
Benchley kept very active in his passion for studying great whites up until the time of his death from pulmonary fibrosis on February 11th, 2006.- Writer
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Mark Flood was born on September 30, 1996, in Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland, as the second child of two school teachers. He is of Irish, Hebridean and Lithuanian heritage. He attended St. Cadoc's Primary School and St. Ninian's High School. Due to a lifelong fondness for film, art and animation, he attended classes at the Glasgow School of Art as a teenager, and began working on his own projects.
Mark began working regularly as a cartoonist in his teens, teaching himself the art of animation and screenwriting, learning from mentors in the industry, and borrowing equipment to produce his own material. He assembled a small team of fellow aspiring animators, whom he met at school and art school, to produce animated shorts. His team still work with him today, and in the early days, the group completed their work in their homes, garages and attics. The short cartoon films he directed as a teenager were screened in various festivals on both sides of the Atlantic, allowing him to begin establishing himself in the industry as a writer, actor, voice actor, animator, producer, and director.
Flood officially founded his own film company in 2014, to create feature-length films and television series using traditional hand-drawn animation, and eventually employing first-class animators from around the globe. He was the recipient of the Young Scot Award for Enterprise in 2015, and was named in June 2015 as one of 10 of Scotland's "Young Rising Stars" by Glasgow's Evening Times, a list that also included singer-songwriter Nina Nesbitt, Katie Archibald, Millie Innes and politician Mhairi Black.
Flood splits his time between his hometown of Glasgow, Scotland, and London. His upcoming work includes the 30-minute animated film Operation Alley Cat, and a live-action sitcom Strivers and Skivers, with several feature films and television series in development.
Outside of his work, Mark loves reading, motorbiking, playing guitar, and playing board games such as chess. He is active in campaigning for issues close to him, such as human and animal rights, healthcare and culture.- Actor
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Actor, raconteur, art collector and connoisseur of haute cuisine are just some of the attributes associated with Vincent Price. He was born Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. in St. Louis, Missouri, to Marguerite Cobb "Daisy" (Wilcox) and Vincent Leonard Price, who was President of the National Candy Company. His grandfather, also named Vincent, invented Dr. Price's Baking Powder, which was tartar-based. His family was prosperous, as he said, "not rich enough to evoke envy but successful enough to demand respect." His uniquely cultivated voice and persona were the result of a well-rounded education which began when his family dispatched him on a tour of Europe's cultural centres. His secondary education eventually culminated in a B.A. in English from Yale University and a degree in art history from London's Courtauld Institute.
Famously, his name has long been a byword for Gothic horror on screen. However, Vincent Price was, first and foremost, a man of the stage. It is where he began his career and where it ended. He faced the footlights for the first time at the Gate Theatre in London. At the age of 23, he played Prince Albert in the premiere of Arthur Schnitzler 's 'Victoria Regina' and made such an impression on producer Gilbert Miller that he launched the play on Broadway that same year (legendary actress Helen Hayes played the title role). In early 1938, he was invited to join Orson Welles 's Mercury Theatre on a five-play contract, beginning with 'The Shoemaker's Holiday'. He gave what was described as "a polished performance". Thus established, Vincent continued to make sporadic forays to the Great White Way, including as the Duke of Buckingham in Shakespeare's 'Richard III' (in which a reviewer for the New Yorker found him to be "satisfactorily detestable") and as Oscar Wilde in his award-winning one man show 'Diversions and Delights', which he took on a hugely successful world-wide tour in 1978. While based in California, Vincent was instrumental in the success of the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, starring in several of their bigger productions, including 'Billy Budd' and 'The Winslow Boy'. In 1952, Vincent joined the national touring company of 'Don Juan in Hell' in which he was cast as the devil. Acting under the direction of Charles Laughton and accompanied by noted thespians Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke and Agnes Moorehead, he later recalled this as one of his "greatest theatrical excitements".
As well as acting on stage, Vincent regularly performed on radio network programs, including Lux Radio Theatre, CBS Playhouse and shows for the BBC. He narrated or hosted assorted programs ranging from history (If these Walls Could Speak) to cuisine (Cooking Price-Wise). He wrote several best-selling books on his favourite subjects: art collecting and cookery. In 1962, he was approached by Sears Roebuck to act as a buying consultant "selling quality pictures to department store customers". As if that were not enough, he lectured for 15 years on art, poetry and even the history of villainy. He recorded numerous readings of poems by Edgar Allan Poe (nobody ever gave a better recital of "The Raven"!), Shelley and Whitman. He also served on the Arts Council of UCLA, was a member of the Fine Arts Committee for the White House, a former chairman of the Indian Arts & Crafts Board and on the board of trustees of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
And besides all of that, Vincent Price remained a much sought-after motion picture actor. He made his first appearance on screen as a romantic lead in Service de Luxe (1938), a frothy Universal comedy which came and went without much fanfare. After that, he reprized his stage role as Master Hammon in an early television production of 'The Shoemaker's Holiday'. For one reason or another, Vincent was henceforth typecast as either historical figures (Sir Walter Raleigh, Duke of Clarence, Mormon leader Joseph Smith, King Charles II, Cardinal Richelieu, Omar Khayyam) or ineffectual charmers and gigolos. Under contract to 20th Century Fox (1940-46), Laura (1944) provided one of his better vehicles in the latter department, as did the lush Technicolor melodrama Leave Her to Heaven (1945) which had Vincent showcased in a notably powerful scene as a prosecuting attorney. His performance was singled out by the L.A. Times as meriting "attention as contending for Academy supporting honors".
His first fling with the horror genre was Dragonwyck (1946), a Gothic melodrama set in the Hudson Valley in the early 1800's. For the first time, Vincent played a part he actually coveted and fought hard to win. His character was in effect a precursor of those he would later make his own while working for Roger Corman and American-International. As demented, drug-addicted landowner Nicholas Van Ryn, he so effectively terrorized Gene Tierney's Miranda Wells that the influential columnist Louella Parsons wrote with rare praise: "The role of Van Ryn calls for a lot of acting and Vincent admits he's a ham and loves to act all over the place, but the fact that he has restrained himself and doesn't over-emote is a tribute to his ability". If Vincent was an occasional ham, he proved it with his Harry Lime pastiche Carwood in The Bribe (1949). Much better was his starring role in a minor western, The Baron of Arizona (1950), in which he was convincingly cast as a larcenous land office clerk attempting to create his own desert baronetcy.
With House of Wax (1953) , Vincent fine-tuned the character type he had established in Dragonwyck, adding both pathos and comic elements to the role of the maniacal sculptor Henry Jarrod. It was arduous work under heavy make-up which simulated hideous facial scarring and required three hours to apply and three hours to remove. He later commented that it "took his face months to heal because it was raw from peeling off wax each night". However, the picture proved a sound money maker for Warner Brothers and firmly established Vincent Price in a cult genre from which he was henceforth unable to escape. The majority of his subsequent films were decidedly low-budget affairs in which the star tended to be the sole mitigating factor: The Mad Magician (1954), The Fly (1958) (and its sequel), House on Haunted Hill (1959), the absurd The Tingler (1959) (easily the worst of the bunch) and The Bat (1959). With few exceptions, Vincent's acting range would rarely be stretched in the years to come.
Vincent's association with the genial Roger Corman began when he received a script for The Fall of the House of Usher, beginning a projected cycle of cost-effective films based on short stories by Edgar Allen Poe. As Roderick Usher, Vincent was Corman's "first and only choice". Though he was to receive a salary of $50,000 for the picture, it was his chance "to express the psychology of Poe's characters" and to "imbue the movie versions with the spirit of Poe" that clinched the deal for Vincent. He made another six films in this vein, all of them box office winners. Not Academy Award stuff, but nonetheless hugely enjoyable camp entertainment and popular with all but highbrow audiences. Who could forget Vincent at his scenery chewing best as the resurgent inquisitor, luring Barbara Steele into the crypt in The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)? Or as pompous wine aficionado Fortunato Luchresi in that deliriously funny wine tasting competition with Montresor Herringbone (Peter Lorre) in Tales of Terror (1962)? Best still, the climactic battle of the magicians pitting Vincent's Erasmus Craven against Boris Karloff's malevolent Dr. Scarabus in The Raven (1963) (arguably, the best offering in the Poe cycle). The Comedy of Terrors (1963) was played strictly for laughs, with the inimitable combo of Price and Lorre this time appearing as homicidal undertakers.
For the rest of the 60s, Vincent was content to remain in his niche, playing variations on the same theme in City in the Sea (1965) and Witchfinder General (1968) (as Matthew Hopkins). He also spoofed his screen personae as Dr. Goldfoot and as perennial villain Egghead in the Batman (1966) series. He rose once more to the occasion in the cult black comedy The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) (and its sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972)) commenting that he had to play Anton Phibes "very seriously so that it would come out funny". The tagline, a parody of the ad for Love Story (1970), announced "love means never having to say you're ugly".
During the 70s and 80s, Vincent restricted himself mainly to voice-overs and TV guest appearances. His final role of note was as the inventor in Edward Scissorhands (1990), a role written specifically for him. The embodiment of gleeful, suave screen villainy, Vincent Price died in Los Angeles in October 1993 at the age of 82. People magazine eulogized him as "the Gable of Gothic." Much earlier, an English critic named Gilbert Adair spoke for many fans when he said "Every man his Price - and mine is Vincent."- Actor
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Glenn Thomas Jacobs better known by the ring name Kane, is an American politician, actor, and professional wrestler. He has been the Republican Mayor of Knox County, Tennessee since 2018. He is signed to WWE.
He began his professional wrestling career on the independent circuit in 1992, wrestling in promotions such as Smoky Mountain Wrestling (SMW) and the United States Wrestling Association (USWA), before joining the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE) in 1995. Jacobs played various characters until 1997, when he was repackaged as Kane, a horror-themed personification of fire and juggernaut younger half-brother of The Undertaker and son of Paul Bearer. This "hellfire and brimstone" gimmick branches from acts of arson by The Undertaker as part of their characters' youth backstory. Jacobs would alternatively feud and team with The Undertaker as The Brothers of Destruction.- Randal Keith "Randy" Orton (born April 1, 1980) is an American professional wrestler and actor best known to sports entertainment audiences for his career signed with WWE. Orton was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Bob Orton, Jr. and his wife Elaine. He is the grandson of Bob Orton, Sr. and the nephew of wrestler-turned-musician Barry Orton. Randy has a younger brother named Nate and a younger sister named Rebecca. Early in life, his parents discouraged him from pursuing any career in professional wrestling due to the major amount of time spent away from home and family. Orton however, still became involved with wrestling, on an amateur level while attending Hazelwood Central High School.
Orton graduated from high school in 1998 and then joined the United States Marine Corps. However, Orton received a Bad Conduct Discharge (BCD)in 1999 after twice going AWOL and for disobeying a direct order from a commanding officer.
After his brief military tenure, Orton opted for a career in professional wrestling. During 2000 at age 20, Orton began his training, lasting into the following year in 2001. He wrestled in local training promotions in St. Louis where his father and uncle had working relations with. Orton also gained experience as a wrestling referee.
During 2001, Orton signed with the then-World Wrestling Federation and began training in its instructional program Ohio Valley Wrestling. Orton made his debut the following year in 2002 at WrestleMania X8 (2002) Fan Axxcess, defeating Tommy Dreamer. During 2002, Orton began gaining more televised match time and screen-time for promos. The following year in 2003 after the company renamed itself as the WWE, Orton quickly enhanced his presence on the WWE roster, when he joined the heel stable known as Evolution, fronted by Paul Levesque (known in-ring as Triple H). While in Evolution, Orton won his first singles title when he defeated Rob Van Dam for the WWE Intercontinental Championship at WWE Armageddon (2003). The following year, Orton won his second title when he defeated fan favorite Summerslam (2004). By this time, Orton had began drifting away from his Evolution teammates and went on to strike out on his own. Establishing himself as the "Legend Killer" Orton began on a crusade of taking down every wrestling legend the WWE had to offer. His crusade came to a cryptic end when he was defeated by The Phenom, The Undertaker (Mark Calaway) at WrestleMania 21 (2005), after promising WWE fans he would end Undertaker's 12-0 undefeated WrestleMania record.
As Orton's career continued in the WWE, Orton won the WWE Championship a total of 8 times and was the last World Heavyweight Champion after winning that title 4 times. During the later 2000s, Orton formed a tag team with Adam Copeland (known as Edge), becoming Team Rated RKO (a play on Edge's nickname as the Rated R Superstar and Randy's finisher move named the RKO). They won the World Tag Team Championship for the first and last time before losing the titles to John Cena and Shawn Michaels. During the early 2010s, Orton formed his own stable called Legacy, comprised of Cody Rhodes and Ted DiBiase Jr.. Afterwards, Orton returned to his singular ways and became known as the "Apex Predator" and "The Viper", increasing his aggression and killer-instinct in the wrestling ring.
Outside of wrestling, Orton ventured into acting. He was previously intended to star in WWE-produced film titles such as The Marine 2 (2009), but was injured at the time and the lead role was given to Ted DiBiase Jr. When he was considered for the third sequel to The Marine, he was dismissed from consideration due to his history with the USMC and the lead was given to Mike 'The Miz' Mizanin. Orton made his film debut in 2011 in the film That's What I Am (2011) as the father of a school bully. His next film role was the lead in 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded (2013), followed later with a lead in The Condemned 2 (2015) and an appearance in Countdown (2016). In 2016, Orton got a supporting role in the action thriller series Shooter (2016). - Paul also played college basketball at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville from 1992 to 1993, and was a member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division II Cougars basketball team. Paul is a member of the Xi Beta Chapter of Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville. He scored a total of thirty-nine points for the Cougars in limited action during the 1992-93 season.
- Adam Copeland is an actor and an professional wrestler, who wrestles as Edge in the WWE. He starred as one of the leads in the fifth season of the popular television series Haven on Syfy. He also starred as a recurring character on the History Channel series Vikings. Canadian-born, Copeland's life in wrestling spans three decades, and through his long and decorated career as "Edge", Copeland entertained millions of fans internationally while winning 31 championships overall in WWE - the most by any wrestler ever - including 11 world heavyweight championships. Copeland became the youngest wrestler ever inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in March 2012. As an actor, Copeland appeared in an installment of the popular film franchise Highlander: Endgame, and also starred in the WWE produced, Bending the Rules opposite Jamie Kennedy. Copeland's television appearances include a recurring guest arc on Sanctuary, and numerous appearances as Edge in shows such as Clash Time, the Weakest link, Mind of Mencia, Deal Or No Deal, and MADtv to name a few. Copeland's autobiography, Adam Copeland on Edge, was a New York Times bestseller, Copeland has a massive and dedicated international fan base, with a twitter following of over 750K, and growing daily. He lives in the mountains of Asheville, NC, where he spends his time hiking, biking, cuddling with his family.
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Dustin Rhodes was born on 11 April 1969 in Austin, Texas, USA. He is an actor and producer, known for Copper Bill (2020), Meet Me There (2014) and Scooby-Doo! and WWE: Curse of the Speed Demon (2016). He has been married to Ta-rel Marie Runnels since 22 June 2012. He was previously married to Milena Martelloni and Terri Runnels.- Actor
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Born on March 24, 1965. Best known as "The Undertaker" from World Wrestling Entertainment. He first came to the WWF in 1990 as Ted DiBiase's mystery partner at The Survivor Series (1990). At first, he was a heel, but later turned face, around WrestleMania VIII (1992). He has held the WWF World Title on four separate occasions, first at the Survivor Series (1991) (dubbed "Hulk Hogan's Gravest Challenge"), from then champion, Hulk Hogan. Hogan won the title back shortly thereafter, only to be stripped of the title due to the circumstances by which he won the match. Undertaker next won the title at WrestleMania 13 (1997) from Sycho Sid. Taker defeated Stone Cold Steve Austin to win his third WWF Title at WWF Over the Edge (1999). His fourth and final WWE title reign was won at WWE Judgment Day (2002), coming full circle, by defeating Hulk Hogan once again.- Actor
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Terry Eugene Bollea, better known by his ring name Hulk Hogan, is an American retired professional wrestler and television personality. He is widely regarded as the most recognized wrestling star worldwide and the most popular wrestler of the 1980s.
Hogan began his professional wrestling career in 1977, but gained worldwide recognition after signing for World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE) in 1983. There, his persona as a heroic all-American helped usher in the 1980s professional wrestling boom, where he headlined eight of the first nine editions of WWF's flagship annual event, WrestleMania. During his initial run, he won the WWF Championship five times, with his first reign being the second-longest in the championship's history. He is the first wrestler to win consecutive Royal Rumble matches, winning in 1990 and 1991. His match with Andre the Giant on WWF The Main Event on February 5, 1988, still holds American television viewership records for wrestling with a 15.2 Nielsen rating and 33 million viewers.
In 1993, Hogan departed the WWF to sign for rival promotion World Championship Wrestling (WCW). He won the WCW World Heavyweight Championship six times, and holds the record for the longest reign. In 1996, he underwent a career renaissance upon adopting the villainous persona of "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan, leading the popular New World Order (nWo) stable. As a result, he became a major figure during the "Monday Night Wars", another boom of mainstream professional wrestling. He headlined WCW's annual flagship event Starrcade three times, including the most profitable WCW pay-per-view ever, Starrcade 1997.
Hogan returned to the WWF in 2002 following its acquisition of WCW the prior year, winning the Undisputed WWF Championship for a record equaling (for the year) sixth time before departing in 2003. He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2005, and inducted a second time in 2020 as a member of the nWo.
Hogan also performed for the American Wrestling Association (AWA), New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW) - where he won the original IWGP Heavyweight Championship - and Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA - now known as Impact Wrestling).
During and after wrestling, Hogan had an extensive acting career, beginning with his 1982 cameo role in Rocky III. He has starred in several films (including No Holds Barred, Suburban Commando and Mr. Nanny) and three television shows (Hogan Knows Best, Thunder in Paradise, and China, IL), as well as in Right Guard commercials and the video game, Hulk Hogan's Main Event. He was the frontman for The Wrestling Boot Band, whose sole record, Hulk Rules, reached No. 12 on the Billboard Top Kid Audio chart in 1995.- John Minton, or Big John Studd as he would eventually be known, was born on February 19th, 1948, in Butler, Pennsylvania. He started training to be a professional wrestler under 'Walter 'Killer' Kowalski' at the age of 18. He first worked for the WWF (then the WWWF) under the name Chuck O'Connor, then as one of the Masked Executioners in 1976, leading to a Tag Team Title reign. He later went to Texas and became the masked Captain America, feuding with Fritz Von Erich, Stan Hansen, and 'Andre the Giant'. It was in Texas that he picked up the Big John Studd moniker.
Later, he moved to Jim Crockett's Mid Atlantic territory where he feuded with Greg Valentine and fellow giant Blackjack Mulligan (Bob Windham). He retired from wrestling in the late 70s, but was talked into coming back as Ron Reis' tag team partner in The Giants tag team. He went to the AWA but was generally unhappy there. In the mid 80s the WWF, under 'Vince McMahon Jr.' took off, and Studd was along for the ride. He was always near the top of the card, feuding with the likes of Hulk Hogan and teaming with Ken Patera to cut off Andre's hair. In his most famous match, he took on Andre in a 15,000 dollar bodyslam challenge at the first _Wrestlemania (1985)_. He retired again from pro wrestling, and got himself some acting gigs, including Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1991). Falling off a motorcycle while filming this movie and frequent steroid use probably both accelerated his Hodgkins Disease. Studd learned he had the disease in 1993 right after collapsing after his last match, against the Honky Tonk Man (Wayne Farris). He spent 20 weeks in the hospital in 1994 (during which time he admitted under oath that he used steriods in the 80s during the WWF's steroid trial), and died from liver cancer on March 20th, 1995. He was 47 years old and left behind a wife and three children, John Jr., Janelle and Sean. - Actor
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Josip Peruzovic was born on 14 October 1947 in Croatia, Yugoslavia. He was an actor, known for WWF Championship Wrestling (1972), WrestleMania III (1987) and Spectrum Wrestling (1977). He was married to Eleanor Lynn Breidenbaugh. He died on 29 July 2018 in Glen Arm, Maryland, USA.- Bob Orton was born on 10 November 1950 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. He is an actor, known for WWF Championship Wrestling (1972), WWE Smackdown! (1999) and Saturday Night's Main Event (1985). He has been married to Elaine Orton since 3 June 1972. They have three children.
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Dolph Lundgren was born as Hans Lundgren in Stockholm, Sweden, to Sigrid Birgitta (Tjerneld), a language teacher, and Karl Johan Hugo Lundgren, an engineer and economist for the Swedish government. He lived in Stockholm until the age of 13, when he moved in with his grandparents in Nyland, Ångermanland, Sweden. Despite an early interest in music and the fine arts, Dolph decided to follow in his father's footsteps and pursue an Engineering degree. After having completed his military service, he enrolled at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
It was in the military when Dolph first came in contact with the martial arts. Five years later, he had become a world-class competitor in Japanese Karate and was deeply involved with a discipline that was to become an important part of his life. After graduating High School, Dolph spent considerable time studying in the United States and abroad on various academic scholarships. He attended Washington State University and Clemson University in South Carolina. In 1982, he received a scholarship to complete his Masters Degree in Chemical Engineering at the University of Sydney, Australia. In 1983, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, one of the world's top engineering schools.
However, that same year, he decided to move to New York City and take up acting. He changed his forename to Dolph. He started studying drama at the Warren Robertson Theatre Workshop in Manhattan, not knowing how quickly his life was about to change. His film debut came in A View to a Kill (1985). However, it was his performance in Rocky IV (1985) later that year that definitely got him noticed. After a 9-month audition process among 5,000 hopefuls, he was cast opposite writer-director Sylvester Stallone, as his Russian opponent, "Ivan Drago". Following the success of Rocky IV (1985), Lundgren moved to Los Angeles and has since starred in more than 30 feature films.
Lundgren portrayed the classic action-heroic lead in such films as Gary Goddard's Masters of the Universe (1987), Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991) co-starring Brandon Lee and Blackjack (1998), by Hong-Kong action legend, John Woo. Lundgren has also continued to turning in memorable performances as the main adversary to other action-stars, most notably in Universal Soldier (1992) opposite Jean-Claude Van Damme, directed by Roland Emmerich, as well as Robert Longo's Johnny Mnemonic (1995) opposite Keanu Reeves. In February 2004, Lundgren directed his first feature film, the thriller The Defender (2004), in which he also starred. In 2005, he directed and starred in yet another feature, The Russian Specialist (2005) (a.k.a "The Mechanik").
In January 2006, he finished principal photography of The Final Inquiry (2006), a joint Italian/American/Spanish co-production, directed by Giulio Base, appearing opposite, among others, Daniele Liotti, Max von Sydow and F. Murray Abraham. In 2006, Lundgren starred in Diamond Dogs (2007), a Chinese/American co-production filmed on location in Mongolia. In 2007, he directed a modern day western shot in Texas, Missionary Man (2007). In 2009, he completed two new directorial efforts, the action-packed Command Performance (2009), which showcases Lundgren's longtime musical talents as a drummer; and the neo-noir thriller Icarus (2010). Lundgren also reunited with co-stars Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone for Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009) and the highly anticipated action blockbuster, The Expendables (2010).
Lundgren managed to not let his Hollywood career stand in the way of his athletic background. He has been awarded his Third Degree Black Belt by the World Karate Organization in Tokyo. His accomplishments include being the Captain of the Swedish National Karate Team, as well as a Champion of the Swedish, European and Australian Heavyweight Division titles. Lundgren still regularly performs Karate exhibitions at international tournaments worldwide. In addition, he was selected by the U.S. Olympic Committee to serve as Team Leader of the 1996 U.S. Olympic Pentathlon Team during the Atlanta Games. He is actively involved in promoting the image of this sport. His production company, Thor Pictures, is developing several projects in which he will produce, star and/or direct. He is also a founding member of "Group of Eight", a New York theater group started in 1994.
Lundgren has reportedly been working on a fitness book and sports wear line for men, the creation and launch of a new eponymous brand, a licensing, media and publishing program, and the development of future entertainment and media projects. Lundgren was married to Anette Qviberg-Lundgren, an interior decorator and fashion designer, until their divorce in 2011. They had two daughters together.- Mark Venturini was born on 10 January 1961 in Elmhurst, Illinois, USA. He was an actor, known for The Return of the Living Dead (1985), Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985) and Knight Rider (1982). He died on 14 February 1996 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Liam Neeson was born on June 7, 1952 in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, to Katherine (Brown), a cook, and Bernard Neeson, a school caretaker. He was raised in a Catholic household. During his early years, Liam worked as a forklift operator for Guinness, a truck driver, an assistant architect and an amateur boxer. He had originally sought a career as a teacher by attending St. Mary's Teaching College, Newcastle. However, in 1976, Neeson joined the Belfast Lyric Players' Theater and made his professional acting debut in the play "The Risen People". After two years, Neeson moved to Dublin's Abbey Theater where he performed the classics. It was here that he was spotted by director John Boorman and was cast in the film Excalibur (1981) as Sir Gawain, his first high-profile film role.
Through the 1980s Neeson appeared in a handful of films and British TV series - including The Bounty (1984), A Woman of Substance (1984), The Mission (1986), and Duet for One (1986) - but it was not until he moved to Hollywood to pursue larger roles that he began to get noticed. His turn as a mute homeless man in Suspect (1987) garnered good reviews, as did supporting roles in The Good Mother (1988) and High Spirits (1988) - though he also starred in the best-to-be-forgotten Satisfaction (1988), which also featured a then-unknown Julia Roberts - but leading man status eluded him until the cult favorite Darkman (1990), directed by Sam Raimi. From there, Neeson starred in Under Suspicion (1991) and Ethan Frome (1992), was hailed for his performance in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives (1992), and ultimately was picked by Steven Spielberg to play Oskar Schindler in Schindler's List (1993). The starring role in the Oscar-winning Holocaust film brought Neeson Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for Best Actor.
Also in 1993, he made his Broadway debut with a Tony-nominated performance in "Anna Christie", in which he co-starred with his future wife Natasha Richardson. The next year, the two also starred opposite Jodie Foster in the movie Nell (1994), and were married in July of that year. Leading roles as the 18th century Scottish Highlander Rob Roy (1995) and the Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins (1996) followed, and soon Neeson was solidified as one of Hollywood's top leading men. He starred in the highly-anticipated Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) as Qui-Gon Jinn, received a Golden Globe nomination for Kinsey (2004), played the mysterious Ducard in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (2005), and provided the voice for Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005).
Neeson found a second surprise career as an action leading man with the release of Taken (2008) in early 2009, an unexpected box office hit about a retired CIA agent attempting to rescue his daughter from being sold into prostitution. However, less than two months after the release of the film, tragedy struck when his wife Natasha Richardson suffered a fatal head injury while skiing and passed away days afterward. Neeson returned to high-profile roles in 2010 with two back-to-back big-budget films, Clash of the Titans (2010) and The A-Team (2010), and returned to the action genre with Unknown (2011), The Grey (2011), Battleship (2012) and Taken 2 (2012), as well as the sequel Wrath of the Titans (2012).
Neeson was awarded Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 1999 Queen's New Year's Honours List for his services to drama. He has two sons from his marriage to Richardson: Micheal Richard Antonio Neeson (born June 22, 1995) and Daniel Jack Neeson (born August 27, 1996).- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Liam Neeson was born on June 7, 1952 in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, to Katherine (Brown), a cook, and Bernard Neeson, a school caretaker. He was raised in a Catholic household. During his early years, Liam worked as a forklift operator for Guinness, a truck driver, an assistant architect and an amateur boxer. He had originally sought a career as a teacher by attending St. Mary's Teaching College, Newcastle. However, in 1976, Neeson joined the Belfast Lyric Players' Theater and made his professional acting debut in the play "The Risen People". After two years, Neeson moved to Dublin's Abbey Theater where he performed the classics. It was here that he was spotted by director John Boorman and was cast in the film Excalibur (1981) as Sir Gawain, his first high-profile film role.
Through the 1980s Neeson appeared in a handful of films and British TV series - including The Bounty (1984), A Woman of Substance (1984), The Mission (1986), and Duet for One (1986) - but it was not until he moved to Hollywood to pursue larger roles that he began to get noticed. His turn as a mute homeless man in Suspect (1987) garnered good reviews, as did supporting roles in The Good Mother (1988) and High Spirits (1988) - though he also starred in the best-to-be-forgotten Satisfaction (1988), which also featured a then-unknown Julia Roberts - but leading man status eluded him until the cult favorite Darkman (1990), directed by Sam Raimi. From there, Neeson starred in Under Suspicion (1991) and Ethan Frome (1992), was hailed for his performance in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives (1992), and ultimately was picked by Steven Spielberg to play Oskar Schindler in Schindler's List (1993). The starring role in the Oscar-winning Holocaust film brought Neeson Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for Best Actor.
Also in 1993, he made his Broadway debut with a Tony-nominated performance in "Anna Christie", in which he co-starred with his future wife Natasha Richardson. The next year, the two also starred opposite Jodie Foster in the movie Nell (1994), and were married in July of that year. Leading roles as the 18th century Scottish Highlander Rob Roy (1995) and the Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins (1996) followed, and soon Neeson was solidified as one of Hollywood's top leading men. He starred in the highly-anticipated Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) as Qui-Gon Jinn, received a Golden Globe nomination for Kinsey (2004), played the mysterious Ducard in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (2005), and provided the voice for Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005).
Neeson found a second surprise career as an action leading man with the release of Taken (2008) in early 2009, an unexpected box office hit about a retired CIA agent attempting to rescue his daughter from being sold into prostitution. However, less than two months after the release of the film, tragedy struck when his wife Natasha Richardson suffered a fatal head injury while skiing and passed away days afterward. Neeson returned to high-profile roles in 2010 with two back-to-back big-budget films, Clash of the Titans (2010) and The A-Team (2010), and returned to the action genre with Unknown (2011), The Grey (2011), Battleship (2012) and Taken 2 (2012), as well as the sequel Wrath of the Titans (2012).
Neeson was awarded Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 1999 Queen's New Year's Honours List for his services to drama. He has two sons from his marriage to Richardson: Micheal Richard Antonio Neeson (born June 22, 1995) and Daniel Jack Neeson (born August 27, 1996).- Producer
- Writer
- Director
Drew Goddard was raised in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He attended Los Alamos High School in Los Alamos, New Mexico and graduated in 1993. He then attended the University of Colorado, and worked as a production assistant in L.A. after graduation. A spec script Drew wrote based on Six Feet Under (2001) came to the attention of both Marti Noxon at Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997) and David Greenwalt at Angel (1999). Both wanted him but because Marti found him first, Joss Whedon determined Drew would go to "Buffy". He became a staff writer for Season 7 (2002-2003), writing five episodes. Once "Buffy" was over, Drew moved over to "Angel" and became the executive story editor for Season 5 (2003-2004), writing four episodes. Drew also found time to write the introduction for a book of essays about Buffy, "Seven Seasons of Buffy", and to contribute two stories to the "Tales of the Vampires" comic series. In the summer of 2003, Drew received his first screenwriting award, along with co-writer Jane Espenson, when the Hugos honored "Conversations with Dead People" from "Buffy" with an award for Best Dramatic Presentation/Short Form. That episode was also honored with a SyFy Portal Genre Award for Best Episode/Television; another of Drew's "Buffy" episodes, "Lies My Parents Told Me" (co-written with David Fury), was nominated for the same award.- Actor
- Producer
- Additional Crew
Liev (pronounced Lee-ev) Schreiber was born in San Francisco. His mother, Heather (Milgram), is a painter, and his father, Tell Schreiber (Tell Carroll Schreiber III), is a theatrical actor who had a small role in The Keeper (1976). His mother is from a working-class Jewish family from Poland and Ukraine, while his father is from an upper-class Protestant family. His parents moved the family to Canada when Liev was one, and divorced when he was five. He and his mother moved to New York, where she drove a cab. During that time, they lived as squatters in abandoned buildings. His mother taught him to read, and she also forbade him from seeing color movies. He grew up seeing silent and black & white movies at a local revival house and particularly enjoyed those of Charles Chaplin. His mother now lives in an ashram in Virginia. He began acting at Hampshire College and continued at the Yale University School of Drama in 1992. He originally wanted to be a playwright, but his teacher encouraged him to become an actor.- Actor
- Writer
- Music Department
As one of Hollywood's tallest actors standing at 6' 3", he will always be noticed. Michael Moriarty is one of the great character T.V. actors of all time. He was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1941. Moriarty was to move to London, England, where he built up a name as a great stage actor. It was also here he attended London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts as a Fullbright Scholar and as a student of Stella Adler. Michael Moriarty also had early employment selling encyclopedias and tyres. Moriarty from 1971 was to star in a number of successful movies, like Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) and The Last Detail (1973), but his biggest success was to follow when he won a Golden Globe for his performance as the cruel, old, vicious Erik Dorf in Holocaust (1978) (a 1978 mini series), which also stars James Woods.- Composer
- Music Department
- Actor
Kyle Eastwood was born on 19 May 1968 in Santa Monica, California, USA. He is a composer and actor, known for Gran Torino (2008), Invictus (2009) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). He has been married to Cynthia Ramirez since September 2014. He was previously married to Laura Gómez.- Writer
- Producer
- Actor
Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, at the Maine General Hospital in Portland. His parents were Nellie Ruth (Pillsbury), who worked as a caregiver at a mental institute, and Donald Edwin King, a merchant seaman. His father was born under the surname "Pollock," but used the last name "King," under which Stephen was born. He has an older brother, David. The Kings were a typical family until one night, when Donald said he was stepping out for cigarettes and was never heard from again. Ruth took over raising the family with help from relatives. They traveled throughout many states over several years, finally moving back to Durham, Maine, in 1958.
Stephen began his actual writing career in January of 1959, when David and Stephen decided to publish their own local newspaper named "Dave's Rag". David bought a mimeograph machine, and they put together a paper they sold for five cents an issue. Stephen attended Lisbon High School, in Lisbon, in 1962. Collaborating with his best friend Chris Chesley in 1963, they published a collection of 18 short stories called "People, Places, and Things--Volume I". King's stories included "Hotel at the End of the Road", "I've Got to Get Away!", "The Dimension Warp", "The Thing at the Bottom of the Well", "The Stranger", "I'm Falling", "The Cursed Expedition", and "The Other Side of the Fog." A year later, King's amateur press, Triad and Gaslight Books, published a two-part book titled "The Star Invaders".
King made his first actual published appearance in 1965 in the magazine Comics Review with his story "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber." The story ran about 6,000 words in length. In 1966 he graduated from high school and took a scholarship to attend the University of Maine. Looking back on his high school days, King recalled that "my high school career was totally undistinguished. I was not at the top of my class, nor at the bottom." Later that summer King began working on a novel called "Getting It On", about some kids who take over a classroom and try unsuccessfully to ward off the National Guard. During his first year at college, King completed his first full-length novel, "The Long Walk." He submitted the novel to Bennett Cerf/Random House only to have it rejected. King took the rejection badly and filed the book away.
He made his first small sale--$35--with the story "The Glass Floor". In June 1970 King graduated from the University of Maine with a Bachelor of Science degree in English and a certificate to teach high school. King's next idea came from the poem by Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." He found bright colored green paper in the library and began work on "The Dark Tower" saga, but his chronic shortage of money meant that he was unable to further pursue the novel, and it, too, was filed away. King took a job at a filling station pumping gas for the princely sum of $1.25 an hour. Soon he began to earn money for his writings by submitting his short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier.
On January 2, 1971, he married Tabitha King (born Tabitha Jane Spruce). In the fall of 1971 King took a teaching job at Hampden Academy, earning $6,400 a year. The Kings then moved to Hermon, a town west of Bangor. Stephen then began work on a short story about a teenage girl named Carietta White. After completing a few pages, he decided it was not a worthy story and crumpled the pages up and tossed them into the trash. Fortunately, Tabitha took the pages out and read them. She encouraged her husband to continue the story, which he did. In January 1973 he submitted "Carrie" to Doubleday. In March Doubleday bought the book. On May 12 the publisher sold the paperback rights for the novel to New American Library for $400,000. His contract called for his getting half of that sum, and he quit his teaching job to pursue writing full time. The rest, as they say, is history.
Since then King has had numerous short stories and novels published and movies made from his work. He has been called the "Master of Horror". His books have been translated into 33 different languages, published in over 35 different countries. There are over 300 million copies of his novels in publication. He continues to live in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, and writes out of his home.
In June 1999 King was severely injured in an accident, he was walking alongside a highway and was hit by a van, that left him in critical condition with injuries to his lung, broken ribs, a broken leg and a severely fractured hip. After three weeks of operations, he was released from the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.- Producer
- Actor
- Writer
Vincent Anthony Vaughn was born on March 28, 1970, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, and was raised in Lake Forest, Illinois. His parents, Vernon Vaughn (a salesman and character actor), and Sharon Vaughn, née Sharon Eileen DePalmo (a real-estate agent and stockbroker) divorced in 1991. He has two older sisters, Victoria Vaughn and Valeri Vaughn. His recent ancestry includes Lebanese (from his paternal grandmother), Italian (from his maternal grandfather), English, Irish, German, and Scottish. His mother was born in Brantford, Ontario.
Vince was interested in theater early on and grabbed a spot in a Chevy commercial. In 1988 he moved to Hollywood. He managed to hit a few spots on television, but his real goal was to make it to the big screen. He made his first credited role in the film Rudy (1993) where he met his friend Jon Favreau, who was writing a script detailing his life as an out-of-work actor. Vince was written into Swingers (1996) by Jon to play the character of "Trent". He signed on just as a favor to his buddy, not realizing it would be a career changing role. Though not a commercial success, it was a critical success in which Steven Spielberg saw him and cast him in the big budget sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997). This role gave Vince the exposure he needed to become a movie star and, for the first time, choose the roles he wanted to take. A Cool, Dry Place (1998) put him as a loving father, Return to Paradise (1998) cast him as a man having to make a life or death decision to save a friend, and Clay Pigeons (1998) cast him as an interesting serial killer. Since then his roles have been primarily in comedies such as Old School (2003), Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004), Wedding Crashers (2005), and Couples Retreat (2009).- Actor
- Producer
- Writer
Randy Quaid is an Academy Award-nominated actor, for his performance in The Last Detail (1973). Hal Ashby directed Quaid in the role of Meadows opposite Jack Nicholson and Otis Young. Quaid is a great and much-admired actor that has been recognized by Hollywood and the world's finest directors, Midnight Express, The Last Picture Show, Ice Harvest (2005), Real Time (2008), King Carlos in Goya's Ghosts (2006) for director Milos Forman. Forman cast Quaid as "King Carlos IV of Spain" after seeing his Golden Globe-nominated performance as The Colonel in Elvis. Quaid also starred in such mainstream favorites as Kingpin (1996), Vacation (1983), Christmas Vacation (1989) and Independence day (1996).
Quaid earned a Golden Globe for portraying Lyndon Johnson, and received a Golden Globe Nomination for incarnating "Colonel" Tom Parker in Elvis (2005). The portrait of Colonel Parker, a former carnival barker with a murky past, is dark. The New York Times said "Mr. Quaid is riveting as the bully of Graceland" when he has Elvis firmly under his thumb, he is the L.B.J. of rock 'n' roll - a towering, wheedling, tirelessly self-promoting Southern fox in the rare instances when Elvis defies him, Colonel Parker shrinks into a hand-wringing phony, cajoling his only client in the overly ornate language of Professor Marvel in "The Wizard of Oz".
Quaid stars in and was nominated for The Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a cast for his work in Brokeback Mountain (2005), directed by Ang Lee from a script written by Larry McMurtry, who also wrote The Last Picture Show (1971) in which Quaid had his first feature film role. Working with McMurtry and supporting his material has become a Randy Quaid career tradition. Quaid's performance in Brokeback Mountain (2005) was listed as one of the New York Observer's 2005 Noteworthy male performances. In 2009 Randy Quaid Won the Vancouver Critics Award for Best Male Performance in the Feature Film Real-Time for the Role of Rubin an Australian Hit Man.
Randy Quaid was born in Houston, Texas, to Juanita Bonnie Dale (Jordan), a real estate agent, and William Rudy Quaid, an electrician. He grew up in the Houston suburban city of Bellaire, along with his brother, actor Dennis Quaid.
Quaid is married to American Film Director Evi Quaid.- King Kong Bundy was riding a win streak of 300 consecutive victories when he challenged Terry "Hulk" Hogan to the World Wrestling Federation World's Heavyweight Championship. Budy's streak was snapped when Hogan defeated him in a wild brawl.
- Actor
- Producer
- Stunts
Jared Padalecki was born in San Antonio, Texas, to Sherri (Kammer), a teacher of English, and Gerald Padalecki, a tax accountant. He is of Polish (father) and German, English, Scottish, and French (mother) descent. Jared started to take acting lessons when he was 12. Then, he won the "Claim to Fame" Contest in 1999 and got to appear on the Teen Choice awards. Jared lived in San Antonio, Texas and attended James Madison High School. He was named a candidate for the year 2000 Presidential Scholars Program. After graduating in the year 2000, he moved to Los Angeles, California to pursue an acting career. He played "Dean Forester" on Gilmore Girls (2000) on the WB starting in 2000 and ending in 2005. From 2005 to 2020, he portrayed "Sam Winchester" on the CW's Supernatural (2005). He also has several feature film credits.- Actor
- Stunts
- Visual Effects
Derek Mears was born on April 29, 1972 in Bakersfield, California, USA. He has numerous credits as both an actor and a stuntman, and he got his breakthrough lead role in the 2009 Friday the 13th film. He is known for his work on Sleepy Hollow (2013-2017), Predators (2010) and Men in Black II (2002).- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
On the stage and on the big screen, Delroy Lindo projects a powerful presence that is almost impossible to ignore. Alhough it was not his first film role, his portrayal of the bipolar numbers boss West Indian Archie in Spike Lee's Malcolm X (1992) is what first attracted attention to Lindo's considerable talents. Since then, his star has slowly been on the rise.
The son of Jamaican parents, Lindo was born and raised in Lewisham, England, United Kingdom, until his teens when he and his mother, a nurse, moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada. A little later, they moved to the United States, where Lindo would graduate from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. After graduation, Lindo landed his first film role, that of an Army sergeant in More American Graffiti (1979). However, he did not appear in another film for ten years. In the meantime, Lindo worked on stage and, in 1982, debuted on Broadway in "Master Harold and the Boys" directed by the play's author, Athol Fugard. In 1988, Lindo earned a Tony nomination for his portrayal of Harald Loomis in Joe Turner's Come and Gone.
Though he was obviously a talented actor with a bright future, Lindo's career stalled. Wanting someone more aggressive and appreciative of his talents, Lindo changed agents (he'd had the same one through most of his early career). It was a smart move, but it was director Spike Lee who provided the boost Lindo's career needed. The director was impressed enough with Lindo to cast him as patriarch Woody Carmichael in Lee's semi-autobiographical comedy Crooklyn (1994).
For Lindo, 1996 was a big year. He landed major supporting roles in six features, including a heavy in Barry Sonnenfeld's Get Shorty (1995), another villainous supporting role in Lee's Clockers (1995), and still another bad guy in Feeling Minnesota (1996). Lest one believe that Lindo is typecast into forever playing drug lords and gangsters, that year he also played baseball player Leroy "Satchel" Paige in the upbeat Soul of the Game (1996) (a.k.a. Baseball in Black and White), for which he won a NAACP Image Award nomination. Since then, the versatile Lindo has shown himself equally adept at playing characters on both sides of the law. In 1997, he played an angel opposite Holly Hunter in Danny Boyle's offbeat romantic fantasy A Life Less Ordinary (1997) and, in 2009, a vengeful cop in an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999).
Lindo graduated from San Francisco State University in 2004 with a degree in Cinema.- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Brendan Kelly was born on 28 September 1964 in Dublin, Ireland. He is an actor and director, known for The Rock (1996), The Lizzie McGuire Movie (2003) and Cellular (2004).- Actor
- Soundtrack
Brooklyn born Tony Ganios was literally forced into the film business at the tender age of 18 when his even larger and more powerful uncle Pete made him cut short a powerlifting workout at the Sheridan Square Gym in Manhattan to audition for director Philip Kaufman. As a result, Tony made his film debut as the teen paladin "Perry" in Kaufman's cult classic The Wanderers (1979). His initial performance was well liked by audiences and soon he was dancing with Sally Field in Back Roads (1981) in a role he landed by hurling the film's script into the chest of its director. Next, he played a former NFL defensive end turned mountain man in the Lawrence Kasdan scripted John Belushi romantic comedy Continental Divide (1981) before being cast by writer/director Bob Clark as the well hung high school senior "Meat" in the raunchy, but highly successful comedy Porky's (1981). One of Tony's most unforgettable roles was as that ill-fated member of the terrorist team in the hit action film Die Hard 2 (1990) who was fatally dispatched by Bruce Willis with an eye bound icicle. Some of his other film and television credits include The Taking of Beverly Hills (1991), Ring of the Musketeers (1992), and Rising Sun (1993), where he revisited his matchstick chewing Wanderers hero as an adversary for Sean Connery. He is also known for his recurring comedic role as a muscular mob lawyer on the Emmy Award winning series Wiseguy (1987).
An ancient military history and period weapons expert, Ganios is one of Brazilian jiu jitsu pioneer and UFC founder Rorion Gracie's original students. Although retired from acting since 1993, in 2000 Tony and Police Academy veteran Leslie Easterbrook supplied voices for the low budget YouTube animated series "Bad Vlad" under the pseudonyms Nick Fury and Honour Lawrence in what he described as one of the most purely fun performances of his career. The 2014 feature film Daddies' Girls will not only mark Tony Ganios' return to the big screen, but his debut as a producer and screenwriter as well.- Actor
- Producer
- Writer
Joshua David Duhamel was born in Minot, North Dakota. His mother, Bonny L., is a retired high school teacher, and the Executive Director of Minot's Downtown Business & Profession Association, and his father, Larry Duhamel, is an advertisement salesman. Josh has three younger sisters: Ashlee, McKenzee and Kassidy. His ancestry is German, and smaller amounts of Norwegian, French-Canadian, English, Irish, and Austrian (his last name is very common among Francophones in the world). Before his acting career, the football player studied biology and earned his Bachelor's degree at Minot State University with the intention of pursuing dentistry.
At 26 years old, Josh worked in construction, and it was by chance that he got into showbusiness. Modeling eventually gave way to acting as Josh was asked to audition for the title character in The Picture of Dorian Gray (2004), from the novel by Oscar Wilde.
Duhamel can be seen in Vince Gilligan and David Shore's CBS series, "Battle Creek." He is in production on four films: "Lost In The Sun," "Bravetown," "The Wrong Stuff," and "Beyond Deceit."
Duhamel also starred alongside Hillary Swank and Emmy Rossum in the George C. Wolfe directed drama, "You're Not You." Duhamel also starred opposite Julianne Hough in Lasse Hallstrom's "Safe Haven," a drama based on the best-selling novel by Nicholas Sparks and the thriller "Scenic Route," which tells the story of two friends stranded in the desert. In addition, Duhamel was seen in the star-studded, ensemble comedy "Movie 43" alongside Emma Stone, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Kate Winslet, Richard Gere among many others. Co-directed by Peter Farrelly and Patrik Forsberg, the film features various intertwining, raunchy tales.
Other projects include Garry Marshall's "New Year's Eve" alongside Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert DeNiro, Halle Berry, and Hilary Swank and Michael Bay's "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," where he reprised his role of Captain William Lennox for the third installment of the franchise. Additional film credits include the romantic comedy "Life as We Know It" alongside Katherine Heigl, "Ramona and Beezus," "When in Rome" and "The Romantics." On television, Josh is best known for his role as Danny McCoy on the NBC crime drama "Las Vegas." Additionally, he lent his voice to Nickelodeon's Emmy Award-winning animated series "Fanboy & Chum Chum" and starred in several seasons of the long-running ABC soap opera "All My Children," in which he received three consecutive Daytime Emmy nominations.
On January 10 2009, Josh married Fergie Duhamel, better known as Fergie from The Black Eyed Peas. They have one child together, Axl Jack Duhamel. They reside in Los Angeles.- Actor
- Stunts
- Additional Crew
Born June 23, 1957, in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Peter Kent was predestined to be a thrillseeker and adrenaline addict. As a young child, raised along the banks of the often treacherous Seymour River, he was shooting rapids and climbing the highest trees available, then letting himself fall through the branches to the ground, or pedaling his bicycle across planks placed 12 feet atop the family's laurel hedge to get the desired adrenaline rush, usually resulting in lacerations and stitches.
On another occasion he tried to extract his own loose teeth with a hammer in the family garage. At six years of age his parents divorced and he moved to New Jersey with his mother, a move responsible for the dual Canadian-US citizenship which would come in so useful later in life.
Returning again to Canada at age 11, he and his mother ran a local bed-and-breakfast style boarding house while he attended Nanaimo Senior Secondary school on Vancouver Island, and worked in the usual variety of West Coast jobs: Sawmill, salmon fishing, pulp mill, paving crew, bouncer and electronics salesperson in both the towns of Nanaimo and Victoria. He also worked on the road as a sound engineer for various Canadian bands, for five bohemian years.
Nearly killed in a terrible motor vehicle accident in the early 1980s, he survived only through willpower. Multiple skull fractures, broken cheekbones, a crushed nose and a fractured jaw transformed his look, some say, to closely resemble actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was to prove fateful indeed. In 1984, having done Shakespeare in various local theater groups, he decided to move to Los Angeles to pursue a film career, although he had no previous film experience or acquaintances in Los Angeles. After living in the notorious YMCA off Hollywood's infamous Sunset Strip for a tenuous and outrageous six months, he was taken under the wing of James Cameron to double Schwarzenegger in The Terminator (1984).
His minimal stunt experience did not stop him from quickly learning the ropes and becoming one of the most celebrated and highly paid stuntmen in the business. His association with Schwarzenegger lasted 14 films and 13 years, both as friend, workout partner, ski buddy, confidant, chef and dialogue coach. His apprenticeship on 14 of Schwarzenegger's films (from "Terminator" to Jingle All the Way (1996)) has put Kent in a position to understand that genre better than most, and having access to a variety of the best screenplays in Hollywood, was to again prove useful in later years.
While making Eraser (1996), Kent was almost killed when he was struck by a three-ton shipping container 100 feet in the air. It was then he decided to pursue a different, less life-threatening line of work, seeing as how he had been injured in some way during nearly all of Schwarzegenner's pictures.
He has studied with several different Los Angeles-based drama groups, but his longtime coach has been Zina Provendie, former head of MGM's drama department for 26 years, and coach to James Dean in Giant (1956), as well as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963). After a 14 year absence, Kent returned home to Vancouver,BC, where he met the love of his life, a nurse, Marcia Kent. The two were engaged in Venice,Italy in December of 2005 and married in Victoria, BC in August of 2007. Currently, they are expecting twin boys in the fall of 2009.
Kent has been interviewed in numerous publications, including "Entertainment Tonight","Extra", "People Magazine", Germany's "Der Stern", as well as London's "Daily Mirror", "The New York Times", "Dallas Star", "Los Angeles Times" and hundreds of TV and radio stations worldwide. In June 2009, Kent was inducted into the "Hollywood Stuntman's Hall of Fame."- Actor
- Producer
- Writer
Large, likable, and muscular actor Ken Foree was born as Kentotis Alvin Foree on February 29, 1948, in Indianapolis, Indiana. Foree attended Loyola University in Chicago and studied acting at Michael Shulman's Performing Gallery in New York City. He began his career in off-Broadway theater and worked as an assistant manager at a restaurant in Greenwich Village, in order to keep himself afloat during his salad days.
Ken made his film debut in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976). He has since amassed a substantial array of often strong and commanding characters on either side of the law in both movies and television, alike. Foree gave a fine and impressive performance as tough swat team officer, "Peter Washington", in George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978). He also had a sizable supporting part in Romero's offbeat follow-up feature, Knightriders (1981). Ken was marvelously engaging as affable cop, Buford "Bubba" Brownlee, in Stuart Gordon's From Beyond (1986) and was, once again, solid as rugged survivalist "Benny" in Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990). Foree portrayed hard-nosed police officers in such pictures as The Dentist (1996), Sleepstalker (1995), True Blood (1989) and Terror Squad (1987). He had a cameo as a stern televangelist in the Dawn of the Dead (2004) remake by Zack Snyder. More recently, Ken had a terrific role as super mack daddy pimp, "Charlie Altamont", in The Devil's Rejects (2005) and made a brief-yet-memorable appearance as rough-n-tumble truck driver, "Big Joe Grizzley", in the remake of Halloween (2007) by Rob Zombie. Foree showed a softer and more sensitive side as "Roger Rockmore" on the hit Nickelodeon TV series, Kenan & Kel (1996). He also played a recurring part on the popular daytime soap opera General Hospital (1963). Among the TV shows on which Ken has done guest spots are Due South (1994), The X-Files (1993), Babylon 5 (1993), Matlock (1986), Dallas (1978), Cheers (1982), Quantum Leap (1989), Hunter (1984), Beauty and the Beast (1987), Moonlighting (1985), Knight Rider (1982), The Fall Guy (1981), Benson (1979), The A-Team (1983), Hill Street Blues (1981), The Dukes of Hazzard (1979) and Kojak (1973). His hobbies include surfing, boxing, weightlifting and watching basketball. In addition, Foree enjoys history and traveling. Ken Foree lives in Los Angeles.- Actor
- Producer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Tall, bald and nearly always bearded, Sid Haig provided hulking menace to many a low-budget exploitation film and high-priced action film.
Sid Haig was born Sidney Eddie Mosesian on July 14, 1939 in Fresno, California, a screaming ball of hair. His parents, Roxy (Mooradian) and Haig Mosesian, an electrician, were of Armenian descent. Sid's career was somewhat of an accident. He was growing so fast that he had absolutely no coordination. It was decided that he would take dancing lessons, and that's when it all began. At the age of seven, he was dancing for pay in a children's Christmas Show, then a revival of a vaudeville show... and on it went.
Sid also showed a musical inclination, particularly for the drums. So when his parents got tired of him denting all the pots and pans in the house, they bought him a drum set. The music was in him and he took to it immediately, a born natural. First it was swing, then country, then jazz, blues and rock 'n' roll. Sid always found it easy to make money with his music, and did very well. One year out of high school and signing a recording contract is not too bad. Sid went on to record the single "Full House" with the T-Birds in 1958. However, back while he was in high school, Sid got bitten by the "acting bug". Alice Merrill was the head of the drama department at that time and gave him all the encouragement in the world to pursue an acting career. The clincher came in his senior year. The way that the senior play was cast was that she would double cast the show, then have one of her friends from Hollywood come up and pick the final cast.
You see, Merrill was quite famous as an actress on Broadway and kept up her contacts in the business. When the appointed day came, the "friend" that showed up was Dennis Morgan, a big musical comedy star from the 1940s. The rest is history -- he picked Sid for the role, then two weeks later came back to see the show and told Sid that he should continue his education down south and consider acting as a career path. Two years later, Sid enrolled in the world famous Pasadena Playhouse, the school that trained such actors as Robert Preston, Robert Young, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, and so on. After two years of "actor's hell" (non-stop 7:00 am to 11:00 pm with homework thrown in just for the fun of it), it was time to move on to the big "H", Hollywood! Sid did so with longtime friend and roommate Stuart Margolin (Angel on The Rockford Files (1974)).
Sid's first acting job was in Jack Hill's student film at UCLA. It was called The Host (2000), which was released in 2004 on DVD as a companion to Switchblade Sisters (1975), another Hill film. That role launched a 40-year acting career during which Haig appeared in over 50 films and 350 television series. He has proven himself quite valuable to such filmmakers as producer Roger Corman. He also became a staple in the pictures of Jack Hill, appearing in Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told (1967), Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). Haig's other memorable credits include George Lucas' THX 1138 (1971), and the James Bond opus Diamonds Are Forever (1971) (he is one of the Slumber Brothers, and got to toss a topless Lana Wood from the window of a high-rise Vegas hotel).
Among his most significant television credits are appearances on such landmark series as The A-Team (1983), T.J. Hooker (1982), The Dukes of Hazzard (1979), Quincy M.E. (1976), Hart to Hart (1979), Fantasy Island (1977), Charlie's Angels (1976), Police Woman (1974), The Rockford Files (1974), The Six Million Dollar Man (1974), Mannix (1967), Mission: Impossible (1966), Gunsmoke (1955), Get Smart (1965), Here's Lucy (1968), The Flying Nun (1967), Daniel Boone (1964), Star Trek (1966), Batman (1966) and The Untouchables (1959).
Sid was never one to give-up on anything but after nearly 40 years of carrying a gun (except for the occasional Jack Hill or Roger Corman film), his dreams of being recognized as a more than competent actor were fading. Then in 1992, frustrated with being typecast, Sid retired from acting and quoted, "I'll never play another stupid heavy again, and I don't care if that means that I never work, ever." This just proves that if you take a stand people will listen, for Quentin Tarantino wrote for Sid the role of the judge in Jackie Brown (1997). Then things got better, much better. During the mid and late 1990s, Sid managed a community theatre company, as well as dabbled occasionally in theater in Los Angeles.
Then in 2000, Sid came out of his self-imposed retirement at the request of Rob Zombie for a role in Zombie's debut film House of 1000 Corpses (2003). He starred as the fun-loving, but murderous, Captain Spaulding. This role breathed new life into Sid's acting career and earned him an award for Best Supporting Actor in the 13th Annual Fangoria Chainsaw Awards, as well as an induction into the Horror Hall of Fame. Sid's character Captain Spaulding became an icon for the new horror genre. Sid has recently enjoyed success as Captain Spaulding once again in Rob Zombie's follow-up to House of 1000 Corpses (2003), entitled, The Devil's Rejects (2005). For this film, Sid received the award for best Actor in the 15th Annual Fangoria Chainsaw Awards, as well as sharing the award for "Most Vile Villain" at the First Annual Spike TV Scream Awards with Leslie Easterbrook, Sheri Moon Zombie and Bill Moseley as The Firefly Family.
In the 2000s and 2010s, Sid continued to enjoy his renewed success as an actor. In September 2019, he was hospitalized after falling in his home in Los Angeles, California. While recovering, he suffered from a lung infection after vomiting in his sleep. He died on September 21, 2019, from complications of the infection at age 80.- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Michael Corbett Shannon was born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky, the son of Geraldine Hine, a lawyer, and Donald Sutherlin Shannon, an accounting professor at DePaul University. His grandfather was entomologist Raymond Corbett Shannon.
Shannon began his professional stage career in Chicago. His first acting role was in "Winterset" at the Illinois Theatre Center. Over the next several years, he continued working on the stage with such companies as Steppenwolf, The Next Lab and the Red Orchid Theatre. He subsequently relocated to London for a year, and performed on stage in London's West End in such productions as "Woyzeck", "Killer Joe" and "Bug".
While in Chicago, Shannon also kept busy in front of movie and television cameras, most notably in the big screen project Chicago Cab (1997), based on the long-running stage play "Hellcab". Kangaroo Jack (2003) marked the third Jerry Bruckheimer production in which Shannon has appeared. He also appeared in Bad Boys II (2003), directed by Michael Bay and starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, and in Grand Theft Parsons (2003), with Johnny Knoxville and Christina Applegate.
In addition, Shannon appeared in Pearl Harbor (2001), also directed by Bay. His other film credits also include Curtis Hanson's 8 Mile (2002); Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky (2001) with Tom Cruise; Carl Franklin's High Crimes (2002) with Morgan Freeman; John Waters' Cecil B. Demented (2000), and Joel Schumacher's war drama Tigerland (2000).- Actor
- Sound Department
Frank's first "role" was a six month old "theatre mascot" at a tent theatre in Granville, Ohio. His father, John, was an actor and playwright and his mother, Peg, directed him in a number of plays while he was growing up in Virginia and Ohio. As a young boy, Frank assisted his father when he toured with his one man Abraham Lincoln show. His father was selected to play Lincoln for the centennial celebration of Lincoln's first inauguration in Washington, DC ; Frank played young Tad Lincoln.
Frank trained at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, earned his BA in theatre at San Francisco State University, helped establish a summer theatre company in the Sierra Nevadas then went on to earn an MFA in acting at UC San Diego. Before Frank began his professional career in acting, he worked as a forest fire fighter, diaper service dispatcher and substitute teacher. Appearing in over 150 productions, Frank has worked off Broadway and in regional theaters in Boston, Denver and California. His theatrical roles have ranged from "Puck" in Midsummer's Nights Dream to "Miss Havisham" in Great Expectations to "Jacob Marley" in Christmas Carol. Frank is a founding member of Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, California, which has won over 25 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards.
Frank began his film and television career when he moved to Los Angeles in 1984. He is perhaps best known as "Horace Bing," the hapless telegraph operator on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993) and "Wash Hogwallop" in "O Brother Where Art Thou?
Frank is married to actress, Laura Gardner.- Actor
- Producer
- Writer
Dwayne Douglas Johnson, also known as The Rock, was born on May 2, 1972 in Hayward, California. He is the son of Ata Johnson (born Feagaimaleata Fitisemanu) and professional wrestler Rocky Johnson (born Wayde Douglas Bowles). His father, from Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada, is black (of Black Nova Scotian descent), and his mother is of Samoan background (her own father was Peter Fanene Maivia, also a professional wrestler). While growing up, Dwayne traveled around a lot with his parents and watched his father perform in the ring. During his high school years, Dwayne began playing football and he soon received a full scholarship from the University of Miami, where he had tremendous success as a football player. In 1995, Dwayne suffered a back injury which cost him a place in the NFL. He then signed a three-year deal with the Canadian League but left after a year to pursue a career in wrestling.
He made his wrestling debut in the USWA under the name Flex Kavanah where he won the tag team championship with Brett Sawyer. In 1996, Dwayne joined the WWE and became Rocky Maivia where he joined a group known as "The Nation of Domination" and turned heel. Rocky eventually took over leadership of the "Nation" and began taking the persona of The Rock. After the "Nation" split, The Rock joined another elite group of wrestlers known as the "Corporation" and began a memorable feud with Steve Austin. Soon the Rock was kicked out of the "Corporation". He turned face and became known as "The Peoples Champion". In 2000, the Rock took time off from WWE to film his appearance in The Mummy Returns (2001). He returned in 2001 during the WCW/ECW invasion where he joined a team of WWE wrestlers at The Scorpion King (2002), a prequel to The Mummy Returns (2001).
Dwayne has a daughter, Simone Alexandra Johnson, born in 2001, with his ex-wife Dany Garcia, and daughters, Jasmine, born in 2015, and Tiana Gia, born in 2018, with his wife, singer and songwriter Lauren Hashian.- Actor
- Producer
- Location Management
Rex Maynard Linn is an American film and television actor. He is best known for playing the role of Frank Tripp in the television series CSI: Miami. Linn was born in Spearman, Texas, the third child, and second son, of Darlene (née Deere) and James Paul Linn. In August 1969, his parents relocated the family to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where his father practiced law. There he attended Heritage Hall and later Casady School, an independent school affiliated with the Episcopal Church, and was employed part-time at the Oklahoma City Zoo. November 1975, after seeing Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Linn announced he was an actor.- Actor
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- Producer
Chi McBride was born on 23 September 1961 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), I, Robot (2004) and The Terminal (2004). He is married to Julissa Marquez. They have one child.- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Writer
Standing at 6'6' Elijah Everett is an American Actor and singer, a native of Philadelphia, PA. His impressions of President Barack O' Bama, Rodney Danger field, Ray Charles and more has been aired on numerous radio markets such as ClearChannel and iHeart Radio. After finding his love for acting via Producing for network Television he became ambitious to sharpen his acting skills with classes at Ivana Chubbacks school for actors I'm Los Angeles.
Capturing the eye and hearts of Directors such as Barry Jenkins and David Fincher, Elijah's resume continues to climb as he aspires to be cast as a leading man. In the summer of 2022, Elijah Began his give back to Philadelphia at Academy Park Highschool. His event "Skool Days" sponsored by Hall Of Famer Shaquille O' Neal, stood to feed 400+ participants catered meals, healthy food boxes celebrity speakers and activities. He has recently been honored by the school with a trophy being given to the Mens Basketball seniors in his name.- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Rock Hudson was born Roy Harold Scherer, Jr. in Winnetka, Illinois, to Katherine (Wood), a telephone operator, and Roy Harold Scherer, an auto mechanic. He was of German, Swiss-German, English, and Irish descent. His parents divorced when he was eight years old. He failed to obtain parts in school plays because he couldn't remember lines. After high school he was a postal employee and during WW II served as a Navy airplane mechanic. After the war he was a truck driver. His size and good looks got him into movies. His name was changed to Rock Hudson, his teeth were capped, he took lessons in acting, singing, fencing and riding. One line in his first picture, Fighter Squadron (1948), needed 38 takes. In 1956 he received an Oscar nomination for Giant (1956) and two years later Look magazine named him Star of the Year. He starred in a number of bedroom comedies, many with Doris Day, and had his own popular TV series McMillan & Wife (1971). He had a recurring role in TV's Dynasty (1981) (1984-5). He was the first major public figure to announce he had AIDS, and his worldwide search for a cure drew international attention. After his death his long-time lover Marc Christian successfully sued his estate, again calling attention to the homosexuality Rock had hidden from most throughout his career.- Actor
- Additional Crew
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George Harris Kennedy, Jr. was born on February 18, 1925 in New York City, to Helen (Kieselbach), a ballet dancer, and George Harris Kennedy, an orchestra leader and musician. Following high school graduation, Kennedy enlisted in the United States Army in 1943 with the hope to become a fighter pilot in the Army Air Corps. Instead, he wound up in the infantry, served under General George S. Patton and distinguished himself with valor. He won two Bronze Stars and four rows of combat and service ribbons.
A World War II veteran, Kennedy at one stage in his career cornered the market at playing tough, no-nonsense characters who were either quite crooked or possessed hearts of gold. Kennedy notched up an impressive 200+ appearances in both television and films, and was well respected within the Hollywood community. He started out on television Westerns in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Have Gun - Will Travel (1957), Rawhide (1959), Maverick (1957), Colt .45 (1957), among others) before scoring minor roles in films including Lonely Are the Brave (1962), The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) and The Flight of the Phoenix (1965).
The late 1960s was a very busy period for Kennedy, and he was strongly in favor with casting agents, appearing in Hurry Sundown (1967), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and scoring an Oscar win as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Cool Hand Luke (1967). The disaster film boom of the 1970s was also kind to Kennedy and his talents were in demand for Airport (1970) and the three subsequent sequels, as a grizzled police officer in Earthquake (1974), plus the buddy/road film Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) as vicious bank robber Red Leary.
The 1980s saw Kennedy appear in a mishmash of roles, playing various characters; however, Kennedy and Leslie Nielsen surprised everyone with their comedic talents in the hugely successful The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988), and the two screen veterans exaggerate themselves again, in The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991) and Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994). From 1988-1991, he also played Ewing family nemesis Carter McKay on the CBS prime-time soap opera Dallas (1978).
Kennedy also played President Warren G. Harding in the miniseries Backstairs at the White House (1979) and had a long standing role on the CBS daytime soap opera The Young and the Restless (1973). He remained busy in Hollywood and lent his distinctive voice to the animated Cats Don't Dance (1997) and the children's action film Small Soldiers (1998). A Hollywood stalwart for nearly 50 years, he is one of the most enjoyable actors to watch on screen. His last role was in the film The Gambler (2014), as Mark Wahlberg's character's grandfather.
George Kennedy died of natural causes in Middleton, Idaho on February 28, 2016, only ten days after his 91st birthday.- Da'Vone McDonald is known for Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), Walk of Shame (2014) and Drillbit Taylor (2008).
- Actor
- Soundtrack
Ray Kellogg was born on 12 November 1919 in Great Bend, Pennsylvania, USA. He was an actor, known for April Love (1957), The F.B.I. (1965) and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955). He was married to Eileen Wilson. He died on 26 September 1981 in Olympia, Washington, USA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Dan Blocker is one of the true television immortals, having played Hoss Cartwright -- the heart and soul of Bonanza (1959) -- for 13 seasons, before his untimely death in 1972 at the age of 43. "Bonanza" was the most popular TV series of the 1960s, ranked #1 for three straight seasons (1964-65 through 1966-67) and spending a then-unprecedented nine seasons in the Top 5. After Blocker's death, "Bonanza" -- still in the Top 20 with Hoss after being #8 the previous year -- didn't last another entire season.
The character of Hoss was conceived as a stereotype: The Gentle Giant. The 6'4", 300 lbs. Blocker filled Hoss's cowboy boots and ten-gallon hat admirably but brought something extra to the role, a warmth and empathy that helped ground the show. Personal accounts of Blocker testify to the fact that the man was gregarious and friendly to everyone. He brought that upbeat personality to the character of Hoss.
Hoss originally had been conceived as dull-witted, but ironically, Blocker's professional acting career was assured after he moved his family to California so he could pursue a PhD at U.C.L.A. A native of West Texas, he reportedly was discovered while making a call in a phone booth while outfitted in Western garb, including a straw cowboy hat, his standard dress being a native son of Texas, soon after arriving in California. Even after being cast in "Bonanza", he intended to complete his PhD, but the great success of the series made that impossible, due to the workload of 30+ episodes per year necessitating a 7AM-9PM work schedule five days a week.
Donny Dany Blocker made his debut on December 10, 1928 in De Kalb, Texas, weighing in at 14 lbs. He reportedly was the biggest baby ever born in Bowie County. By the age of 12, he already was 6' tall and weighed 200 lbs. (Towards the end of "Bonanza", he reportedly had ballooned past his stated weight of 300 to as much as 365 lbs.) A "TV Guide" story after his death reported that back in Texas, the young Dan once lifted a car off of a man after it slid off a jack and pinned him under the auto. "My daddy used to say that I was too big to ride and too little to hitch a wagon to," Blocker said, "no good for a damn thing".
His father, Ora Blocker, a poor Texas farmer, was hurt by the Great Depression that began the year after Dan's birth. Ora Blocker lost the farm and later went into the grocery business. He moved his family to O'Donnell, which is just south of Lubbock, where he ran a grocery store. His "no good" son went to the Texas Military Institute, and in 1946 started his undergraduate work at Hardin-Simmons University (Abilene, Texas), where he played football. It was there he fell in love with acting when he was recruited by a girlfriend to play a role in campus production of Arsenic and Old Lace as they needed a strong man to lift the bodies that the spinster aunts had dispatched up from the cellar.
After graduating in 1950 with a degree in English, Blocker went east where he did repertory work in Boston. A 1960 "TV Guide" article says that he appeared on Broadway in the 1950-51 production of King Lear, which starred Louis Calhern. The draft soon ended his apprenticeship, and he served in the Army in the Korean War, making sergeant. After being demobilized in 1952, he attended attended Sul Ross State Teacher's College (Alpine, Texas), earning a master's degree in dramatic arts. He taught English and drama at a Sonora, Texas high school before moving to Carlsbad, New Mexico, where he taught sixth grade. He then moved his family to California, where he again taught school while preparing for his PhD studies.
Blocker picked up bit parts in television, making his debut as a bartender in The Sheriff of Cochise (1956). His career rise was steady and rapid, and he appeared on many Westerns, including Gunsmoke (1955), Have Gun - Will Travel (1957), The Rifleman (1958), and Maverick (1957). He claimed his turn as Hognose Hughes on "Maverick", the comic Western starring James Garner, was the seminal role of his career. As Hoss, Blocker would often star in light-hearted episodes on "Bonanza". He was cast in the recurring role of "Tiny" Carl Budinger in the short lived Western series, Cimarron City (1958). Its cancellation after one season made him available for "Bonanza", which was "Cimarron City" creator David Dortort's next project. He had previously appeared on Dortort's Western series, The Restless Gun (1957).
"Bonanza" debuted in September 1959, shot in color, and R.C.A. made color TV sets and saw the program as a good advertisement for its wares. The company sponsored the first two seasons of the show, and the sponsorship and R.C.A.'s ownership of N.B.C. was likely why it wasn't cancelled after its shaky first season, when it placed #45 in the ratings for the 1959-60 season. The following year, it cracked the top 20 at #17, but it wasn't until it was shifted to Sundays at 9PM in the 1961-62 season that it became a ratings phenomenon, coming in at #2. It was the first of nine straight seasons in the top 5. Once "Bonanza" was ensconced as America's favorite Western, Blocker and his three co-stars, Lorne Greene, Pernell Roberts and Michael Landon were paid an extremely handsome salary that eventually rose to approximately $10,000 per episode each by the time Roberts quit after the sixth season, its first at #1.
Commenting on Roberts' departure, Landon said, "After he left we took one leaf out of the dining room table and we all made more money because we split the take three ways instead of four." Salary, royalties from Bonanza-related merchandise, and business ventures (Blocker started the Bonanza Steak House chain in 1963), and an eventual $1-million payout from NBC to buy out the residual rights of each of the three remaining stars made them all rich. "Bonanza" made Blocker a very wealthy man, but more importantly, it made him a television immortal. The series continues to be re-run in syndication 40 years after Hoss exited the stage.- Actor
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Andrew Bryniarski was born on February 13, 1969 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The 6' 5" actor is a former bodybuilder. He came to Hollywood for a short summer vacation to visit a friend, was spotted by a talent scout who set up a screen test for Joel Silver, and all of a sudden he was acting alongside Bruce Willis and James Coburn in Hudson Hawk (1991). Since then, Andrew has worked with Al Pacino, James Woods, Michelle Pfeiffer, Halle Berry, and Cuba Gooding Jr. to mention just a few, as well as Hong Kong's best including Hark Tsui and Woo-Ping Yuen. His film work includes Pearl Harbor (2001), Tim Burton's Batman Returns (1992), Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday (1999), Rollerball (2002), Scooby-Doo (2002), Street Fighter (1994), The Program (1993), and John Singleton's Higher Learning (1995).
He also appeared on TV in FX's 44 Minutes: The North Hollywood Shoot-Out (2003), which received enormous ratings and broke several records. His other guest appearances on TV shows has included in L.A. Law (1986), Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993), Firefly (2002), Without a Trace (2002), and Burn Notice (2007). Andrew was included by Entertainment Weekly in 2003's "It List" of the top 100 creative people in Hollywood. He also starred in New Line's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), playing the killer known as 'Leatherface". He reprised the role in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006).
He is involved in all outdoor activities from mountain climbing to horseback riding, and lives a healthy lifestyle, working out at the gym and practicing yoga.- He was born in Reykjavik, Iceland and moved to the United States at the age of 5. Gunnar lived in Maine till he was 11, his family then moving to Texas, where he went to high school before attending the University of Texas. At the university, he did some theater work and majored in English and mathematics before going on to graduate in English and Scandinavian Studies. Despite graduating in the aforementioned fields, his first job out of high school was as a computer operator.
In the summer of 1973, he heard that Tobe Hooper and others were in town to work on a movie and decided to try out for a part. After interviewing with Tobe Hooper and the writer of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Kim Henkel, he was cast in the role of the disturbed, mentally handicapped killer, Leatherface.
After Chainsaw, Hansen went on to work as a freelance writer for magazines for several years before going on to write books, one later being set in Iceland about purported serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas. He has gone on to write multiple screenplays - one co-written with his partner Gary Jones, director of Mosquito (1994)).
Gunnar also directed a documentary on Greenland and had a stint designing web pages for GTE. - Actor
- Producer
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Joseph Jason Namakaeha Momoa was born on August 1, 1979, in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is the son of Coni (Lemke), a photographer, and Joseph Momoa, a painter. His father is of Native Hawaiian and Samoan descent; and his mother, who is from Iowa, is of German, Irish, and Native American ancestry. Jason was raised in Norwalk, Iowa, by his mother. After high school, he moved to Hawaii, where he landed a lead role, beating out of thousands of hopefuls in the TV series Baywatch (1989) (known as "Baywatch Hawaii" in its 10th season). When the show ended, he spent the next couple of years traveling around the world. In 2001, he moved to Los Angeles, where he continued to pursue an acting career. In 2004, after the short-lived TV series North Shore (2004), he was cast as the popular character "Ronon Dex" in the TV series Stargate: Atlantis (2004), which achieved a cult-like following. In 2010, he appeared in the Emmy-nominated HBO series Game of Thrones (2011), playing the Dothraki king, Khal Drogo. To illustrate to the producers that he was Khal Drogo, he performed the Haka, a traditional war dance of the Maori of New Zealand. The audition was with the same casting director who was casting the titular role in the reboot of Conan the Barbarian (2011). Four weeks after being cast as the popular Robert E. Howard character, Momoa began shooting in Bulgaria. His approach, like that of the filmmakers, was to pull from the eight decades of comics and stories as well as the Frank Frazetta images rather than the hugely popular 1982 movie. Jason has a production company, Pride of Gypsies, in which he is expanding his career from actor to filmmaker. He has directed a couple of short films and is working on his feature film debut Road to Paloma (2014), which is pulled from a series of stories that he's been developing over the years, which he calls the Brown Bag Diaries: Ridin' the Blinds in B Minor (2010). Jason lives with his wife, actress Lisa Bonet, with whom he has two children, Lola and Nakoa-Wolf.- Actor
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- Actor
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Omar Benson Miller was born on 7 October 1978 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is an actor and producer, known for Ballers (2015), 8 Mile (2002) and Miracle at St. Anna (2008).- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Buddy Ebsen began his career as a dancer in the late 1920s in a Broadway chorus. He later formed a vaudeville act with his sister Vilma Ebsen, which also appeared on Broadway. In 1935 he and his sister went to Hollywood, where they were signed for the first of MGM's Eleanor Powell movies, Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935). While Vilma retired from stage and screen shortly after this, Buddy starred in two further MGM movies with Powell. Two of his dancing partners were Frances Langford in Born to Dance (1936) and Judy Garland in Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937). They were a little bit taller than Shirley Temple, with whom he danced in Captain January (1936). MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer offered him an exclusive contract in 1938, but Ebsen turned it down. In spite of Mayer's warning that he would never get a job in Hollywood again, he was offered the role of the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Ebsen agreed to change roles with Ray Bolger, who was cast as the Tin Man. Ebsen subsequently became ill from the aluminum make-up, however, and was replaced by Jack Haley. He returned to the stage, making only a few pictures before he got a role in the Disney production of Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier (1955). After this, he became a straight actor, and later won more fame in his own hit series, The Beverly Hillbillies (1962) and Barnaby Jones (1973).- Actor
- Soundtrack
Carmine Caridi was born on 23 January 1934 in New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for The Godfather Part II (1974), The Godfather Part III (1990) and The Money Pit (1986). He died on 28 May 2019 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
- Director
Genial, pleasant-voiced character actor Paul Benedict was born in New Mexico on September 17, 1938, and made hosts of stage, film and TV appearances in a career lasting five decades. The son of a doctor, he was diagnosed with acromegaly by an endocrinologist who happened to catch the nascent actor in a stage play. He underwent medical treatment that successfully prevented the advancing of the disease. Following military service with the Marine Corps., Paul went on to a highly successful entertainment career using his spade-sized jaw and large nose often to humorous effect.
Following his graduation from Suffolk University, Benedict began acting at the Theatre Company of Boston and performed with such up-and-coming hopefuls as Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino before moving to New York in 1968. Decades laterk, Pacino remembered his old colleague when he revived Eugene O'Neill's one-act, two-person drama "Hughie" on Broadway in 1996. Paul was cast as the hotel night clerk who listens patiently and endlessly to the forlorn ramblings of Pacino's hustler character. Paul made his unofficial Broadway debut in 1968 with "Leda Had a Little Swan," but it closed just before it officially opened. He then went on to appear in "Little Murders" (1969), "The White House Murder Case" (1970) and "Bad Habits" (1974).
Benedict began his on-camera career with the little seen western film spoof The Double-Barrelled Detective Story (1965) and then was seen in another spoof, the political satire The Virgin President (1968). He continued in a quirky, humorous vein in Norman Lear's Cold Turkey (1971), as well as Taking Off (1971), They Might Be Giants (1971), The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971), Deadhead Miles (1972), Up the Sandbox (1972) and The Front Page (1974). Lear took a liking to Paul and began using him as a guest on some of his classic TV comedies, including "Maude" and "All in the Family," before casting him as Harry Bentley, the polite but put-upon white Englishman next door neighbor to affluent black couple Isabel Sanford and Sherman Hemsley on the decade-long comedy series The Jeffersons (1975). It remains his best known oddball comedy role. Another familiar character would be The Mad Painter on the long-running children's PBS show Sesame Street (1969).
He played an fascinating assortment of erudite, toothy and tweedy characters on film, one of his best remembered being that of Reverend Lindquist in Jeremiah Johnson (1972). He also played the emissary of the governor in The Front Page (1974), a slave trader in Mandingo (1975), an untalented Shakespearean stage director in The Goodbye Girl (1977); an eccentric butler in The Man with Two Brains (1983); another butler in Arthur 2: On the Rocks (1988); a business college professor in Cocktail (1988); a warden in The Chair (1988); a film school teacher in The Freshman (1990); an irritated judge in The Addams Family (1991); and a professor in Isn't She Great (2000).
Benedict made an impression as a stage director as well, including "Any Given Day," the original production of "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune," and the Obie-winning "The Kathy and Mo Show." His final Broadway appearance was as Mayor Shinn in the 2000 revival of "The Music Man" and he took his final curtain call with Pinter's "No Man's Land" at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
On TV, Paul made appearances on some of TV's most popular shows, including "Sweepstakes," "Mama Malone," "Murder, She Wrote," "The New Twilight Zone," "A Different World," "Tales from the Crypt," "Seinfeld" and "The Drew Carey Show." On film, Paul became a stock player for Christopher Guest and his hilarious "mockumentary" features -- This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Waiting for Guffman (1996) (as the long-awaited guest) and A Mighty Wind (2003).
Unmarried, the 70-year-old actor died of natural causes on December 1, 2008, at his home in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.- Actor
- Director
- Editor
John Carroll Lynch was born August 1, 1963 in Boulder, Colorado, and was raised in Denver. It was there John found a passion for acting and became a Denver Broncos fan. He graduated in the mid-80s with a B.F.A. in theatre from the The Catholic University of America / Hartke Theatre Acting program. From then, he continued to work in theatre around the country, but concentrated mostly on his work at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, acting in many plays from Shakespeare to Shaw to Chekhov. In the early nineties, John was able to find time away from the theatre to work in film, as productions came through Minnesota. In 1996, he received critical acclaim for his role as Marge Gunderson's simple husband Norm Gunderson in Fargo (1996). He went on to make two more films that year, both of which were conveniently set in Minnesota, the acclaimed Beautiful Girls (1996) and Feeling Minnesota (1996). Since then, John's film career has been on an amazing climb. Much like other well respected actors from the theatre, such as John Malkovich and Gary Sinise, he chooses to play very interesting and diverse roles.- Vincent Schiavelli, selected in 1997 by Vanity Fair as one of the best character actors in America, had made over 120 film and television appearances. He studied acting at NYU's Theatre Program. Aside from his acting career, Vincent was the author of three cookbooks, and has written numerous articles on food for magazines and newspapers. In 2001, he received the James Beard Journalism Award.
- Actor
- Soundtrack
One of the most versatile actors working in Hollywood today, Lee Pace has established himself as a powerful leading man, consistently delivering compelling performances in film, television, and on stage.
Pace will next be seen in the highly anticipated Apple TV+ series FOUNDATION. Scheduled for a Fall 2021 release, the show is based on the beloved Isaac Asimov novels of the same name. FOUNDATION chronicles the saga of a band of exiles who discover that the only way to save the Galactic Empire from destruction is to defy it. Pace stars as Brother day, the current Emperor of the Galaxy.
He is known for starring as Thranduil the Elvenking in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy and as intergalactic villain Ronan the Accuser in the blockbuster Marvel film Guardians of the Galaxy, a role he reprised in Captain Marvel. In 2003, Pace starred in the Sundance hit, Soldier's Girl. His breakthrough performance garnered him nominations for both the Golden Globes and the Independent Spirit Award, and he won a Gotham Award for Outstanding Breakthrough Performance. In 2008 he starred in Tarsem Singh's visually stunning adventure fantasy film, The Fall, which had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Other notable credits include The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2, Driven, Lincoln, A Single Man, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Infamous and The Good Shepherd.
On the small screen, Pace is most notable for his starring role in Bryan Fuller's award-winning and critically acclaimed series "Pushing Daisies," for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe and Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Lead Actor. He has also appeared as Joe MacMillan in four seasons of the AMC period drama television series Halt and Catch Fire.
After graduating with a BFA from Juilliard, Pace starred in the critically acclaimed Off-Broadway play, The Credeaux Canvas, as well as being part of the Vineyard production of The Fourth Sister. In the spring of 2004, he starred a limited engagement of the Off-Broadway production Small Tragedy, winning an Obie Award and was nominated for a Lucille Lortel Awards in the category of Outstanding Actor. In 2006, Lee starred in the two-character play Guardians by Peter Morris, which earned him his second nomination for a Lortel Award as Outstanding Actor.
In 2011, Pace made his Broadway debut in Larry Kramer's play The Normal Heart, portraying Bruce Niles. In 2018, he starred as Joe Pitt in the Broadway revival of Angels in America.- Stipe Miocic was born on 19 August 1982 in Independence, Ohio, USA. He is an actor, known for Acts of Violence (2018), American Violence (2017) and Billions (2016). He has been married to Ryan Marie Carney since 2016. They have one child.
- Tall, hulking character actor Dick Curtis spent years at Columbia Pictures menacing everyone from cowboy star Charles Starrett to the slapstick team of The Three Stooges. Curtis, unlike many movie villains, showed a genuine flair for comedy--especially physical comedy--in his many appearances in the studio's two-reelers and could do a double-take, a pratfall, take a pie in the face, a finger-poke to the eyes or a crowbar on the top of the head with the best of them. Although much of his career was spent at Columbia, where he specialized in western villains, he can also be seen as one of the crewmen who set out to rescue Fay Wray from the clutches of the giant ape in the original King Kong (1933).
He died in Hollywood of pneumonia in 1952. - Actor
- Cinematographer
American actor and journalist. Born to famed swashbuckling movie hero Errol Flynn and actress Lili Damita, Sean Flynn was the object of contention between the divorced couple for his entire life. Raised primarily by his mother, he was alternately ignored and fought for by his father, who engaged in a years-long custody battle with Damita. Sean grew up in Palm Beach, Florida and attended Palm Beach Private School and prep school Lawrenceville. Summers he spent with his father in Jamaica or on the elder Flynn's yacht. He enrolled at Duke University, but soon thereafter accepted a contract to appear in a sequel to his father's hit film Captain Blood (1935), The Son of Captain Blood (1962). He made a few more films in Europe, in all of which he was extraordinarily handsome but not particularly skilled or at ease before the camera. He became bored with acting and then went to Africa in 1965. There he worked for a time as a game warden and hunter in Kenya. The Vietnam war was heating up, and in 1966 Flynn went to cover the war as a photographer-correspondent for Paris-Match. He was wounded in the knee in March. He left Vietnam long enough to appear in a final film, Singapore, Singapore (1967), and to cover the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. He then returned to Vietnam in 1968, where he sold photographs and news stories to most of the major news organizations and made plans for a documentary film on the war. His exploits and those of his colleagues made them somewhat legendary figures in military and journalism circles. In April, 1970, while covering the widening of combat to the border areas of Cambodia, Flynn and colleague Dana Stone disappeared. They were presumed captured by elements of the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong, or the Khmer Rouge .. Although some reports indicated they may have survived as prisoners for as much as another two months, Flynn and Stone were never definitively heard from again after April 6, 1970, and were almost certainly executed by captors.- Music Artist
- Actor
- Composer
Gerald Earl Gillum (born May 24, 1989), known professionally as G-Eazy, is an American rapper and philanthropist from Oakland, California. His first major-label album, These Things Happen, was released on June 23, 2014 and peaked at number 3 on the US Billboard 200. His second studio album, When It's Dark Out, was released on December 4, 2015. It featured the single "Me, Myself & I", which reached the top 10 of the US Billboard Hot 100. His third and most recent studio album, The Beautiful & Damned, was released on December 15, 2017.
When Gillum was in the first grade, his mother left his father (who is an associate professor of art at CSU Fresno). Gillum moved in with his grandparents in Berkeley, California. They later moved to North Oakland, although Gillum continued to attend school in Berkeley. Gillum attended Loyola University and graduated in 2011.
Starting out as a record producer, G-Eazy began working on numerous singles while he was still a student at the Loyola University at New Orleans with his producer Christoph Andersson who also was a student there. He then gained some recognition for being a part of the new hip hop scene back in the East Bay Area, joining with such artists as Lil B, Crohn and The Cataracs. During his early years, he became a member of a local hip hop group, called "The Bay Boyz", who had released several songs on their official Myspace page. In 2010, G-Eazy started gaining popularity when he was given an opportunity to open for some well-known artists, most notably Lil Wayne and Snoop Dogg.- Actor
- Producer
- Writer
The towering presence of Canadian actor Donald Sutherland is often noticed, as are his legendary contributions to cinema. He has appeared in almost 200 different shows and films. He is also the father of renowned actor Kiefer Sutherland, among others.
Donald McNichol Sutherland was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, to Dorothy Isobel (McNichol) and Frederick McLea Sutherland, who worked in sales and electricity. He has Scottish, as well as German and English, ancestry. Sutherland worked several different jobs - he was a radio DJ in his youth - and was almost set on becoming an engineer after graduating from the University of Toronto with a degree in engineering. However, he also graduated with a degree in drama, and he chose to abandon becoming an engineer in favour of an actor.
Sutherland's first roles were bit parts and consisted of such films as the horror film Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965) which starred Christopher Lee. He was also appearing in episodes of TV shows such as "The Saint" and "Court Martial". Sutherland's break would come soon, though, and it would come in the form of a war film in which he was barely cast.
The reason he was barely cast was because he had been a last-minute replacement for an actor that had dropped out of the film. The role he played was that of the dopey but loyal Vernon Pinkley in the war film The Dirty Dozen (1967). The film also starred Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, and Telly Savalas. The picture was an instant success as an action/war film, and Sutherland played upon this success by taking another role in a war film: this was, however, a comedy called M*A*S*H (1970) which landed Sutherland the starring role alongside Elliott Gould and Tom Skerritt. This is now considered a classic among film goers, and the 35-year old actor was only getting warmed up.
Sutherland took a number of other roles in between these two films, such as the theatrical adaptation Oedipus the King (1968), the musical Joanna (1968) and the Clint Eastwood-helmed war comedy Kelly's Heroes (1970). It was Kelly's Heroes (1970) that became more well-known, and it reunited Sutherland with Telly Savalas. 1970 and 1971 offered Sutherland a number of other films, the best of them would have to be Klute (1971). The film, which made Jane Fonda a star, is about a prostitute whose friend is mysteriously murdered. Sutherland received no critical acclaim like his co-star Fonda (she won an Oscar) but his career did not fade.
Moving on from Klute (1971), Sutherland landed roles such as the lead in the thriller Lady Ice (1973), and another lead in the western Alien Thunder (1974). These films did not match up to "Klute"'s success, though Sutherland took a supporting role that would become one of his most infamous and most critically acclaimed. He played the role of the murderous fascist leader in the Bernardo Bertolucci Italian epic 1900 (1976). Sutherland also gained another memorable role as a marijuana-smoking university professor in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) among other work that he did in this time.
Another classic role came in the form of the Robert Redford film, Ordinary People (1980). Sutherland portrays an older father figure who must deal with his children in an emotional drama of a film. It won Best Picture, and while both the supporting stars were nominated for Oscars, Sutherland once again did not receive any Academy Award nomination. He moved on to play a Nazi spy in a film based on Ken Follett's book "Eye of the Needle" and he would star alongside Al Pacino in the commercial and critical disaster that was Revolution (1985). While it drove Al Pacino out of films for four years, Sutherland continued to find work. This work led to the dramatic, well-told story of apartheid A Dry White Season (1989) alongside the legendary actor Marlon Brando.
Sutherland's next big success came in the Oliver Stone film JFK (1991) where Sutherland plays the chilling role of Mister X, an anonymous source who gives crucial information about the politics surrounding President Kennedy. Once again, he was passed over at the Oscars, though Tommy Lee Jones was nominated for his performance as Clay Shaw. Sutherland went on to appear in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), Shadow of the Wolf (1992), and Disclosure (1994).
The new millennium provided an interesting turn in Sutherland's career: reuniting with such former collaborators as Clint Eastwood and Tommy Lee Jones, Sutherland starred in Space Cowboys (2000). He also appeared as the father figure to Nicole Kidman's character in Cold Mountain (2003) and Charlize Theron's character in The Italian Job (2003). He has also made a fascinating, Oscar-worthy performance as the revolutionist Mr. Thorne in Land of the Blind (2006) and also as a judge in Reign Over Me (2007). Recently, he has joined forces with his son Rossif Sutherland and Canadian comic Russell Peters with the new comedy The Con Artist (2010), as well as acting alongside Jamie Bell and Channing Tatum in the sword-and-sandal film The Eagle (2011). Sutherland has also taken a role in the remake of Charles Bronson's film The Mechanic (1972).
Donald Sutherland has made a lasting legacy on Hollywood, whether portraying a chilling and horrifying villain, or playing the older respectable character in his films. A true character actor, Sutherland is one of Canada's most well-known names and will hopefully continue on being so long after his time.- Stunts
- Actor
Ben Bates was born on 4 September 1933 in Texas, USA. He was an actor, known for Ruckus (1980), Swamp Thing (1982) and Gemini Man (1976). He died on 4 October 2017 in Sun City, California, USA.- Actor
- Stunts
- Producer
Born to Alice Cooper and Charles Cooper. Gary attended school at Dunstable school England, Helena Montana and Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa (then called Iowa College). His first stage experience was during high school and college. Afterwards, he worked as an extra for one year before getting a part in a two-reeler by the independent producer Hans Tiesler . Eileen Sedgwick was his first leading lady. He then appeared in The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926) for United Artists before moving to Paramount. While there he appeared in a small part in Wings (1927), It (1927), and other films.- Actor
- Producer
Richard Anderson appeared in high school plays, served a hitch in the Army and, upon his discharge, began doing summer stock, radio work, a movie bit part (a wounded soldier in Twelve O'Clock High (1949)) and all the other minor jobs required of your basic struggling actor. He did comedy scenes on a "screen test"-like TV series called Lights, Camera, Action! (1950) and impressed the right people at MGM, who offered him a contract. After leaving MGM he continued to dabble in movies while at the same time becoming a huge presence on TV. He was a regular (Police Lt. Drum) during the last season of TV's Perry Mason (1957); in the series' last episode, he interrogates witnesses to a murder in a TV studio--the witnesses being played by the "Perry Mason" crew. In the high-rated last episode of The Fugitive (1963) he plays Richard Kimble's (David Janssen) brother-in-law, and is briefly suspected of being the real killer of Kimble's wife. A regular on The Six Million Dollar Man (1974), Anderson has more recently produced the TV-movie reprises of that series.- Actor
- Additional Crew
The youngest of three, Jason Liles was born on July 4, 1987 in Memphis, TN and grew up in Germantown. Although he and his older brother, Jordan, made short films regularly as kids with a handy cam, it wasn't until 2008 at the age of 21-years-old that he began studying theatre in college.
Jason moved to New York, NY in 2009 to pursue a career as an actor. He booked dozens of short films, a national Allstate commercial helping him join the union SAG-AFTRA, and worked with 7-time Oscar-winning makeup artist Rick Baker on Men In Black III playing several aliens throughout the production.
Jason's roles in MIB III, gaining a mentor in Doug Jones, and his unique height of 6'9" helped him realize a niche playing non-human characters in prosthetics and performance capture.
Jason moved to LA in 2015 to be closer to many special effects makeup artists and quickly became known for major roles such as Ryuk the death god in Death Note (shared with the voice of Willem Dafoe), George the albino gorilla alongside Dwayne Johnson in Rampage, King Ghidorah the three-headed dragon in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, The Chatterer in Hellraiser, Star Trek: Picard, and more.
Although known mainly for his work under prosthetics and visual effects, he has also played "himself" in films such as Aftermath playing the lead antagonist and guest starring on shows like Dream Corp LLC.
Jason is married to his wife Allie and lives in California.