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- Marsden's credits are numerous and span a half century of widely, and wildly, different genres and character types. Not the least is his portrayal of the mysterious and mystical character John Stockton in the long-running ITV series The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1991) starring Jeremy Brett. In The Last Vampyre (1993) Marsden brings, literally to life, Sir Conan Doyle's take on the ages' old, indeed historic, legend most known to modern viewers through Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic horror novel "Dracula."
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Sidney Lumet was a master of cinema, best known for his technical knowledge and his skill at getting first-rate performances from his actors -- and for shooting most of his films in his beloved New York. He made over 40 movies, often complex and emotional, but seldom overly sentimental. Although his politics were somewhat left-leaning and he often treated socially relevant themes in his films, Lumet didn't want to make political movies in the first place. Born on June 25, 1924, in Philadelphia, the son of actor Baruch Lumet and dancer Eugenia Wermus Lumet, he made his stage debut at age four at the Yiddish Art Theater in New York. He played many roles on Broadway in the 1930s and also in the film ...One Third of a Nation... (1939). After starting an off-Broadway acting troupe in the late 1940s, he became the director of many television shows in the 1950s. Lumet made his feature film directing debut with 12 Angry Men (1957), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and earned three Academy Award nominations. The courtroom drama, which takes place almost entirely in a jury room, is justly regarded as one of the most auspicious directorial debuts in film history. Lumet got the chance to direct Marlon Brando in The Fugitive Kind (1960), an imperfect, but powerful adaptation of Tennessee Williams' "Orpheus Descending". The first half of the 1960s was one of Lumet's most artistically successful periods. Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), a masterful, brilliantly photographed adaptation of the Eugene O'Neill play, is one of several Lumet films about families. It earned Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Dean Stockwell and Jason Robards deserved acting awards in Cannes and Hepburn an Oscar nomination. The alarming Cold War thriller Fail Safe (1964) unfairly suffered from comparison to Stanley Kubrick's equally great satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), which was released shortly before. The Pawnbroker (1964), arguably the most outstanding of the great movies Lumet made in this phase, tells the story of a Holocaust survivor who lives in New York and can't overcome his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps. Rod Steiger's unforgettable performance in the title role earned an Academy Award nomination. Lumet's intense character study The Hill (1965) about inhumanity in a military prison camp was the first of five films he did with Sean Connery. After the overly talky but rewarding drama The Group (1966) about young upper-class women in the 1930s, and the stylish spy thriller The Deadly Affair (1967), the late 1960s turned out to be a lesser phase in Lumet's career. He had a strong comeback with the box-office hit The Anderson Tapes (1971). The Offence (1973) was commercially less successful, but artistically brilliant - with Connery in one of his most impressive performances. The terrific cop thriller Serpico (1973), the first of his films about police corruption in New York City, became one of his biggest critical and financial successes. Al Pacino's fascinating portrayal of the real-life cop Frank Serpico earned a Golden Globe and the movie earned two Academy Award nominations (it is worth noting that Lumet's feature films of the 1970s alone earned 30 Oscar nominations, winning six times). The love triangle Lovin' Molly (1974) was not always convincing in its atmospheric details, but Lumet's fine sense of emotional truth and a good Blythe Danner keep it interesting. The adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1974), an exquisitely photographed murder mystery with an all-star cast, was a big success again. Lumet's complex crime thriller Dog Day Afternoon (1975), which Pauline Kael called "one of the best "New York" movies ever made", gave Al Pacino the opportunity for a breathtaking, three-dimensional portrayal of a bisexual man who tries to rob a bank to finance his lover's sex-change operation. Lumet's next masterpiece, Network (1976), was a prophetic satire on media and society. The film version of Peter Shaffer's stage play Equus (1977) about a doctor and his mentally confused patient was also powerful, not least because of the energetic acting by Richard Burton and Peter Firth. After the enjoyable musical The Wiz (1978) and the interesting but not easily accessible comedy Just Tell Me What You Want (1980), Sidney Lumet won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for his outstanding direction of Prince of the City (1981), one of his best and most typical films. It's about police corruption, but hardly a remake of Serpico (1973). Starring a powerful Treat Williams, it's an extraordinarily multi-layered film. In his highly informative book "Making Movies" (1995), Lumet describes the film in the following way: "When we try to control everything, everything winds up controlling us. Nothing is what it seems." It's also a movie about values, friendship and drug addiction and, like "Serpico", is based on a true story. In Deathtrap (1982), Lumet successfully blended suspense and black humor. The Verdict (1982) was voted the fourth greatest courtroom drama of all time by the American Film Institute in 2008. A few minor inaccuracies in legal details do not mar this study of an alcoholic lawyer (superbly embodied by Paul Newman) aiming to regain his self-respect through a malpractice case. The expertly directed movie received five Academy Award nominations. Lumet's controversial drama Daniel (1983) with Timothy Hutton, an adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's "The Book of Daniel" about two young people whose parents were executed during the McCarthy Red Scare hysteria in the 1950s for alleged espionage, is one of his underrated achievements. His later masterpiece Running on Empty (1988) has a similar theme, portraying a family which has been on the run from the FBI since the parents (played by Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch) committed a bomb attack on a napalm laboratory in 1971 to protest the war in Vietnam. The son (played by River Phoenix in an extraordinarily moving, Oscar-nominated performance) falls in love with a girl and wishes to stay with her and study music. Naomi Foner's screenplay won the Golden Globe. Other Lumet movies of the 1980s are the melancholic comedy drama Garbo Talks (1984); the occasionally clichéd Power (1986) about election campaigns; the all too slow thriller The Morning After (1986) and the amusing gangster comedy Family Business (1989). With Q&A (1990) Lumet returned to the genre of the New York cop thriller. Nick Nolte shines in the role of a corrupt and racist detective in this multi-layered, strangely underrated film. Sadly, with the exception of Night Falls on Manhattan (1996), an imperfect but fascinating crime drama in the tradition of his own previous genre works, almost none of Lumet's works of the 1990s did quite get the attention they deserved. The crime drama A Stranger Among Us (1992) blended genres in a way that did not seem to match most viewers' expectations, but its contemplations about life arouse interest. The intelligent hospital satire Critical Care (1997) was unfairly neglected as well. The courtroom thriller Guilty as Sin (1993) was cold but intriguing. Lumet's Gloria (1999) remake seemed unnecessary, but he returned impressively with the underestimated courtroom comedy Find Me Guilty (2006) and the justly acclaimed crime thriller Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007). In 2005, Sidney Lumet received a well-deserved honorary Academy Award for his outstanding contribution to filmmaking. Sidney Lumet tragically died of cancer in 2011.- Writer
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Jimmy McGovern was born in September 1949 in Liverpool, Merseyside, England, UK. He is a writer and producer, known for The Street (2006), Cracker (1993) and Moving On (2009).- Actor
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Robert Lindsay was born on 13 December 1949 in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, England, UK. He is an actor, known for Fierce Creatures (1997), My Family (2000) and G.B.H. (1991). He has been married to Rosemarie Ford since 31 December 2006. They have two children. He was previously married to Cheryl Hall.- Actor
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Steve Coogan was born on 14 October 1965 in Middleton, Manchester, England, UK. He is an actor and producer, known for Philomena (2013), Alan Partridge (2013) and 24 Hour Party People (2002). He was previously married to Caroline Hickman.- Actor
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Hugh Grant, one of Britain's best known faces, has been equally entertaining on-screen as well as in real life, and has had enough sense of humor to survive a media frenzy. He is known for his roles in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), with Andie MacDowell, Notting Hill (1999), opposite Julia Roberts, and Music and Lyrics (2007), opposite Drew Barrymore, among his other works.
He was born Hugh John Mungo Grant on September 9, 1960, in Hammersmith, London, United Kingdom. His mother, Fyvola Susan (MacLean), was a teacher. His father, James Murray Grant, was an artist and carpet salesman, and his grandfather was in the British Army during WWII. He is of mostly Scottish and English descent, with many recent ancestors who were prominent in the military. Young Grant was fond of literature and acting. He won a scholarship to Oxford, going up to New College in 1979. There he was involved in student drama, and considered a career as an art historian. After Oxford, he turned down a scholarship to do postgraduate studies in Art History at the Courtauld Institute in London, and focused on his acting career. In 1982, while still a student, Grant made his big screen debut in Privileged (1982) by director Michael Hoffman.
Grant's breakthrough came with the leading role as Charles in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), opposite Andie MacDowell, a role which won him a Golden Globe Award, as well as a BAFTA Film Award for Best Actor. During the 1990s Grant established himself as a very original and resourceful actor. He played a string of characters projecting a positive mindset, showing how do you stay optimistic when you are actually worried about a cascade of troubles. Grant had his own experience as a survivor of an unfortunate episode in his private life, which he managed to overcome thanks to having a pretty damn good outlook on life.
His forte is playing characters projecting warmth and sincere happiness, with his hallmark stuttering, albeit some accused him of reprising the same character he has been playing for the past two decades. Grant's ability to show his character development within a limited screen time shines in Love Actually (2003), with his witty portrayal of a Prime Minister whose personal insecurities become intertwined with his country's international affairs, a performance that earned him a nomination for European Audience Award. His screen presence and skillful understatement takes his characters beyond the written script, thanks to his mastery of timing and effortless style.
Outside of his acting profession, Grant has been a good athlete, he played cricket and football in his younger years. He enjoys playing golf, frequently taking part in Pro-Am tournaments. He has been an avid art lover since his younger years, and has been collecting fine art, a passion he inherited from his father.- Actress
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On January 30, 1937, renowned theatre actor Michael Redgrave was performing in a production of Hamlet in London. During the curtain call, the show's lead, Laurence Olivier, announced to the audience: "tonight a great actress was born". This was in reference to his co-star's newborn daughter, Vanessa Redgrave.
Vanessa was born in Greenwich, London, to Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, both thespians. Three quarters of a century after her birth (despite numerous ups and down) this rather forward expectation has definitely been lived up to with an acclaimed actress that has won (among many others) an Academy Award, two Emmys, two Golden Globes, two Cannes Best Actress awards, a Tony, a Screen Actors Guild award, a Laurence Olivier theatre award and a BAFTA fellowship.
Growing up with such celebrated theatrical parents, great expectations were put on both herself, her brother Corin Redgrave and sister Lynn Redgrave at an early age. Shooting up early and finally reaching a height just short of 6 foot, Redgrave initially had plans to dance and perform ballet as a profession. However she settled on acting and entered the Central School of Speech and Drama in 1954 and four years later made her West End debut. In the decade of the 1960s she developed and progressed to become one of the most noted young stars of the English stage and then film. Performances on the London stage included the classics: 'A Touch of Sun', 'Coriolanus', 'A Midsummer's Night Dream', 'All's Well that Ends Well', 'As You Like It', 'The Lady from the Sea', 'The Seagull' and many others. By the mid 1960s, she had booked various film roles and matured into a striking beauty with a slim, tall frame and attractive face. In 1966 she made her big screen debut as the beautiful ex-wife of a madman in an Oscar nominated performance in the oddball comedy Morgan! (1966), as well as the enigmatic woman in a public park in desperate need of a photographer's negatives in the iconic Blow-Up (1966) and briefly appeared in an unspoken part of Anne Boleyn in the Best Picture winner of the year A Man for All Seasons (1966).
She managed to originate the title role in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" the same year on the London stage (which was then adapted for the big screen a few years later, but Maggie Smith was cast instead and managed to win an Oscar for her performance). Her follow up work saw her play the lead in the box office hit adaptation Camelot (1967), a film popular with audiences but dismissed by critics, and her second Academy Award nominated performance as Isadora Duncan in the critically praised Isadora (1968).
Her rise in popularity on film also coincided with her public political involvement, she was one of the lead faces in protesting against the Vietnam war and lead a famous march on the US embassy, was arrested during a Ban-the-Bomb demonstration, publicly supported Yasar Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and fought for various other human rights and particularly left wing causes. Despite her admirably independent qualities, most of her political beliefs weren't largely supported by the public. In 1971 after 3 films back to back, Redgrave suffered a miscarriage (it would have been her fourth, after Natasha Richardson, Joely Richardson and Carlo Gabriel Nero) and a break up with her then partner and father of her son, Franco Nero. This was around the same time her equally political brother Corin introduced her to the Workers Revolutionary Party, a group who aimed to destroy capitalism and abolish the monarchy. Her film career began to suffer and take the back seat as she became more involved with the party, twice unsuccessfully attempting to run as a party member for parliament, only obtaining a very small percentage of votes.
In terms of her film career at the time, she was given probably the smallest part in the huge ensemble who-dunnit hit, Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and given another thankless small part as Lola Deveraux in the Sherlock Holmes adventure The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976).
After a celebrated Broadway debut, she created further controversy in 1977 with her involvement in two films, firstly in Julia (1977) where she acted opposite Jane Fonda as a woman fighting Nazi oppression and narrated and featured in the documentary The Palestinian (1977) where she famously danced holding a Kalashnikov rifle. She publicly stated her condemnation of what she termed "Zionist hudlums", which outraged Jewish groups and as a result a screening of her documentary was bombed and Redgrave was personally threatened by the Jewish Defense League (JDL). Julia (1977) happened to be a huge critical success and Redgrave herself was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, but Jewish support groups demanded her nomination to be dropped and at the event of the Academy Awards burned effigies of Redgrave and protested and picketed. Redgrave was forced to enter the event via a rear entrance to avoid harm and when she won the award she famously remarked on the frenzy causes as "Zionist hoodlums" which caused the audience to audibly gasp and boo. The speech reached newspapers the next morning and her reputation was further damaged.
It came as a surprise when CBS hired her for the part of real life Nazi camp survivor Fania Fenelon in Playing for Time (1980), despite more controversy and protesting (Fenelon herself didn't even want Redgrave to portray her) she won an Emmy for the part and the film was one of the highest rating programs of the year. Her follow up film work to her Oscar had been mostly low key but successful, performances in films such as Yanks (1979), Agatha (1979), The Bostonians (1984), Wetherby (1985) and Prick Up Your Ears (1987) further cemented her reputation as a fine actress and she received various accolades and nominations.
However mainly in the 1980s, she focused on TV films and high budget mini-series as well as theatre in both London and New York. She made headlines in 1984 when she sued the Boston Symphony Orchestra for $5 million for wrongful cancellation of her contract because of her politics (she also stated her salary was significantly reduced in Agatha (1979) for the same reason). She became more mainstream in the 1990s where she appeared in a string of high profile films but the parts often underused Redgrave's abilities or they were small cameos/5-minute parts. Highlights included Howards End (1992), Little Odessa (1994), Mission: Impossible (1996) and Cradle Will Rock (1999), as well as her leading lady parts in A Month by the Lake (1995) and Mrs Dalloway (1997).
In 2003 she finally won the coveted Tony award for her performance in 'The Long Day's Journey Into Night' and followed up with another two Tony nominated performances on Broadway, her one woman show 'The Year of Magical Thinking' in 2007 and 'Driving Miss Daisy' in 2010 which not only was extended due to high demand, but was also transferred to the West End for an additional three months in 2011.
Vanessa continues to lend her name to causes and has been notable for donating huge amounts of her own money for her various beliefs. She has publicly opposed the war in Iraq, campaigned for the closure of Guantanamo Bay, supported the rights of gays and lesbians as well as AIDs research and many other issues. She released her autobiography in 1993 and a few years later she was elected to serve as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. She also famously declined the invitation to be made a Dame for her services as an actress. Many have wondered the possible heights her career could have reached if it wasn't for her outspoken views, but being a celebrity and the artificial lifestyle usually attached doesn't seem to interest Redgrave in the slightest.
Vanessa has worked with all three of her children professionally on numerous occasions (her eldest daughter, Natasha Richardson tragically died at the age of 45 due to a skiing accident) and in her mid 70s she still works regularly on television, film and theatre, delivering time and time again great performances.- Director
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Oliver Stone has become known as a master of controversial subjects and a legendary film maker. His films are filled with a variety of film angles and styles, he pushes his actors to give Oscar-worthy performances, and despite his failures, has always returned to success.
William Oliver Stone was born in New York City, to Jacqueline (Goddet) and Louis Stone, a stockbroker. His American father was from a Jewish family (from Germany and Eastern Europe), and his mother, a war bride, was French (and Catholic). After dropping out of Yale University, he became a soldier in the Vietnam War. Serving in two different regiments (including 1rst Cavalry), he was introduced to The Doors, drugs, Jefferson Airplane, and other things that defined the sixties. For his actions in the war, he was awarded a Bronze Star for Gallantry and a Purple Heart. Returning from the war, Stone did not return to graduate from Yale. His first film was a student film entitled Last Year in Viet Nam (1971), followed by the gritty horror film Seizure (1974) for which he also wrote the screenplay. The next seven years saw him direct two films: Mad Man of Martinique (1979) and The Hand (1981), starring Michael Caine. He also wrote many screenplays for films such as Midnight Express (1978), Conan the Barbarian (1982), and Scarface (1983). Stone won his first Oscar for Midnight Express (1978), but his fame was just beginning to show.
1986 was the year that brought him much fame to the U.S.A. and the world. He directed the political film Salvador (1986) starring Oscar-nominated James Woods. However, his big hit was the Vietnam war film Platoon (1986) starring Charlie Sheen,Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger, and Francesco Quinn. Berenger and Dafoe received Oscar nominations for their roles as the polar opposite sergeants who each influence the tour of duty of Chris Taylor (Sheen). Stone won his first Oscar for directing this film, which won Best Picture and was a hit at the box office. After Platoon (1986), Stone followed up with the critically acclaimed Wall Street (1987). The movie, starring Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas, focuses on the business world of tycoons and stock brokers. The film was well received and won an Oscar for Douglas' portrayal of the villainous Gordon Gekko. Stone returned immediately the following year with Talk Radio (1988), which talked of a foul-mouthed radio host (played by Eric Bogosian) who never fails to talk about the serious issues. Although it was not as successful as his last three films, Stone did not slow down at all. He directed Tom Cruise into an Oscar-nominated role in Born on the Fourth of July (1989).
The movie talked about the return of an embittered, crippled Vietnam soldier from the war. Although it failed to win Best Picture or Best Actor, Oliver Stone won an Academy Award for Directing, his third win to date. After Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Stone took a hand in producing several movies, including the Academy Award-winning film Reversal of Fortune (1990). He returned to the director's chair in 1991, once again with two films. Val Kilmer starred as the legendary and controversial Jim Morrison in Stone's psychedelic film The Doors (1991).
Despised by former Doors member Ray Manzarek, the film is nevertheless a wonderful achievement, with Kilmer pulling off an almost flawless impersonation of Morrison. Regardless of opinion, The Doors (1991) was overshadowed by Stone's colossal film JFK (1991), which Stone himself considers the best of his films. In Stone's movie, Jim Garrison tackles the conspiracy behind the murder of America's president John F. Kennedy. The large cast featured such well-known names as Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, John Candy, Joe Pesci, Donald Sutherland, and Walter Matthau. This film represented a change in Stone's works, because it was with this film that he really began to explore the different camera styles and combining them together to create a multi-dimensional way of showing a movie. JFK (1991), as with Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), earned eight Oscar nominations and was one of Stone's most successful films. However, he failed to win a third Oscar for Best Director.
After this film, Stone directed his third Vietnam film to date. Heaven & Earth (1993) was a film about the war from the viewpoint of a Vietnamese girl, and also co-starred Tommy Lee Jones (who had received an Oscar nomination for JFK (1991)). Despite its new woman's perspective and several positive reviews, it was a box office failure. Stone was unfazed; his next film is perhaps his most notorious film to date. Adapting a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, Stone made Natural Born Killers (1994) starring Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore and Rodney Dangerfield in his only dramatic performance. The film was received well at the box office, while review were very mixed. Because of the violence that people claimed was inspired by the film, it was compared to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). As usual, Stone was at the center of controversial subjects; his next film Nixon (1995) was no exception. The film focused on the life of President Richard Nixon, played by Anthony Hopkins, while featuring another well-known cast, including Joan Allen in the role of Nixon's wife. Both went on to receive Oscar nominations, while Stone received his sixth Oscar nomination for Screenwriting. The film got mixed reviews, and failed to recoup its budget.
Aside from directing, Stone has worked as a producer on several different films. There was, of course, the successful film Reversal of Fortune (1990), which won Jeremy Irons an Oscar and also nominated the director for an Oscar. There was also the highly praised and successful emotional drama The Joy Luck Club (1993) which centered around four Chinese immigrant women whose relationships with their daughters is affected by their own lives. Another highly praised Oscar nominated film was Milos Forman's classic film The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) starring Woody Harrelson, Edward Norton, and Courtney Love. Whether the crime/action film The Corruptor (1999) or the brilliant war epic Savior (1998), Stone has worked in a variety of film genres.
Stone had directed ten films in nine years; now however, he began to slow down. He directed the film U Turn (1997) starring Sean Penn and Jennifer Lopez. As with Natural Born Killers (1994), it was a dark and twisted satire on violence, but did not have the same success as the former. Stone was set to direct several projects in the late 90's but they fell through and were not made. However, success came back to Stone in the Al Pacino film Any Given Sunday (1999). This sports movie centered on the life behind the game of football, and it starred an impressive cast that included frequent Stone collaborators James Woods and John C. McGinley. This film was one of his most successful box office films, and put him back on track.
The following years brought Stone no new theatrical films, though he did make three fascinating TV documentaries. Two of them, 'Looking for Fidel' and Comandante (2003) were interviews of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, while 'Persona Non Grata' was an interview of several Palestinian leaders. Stone was also set to direct American Psycho (2000) with Leonardo DiCaprio and Beyond Borders (2003), starring Angelina Jolie and at the time, Ralph Fiennes. However, Stone dropped out of both projects, as did a number of the actors mentioned. Finally, five years after Any Given Sunday (1999), Stone directed a film he'd long wanted to make; the colossal epic Alexander (2004). Starring Colin Farrell as the Macedonian leader, Stone attempted to capture the essence of Alexander the Great through his conquests of the known world. The film focused on Alexander's relationships with his parents (a brilliant performance by Val Kilmer and a less impressive one by Angelina Jolie) and his relationships with his wife and childhood friend/ gay lover (played by Rosario Dawson and Jared Leto respectively).
Alexander (2004) was a critical failure, and failed to win back its budget domestically. Despite being one of 2004's highest grossing films internationally, and recouping its budget through DVD sales, Stone's pet project was heavily criticized. Despite a far superior version (Alexander Revisited) being released on DVD, the film's reputation remains low by the majority. Stone was personally stung at these attacks, but managed to rebound, if mildly, with his hopeful film World Trade Center (2006). The film centers on two firefighters trapped in the rubble of the twin towers. It received good reviews, and allowed Oliver to step forward from his failure towards the possibility of more films.
In late 2007, besides a number of projects Stone was set to direct "Pinkville", which would have been his fourth Vietnam film to date. It was set to star a large number of well known actors such as Bruce Willis, Toby Jones, Channing Tatum, Michael Pitt, Woody Harrelson, and Michael Peña. However, a week before shooting was to begin, the Writer's Strike was started, and the finance for the film was cut, using the strike as an excuse. After Willis backed out of the project, it was eventually scuttled, much like Stone's early productions of Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). Stone turned to another project he had worked on with former Wall Street (1987) collaborator Stanley Weiser. The project was W. (2008), a biography on president George W. Bush. Stone initially cast Christian Bale in the role of Bush but the actor dropped out at the last minute. Josh Brolin was cast, and this followed with a large cast of well known Oscar nominated character actors such as Richard Dreyfuss, James Cromwell, and Ellen Burstyn. The film was made in a record four months, starting in June and released in October. The film opened to mixed reviews, and though film's budget was recouped, it was not a financial hit.
Stone then made the documentary South of the Border (2009), a documentary which focused on bringing to light the positive aspects of the left-wing governments in South America, particularly Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Stone was much less critical than usual, instead making the documentary as a response to the harsh reputation that Chavez has in the States. The documentary was poorly received in the States. Stone also began work on Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010). Starring Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Josh Brolin, Carey Mulligan, and Eli Wallach, the film focuses on the 2008 economic crisis, and the return of Gordon Gekko from prison. The film was screened at Cannes to positive reception, and hailed as Stone's triumphant return. After this, Stone made a film adaptation of "Savages", a novel by Don Winslow . The movie follows two highly successful marijuana growers (Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Taylor-Johnson ), whose shared girlfriend (Blake Lively) is kidnapped by a Mexican cartel and held for ransom. The movie also starred Salma Hayek, Benicio Del Toro, John Travolta, and Emile Hirsch. The film was a return to the tense action and violence of Stone's earlier films, though it polarized many audience members due to the colorful narrations of Lively's vapid and naive character, as well as the film's ending.
After completing the ambitious and well-received television project The Untold History of the United States (2012), as well as a documentary on Hugo Chavez, Stone finally returned to feature films with Snowden (2016). Based on the life of American whistle blower Edward Snowden, Stone's film depicted his awakening to the truth behind the massive surveillances conducted by the NSA, and his attempt to warn the general public of what they did not know. The film was done independently, financed by Europeans on a low budget. It was also a return to form for Stone in a way that had not been seen since "Alexander". Joseph Gordon-Levitt, delivered a very strong performance as Snowden, with the supporting cast including Shailene Woodley, Rhys Ifans, Melissa Leo, Timothy Olyphant, and Nicolas Cage. Sadly, the film received a mixed response from critics, and was a box office disappointment.
Since then, Stone has returned to television for his next two projects. One is a series of interviews with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and the other is directing a new fictional series based on the abusive Guantanamo prison. It will be his first venture into fictional television.
Oliver Stone is a three-time Oscar winner, and although he has mostly been stung by critics of his films, he remains a well-known name today in the film industry. The films he directed have been nominated for 31 Academy Awards, including eight for acting, six for screen writing, and three for directing. There is no denying that Stone has cemented himself a position among the legends of Hollywood.- Director
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Unlike virtually all his contemporaries, Ken Loach has never succumbed to the siren call of Hollywood, and it's virtually impossible to imagine his particular brand of British socialist realism translating well to that context.
After studying law at St. Peter's College, Oxford, he branched out into the theater, performing with a touring repertory company. This led to television, where in alliance with producer Tony Garnett he produced a series of docudramas, most notably the devastating "Cathy Come Home" episode of The Wednesday Play (1964), whose impact was so massive that it led directly to a change in the homeless laws.
He made his feature debut Poor Cow (1967) the following year, and with Kes (1969), he produced what is now acclaimed as one of the finest films ever made in Britain. However, the following two decades saw his career in the doldrums with his films poorly distributed (despite the obvious quality of work such as The Gamekeeper (1968) and Looks and Smiles (1981)) and his TV work in some cases never broadcast (most notoriously, his documentaries on the 1984 miners' strike).
He made a spectacular comeback in the 1990s, with a series of award-winning films firmly establishing him in the pantheon of great European directors - his films have always been more popular in mainland Europe than in his native country or the US (where Riff-Raff (1991) was shown with subtitles because of the wide range of dialects). Hidden Agenda (1990) won the Special Jury Prize at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival; Riff-Raff (1991) won the Felix award for Best European Film of 1992; Raining Stones (1993) won the Cannes Special Jury Prize for 1993, and Land and Freedom (1995) won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival - and was a substantial box-office hit in Spain where it sparked intense debate about its subject matter. This needless to say, was one of the reasons that Loach made the film!- Producer
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Barry Lee Levinson was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Violet (Krichinsky) and Irvin Levinson, who worked in furniture and appliance. He is of Russian Jewish descent. Levinson graduated from high school in 1960, attended college at American University in Washington, DC. He did well, but decided he wanted to go to Los Angeles. In LA, Levinson worked for the Oxford Company, studying acting, improvisation, and production; worked in comedy clubs, where he learned how to write; and began dating Valerie Curtin. In 1967, won a job writing for a local TV comedy show. He eventually performed his material on the show, winning a local Emmy. In the 70s, Levinson wrote for The Carol Burnett Show (1967) -- and won two Emmys in three years. Mel Brooks hired him for Silent Movie (1976), then, High Anxiety (1977). Levinson and Curtin married in 1975. They co-wrote: _...And Justice for All (1979)_, and other scripts. While Curtin performed in San Francisco, he wrote Diner (1982). MGM bought it and, with a budget of under $5 million, Levinson directed. Curtin and Levinson divorced in 1982. Levinson met Dianna Rhodes while he was filming Diner (1982). She lived in Baltimore, with her two children Patrick and Michelle Levinson. Levinson and Rhodes later married and had two more children, Sam Levinson and Jack Levinson. Proving himself as a director with The Natural (1984), he tackled his most ambitious project to that time in Rain Man (1988). Levinson went on to place his stamp on films like Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), and Bugsy (1991). After his many successes, Toys (1992) did poorly. Levinson had a hit with Disclosure (1994) in 1994, the same year the Levinsons moved to Marin County in Northern California to get away from the Hollywood scene.- Writer
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Carl Foreman was born on 23 July 1914 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Guns of Navarone (1961), High Noon (1952) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). He was married to Estelle Barr and Evelyn Smith. He died on 26 June 1984 in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Producer
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Born on August 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, California, to Charles Robert Redford, an accountant for Standard Oil, and Martha Redford, Charles Robert Redford, Jr. was a scrappy kid who stole hubcaps in high school and lost his college baseball scholarship at the University of Colorado because of drunkenness. However, as a high school student, he had displayed a certain aptitude as a caricaturist and this contributed to his decision to seriously study art. Redford then enjoyed a year-long sojourn travelling around Europe, hitchhiking, living in youth hostels and generally living the painter's life. Eventually, he came to realise that his work was unoriginal and not very good. He therefore returned to New York to pursue studies in theatrical design at the Pratt Institute of Art. He subsequently enrolled in acting classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
By the end of 1960, he was on Broadway in a series of plays including Barefoot in the Park, which launched him to fame. TV and stage experience coupled with all-American good looks led to movies and a breakthrough role in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), when the actor was 33. The Way We Were (1973) and The Sting (1973), both in 1973, made Redford No. 1 at the box office for the next three years. Redford used his clout to advance environmental causes and his riches to acquire Utah property, which he transformed into a ranch and the Sundance ski resort. In 1980, he established the Sundance Institute for aspiring filmmakers. Its annual film festival has become one of the world's most influential. Redford's directorial debut, Ordinary People (1980), won him the Academy Award for Best Director in 1981. He waited eight years before getting behind the camera again, this time for the screen version of John Nichols' acclaimed novel of the Southwest, The Milagro Beanfield War (1988). He scored with critics and fans in 1992 with the Brad Pitt film A River Runs Through It (1992), and again, in 1994, with Quiz Show (1994), which earned him yet another Best Director nomination.
Redford married Lola Van Wagenen on August 9, 1958; they divorced in 1985 after having four children, one of which died of sudden infant death syndrome. Daughter Shauna Redford, born November 15, 1960, is a painter who married Eric Schlosser on October 5, 1985, in Provo, Utah; her first child, born in January 1991, made Redford a grandfather. Son James Redford, a screenwriter, was born May 5, 1962. Daughter Amy Redford, an actress, was born October 22, 1970. Redford has a half-brother named William, who worked in medical research.- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
- Director
Writer-director Abraham Lincoln Polonsky, one of the most prominent victims of the Hollywood blacklisting of communists and social progressives in the post-World War II period, was born on December 5, 1910, in New York, New York. An unreconstructed Marxist, Polonsky never hid his membership in the Communist Party. (Indeed, it was known by the federal government during World War II, when he was a member of the O.S.S. working in France with the Resistance, given credence to the charge that the House Un-American Activities Committee wasn't interested so much in "ferreting out" communists and fellow-travelers as in making progressives of the F.D.R. coalition publicly repudiate their beliefs in a form of public penance.) After being named by former fellow O.S.S. member Sterling Hayden, Polonsky himself was arraigned before HUAC in 1951. After defying the committee by refusing to name names, he was blacklisted for 17 years by the U.S. film industry.
As director and screenwriter, Polonsky was an "auteur" of three of the great film noirs made in the last century: Body and Soul (1947) (screenplay; directed by fellow CPUSA member Robert Rossen, who kept his career by "naming names"), Force of Evil (1948) (which he wrote and directed), and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) (which he wrote using a front).
Polonsky studied English at City College of New York (CCNY) and, after briefly shipping out as a merchant seaman, went to Columbia Law School. Polonsky's father wanted him to have a profession, and he preferred the law over medicine. The young Polonsky had wanted to be a writer, and he taught English at CCNY while matriculating at Columbia Law, but the law was his first career. After graduation from Columbia Law, he became a practicing attorney, which ironically, led to his career in screenwriting.
Gertrude Berg, the creative force behind the popular radio show "The Goldbergs" (which later made the transition to TV), was a client of his firm. Needing background for an episode that would feature the machinations of the law, Polonsky was assigned to Berg as an expert. Berg was so impressed when Polonsky dictated a scene to his secretary, she hired him as one of her writers. Thus, in 1937, by a serendipitous route charted originally by his father, who wanted his son to be a professional, not a writer, Polonsky was on his way to becoming a hot, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and writer-director.
Polonsky eventually left Berg and became a labor organizer. In 1939, after organizing autoworkers at a General Motors plant near his home in Briarcliff, New York, he became the educational director of the Congress of Industrial Organization, the major labor federation for skilled workers, in upstate New York. While working as a labor organizer, Polonsky wrote his first novel, "The Discoverers", a novel dealing with New York City bohemians, radicals, and frustrated intellectuals. The book was optioned by a publisher that unfortunately went out of business; it remains unpublished to this day. However, he began to thrive as a novelist: Simon and Schuster published a novel he co-wrote, "The Goose Is Cooked," in 1942, and Little Brown published his sea-adventure story "The Enemy Sea," which originally had been serialized in "Colliers Magazine".
Paramount became interested in Polonsky and offered him a contract. However, as a dedicated anti-Nazi, Polonsky was determined to serve in the war despite being turned down for military service due to poor eyesight. Recruited by the O.S.S. (likely because of his communist background; it was said that during World War II, communists made the best secret agents due to their propensity for secrecy and their dedication to their ideology). He signed a contract with Paramount guaranteeing him a job after the war, and then was shipped off to London before serving in France as a liaison with the French underground.
Back from World War II, Polonsky alienated Paramount's head writer when he complained that his nominal boss had kept him waiting too long for their initial meeting. The peeved head writer gave him the Marlene Dietrich potboiler Golden Earrings (1947) as his first screenwriting assignment, and although he received a screen credit, he claimed that nothing he wrote made it to the screen. He quit Paramount to take a job with John Garfield's Enterprise Productions, which had a collectivist philosophy akin to the old Group Theater on Broadway, of which the former Julius Garfinkle (Garfield) had been a member. Garfield was a leftist, though not a member of the Communist Party, though he did employ director Robert Rossen, who was a member of CPUSA, as was Polonsky, who had joined during the Depression.
Working from Polonsky's script, Rossen shot the classic boxing drama Body and Soul (1947). Polonsky actually was allowed on the set (not a common occurrence for the film industry) and actively gave Rossen advice. Some critics see Polonsky as a "co-director," a claim Polonsky rejected as "no one," he said, "co-directs a Robert Rossen Picture." However, in the collectivist atmosphere of the studio, he was able to prevail over Rossen's conception of a "happy ending," ensuring that his own ending was part of the picture. Polonsky won an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for the film that was hailed as a classic by cineastes not long after its release. Garfield encouraged Polonsky to become a director, a development the screenwriter relished as it would give him more control over his screenplay and enable him to bring his vision to the screen just as he saw it. Adapting a 1940 crime novel "Tucker's People," Polonsky wrote and directed Force of Evil (1948), which has been hailed as the greatest low-budget film noir ever.
By the time production had wrapped, Enterprise had gone bankrupt, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was impressed enough to pick up the picture, though its hard-hitting indictment of big business, capitalism and political corruption was not Louis B. Mayer's cup of tea. MGM essentially dumped the picture as the bottom half of a double bill released for the Christmas season. This classic noir, with its indictment of capitalist society, was not exactly Christmas fare, and as Turner Classic Movies' Robert Osborne has said, it was quickly forgotten until rediscovered in the early 1960s. It has been considered a classic for at least a generation and had a big influence on Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), whose equation of crime with business, and business with criminal behavior had been aired 24 years before in Polonsky's debut. In a huge loss to American cinema, Polonsky's debut was to be his last directorial effort for 20 years.
Both Body and Soul (1947) and Force of Evil (1948) are about the deleterious effects of materialism on the soul, as both protagonists (both played by John Garfield operating at the peak of his talent) face the loss of their soul due to the temptation of big money. Indeed, it is easy to see why conservatives would be offended by Force of Evil (1948) as it arguably is the most radical film to have come out of mainstream Hollywood, and definitely is informed by Marxism.
Blacklisted after his uncooperative appearance before HUAC in April 1951, Polonsky did not get a chance to direct another film until 1968, when he helmed the production of the revisionist Western Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), which he turned into an indictment of genocide. Although he wrote screenplays and marketed them through fronts (most famously, with the indictment of racism Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), directed by Robert Wise, it wasn't until 1968 that he was credited on a film, for the screenplay for Don Siegel's exegesis of police corruption, Madigan (1968). After the release of the well-reviewed "Willie Boy," Polonsky enter4ed into "Fiddler on the Roof" territory and helmed the more light-hearted Romance of a Horsethief (1971). After that, he was told by his physician that his heart could not take the strain of movie directing, so he retired from that part of his work, though he continued to write screenplays until the end of his life.
After the tide of public opinion turned against the HUAC informers after Victor Navasky's 1980 history "Naming Names," Polonsky was rediscovered by scholars of the cinema. However, he proved a frustrating subject to those that wanted to ferret out the films that had been produced from his fronted-work screenplays. Similarly to his stand 40 years earlier, when he had refused to "name names," Polonsky refused to cite the pictures he had ghostwritten or to name the fronts he had used for his fronted screenplays during the days of the blacklist. He said he had given the men his word that he would not betray their confidence, and indeed, he refused to cite his anonymous work as he felt it would have gone back on his pledge to the men who had helped him through a tough period, as it would have resulted in them being denied credit for the work. Polonsky had bargained with them in good faith, and a man of principle, he refused to go back on his pledge to them.
An unrepentant Marxist until his death, Polonsky publicly objected when director Irwin Winkler sanitized his script for Guilty by Suspicion (1991) to make the character played by Robert De Niro a liberal rather than a communist. He also was prominent in objecting to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences awarding an honorary Academy Award to director Elia Kazan, who was the most prominent of the people who "named names" before HUAC.
Abraham Polonsky died of a heart-attack in Beverly Hills, California, on October 26, 1999, convinced that he had been exonerated by history. As the auteur of three classic films that will live on in cinema history, he was right.- Actor
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Imposing, barrel-chested and often silver-haired Brian Dennehy was a prolific US actor, well respected on both screen and stage over many decades. He was born in July 1938 in Bridgeport, CT, and attended Columbia University in New York City on a football scholarship. Brian majored in history, before moving on to Yale to study dramatic arts. He first appeared in minor screen roles in such fare as Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), Semi-Tough (1977) and Foul Play (1978) and proved popular with casting directors, leading to regular work. However, he really got himself noticed by movie audiences in the box-office hit First Blood (1982) as the bigoted sheriff determined to run Vietnam veteran "John Rambo" (played by Sylvester Stallone) out of his town. Dennehy quickly escalated to stronger supporting or co-starring roles in films including the Cold War thriller Gorky Park (1983), as a benevolent alien in Cocoon (1985), a corrupt sheriff in the western Silverado (1985), a tough but smart cop in F/X (1986) and a cop-turned-writer alongside hit man James Woods in Best Seller (1987). In 1987, Dennehy turned in one of his finest performances as cancer-ridden architect "Stourley Kracklite" in Peter Greenaway's superb The Belly of an Architect (1987), for which he won the Best Actor Award at the 1987 Chicago Film Festival. More strong performances followed. He reprised prior roles for Cocoon: The Return (1988) and F/X2 (1991), and turned in gripping performances in three made-for-TV films: a sadistic small-town bully who gets his grisly comeuppance in In Broad Daylight (1991), real-life serial killer John Wayne Gacy in the chilling To Catch a Killer (1992) and a corrupt union boss in Teamster Boss: The Jackie Presser Story (1992). In 1993, Dennehy appeared in the role of police "Sgt. Jack Reed" in the telemovie Jack Reed: Badge of Honor (1993), and reprised the role in four sequels, which saw him for the first time become involved in co-producing, directing and writing screen productions! Demand for his services showed no signs of abating, and he put in further memorable performances in Romeo + Juliet (1996), as bad-luck-ridden "Willy Loman" in Death of a Salesman (2000) (which earned him a Golden Globe Award), he popped up in the uneven Spike Lee film She Hate Me (2004) and appears in the remake Assault on Precinct 13 (2005). The multi-talented Dennehy also had a rich theatrical career and appeared both in the United States and internationally in dynamic stage productions including "Death of a Salesman" (for which he picked up the 1999 Best Actor Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award), "A Touch of the Poet", "Long Day's Journey into Night" (for which he picked up another Tony Award in 2003) and in Eugene O'Neill's heart-wrenching "The Iceman Cometh."- Director
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Norman Jewison was an award-winning, internationally acclaimed filmmaker who produced and directed some of the world's most memorable, entertaining and socially important films, exploring controversial and complicated subjects and giving them a universal accessibility. Some of his most well-known works include the pre-glasnost political satire The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, the original The Thomas Crown Affair, the groundbreaking civil rights-era drama In the Heat of the Night (winner of five Academy Awards, including Best Picture), the first rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, the futuristic cult hit Rollerball, hit musical comedy-drama Fiddler on the Roof, the romantic comedy Moonstruck, the courtroom drama ...And Justice For All, the military drama A Soldier's Story, the labor movement picture F.I.S.T., the war dramas The Statement and In Country, and the masterfully told story of Reuben 'Hurricane' Carter, The Hurricane, among many others.
Jewison was personally nominated for four Oscars and received three Emmy Awards; his films received 46 nominations and won 12 Academy Awards. In 1999, Jewison received the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the Academy Awards.
In Canada, his life's work has been recognized with the Governor General's Performing Arts Award, and he was named a Member of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the Order of Ontario and a Companion of the Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian honour. In 2010, Jewison was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America.
Jewison was committed to advancing the art of storytelling and filmmaking, both through his groundbreaking films, and through his creation of the Canadian Film Centre (CFC) in 1986, which opened its doors in Toronto in 1988. The CFC is a charitable cultural organization which drives the future of Canadian storytelling.- Diane Abbott was born on 27 September 1953 in Paddington, London, England, UK. She is an actress, known for Black Cab (2000), The All Star Impressions Show (2009) and Babyfather (2001). She was previously married to David Thompson.
- Tam Dalyell was born on 9 August 1932 in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. He died on 26 January 2017 in Scotland, UK.
- Alexander Dubcek (27 November 1921 - 7 November 1992) was a Slovak politician who served as the First Secretary of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC) (de factors leader of Czechoslovakia) from January 1968 to April 1969. He attempted to reform the communist government during the Prague Spring but was forced to resign following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968.
- Robin Cook was born on 28 February 1946 in Bellshill, Lanarkshire, Scotland, UK. He was married to Gaynor Regan and Margaret Katherine Whitmore. He died on 6 August 2005 in Ben Stack, near Laxford Bridge, Highland, Scotland, UK.
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- Writer
Paul Foot was born on 8 November 1937 in Haifa, Palestine. He was an actor and writer, known for Private Eye TV (1971), Horizon (1964) and Thinking Aloud (1984). He was married to Roseanne Harvey and Monica Beckinsale. He died on 18 July 2004 in Stansted, Essex, England, UK.- David Dellinger was born on 22 August 1915 in Wakefield, Massachusetts, USA. He was an actor, known for Ethan Frome (1992), Ten for Two: The John Sinclair Freedom Rally (1972) and The Source (1999). He was married to Elizabeth Peterson. He died on 25 May 2004 in Montpelier, Vermont, USA.
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John Steinbeck was the third of four children and the only son born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. His father was County Treasurer and his mother, a former schoolteacher. John graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and attended classes at Stanford University, leaving in 1925 without a degree. He was variously employed as a sales clerk, farm laborer, ranch hand and factory worker. In 1925, he traveled by freight from Los Angeles to New York, where he was a construction worker. From 1926-1928, he was a caretaker in Lake Tahoe, CA. His first novel, "Cup of Gold," was published in 1929. During the 1930s, he produced most of his famous novels ("To a God Unknown," "Tortilla Flat," "In Dubious Battle," "Of Mice and Men," and his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Grapes of Wrath"). In 1941, he moved with the singer who would become his second wife to New York City. They had two sons, Thom (b. 1944) and John IV (b. 1946). In 1948, his close friend Ed Ricketts died, he went through a divorce, he took a a tour of Russia, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His wrote the screenplay for Viva Zapata! (1952), and 17 of his works have been made into movies. He received three Academy Award nominations. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. US President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the United States Medal of Freedom in 1964, and he was commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp on what would have been his 75th birthday. His ashes lie in Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas.- Amilcar Cabral was born on 12 September 1924 in Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau. He was married to Maia Helena Rodrigues and Ana Maria Voss de si. He died on 20 January 1973 in Conakry, Guinea.
- Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein was an Egyptian politician who served as the second president of Egypt from 1954 until his death in 1970. Nasser led the 1952 overthrow of the monarchy and introduced far-reaching land reforms the following year. Following a 1954 attempt on his life by a Muslim Brotherhood member, he cracked down on the organization, put President Mohamed Naguib under house arrest and assumed executive office. He was formally elected president in June 1956.
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Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born to a middle-class family in Rosario, Santa Fe Province, Argentina, on June 14, 1928. Disgusted by the corrupt Argentine military dictatorship, Guevara became a dedicated Marxist while in his teens. As a student he vowed to devote his life to revolutionary causes, and in 1953 he received a medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires. He left Argentina later that year to take part in a Communist revolt in Guatemala. There he adopted his revolutionary nickname and nom de guerre of "Che", the local slang for "pal." When the revolution in Guatemala failed the following year, Che fled to Mexico where he was introduced to another Communist revolutionary in exile, Fidel Castro.
Joining Castro's July 26 Movement, named after the date of Castro's aborted 1953 revolution in Cuba, Guevara sailed with Castro and over 80 guerrillas to Cuba, where they landed on December 2, 1956, bent on overthrowing Gen. Fulgencio Batista's government. The invasion force was decimated by a combination of fierce attacks by government troops and air strikes, and Castro, Guevara and about 10 others fled to the Sierra Maestra mountains of southern Cuba and established a base there. In July 1957 Che was assigned command of half of Castro's forces and given the rank of Comandante, a title he shared only with Castro himself. For the next year and a half he led his insurgents against government forces in the province of Las Villas, aided by the growing hatred by the population of Batista's corrupt and brutal government. Castro's forces were bolstered by help in both recruits from and material assistance by the local population. Che's attack against and decisive defeat of government forces in Santa Clara in December 1958 sealed the fate of Batista's crumbling government. He fled into exile on January 1, 1959, and Castro's troops marched unopposed into Havana a week later. After Castro assumed power, Che became one of his most trusted advisers and a leading international revolutionary and was appointed Minister of Agriculture. In 1960 he wrote a book titled "Guerilla Warfare," a manual for Third World insurgents, as part of his plan to spread Communism throughout the world. Che resigned his government post in Cuba in 1965 and traveled widely to Africa and other insurgent hot spots in the world, including the Belgian Congo, where he organized local Communists in revolts against the colonial government and trained Cuban contingents there. The training included taking courses in French, it was the language of Belgium, the Congo's colonial power, and was also spoken by many locals. Guevara wanted to make sure his men were able to effectively communicate with the locals in their own language.
In November 1966 he surfaced in Bolivia to organize a revolt by local Communist insurgents. However, the "revolution" there didn't garner much support from the Bolivian peasantry, most of whom were poorly uneducated (or not educated at all) and spoke mostly local Indian dialects rather than Spanish, which made communication with them difficult. They also preferred to support the Bolivian government rather than a group of mostly foreign revolutionaries they neither knew nor trusted, and they often reported the locations and numbers of Che's forces to Bolivian military authorities. After a long and unsuccessful campaign during which Che's men were relentlessly pursued and whittled down by government troops, his "revolt" in Bolivia came to an abrupt end. On October 7, 1967, he and the surviving members of his group were ambushed and captured by government soldiers. Two days later, on October 9, Che was executed by a Bolivian firing squad, supposedly acting under orders from the CIA, which was training the Bolivian army.- Actor
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Dick Gregory was born on 12 October 1932 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for The Hot Chick (2002), The Leisure Seeker (2017) and Reno 911! (2003). He was married to Lillian Gregory. He died on 19 August 2017 in Washington, District of Columbia, USA.- Philip Agee was born on 19 July 1935 in Tacoma Park, Florida, USA. He was married to Giselle Roberge and Janet Wasserberger. He died on 7 January 2008 in Havana, Cuba.
- Arthur Scargill was born on 11 January 1938 in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, England, UK. He was previously married to Anne Harper.
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born in Birán, Holguin Province, Cuba, the fifth of nine children of Ángel María Bautista Castro y Argiz, a plantation owner originally from Galicia, Spain, who operated a plantation in Cuba's Oriente Province. His mother, Lina Ruz González, was a servant in his father's home who bore Fidel out of wedlock (they later were married several years after Angel's first wife died). Known as a rebellious, loud, and troublesome child, Fidel was sent to a Jesuit boarding school in Santiago de Cuba, where he was often teased by his wealthier classmates who called him a "peasant." He later attended Belen College before enrolling at the University of Havana, where he earned a law degree. After graduating from the university, Castro briefly practiced law, before he went on to marry Mirta Diaz-Balart, a wealthy philosophy student with family ties to Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. They had a son, Fidelito, but after 5 years, the couple divorce and went their separate ways. After several years in prison and exile (he lived in Mexico and New York City before starting the revolution) Castro led an attack on the Moncada barracks on July 26, 1953. The attack, which was a major attack on Batista's hold of Cuba, found Castro once again imprisoned before he was released. After his release he went to the Yucatan, where he organized a rebel force that landed in Cuba in 1958 and after many successful battles, Castro rode triumphantly into Havana on January 8, 1959.- Michael Foot was born on 23 July 1913 in Plymouth, Devon, England, UK. He was a writer, known for The Biter Bit (1943), Yellow Caesar (1941) and Young Veteran (1940). He was married to Jill Craigie. He died on 3 March 2010 in Hampstead, London, England, UK.
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Tariq Ali was born on 21 October 1943 in Lahore, Punjab, British India [now Pakistan]. He is a producer and writer, known for Partition (1987), The Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree and Wittgenstein (1993).- Additional Crew
- Editor
Ed Vulliamy was born on 1 August 1954 in Notting Hill, London, England, UK. He is an editor, known for World in Action (1963), Dispatches (1987) and Democracy Now! (2001).- Actor
- Producer
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Byrne was the eldest of six children born to a family in Dublin, Ireland. His father was a cooper and his mother a hospital worker. He was raised Catholic and educated by the Irish Christian Brothers. He spent five years of his childhood in a seminary training to be a Catholic priest. He later said, "I spent five years in the seminary and I suppose it was assumed that you had a vocation. I have realized subsequently that I didn't have one at all. I don't believe in God. But I did believe at the time in this notion that you were being called." He attended University College Dublin, where he studied archaeology and linguistics, and became proficient in Irish. He played football (soccer) in Dublin with the Stella Maris Football Club.
Byrne worked in archaeology after he left UCD but maintained his love of the Irish language, eventually writing Draíocht (Magic), the first drama in Irish on Ireland's national Irish television station, TG4, in 1996.
He discovered his acting ability as a young adult. Before that he worked at several occupations: archaeologist, cook, bullfighter, schoolteacher of Spanish. He began acting when he was 29 - at first on stage at the Focus Theatre and the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, later joining the Royal Court Theatre and the Royal National Theatre in London.
Byrne came to prominence in the final season of the Irish television show The Riordans, later starring in the spin-off series, Bracken. He made his film debut in 1981 as Lord Uther Pendragon in John Boorman's King Arthur epic, Excalibur.
Byrne was featured as therapist Dr. Paul Weston in the critically acclaimed HBO series In Treatment (2008).
In his return to theater in 2008, he appeared as King Arthur in Lerner and Loewe's Camelot with the New York Philharmonic, which was featured in a PBS broadcast in the Live From Lincoln Center series in May of 2008.
Byrne did not visit America until he was 37. In 1988, Byrne married actress Ellen Barkin with whom he has two children. The couple separated amicably in 1993 and divorced in 1999. Byrne resides in Brooklyn, New York.
In November 2004, Byrne was appointed a UNICEF Ireland Ambassador.
In 2007 Byrne was presented with the first of the newly created Volta awards at the 5th Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. This was for lifetime achievement in acting. He also received the Honorary Patronage of the University Philosophical Society, of Trinity College, Dublin, on February 20, 2007. He was awarded an honorary degree in late 2007 by the National University of Ireland, Galway, in recognition of his "outstanding contribution to Irish and international film".- Director
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Miguel Littin was born on 9 August 1942 in Palmilla, Colchagua, VI Region, Chile. He is a director and writer, known for La Última Luna (2005), Letters from Marusia (1975) and Jackal of Nahueltoro (1969). He has been married to Ely Menz since 1963. They have one child.- Director
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Nick Broomfield was born on 30 January 1948 in London, England, UK. He is a director and producer, known for Ghosts (2006), Battle for Haditha (2007) and Aileen Wuornos: Selling of a Serial Killer (1992).- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
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Ron Fricke is known for Samsara (2011), Baraka (1992) and Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005).- Writer
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John Pilger was born on 9 October 1939 in Bondi, New South Wales, Australia. He was a writer and director, known for The War You Don't See (2010), The World About Us (1967) and Heroes: A John Pilger Report (1981). He was married to Scarth Flett. He died on 30 December 2023 in London, England, UK.- Director
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Allan Francovich was born on 23 March 1941 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a director and producer, known for On Company Business (1980), The Houses Are Full of Smoke (1987) and The Maltese Double Cross (1994). He died on 17 April 1997 in Houston, Texas, USA.- Actor
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Brian Cox is an Emmy Award-winning Scottish actor. He was born on June 1, 1946 in Dundee, Scotland, to Mary Ann Guillerline Cox, maiden surname McCann, a spinner, and Charles McArdle Campbell Cox, a shopkeeper and butcher. His father was of Irish ancestry and his mother was of Irish and Scottish descent.
Cox first came to attention in the early 1970s with performances in numerous television films. His first big break was as Dr. Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter (1986). The film was not overly successful at the box office, although Cox's career prospects and popularity continued to develop. Through the 1990s, he appeared in nearly 20 films and television series, as well as making numerous television guest appearances. More recently, Cox has had roles in some major films, including The Corruptor (1999), The Ring (2002) and X2 (2003). He was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2003 Queen's New Year's Honours List for his services to drama.- Victor Marchetti was born on 23 December 1929 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, USA. He was married to Bernice Baran. He died on 19 October 2018 in Ashburn, Virginia, USA.
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Douglas Henshall was born in Glasgow, Scotland in November 1965. His mother was a nurse and his father a salesman. He is the youngest of three children and has two older sisters. He grew up in Barrhead and attended Barrhead High School. Whilst at school a friend asked him to join The Scottish Youth Theatre based in Glasgow. After leaving school, he moved to London to train at Mountview Theatre School. He returned to Glasgow after training where he joined the 7:84 theater company. Eventually, he went back to live in London where he received critical acclaim for his theater work, notably "Life of Stuff" at the Donmar Warehouse (1993) and "American Buffalo" at the Young Vic (1997).
One of his first successful film roles was as Edgar in Angels and Insects (1995) before going on to star in Orphans (1998), Twice Upon a Yesterday (1998), Lawless Heart (2001) and It's All About Love (2003) .
He has also starred in many television series and is known for his roles in Psychos (1999), Kid in the Corner (1999), Loving You (2003) and Frances Tuesday (2004).
Douglas has also performed in plays for BBC radio, including the role of Romeo in "Romeo and Juliet (1999), David in "The Long Farewell" (2002), Jack Parlabane in "Bampot Central" (2004) and Richard in "Richard III" (2004).
In the summer of 2002, Douglas returned to the London stage where he performed the role of Michael Bakunin in Tom Stoppard's new trilogy of plays, 'The Coast of Utopia', at The National Theatre.
During 2004 he continued stage work starring as John Proctor in 'Arthur Miller' 's 'The Crucible' at The Crucible in Sheffield and Thomas Huxley in 'Darwin in Malibu' by Crispin Whittell, at the Hampstead Theatre.
In 2005 Douglas made his West End debut at The Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue playing Biff Loman in the critically acclaimed production of Arthur Miller' 's play 'Death of a Salesman', alongside Brian Dennehy.- Writer
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Jill Craigie was born on March 7, 1911 in Fulham, London, England as Noreen Joan Craigie. Her father, Arthur Charles Craigie, worked as a clerk in a theatre box office. Her mother, Sonia Elkind, was born in Russia. She married first the sculptor Claude Begbie-Clench, but this marriage did not last long: he was said to be an alcoholic. They had one daughter together. In 1938 she married the author John E F (Jeffrey) Dell, again this marriage ended in divorce. In 1949 she married the MP and author Michael Foot. He was deputy-leader (under James Callaghan) of the Labour Party from 1976-1980 and leader from 1980-1983. They were married for 50 years.- Director
- Actor
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Philip Saville was born on 28 October 1930 in London, England, UK. He was a director and actor, known for Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986) and The Buccaneers (1995). He was married to Nina Zuckerman and Jane Arden. He died on 22 December 2016 in Hampstead, Camden, London, England, UK.- Actor
- Director
- Writer
He was interested in directing films at the age of 19 and he made several shorts. As he wasn't admitted to the National Film School, he decided to dedicate himself to acting, and made his debut in the theatre in 1988 before moving to cinema and television. Fame came with the parts he played in such films as Riff-Raff (1991) by Ken Loach, Braveheart (1995) by Mel Gibson and Trainspotting (1996) by Danny Boyle, but above all when he won for best leading actor at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998 for My Name Is Joe (1998), once again by Loach. The Magdalene Sisters (2002) is the second feature-length film he has directed. He also directed a few episodes of the BBC TV series, Cardiac Arrest (1994), which earned him a best director nomination from the Royal Television Society.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
Sandi Sissel was born on 9 August 1949 in Paris, Texas, USA. She is a cinematographer and director, known for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), Salaam Bombay! (1988) and The People Under the Stairs (1991).- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Actor
Yulian Semyonov was born on 8 October 1931 in Moscow, RSFSR, USSR [now Russia]. He was a writer and assistant director, known for Solaris (1972), Noch na 14-y paralleli (1971) and Po tonkomu ldu (1966). He died on 5 September 1993.- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Writer
- Director
Sergio Leone was virtually born into the cinema - he was the son of Roberto Roberti (A.K.A. Vincenzo Leone), one of Italy's cinema pioneers, and actress Bice Valerian. Leone entered films in his late teens, working as an assistant director to both Italian directors and U.S. directors working in Italy (usually making Biblical and Roman epics, much in vogue at the time). Towards the end of the 1950s he started writing screenplays, and began directing after taking over The Last Days of Pompeii (1959) in mid-shoot after its original director fell ill. His first solo feature, The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), was a routine Roman epic, but his second feature, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), a shameless remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961), caused a revolution. It was the first Spaghetti Western, and shot T.V. cowboy Clint Eastwood to stardom (Leone wanted Henry Fonda or Charles Bronson but couldn't afford them). The two sequels, For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), were shot on much higher budgets and were even more successful, though his masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), in which Leone finally worked with Fonda and Bronson, was mutilated by Paramount Pictures and flopped at the U.S. box office. He directed Duck, You Sucker! (1971) reluctantly (as producer he hired Peter Bogdanovich to direct but he left before shooting began), and turned down offers to direct The Godfather (1972) in favor of his dream project, which became Once Upon a Time in America (1984). He died in 1989 after preparing an even more expensive Soviet co-production on the World War II siege of Leningrad.- Director
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- Producer
Godfrey Reggio is a pioneer of a film style that creates poetic images of extraordinary emotional impact for audiences worldwide. Reggio is prominent in the film world for his QATSI trilogy, essays of visual images and sound that chronicle the destructive impact of the modern world on the environment. Reggio, who spent 14 years in silence and prayer while studying to be a monk, has a history of service not only to the environment but to youth street gangs, the poor, and the community as well.
Born in New Orleans in 1940 and raised in southwest Louisiana, Reggio entered the Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic pontifical order, at age 14. He spent 14 years of his adolescence and early adulthood in fasting, silence, and prayer. Based in New Mexico during the 1960s, Reggio taught grade school, secondary school, and college. In 1963, he co-founded Young Citizens for Action, a community organization project that aided juvenile street gangs. Following this, Reggio co-founded La Clinica de la Gente, a facility that provided medical care to 12,000 community members in Santa Fe, and La Gente, a community-organizing project in Northern New Mexico's barrios. In 1972, he co-founded the Institute for Regional Education in Santa Fe, a non-profit foundation focused on media development, the arts, community organization, and research. In 1974 and 1975, with funding from the American Civil Liberties Union, Reggio co-organized a multi-media public interest campaign on the invasion of privacy and the use of technology to control behavior.
_Koyaanisqatsi (1983)_, Reggio's debut as a film director and producer, is the first film of the QATSI trilogy. The title is a Hopi word meaning "life out of balance." Created between 1975 and 1982, the film is an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds--urban life and technology versus the environment. The musical score was composed by renowned composer Philip Glass. Powaqqatsi (1988), Reggio's second film, conveys a humanist philosophy about the earth, the encroachment of technology on nature and ancient cultures, and the splendor that disappears as a result. The film focuses on the so-called modern way of life and the concept of the Global Village, entwining the distinctive textures of ancient and so-called Third World cultures. Powaqqatsi was co-written, co-produced and directed by Reggio and had music composed by Philip Glass between 1985 and 1987. In 1991 Reggio directed Anima Mundi (1991), a film commissioned by Bulgari, the Italian jewelry company, for the World Wide Fund for Nature, which used the film for its Biological Diversity Program. Accompanied by the music of Philip Glass, the 28-minute Anima Mundi is a montage of intimate images of over seventy animal species that celebrates the magnificence and variety of the world's fauna.
In 1993, Reggio was invited to develop a new school of exploration and production in the arts, technology, and mass media being founded by the Benetton company. Called Abrica--Future, Presente, it opened in May 1995, in Treviso, Italy, just outside Venice. While serving as the initial director of the school through 1995, Reggio co-authored the 7-minute film Evidence (1995) that provides another point of view to observe the subtle but profound effects of modern living on children. In 2002, Godfrey Reggio completed Naqoyqatsi (2002), the final film of the QATSI trilogy, again with music by Philip Glass. Currently, Reggio is in the initial stages of production on a new film, working with a narrative structure for the first time, that will explore the negative impact that consumerism and fundamentalism has had on the world. He resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is a frequent lecturer on philosophy, technology, and film.- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Alanis Obomsawin was born on 31 August 1932 in Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA. She is a director and producer, known for Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), Waban-aki: People from Where the Sun Rises (2006) and Is the Crown at War with Us? (2002).- Actor
- Director
- Producer
Irish actor Liam Cunningham was an electrician in the mid-'80s. He saw an ad for an acting school and he decided to give it a try. His first film role was as a policeman in "Into the West." Since then, he has been involved in many films and theater productions on both sides of the Atlantic.- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
Barry Hines was born on 30 June 1939 in Hoyland Common, Barnsley, Yorkshire, England, UK. He was a writer, known for Kes (1969), Looks and Smiles (1981) and The Gamekeeper (1980). He was married to Eleanor Mulvey and Margaret Croft. He died on 18 March 2016 in South Yorkshire, England, UK.- Director
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- Additional Crew
Mike Leigh is an English film and theatre director, screenwriter and playwright. He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and further at the Camberwell School of Art, the Central School of Art and Design and the London School of Film Technique. He began his career as a theatre director and playwright in the mid-1960s, before transitioning to making televised plays and films for BBC Television in the 1970s and '80s. Leigh is known for his lengthy rehearsal and improvisation techniques with actors to build characters and narrative for his films. His purpose is to capture reality and present "emotional, subjective, intuitive, instinctive, vulnerable films." His films and stage plays, according to critic Michael Coveney, "comprise a distinctive, homogenous body of work which stands comparison with anyone's in the British theatre and cinema over the same period."
Leigh's most notable works include the black comedy-drama Naked (1993), for which he won the Best Director Award at Cannes, the Oscar-nominated, BAFTA- and Palme d'Or-winning drama Secrets & Lies (1996), the Golden Lion-winning working-class drama Vera Drake (2004), and the Palme d'Or-nominated biopic Mr. Turner (2014). Other well-known films include the comedy-dramas Life Is Sweet (1990) Meantime (1983) and Career Girls (1997), the Gilbert and Sullivan biographical film Topsy-Turvy (1999) and the bleak working-class drama All or Nothing (2002). He won great success with American audiences with the female led films, Vera Drake (2004) starring Imelda Staunton, Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) with Sally Hawkins, the family drama Another Year (2010), and the historical drama Peterloo (2018). His stage plays include Smelling A Rat, It's A Great Big Shame, Greek Tragedy, Goose-Pimples, Ecstasy and Abigail's Party.
Leigh has helped to create stars - Liz Smith in Hard Labour, Alison Steadman in Abigail's Party, Brenda Blethyn in Grown-Ups, Antony Sher in Goose-Pimples, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in Meantime, Jane Horrocks in Life is Sweet, David Thewlis in Naked - and remarked that the list of actors who have worked with him over the years - including Paul Jesson, Phil Daniels, Lindsay Duncan, Lesley Sharp, Kathy Burke, Stephen Rea, Julie Walters - "comprises an impressive, almost representative, nucleus of outstanding British acting talent." His aesthetic has been compared to the sensibility of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu and the Italian Federico Fellini. Ian Buruma, writing in The New York Review of Books in January 1994, commented: "It is hard to get on a London bus or listen to the people at the next table in a cafeteria without thinking of Mike Leigh. Like other original artists, he has staked out his own territory. Leigh's London is as distinctive as Fellini's Rome or Ozu's Tokyo."
Leigh was born to Phyllis Pauline (née Cousin) and Alfred Abraham Leigh, a doctor. Leigh was born at Brocket Hall in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, which was at that time a maternity home. His mother, in her confinement, went to stay with her parents in Hertfordshire for comfort and support while her husband was serving as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Leigh was brought up in the Broughton area of Salford, Lancashire. He attended North Grecian Street Junior School. He is from a Jewish family; his paternal grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled in Manchester. The family name, originally Lieberman, had been anglicised in 1939 "for obvious reasons". When the war ended, Leigh's father began his career as a general practitioner in Higher Broughton, "the epicentre of Leigh's youngest years and the area memorialised in Hard Labour." Leigh went to Salford Grammar School, as did the director Les Blair, his friend, who produced Leigh's first feature film Bleak Moments (1971). There was a strong tradition of drama in the all-boys school, and an English master, Mr Nutter, supplied the library with newly published plays.
Outside school Leigh thrived in the Manchester branch of Labour Zionist youth movement Habonim. In the late 1950s he attended summer camps and winter activities over the Christmas break all-round the country. Throughout this time the most important part of his artistic consumption was cinema, although this was supplemented by his discovery of Picasso, Surrealism, The Goon Show, and even family visits to the Hallé Orchestra and the D'Oyly Carte. His father, however, was deeply opposed to the idea that Leigh might become an artist or an actor. He forbade him his frequent habit of sketching visitors who came to the house and regarded him as a problem child because of his creative interests. In 1960, "to his utter astonishment", he won a scholarship to RADA. Initially trained as an actor at RADA, Leigh started to hone his directing skills at East 15 Acting School where he met the actress, Alison Steadman.
Leigh responded negatively to RADA's agenda, found himself being taught how to "laugh, cry and snog" for weekly rep purposes and so became a sullen student. He later attended Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (in 1963), the Central School of Art and Design and the London School of Film Technique on Charlotte Street. When he had arrived in London, one of the first films he had seen was Shadows (1959), an improvised film by John Cassavetes, in which a cast of unknowns was observed 'living, loving and bickering' on the streets of New York and Leigh had "felt it might be possible to create complete plays from scratch with a group of actors." Other influences from this time included Harold Pinter's The Caretaker-"Leigh was mesmerised by the play and the (Arts Theatre) production"- Samuel Beckett, whose novels he read avidly, and the writing of Flann O'Brien, whose "tragi-comedy" Leigh found particularly appealing. Influential and important productions he saw in this period included Beckett's Endgame, Peter Brook's King Lear and in 1965 Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, a production developed through improvisations, the actors having based their characterisations on people they had visited in a mental hospital. The visual worlds of Ronald Searle, George Grosz, Picasso, and William Hogarth exerted another kind of influence. He played small roles in several British films in the early 1960s, (West 11, Two Left Feet) and played a young deaf-mute, interrogated by Rupert Davies, in the BBC Television series Maigret. In 1964-65, he collaborated with David Halliwell, and designed and directed the first production of Little Malcolm and his Struggle Against the Eunuchs at the Unity Theatre.
Leigh has been described as "a gifted cartoonist ... a northerner who came south, slightly chippy, fiercely proud (and critical) of his roots and Jewish background; and he is a child of the 1960s and of the explosion of interest in the European cinema and the possibilities of television."
Leigh has cited Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray among his favourite film makers. In addition to those two, in an interview recorded at the National Film Theatre at the BFI on 17 March 1991; Leigh also cited Frank Capra, Fritz Lang, Yasujiro Ozu and even Jean-Luc Godard, "...until the late 60s." When pressed for British influences, in that interview, he referred to the Ealing comedies "...despite their unconsciously patronizing way of portraying working-class people" and the early 60s British New Wave films. When asked for his favorite comedies, he replied, One, Two, Three, La règle du jeu and "any Keaton". The critic David Thomson has written that, with the camera work in his films characterised by 'a detached, medical watchfulness', Leigh's aesthetic may justly be compared to the sensibility of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. Michael Coveney: "The cramped domestic interiors of Ozu find many echoes in Leigh's scenes on stairways and in corridors and on landings, especially in Grown-Ups, Meantime and Naked. And two wonderful little episodes in Ozu's Tokyo Story, in a hairdressing salon and a bar, must have been in Leigh's subconscious memory when he made The Short and Curlie's (1987), one of his most devastatingly funny pieces of work and the pub scene in Life is Sweet..."- J. Parnell Thomas was born on 16 January 1895 in Jersey City, New Jersey, USA. He died on 19 November 1970 in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA.
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- Actor
John Berry was born on 6 September 1917 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a director and writer, known for Ça va barder (1955), 'Round Midnight (1986) and A Captive in the Land (1990). He was married to Myriam Boyer and Gladys Berry. He died on 29 November 1999 in Paris, France.- Oscar-nominated screenwriter Albert Maltz was born on October 28, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from Columbia University in 1930, he attended the Yale School of Drama for two years as a tyro playwright. After striking out on his own as a dramatist, he developed sociopolitical plays which were destined to be produced by the left-wing theatrical companies the Theatre Union and the Group Theatre. He also wrote novels and short stories. In 1935, during the Great Depression, he joined the Communist Party.
Maltz labored as a screenwriter for Warner Bros., which had made its reputation in the 1930s for its socially aware dramas. He worked on the classic Casablanca (1942) and other feature films and documentaries during World War II. He wrote the Oscar-winning documentary The House I Live In (1945), a plea for racial tolerance, and was nominated for an Oscar for writing Pride of the Marines (1945).
Maltz wrote an article in 1945 for the "New Masses" that demanded more intellectual freedom from the Communist Party for its members. Pressure from the Party made him recant his position, which had a chilling effect on some other Party members and liberal supporters of the Party's right to exist.
In 1947, Maltz and other Party members (and suspected Party members and sympathizers) were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which had determined to investigate "communist infiltration" of the movie industry. Maltz and nine others were cited for contempt of Congress for their uncooperative behavior before the Committee, which included not "naming names" of other communists, and were dubbed the "Hollywood 10". All were fined and jailed, and they were also blacklisted by the American film industry.
Remaining a committed communist, Maltz continued to write, using "fronts" who sold his screenplays and received any writing credit alloted by the studios and WGA. He remained unrepentant about his progressive politics until the end, which came on August 26, 1985 when he died in Los Angeles at the age of 76. - Writer
- Additional Crew
Screenwriter Lester Cole, who is known in cinema history primarily as a member of the "Hollywood Ten," a group who defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigation into their political beliefs who were black-listed by the industry for their defiance, was born on June 19, 1904 in New York to a Polish immigrant family. His first desire was to be an actor, and Cole dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen in 1920. He began writing and directing plays, and in the 1920s and '30s, he worked primarily as an actor on the stage. He appeared in Painted Faces (1929) and Love at First Sight (1929) but made his name as a screenwriter. His first screenplay, W.C. Fields comedy If I Had a Million (1932) was made in 1932. In 1933, the first year of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, Cole and eight other screenwriters, including future Hollywood Ten members John Howard Lawson and Samuel Ornitz, organized the Screen Writers Guild (SWG), the first and most radical of the Hollywood guilds. Cole's politics were on the hard left, and he joined the Communist Party-USA in 1934.
Cole adhered to the Hollywood Ten's common front strategy of challenging HCUA's right to interrogate them on the basis of their political beliefs. Convicted of contempt of Congress, he was fined and served one year in prison. His unfinished script about the Mexican revolutionary general Emiliano Zapata later finished by fellow traveler John Steinbeck for former CP-USA members (and HUAC song-bird) Elia Kazan, who made Viva Zapata! (1952) starring Marlon Brando from the script.
After he got out of federal prison, Cole worked a series of odd jobs. He emigrated to London in 1961, but eventually returned to the U.S., where he began collaborating on screenplays using an assumed name. One of his scripts, written under the pseudonym "Gerald L.C. Copley", was made into the popular movie Born Free (1966). He also wrote his autobiography, "Hollywood Red" (1981) and reviewed films for "The People's World" and taught screen-writing at the University of California, Berkeley.
Lester Cole died of a heart attack on August 15, 1985. He was 81 years old.- Samuel Ornitz, a novelist and screenwriter best remembered now as as one of the "Hollywood Ten" of accused communists who defied the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and was blacklisted, was born on November 15, 1890 in New York, New York, at the height of the Progressive Era of American politics. His father was a prosperous dry-goods merchant, but Samuel did not follow his two older brothers into the business world but became an artist, a left-wing artist determined to replace the capitalist system.
The precocious Samule made his first progressive speech in public just after the dawn of the new 20th Century, at the tender age of 12. He became a writer, and had a success with his 1923 novel of Jewish immigrant life, "Haunch Paunch and Jowl".
In 1929, he was one of the writers for director Josef von Sternberg's The Case of Lena Smith (1929) at Paramount (which soon would be headed by B.P. Schulberg, whose son Budd Schulberg would be a pivotal figure in the witch trials of the late 1940s),a nd then moved over to William Randolph Hearst's Cosmpolitan Pictures for William A. Wellman's Chinatown Nights (1929). In 1932-33, he worked at R.K.O., the company capitalist-extraordinaire Joseph P. Kennedy created in the late 1920s from a vaudeville chain, poverty row studio, and film booking office, before moving on to Universal in 1934, where he labored on horror films and other programmers. He bounced around, working for the majors such as Paramount and 20th Century Fox, the major-minors such as Columbia, and Povery Row outfits such as Colonial Pictures. His last credited picture, Circumstantial Evidence (1945), was made by Monogram and released in 1945.
As a screenwriter, Ornitz never lived up to his early promise as a writer. However, he did have a major impact on Hollywood as an early organizer and board member of the Screen Writers Guild, the trade union organized in the mid-1930s as an answer to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, the industry's company union. The SWG was the first and most radical of the Guilds, and despised by the powers that be in Hollywood for its success in organizing labor.
Ornitz also distinguished himself as also one of the most outspoken m embers of Hollywood's left-wing/progressive community. However, his doctrinaire, party-line communism alienated many of his liberal colleagues and friends, such as his dogged insistence that there was no anti-Semitism in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. (he later backed off of this assertion.)
In 1947, Ornitz was arraigned by the HUAC. He and other members of the Hollywood Ten refused to answer the HUAC's questions about their involvement in the Communist Party, adopting a common front and maintaining party discipline. Ornitz was fined and sentenced to a year in prison for contempt of court, during which time he published his last major novel, "Bride of the Sabbath". Ornitz was blacklisted by Hollywood, and never again wrote for motion pictures, but continued writing novels until his death.
Samuel Ornitz died of cancer on March 10, 1957 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. He was 66 years old. - Writer
- Producer
Adrian Scott, the producer of progressive films who was blacklisted as one of the Hollywood 10, was born into a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Arlington, New Jersey, on February 6, 1912, to Mary (Redpath) and Allan Scott. He established his reputation as a writer on various magazines before finding employment in the movie industry. As a screenwriter, Scott worked on Keeping Company (1940), The Parson of Panamint (1941), We Go Fast (1941) and Mr. Lucky (1943), but it was as a producer he made his biggest mark in Hollywood, helping to create the genre later known as "film noir". In the mid-1940s at R.K.O., working with director Edward Dmytryk and screenwriter 'John Paxton ', Scott produced Murder, My Sweet (1944), a detective thriller based on 'Raymond Chander's's "Farewell My Lovely", with 'Dick Powell' as Philip Marlowe. The team next made Cornered (1945) (again with Dick Powell) and So Well Remembered (1947), with Scott producing Clifford Odets Deadline at Dawn (1946), directed by Harold Clurman. But it was for the gritty noir masterpiece Crossfire (1947), the first Hollywood film to deal with anti-semitism, that the group is best known. "Crossfire" was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Robert Ryan, Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Gloria Grahame), Best Director (Dmytryk), Best Writing-Screenplay (Paxton) and Best Picture (Scott). Scott and his collaborator Dymytrk had reached the summit of their careers; for Scott, it would be the last motion picture he'd ever produce. Both he and Dmytryk were called before the House Un-American Actitivies Committee in 1947 and refused to name names. As a part of a common defense strategy crafted by Communist Party lawyers (Scott had joined the Party in 1944), he and Dymytrk and the eight others who became known to posterity as "The Hollywood 10", refused to answer any questions other than their names and addresses. The even denied the Committee the right to query them as to their membership in the Screen Writers Guild. The 10 claimed that the Firstst Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave them the right to refuse HUAC's inquiry into their political beliefs as it was an unconstitutional violation of privacy. All members of the Hollywood 10 subsequently were found guilty of contempt of Congress and fined and jailed. All were blacklisted from the industry. Scott was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $1,000. (Dmytryk later recanted his communist past and was re-employed by Hollywood. Testifying before HUAC in 1951, he claimed that Scott had pressured him to put communist propaganda in his films.) On his part, Scott took on the Hollywood blacklist: He sued R.K.O. for wrongful dismissal, but the case was ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court in 1957. While blacklisted, Scott survived by writing for television under an assumed name, including such All-American fare as "Lassie" and the faintly subversive ("Steals from the rich/Gives to the poor!") "The Adventures of Robin Hood". He also produced one of the more remarkable American movies, the left-wing Salt of the Earth (1954), a film about a miner's strike that was made by Scott and other victims of the blacklist. Adrian Scott died of lung cancer in Los Angeles, on 25th December, 1973.- Writer
- Actor
Alvah Bessie was born on 4 June 1904 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Objective, Burma! (1945), Northern Pursuit (1943) and Smart Woman (1948). He was married to Sylviane L. Martin. He died on 21 July 1985 in Terra Linda, California, USA.- The Oscar-winning screenwriter, Ring Lardner, Jr., will always be known for one of two things: that he was the son of one of the greatest humorists American literature has produced, and he was one of the Hollywood 10, the ten film-makers who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigating subversion in Hollywood and were fined and jailed for the defiance.
The son of newspaper sports columnist and best-selling writer Ring Lardner, the future double Oscar winner was born on August 19, 1915 in Chicago, Illinois. Ring, Sr. (who was born Ringgold Wilmer Lardner) became famous for his "Saturday Evening Post" series, "You Know Me Al", fictional letters being sent from one baseball player to another. Mawell Perkins, editor-extraordinaire at the publishing house, Charles Scribners & Son, collected Lardner's columns and stories into publishable form (Ernest Hemingway, another Scribers writer, was a great fan) and they were a great success. Such was Lardner's renown, that 30 years after his death (while his son and namesake was still officially blacklisted), he was the first sportswriter inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, for meritorious contributions to baseball writing, in 1963.
On his part, Ring, Jr. became a reporter for the "New York Daily Mirror" after dropping out of Princeton. He moved West and became a publicist for producer David O. Selznick, where he met his future wife, who also worked for the producer. He also worked as a script doctor for Selznik, then went on to become a screenwriter, often working in collaboration.
During the Spanish Civil War, Lardner moved steadily left in his political thinking, and helped raise funds for the Republican cause. He joined the Communist Party and became involved in organizing anti-fascist demonstrations. Although his leftist politics were known to the studios, in the 1930s and early '40s, Hollywood did not shy away from hiring talented writers no matter what their political proclivities, and employed many known (as well as secret) communists.
In 1943, he and Michael Kanin won the Oscar in 1942 for their Woman of the Year (1942) screenplay. He wrote such great pictures as Laura (1944) for Otto Preminger and, in 1947, 20th Century Fox gave him a contract at $2,000 a week, making him one of the highest paid scribes in La-La Land. Ironically, at the time of this seeming triumph, his career and life were about to unravel.
When it was Lardner turn to be hauled before HUAC and asked, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?", he came up with a witty riposte.
"I could answer the question exactly the way you want, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning". After the appeals process against HUAC's citations for contempt of Congress played out, Lardner was sentenced to a year in prison and fined. More importantly, he was blacklisted and could not find work in Hollywood except under pseudonyms for work "fronted" by others. After the blacklist was officially broken when Preminger hired Dalton Trumbo to adapt Leon Uris's novel "Exodus" for his 1960 production (Kirk Douglas then immediately hired Trumbo to write a screenplay for his upcoming Spartacus (1960)), the blacklisted writers slowly returned to work under their own names. Lardner was hired by producer Martin Ransohoff, who respected writers more than did the average Hollywood producer, to write the screenplay for The Cincinnati Kid (1965) under his own name. His comeback was complete when, in 1971, he won his second Oscar for adapting Robert Hooker's comic novel, "M*A*S*H" (1970) (ironically, due to director Robert Altman's improvisational style, little of Lardner's dialogue remained in the movie). His career, though, had been effectively aborted by the blacklist, and he only was credited with two more screenplays during his lifetime.
Ring Lardner, Jr. was the last of the Hollywood 10 to die, passing away on Halloween, October 31, 2000, in New York City from cancer. He was 85 years old and had long outlived most of the witch-hunters who had tormented him. He was survived by his wife, Frances Chaney, and five children. - Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
John Howard Lawson is not the most famous member of the Hollywood 10, those filmmakers who defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities' inquiry into alleged "Communist subversion" in the Hollywood movie industry in 1947, but he was the central figure of the group--the mind if not the heart and soul of the Communist community in Hollywood. One of the founders and the first president of the Screenwriters Guild (now called the Writers' Guild of America), the first and most aggressive of the Hollywood guilds, he was the Communist Party's de facto cultural commissar in Hollywood, particularly as it affected writers.
Technically, New York-based American Communist Party (CPUSA) cultural commissar V.J. Jerome was his superior but in the Hollywood hierarchy, Lawson arguably was second only to Gerhart Eisler in authority. Eisler was the "boss" in his role as an agent of the Moscow-controlled Comintern, and thus outranked Lawson, who was not a member of the secret quasi-military organization. Like Eisler, he was unquestionably under the discipline of Moscow, and thus, in essence, answerable to Joseph Stalin, the spider at the center of the web. When the party wanted a member to come to heel, Lawson enforced the ukase. (Eisler's brother, film composer Hanns Eisler -- a good friend of "Hollywood 19" member Bertolt Brecht, was deported from the United States after his own 1947 HUAC testimony. On his part, Brecht willingly testified before HUAC, told them nonsense, then decamped for East Germany, where he lived out the rest of his life under the aegis of the Warsaw Pact.)
Like the rest of the Hollywood 10, Lawson would be blacklisted by the film and television industries during the late 1940s and through the 1950s.
Lawson was born into a wealthy family in New York City on September 25, 1894, the son of Simeon Levy and the former Belle Hart Lawson,who were Jews. He was named after the 19th century British prison reformer John Howard. With a strong desire to assimilate, Simeon changed the family name to Lawson so that his children would not experience anti-Semitism and had them join a Christian Church. However, John Howard Lawson would adhere to Jewish dietary laws all his life.
He matriculated at at Williams College, earning a bachelor of arts degree in 1914. (Oscar-winning director Elia Kazan, whom Lawson would deride as a "stool pigeon" for cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee, was also an alumnus of that small, prestigious private college located in Massachusetts' Berkshire Mountains.) He contributed to the school's literary magazine, served as editor of the year book and wrote his first play, "A Hindoo Love Drama," which attracted the attention of Mary Kirkpatrick, who would become his first agent.
After graduation, Lawson moved to New York and worked for Reuters while dedicating himself to drama. In 1914 he began a play he called "Atmosphere" that was entitled "Souls: "A Psychic Fantasy" when the 69-page-long typewritten manuscript was copyrighted on May 21, 1915. An innovative though talky melodrama, this effort was discounted by Kirkpatrick as non-commercial. It was never produced or published.
In "Souls", Lawson had experimented with using asides to the audience by his characters, which precedes the same use of the device by O'Neil in his 1926 play "Strange Interlude". (O'Neill got the credit for "reviving" the device, which had been used in venerable dramas; however, at the time of "Souls", O'Neil was studying dramatic writing at Harvard).
In the period of 1915-16, he wrote three more plays, "Standards", "The Spice of Life", and "Servant-Master-Lover". "Standards" and "Servant-Master-Lover" were optioned, the first by George M. Cohan and Sam Harris and the latter by Olivier Morosco, but both plays closed out of town due to bad reviews.
He became involved with the avant-garde dramatists and actors of Greenwich Village's Playwrights' Theater that would produce Eugene O'Neill's first play, "Bound East for Cardiff" (and their first production) in November 1916. Before Lawson could become a Broadway playwright, World War I intervened.
After the United States entered the war, Lawson volunteered to be an ambulance driver with the American Field Service in France, where he befriended another driver, John Dos Passos, who would establish himself as a proletarian writer before veering sharply rightward later in his career. After the cessation of hostilities, Lawson moved to Rome, where he edited a newspaper. When he repatriated himself to the United States, he once again took up the career of the Broadway dramatist.
As a playwright, Lawson was committed to the avant-garde, and he began using non-realistic play-writing techniques. His plays were subtle though unfocused attacks on the bourgeoisie. He was deeply affected by the protests surrounding the case of the imprisoned--and later executed--anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (who served as the basis for Maxwell Anderson's Pultizer-Prize winning play "Winterset (1936)"), which stimulated the development of his left-wing politics and radicalism.
Tutored in Marxism by the great critic Edmund Wilson, Lawson imbued his plays with Marxist ideas, including his Broadway debut, 1923's "Roger Bloomer". There were ten productions of Lawson's plays on Broadway from 1923-37, all originals, and a revival of his second Broadway play, 1925's "Processional". Though his plays have not been revived since 1937, he did exert an influence on Eugene O'Neill, whose play "Dynamo" is indebted to Lawson.
With the dawn of talking pictures, there was a demand for dramatists and in 1928 Lawson moved to Hollywood, where he established himself as a screenwriter. He helped establish the Writers' Guild of America in 1933 with fellow future "Hollywood 10" members Lester Cole and Samuel Ornitz, and served as the union's first president from 1933-34. It was in 1934 that Lawson joined the Communist Party. It would come to dominate his life as he became an important member of the small CPUSA community in Hollywood, then eventually its cultural czar.
It's ironic that Lawson would become an enforcer of party ukases, in that with the writing of his last plays produced on Broadway in the late 1930s, he had undergone a struggle between his own aesthetic choices and his commitment to communist ideology. In the 1940s, however, it fell to Lawson as a senior party apparatchik to enforce party discipline among screenwriters who were CPUSA members, making sure that they toed the party line and that their work adhere to the CPUSA's ideology, no matter how impractical that was in the Hollywood studio system, which was based on a collaborative factory paradigm in which individuals contributions were subsumed and muted by the mass nature of the constructed product.
As a screenwriter, Lawson was able to inject politics into several movies, including his most important film, Blockade (1938), a story about the Spanish Civil War. For his screenplay, Lawson was nominated for a Best Story Oscar. Seven years later, the Lawson-scribed movie _Counter-Attack (1945)_ (qv, paid tribute to the US-USSR anti-fascist alliance of World War Two. However, as befits a Hollywood screenwriter who is but one writer of many assigned to a film, his credited work typically ran to more innocuous fare, such as the hit Algiers (1938).
For his defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was cited for contempt of Congress. After exhausting his appeals (his legal strategy dictated by party lawyers), he was sentenced to one year in prison and fined, resulting in his "official" blacklisting in Hollywood. (In fact, he had been blacklisted immediately after refusing to testify.) Not long afterwards, Lawson went into self-imposed exile in Mexico, where he began writing books on drama and film making. During his exile, he wrote a screenplay for the early anti-apartheid film Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) under a pseudonym. His last screenplay, also written under a pseudonym, was The Careless Years (1957), in which a high school couple in love takes it on the lam for Mexico. He also became a lecturer in American universities, where he taught drama and film.
John Howard Lawson died in San Francisco on August 14, 1977, at the age of 82.- Writer
- Director
- Producer
Herbert J. Biberman, the progressive producer, director and screenwriter now best known as one of the Hollywood Ten who were blacklisted by the American Film Industry for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was born on March 4, 1900 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale, Biberman entered his family's textile business after a journey to Europe. In 1928, Biberman joined the left-wing Theater Guild as an assistant stage manager, beginning his professional career in the arts. He married actress Gale Sondergaard in 1930.
Biberman became a director with the Theater Guild, and entered the movie industry as a dialog director on Colmbia Pictures' Eight Bells (1935) in 1935. He made his first picture that year, directing One-Way Ticket (1935) for B.P. Schulberg Productions and Columbia. Ironically, it would be producer B.P. Schulberg's son Budd Schulberg, an ex-communist, who would be one of his chief accusers in the Hollywood show trials of the late 1940s.
Biberman was arraigned before HUAC in 1947, where he was one of 19 unfriendly witnesses who refused to answer the Committee's inquiry into their political affiliations. The 19 eventually became the Hollywood Ten, as others of the 19 dropped away, including such luminaries as Bertolt Brecht, who left the U.S. for East Germany. Under the advice of lawyers with Communist Party affiliations, the Ten decided to adopt a common front and defy the committee by refusing to or deny the allegations that they were communists. In 1950, Biberman was fined and sentenced to six months in prison for contempt of Congress. Biberman's wife, the Oscar-winner Gale Sondergaard, was similarly accused and refused to testify. She also was blacklisted.
In 1954, Biberman directed the independently produced, left-wing motion picture Salt of the Earth (1954), a fictionalized account of a miners; strike in Grant County, New Mexico. Working with other blacklisted movie professionals, including screenwriters Michael Wilson (who wrote the picture) and Paul Jarrico (who produced it), the film starred such progressive actors as Will Geer. It was made against tremendous odds, including opposition from Hollywood and the government. A chronicle of the terrible working conditions faced by miners in New Mexico, the film had the official backing of the local miner's union and employed real workers and their families. However, other unions, involved in a Cold War fight in the 1950s against communist-dominated domestic unions and Communist Party-affiliated union organizers (a fight that began in Hollywood immediately after World War II, when returning veterans fought back against trade guilds that had become infiltrated by organized crime during their war service), refused to show the film because Biberman was still blacklisted. It was screened only once, in New York, before being blackballed from exhibition in the U.S. for 11 years.
Biberman released the film in Europe where it won awards in France and Czechoslovakia. In 1965, the film was finally released in the U.S. market. "Salt of the Earth" has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Biberman and Sondergaard had two children. They remained married until his death from bone cancer on June 30, 1971. Blacklisted for a quarter-of-a-century, Sondergaard finally found work in Hollywood after her husband's death.- Writer
- Actor
- Director
Dalton Trumbo, the Oscar-winning screenwriter, arguably the most talented, most famous of the blacklisted film professionals known to history as the Hollywood 10, was born in Montrose, Colorado to Orus Trumbo and his wife, the former Maud Tillery.
Dalton Trumbo was raised at 1124 Gunnison Ave. in Grand Junction, Colorado, where his parents moved in 1908. His father, Orus, worked in a shoe store. Dalton, the first child and only son, was later joined by sisters Catharine and Elizabeth. The young Dalton peddled the produce from his father's vegetable garden around town and had a paper route. While attending Grand Junction High School (Class of 1924), he worked at The Daily Sentinel as a cub reporter. Of his early politics, a much older Dalton Trumbo told how he asked his father for five dollars so he could join the Ku Klux Klan, a mass organization after the First World War. He didn't get the five dollars.
While at university, he realized that his calling was as a writer. He worked on the school's newspaper, humor magazine and yearbook, while also toiling for the Boulder Daily Camera. He left school his first year to follow his family to Los Angeles. The family moved due to financial difficulties after his father had been terminated by the shoe company. In L.A., Dalton enrolled at the University of Southern California but was unable to complete enough credits for a degree. Orus Trumbo died of pernicious anemia in 1926, and Dalton had to take a job to become the breadwinner for his widowed mother and two younger sisters. Dalton Trumbo took on whatever jobs were available, including repossessing motorcycles and bootlegging, which he quit because it was too dangerous. Eventually, Trumbo took a job at the Davis Perfection Bakery on the night shift and remained for nearly a decade. Trumbo continued to write, mostly short stories, becoming more and more anxious and eventually desperate to leave the bakery, fearing that he would never achieve his destiny of becoming an important writer. During this time, he sold several short stories, written his first novel and worked for the "Hollywood Spectator" as a writer, critic and editor. His work also appeared in "Vanity Fair" and "Vogue" magazines. Trumbo's first novel, "Eclipse" (1934), was set in fictional Shale City, Colorado (a thinly veiled Grand Junction) during the 1920s and 1930s, with characters who resembled notable community members. One of its main characters, John Abbott, is modeled after Trumbo's father. Dalton had tried, perhaps unfairly he admitted later, to avenge his father on the town where he had failed.
In 1934, Warner Bros. hired Trumbo as a reader, a job that entailed reading and summarizing plays and novels and advising whether they might be adapted into movies. It lead to a contract as a junior screenwriter at its B-pictures unit. In 1936, the same year he of his first screen credit for the B-move Road Gang (1936), Trumbo met his future soulmate Cleo Fincher and they married two years later. Daughter Nikola was born in 1939 and son Christopher in 1940. A daughter was added, Mitzi, the baby of the family.
He wrote the story for Columbia's Canadian-made Tugboat Princess (1936), clearly influenced by Captain January (1936), which had been made into a silent in 1924 before being remade with superstar Shirley Temple, substituting a tugboat in the original with a lighthouse. His screenplays for such films as Devil's Playground (1937) showed some concern for the plight of the disenfranchised, but the Great Depression still existed, and social commentary was inevitable in all but fantasies and musicals.
After leaving Warners, he worked for Columbia, Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, and beginning in 1937, M.G.M., the studio for which he would do some of his best work in the 1940s. By the late 1930s, he had worked himself up to better assignments, primarily for RKO (though he returned to Warners for The Kid from Kokomo (1939)), and was working on A-list pictures by the turn of the decade. He won his first Oscar nod for RKO's Kitty Foyle (1940), for which Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for best actress as a girl from a poor family who claws her way into the upper middle class via a failed marriage to a Main Line Philadelphia swell.
By the time of America's entry into World War II, Trumbo was one of the most respected, highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood. He had also established a name for himself as a left-wing political activist whose sympathies coincided with those of the American Communist Party (CPUSA), which hewed to the line set by Moscow.
Trumbo was part of the anti-fascist Popular Front coalition of communists and liberals in the late 1930s, at the time of the Spanish Civil War. The Popular Front against Nazism and Fascism was been torn asunder in August 1939 when the USSR signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Many party members quit the CPUSA in disgust, but the true believers parroted the party line, which was now pro-peace and against US involvement in WWII.
Trumbo reportedly did not join the Party until 1943 and harbored personal reservations about its policies as regards enforcing ideological conformity. However, the publication of his anti-war novel "Johnny Got His Gun" in 1939 coincided with the shift of the CPUSA's stance from anti-Hitler to pro-peace, and his novel was embraced by the Party as the type of literature needed to keep the US out of the war. Trumbo agreed with the Party's pro-peace platform. The book, about a wounded World War One vet who has lost his limbs, won the American Book Sellers Award (the precursor to the National Book Award) in 1939. In a speech made in February 1940, four months before the Nazi blitzkrieg knocked France out of the war, Trumbo said, "If they say to us, 'We must fight this war to preserve democracy,' let us say to them, 'There is no such thing as democracy in time of war. It is a lie, a deliberate deception to lead us to our own destruction. We will not die in order that our children may inherit a permanent military dictatorship.'"
His speech was a rebuke to New Deal liberals. The Party began demonizing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who hated Hitler and was pro-British, as a war-monger. The Party ordered its members to henceforth be pro-peace and anti-FDR in their work and statements. In June 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, the CPUSA shifted gears to become pro-war, supportive of FDR's aggressive behavior towards Nazi Germany.
Shortly after the German invasion, Trumbo instructed his publisher to recall all copies of "Johnny Got His Gun" and to cease publication of the book. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war against the U.S. catapulted the U.S. into both the Asian and European theaters of World War II, the book - always popular with peace-lovers and isolationists who opposed America's involvement in foreign wars - suddenly became popular among native fascists, too. However, it proved hard to get a copy of the book during the war years.
Trumbo joined the CPUSA in 1943, the same year Victor Fleming's great patriotic war movie A Guy Named Joe (1943), with a Trumbo screenplay, appeared on screens. In 1944, Original Story was a separate Oscar category and David Boehm and Chandler Sprague were nominated in that category for an Academy Award. Trumbo's screenplay was overlooked. Like other communist screenwriters, he proved to be an enthusiastic writer of pro-war propaganda, though except for the notorious pro-Stalin Mission to Moscow (1943), few films displayed any overt communist ideas or propaganda. One that did was Tender Comrade (1943) , which Trumbo wrote as a Ginger Rogers vehicle for RKO. Directed by his future Hollywood 10 comrade Edward Dmytryk, it depicted a mild form of socialism and collectivization among women working in the defense industry. He also wrote the patriotic classic Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) for M.G.M., which was based on the Doolittle Raid of 1942.
Trumbo voluntarily invited FBI agents to his house in 1944 and showed them letters he had received from what he perceived were pro-fascist peaceniks who had requested copies of "Johnny Got His Gun", then out-of-print due to Trumbo's orders to his publisher. He turned those letters over to the FBI and later kept in contact with the Bureau, a fact that would later haunt blacklisted leftists, urging that the F.B.I. deal with them. His actions conformed to the CPUSA policy of denouncing anyone who opposed the war.
In 1945, the last year of the war, MGM released the Margaret O'Brien / Edward G. Robinson vehicle, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945), penned by Trumbo. Robinson was a future member of the Hollywood "gray-list" with those, like Henry Fonda who were suspected of leftist sympathies or for being Fellow Travelers, but who could not be officially blacklisted. Drawing on his own rural childhood, it was a picture of a young girl's life on a farm in rural Wisconsin. The year 1945 was crucial for Trumbo and other Hollywood party members in terms of the CPUSA's desire to have their work reflect the party's ideological agenda.
HCUA was originally created in 1934 as the Special Committee on Un-American Activities to look into the activities of fascist and pro-Nazi organizations. Then popularly known as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities exposed fascist organizations, including a planned coup d'etat against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the so-called Business Plot. Later on, it became known as the House Un-American Activities Committee or the Dies Committee after the new chairman, Martin Dies. HCUA originally was tasked with investigating the involvement of German Americans with the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
HCUA became a standing committee in 1946, still tasked with investigating suspected threats of subversion or propaganda that attacked "the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution." The focus was solely on the communists and their allies, so-called Fellow Travelers who made common cause with communists during the War Years. Fellow Travelers was a loose term that seemed to embrace many liberal FDR New Deal Democrats.
HCUA subpoenaed suspected communists in the entertainment industry. Trumbo's screenplay for Tender Comrade (1943), which concerned three Army wives who pool their resources while their husbands are away fighting was denounced as communist propaganda. However, writer-producer James Kevin McGuinness, a conservative who was a friendly witness before HCUA, testified that left-wing screenwriters did not inject propaganda into their movie scripts during World War II. McGuiness testified "[The movie industry] profited from reverse lend-lease because during the [war] the Communist and Communist-inclined writers in the motion picture industry were given leave of absence to be patriotic. During that time...under my general supervision Dalton Trumbo wrote two magnificent patriotic scripts, A Guy Named Joe (1943) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)."
Appearing before HCUA in October 1947 with Alvah Bessie, Herbert J. Biberman, Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson, 'Ring Lardner Jr' , Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, and Samuel Ornitz, Trumbo - like the others - refused to answer any questions. In a defense strategy crafted by CPUSA lawyers, the soon-to-be-known-as "Hollywood 10" claimed that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave them the right to refuse to answer inquiries into their political beliefs as well as their professional associations. One line of questioning of HCUA was to ask if the subpoenaed witnesses were members of the Screen Writers Guild in order to smear the SWG. It was a gambit played by the Committee as it knew that which of the 10 were in the unions, and it knew which were communist. As Arthur Miller has pointed out, HCUA left the Broadway theater alone, despite the fact that there were communists working in it, because no one outside of the Northeastern U.S. really cared about theater or knew who theatrical professionals were, and thus, it could not generate the publicity that HCUA members craved and courted through their hearings.
HCUA cited them for contempt of Congress, and the Hollywood 10 were tried and convicted on the charge. All were fined and jailed, with Trumbo being sentenced to a year in federal prison and a fine of $1,000. He served 10 months of the sentence. The Hollywood 10 were blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, a blacklist enforced by the very guilds they helped create. Trumbo and the other Hollywood 10 screenwriters were kicked out of the Screen Writers Guild (John Howard Lawson had been one of the founders of the SWG and its first president), which meant, even if they weren't blacklisted, they could not obtain work in Hollywood. Those who continued to write for the American cinema had to do so under assumed names or by using a "front", a screenwriter who would take credit for their work and pass on all or some of the fee to the blacklisted writer. Later, as one of the Hollywood Ten, Trumbo claimed for himself the mantle of "Martyr for Freedom of Speech" and attacked, as rats, those who became informers for HCUA by naming names. In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., wrote in The Saturday Review of Books, that Trumbo was in fact NOT a free speech martyr since he would not fight for freedom of speech for ALL the people, such as right-wing conservatives, but only for the freedom of speech of CPUSA members. The anti-communist Schlesinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian, thought Trumbo and others like him were doctrinaire communists and hypocrites. In response, Trumbo wrote a scathing letter to The Saturday Review to defend himself, characterizing himself as a paladin championing free speech for all Americans under the aegis of the First Amendment, which the Hollywood 10 claimed gave them the right to refuse to cooperate with HCUA.
After his blacklisting and failure of the Hollywood 10's appeals, the Trumbo family exiled themselves to Mexico. In Mexico, chain-smoking in the bathtub in which he always wrote, usually with a parrot given to him by 'Kirk Douglas' perched on his shoulder, Trumbo wrote approximately thirty scripts under pseudonyms and using fronts who relayed the money to him. His works included the film noir classic Gun Crazy (1950) (AKA Gun Crazy), co-written under the pseudonym Millard Kaufman, Oscar-winning Roman Holiday (1953) (with screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter as a front), and The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955) for director Otto Preminger and upon which blacklisted Oscar-winning screenwriter Michael Wilson also worked).
At the 1957 Academy Awards, Robert Rich won the Oscar for best original story of 1956 for The Brave One (1956). Rich was not present to accept the award, which was accepted on his behalf by Jesse Lasky Jr. of the Screen Writers Guild. When journalists began digging in to the background of the phantom Mr. Rich, they found out he was the nephew of a producer. Suspicion then arose that Rich was a pseudonym for the blacklisted Trumbo.
Though Hollywood has always been inundated with writers, Trumbo, even while blacklisted, was prized as a good writer who was fast, reliable and could write in many genres. Despite being a communist, Trumbo's favorite themes were more in the vein of populism than Marxism. Trumbo celebrated the individual rebelling against the powers that be.
With rumors circulating that Trumbo had written the Oscar-winning The Brave One (1956), it triggered a discussion in the industry about the propriety of the blacklist, since so many screenplays were being written by blacklisted individuals who were being denied screen credit. The blacklist only worked to suppress the prices of screenplays by these talented writers. In 1958, Pierre Boulle won the Oscar for the screenplay adapted from his novel The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which was unusual since Boulle could not speak nor write in English, which may have been the reason he did not attend the awards ceremony to pick up the Oscar in person. It was immediately realized that the screenplay had likely been written by a blacklisted screenwriter. It was - Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman.
Kirk Douglas hired Trumbo to write the script for Spartacus in 1958. In the summer of 1959 Otto Preminger hired Trumbo to write the script for Exodus. On January 20, 1960, the New York Times carried the story that Otto Preminger had hired Dalton Trumbo to write the script for Exodus, and that he would start shooting in April. On August 8, of the same year Kirk Douglas announced in Variety that Trumbo had written the script for Spartacus. Both pictures opened in the winter of 1960.
Trumbo wrote many more screenplays for A-list films, including Lonely Are the Brave (1962), The Sandpiper (1965), Hawaii (1966) , and _Fixer, The (1968). In 1970, he was awarded the Laurel Award for lifetime achievement by the Screen Writers Guild. He made a famous speech that many saw as a reconciliation of the two sides of fight. In 1971, he wrote and directed the movie adaptation of his famous anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun (1971). His last screenwriting credit on a feature film was for Papillon (1973), in which he also had a cameo role.
A six-pack-a-day smoker, he developed lung cancer in 1973. Two years later, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (which had supported the black list), Walter Mirisch, personally delivered a belated Oscar to Trumbo for his The Brave One (1956) script, now officially recognized by AMPAS as his creation. Eighteen years later, AMPAS would award him a posthumous Oscar for Roman Holiday (1953).
Dalton Trumbo died from a heart attack in California on September 10, 1976. At his memorial service, Ring Lardner Jr., his close friend and fellow Hollywood 10 member, delivered an amusing eulogy. "At rare intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not."- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Nicolas Hayer was born on 1 May 1898 in Paris, France. He was a cinematographer, known for The Charterhouse of Parma (1948), The Raven (1943) and Orpheus (1950). He died on 29 October 1978 in Saint-Laurent-du-Var, Alpes-Maritimes, France.- Director
- Producer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Producer
- Writer
- Director
Irwin Winkler's career as a producer, director and writer encompasses popular and influential movies that have impacted contemporary culture. With a passion for big, bold, meaningful stories, his films include an array of true screen classics, garnering among them 12 Academy Awards and 52 Oscar nominations.
Among Winkler's multiple nominations include five Best Picture nominations, each for a pioneering film: the tale of underdog sports triumph, Rocky, which forged one of most globally recognizable movie characters and themes in history; Raging Bull, which turned the biopic into a gritty, lyrical work of art; the history-capturing look at the U.S. space program, The Right Stuff; the iconic gangster tale, Goodfellas; and the recent The Wolf of Wall Street. Winkler is the only producer honored with three films on the American Film Institute's list of the "Top 100 Films."
Winkler was recently honored by the Producers Guild of America with the prestigious David O. Selznick Achievement Award which recognized his lifetime body of work.
In April 2016, Winkler spoke at Harvard University's Kennedy School on the political and social influence his films have had on both the U.S. and international culture.
In December 2016 The American Cinematheque held a three-day retrospective to honor Winkler by showcasing such works as Goodfellas, New York, New York and Raging Bull, culminating with an onstage conversation alongside Martin Scorsese to discuss Winkler's storied career.
Winkler most recently produced the critically acclaimed Silence with longtime collaborator Martin Scorsese, written by Jay Cocks and starring Liam Neeson, Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver.
In 2016 Winkler produced Creed, the latest installment of his Academy Award winning franchise, Rocky Starring Sylvester Stallone and Michael B. Jordan, with Ryan Coogler directing, the film garnered both commercial and critical success; earning a Golden Globe nomination and Academy Award nomination for Sylvester Stallone. The film was named Outstanding Motion Picture from the NAACP Image Awards, the Black Film Critics Circle and named as one of the top films by the National Board of Review.
In 2013, Winkler Executive Produced the Academy Award and Golden Globe nominated The Wolf of Wall Street, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, illustrates his continual presence as one of Hollywood's most prolific producers making an indelible impact with his ability to showcase emotional storytelling with hard hitting relevance.
For Winkler, success has come from his constant instinctual draw to fresh, current, even controversial subjects and visionary talents. As a storyteller he has been fascinated by both the dangers of corruption and the beauty of courage and compassion.
Winkler first made a resounding impact producing a series of raw, edgy human dramas that helped to define the gritty landscape of 70s and 80s cinema. Thus the the fiercely original They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, about the desperate contenders in a Depression-era dance contest, starring Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin, which would seal Winkler's reputation with 9 Academy Award nominations and status as a Hollywood classic.
Other highlights from this period include New York, New York, starring Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro, which produced one of the most recognizable songs in pop culture; the enduring masterpiece, Raging Bull, considered by many to be among the great cinematic works of the 20th Century and highlighted by DeNiro's Oscar winning performance; and Goodfellas, which was honored with numerous critics' awards and has become etched in filmgoers' consciousnesses as the paragon of the American crime drama.
In that era, Winkler also produced the Mafia comedy Jimmy Brolin's The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight starring Bob DeNiro ; Up The Sandbox a look at the women's movement starring Barbra Streisand; The Gambler a penetrating look at gambling addiction, starring James Caan; the stirring modern Western, Comes A Horseman teaming Caan with Jane Fonda, directed by Alan Pakula; True Confessions written by Joan Didion and John Dunne starring Robert DeNiro and Robert Duvall; the critically-acclaimed suspense thriller about a woman who discovers her father is an accused Nazi war criminal, Music Box, which earned an Oscar nomination for star Jessica Lange and the homage to the Jazz Era, Round Midnight, with Herbie Hancock winning an Academy Award for his musical composition and a Best Actor nomination for Dexter Gordon.
In 1989, Winkler made his directorial debut from his own screenplay, Guilty By Suspicion, hailed by the New York Times as "A stirring and tragic evocation of terrible times" about Hollywood's all-too-real blacklisting era. Starring Robert DeNiro as a prominent director asked to "name names" and Annette Bening as his wife, the film presaged a writing and directing career that would, like Winkler's producing career, be focused on taut human drama and politically-charged themes and nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Winkler's next directorial outing reunited him with both Robert DeNiro and Jessica Lange in the noir crime drama, Night and the City, which would close the prestigious New York Film Festival in 1992 and become a rousing critical success. He went on to direct and produce At First Sight, a romantic drama based on a true story by Dr. Oliver Sacks, starring Val Kilmer, Mira Sorvino and Nathan Lane and the prescient cyber-crime thriller The Net, starring Sandra Bullock, one of the big box-office hits of 1995.
Winkler's directorial career would continue to take intriguing turns. He broached the thought-provoking question of what happens when a man suddenly faces his own mortality in the poignantly complex Life as a House, featuring a landmark performance by Kevin Kline.
Radically switching gears, Winkler next directed one of his most distinctive features, the musical biography of the legendary composer Cole Porter: De-Lovely. Featuring Golden Globe-nominated performances from Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd, as well as performances from pop and rock music talents, including Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morissette, Elvis Costello, Robbie Williams, Natalie Cole, and Diana Krall, all performing Porter's classic songs, the film was selected as the closing night gala event at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.
Winkler became one of the very first American filmmakers to turn his camera on the return of U.S. veterans from the war in Iraq - when he directed and produced the provocative drama Home of the Brave, starring Samuel L. Jackson, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Jessica Biel and Brian Presley.
Winker's motion picture producing career began in the late 1960s when he produced his first film, the Elvis Presley movie Double Trouble, with the legendary director Norman Taurog. Soon after, he entered into a partnership with Robert Chartoff, producing such films as the classic revenge thriller Point Blank. In 1970, an eclectic trio of Winkler/Chartoff films each made a splash at the Cannes Film Festival: Leo the Last won the Best Director prize, the counter-culture cult film, The Strawberry Statement received the Jury Award They Shoot Horses, Don't They? garnered the closing night honors.
For his contributions to the popular culture, Winkler has been the recipient of numerous American and international honors, including the Commandeur des Arts et Lettres, the French government's highest decoration for contribution to the arts. In 1989, the British Film Institute saluted him with a retrospective of his work and in 1995, Winkler became the first producer to be honored with a showcase screening of ten of his films at the Deauville Film Festival. He has also received a Lifetime Achievement award from the Chicago Film Festival, a star on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame and retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which had not honored a producer since their tribute to David O. Selznick in 1980. Winkler also received the National Board of Review's highest honor for Career Achievement in Producing, which Kevin Kline presented to him at their annual gala in January 2007 in New York. Winkler was a Governor of the New York City Ballet and is on the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.- Actor
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Brad Sullivan was born on 18 November 1931 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was an actor, known for Slap Shot (1977), The Untouchables (1987) and Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993). He died on 31 December 2008 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.- Actor
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Walter Matthau was best known for starring in many films which included Charade (1963), The Odd Couple (1968), Grumpy Old Men (1993), and Dennis the Menace (1993). He often worked with Jack Lemmon and the two were Hollywood's craziest stars.
He was born Walter Jake Matthow in New York City, New York on October 1, 1920. His mother was an immigrant from Lithuania and his father was a Russian Jewish peddler and electrician from Kiev, Ukraine. As a young boy, Matthau attended a Jewish non-profit sleep-away camp. He also attended Surprise Lake Camp. His high school was Seward Park High School.
During World War II, Matthau served in the U.S. Army Air Forces with the Eighth Air Force in Britain as a Consolidated B-24 Liberator radioman-gunner, in the same 453rd Bombardment Group as James Stewart. He was based at RAF Old Buckenham, Norfolk during this time. He reached the rank of staff sergeant and became interested in acting.
Matthau appeared in the pilot of Mister Peepers (1952) alongside Wally Cox. He later appeared in the Elia Kazan classic, A Face in the Crowd (1957), opposite Patricia Neal and Andy Griffith, and then appeared in Lonely Are the Brave (1962), with Kirk Douglas, a film Douglas has often described as his personal favorite. Matthau then appeared in Charade (1963) with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. In 1968, Matthau made his big screen appearance as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple (1968) alongside Jack Lemmon. The two were also in the sequel (The Odd Couple II (1998)) as well as Grumpy Old Men (1993) and Grumpier Old Men (1995). Matthau was in Dennis the Menace (1993), alongside Mason Gamble. On July 1, 2000, Matthau died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, California. He was 79 years old.- Actor
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Edward Asner was born of Russian Jewish parentage in Kansas City, to Morris David Asner (founder and owner of the Kansas City-based Asner Iron & Metal Company) and his wife Elizabeth "Lizzie" (Seliger). After attending college, Ed worked various jobs, including in a steel mill, as a door-to-door salesman and on an assembly line for General Motors. Between 1947 and 1949, he attended the University of Chicago. The onset of the Korean War saw him drafted into the U.S. Army Signals Corps and posted to France where he was primarily assigned clerical tasks. Upon demobilization, Asner joined the Playwrights Theatre Company in Chicago but soon progressed to New York. In 1955, he appeared off-Broadway in the leading role of the beggar king Jonathan Peachum in Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Five years later, he made his debut on the Great White Way in the courtroom drama Face of a Hero, co-starring alongside Jack Lemmon. He also began regular TV work in anthology drama.
From the early '60s, Asner, now based in California, earned his living as a busy supporting actor. His many noted guest appearances included turns in Route 66 (1960), The Untouchables (1959), The Fugitive (1963), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964) (sinister dictator-in-exile Brynov), The Invaders (1967) (twice -- as aliens) and How the Ghosts Stole Christmas (1998) (one of a couple of ghostly residents in a haunted mansion). Heavy-set and distinctively gravelly-voiced, Asner established his reputation as tough, robust and uncompromising (though, on occasion, good-hearted) authority figures. Excellent at conveying menace, he was memorably cast as the brutish patriarch Axel Jordache in Rich Man, Poor Man (1976) and as the slave ship's morally conflicted master, Captain Thomas Davies, in Roots (1977), which earned him a Primetime Emmy Award in 1977. The immensely prolific Asner (417 IMDB screen credits!) would receive seven Emmys in total (from 21 nominations), all Primetime, and become the only actor to win in both the comedy and drama category for the same role. That was also the part which made Asner a household name: the gruff, snarky newspaper editor Lou Grant (1977). Grant began as a mainstay on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970), a 30-minute sitcom.
When the character was promoted to West Coast editor of The Los Angeles Tribune, Asner went on to star in his own much acclaimed drama series. Despite consistently high ratings, the show was axed after five seasons amid rumours of disharmony between the star and producers, possibly due to the former's outspoken political views. Indeed, Asner has been a controversial figure as an activist and campaigner, engaged in a variety of humanitarian and political issues. A self-proclaimed liberal Democrat, he published a book in 2017, amusingly titled "The Grouchy Historian: An Old-Time Lefty Defends Our Constitution Against Right-Wing Hypocrites and Nutjobs."
Between 1981 and 1985, Asner served twice as President of the Screen Actors Guild, during which time he was critical of former SAG President Ronald Reagan -- then the president of a greater concern -- for his Central American policy. In 1996, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame and in 2002 received the Screen Actors Guild's Life Achievement Award. In addition to appearing on screen and stage, he performed extensive work for radio, video games and animated TV series. He voiced the lead character Carl Fredricksen in Pixar's Oscar-winning production of Up (2009), starred as Santa in Elf (2003), and played Nicholas Drago in The Games Maker (2014). Ed passed away in Los Angeles at the age of 91 on August 29, 2021.- Actor
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Howard Hesseman was a leading counter-culture figure since the late 1960s. He was a member of the improv group, "The Committee", for a decade in the 1960s/1970s. A character actor for many years on different television shows since the 1960s, he took small parts in The Andy Griffith Show (1960), Dragnet 1967 (1967), Soap (1977), and Sanford and Son (1972). The role that brought him to prominence was Howard Johnson in the cult classic Billy Jack (1971).
He was a frequent guest star on The Bob Newhart Show (1972) but would become best-known for his role on the classic series WKRP in Cincinnati (1978), as anti-disco hipster DJ "Dr. Johnny Fever". Also in the 1970s, he appeared in The Sunshine Boys (1975), Tunnel Vision (1976), Silent Movie (1976) and The Big Bus (1976). After the cancellation of WKRP in Cincinnati (1978), he went on to star as the husband of Ann Romano in One Day at a Time (1975). After that series was cancelled, Hesseman starred in This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Doctor Detroit (1983), Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (1985), Clue (1985), and Flight of the Navigator (1986).
He then starred as history teacher Charlie Moore in Head of the Class (1986). He left that show in 1990 and appeared in a steady stream of television guest roles. In 1987, he appeared in Amazon Women on the Moon (1987). In 1991, he starred in Rubin and Ed (1991). Afterward, he appeared in other films, including Gridlock'd (1997) (with Tupac Shakur). His work in later years concentrated mostly on television, where he took mostly small guest roles, in such shows as That '70s Show (1998), Touched by an Angel (1994), The Practice (1997), and Crossing Jordan (2001).- Writer
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Blacklisted writer in the 1950s, a victim of the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), he still continued to write under pseudonyms as did many other blacklisted writers such as Ring Lardner Jr. and Dalton Trumbo, and his biggest contribution during that time was probably his writing work with other blacklisted writers Arnold Manoff & Abraham Polonsky on the You Are There (1953) TV segments starring Walter Cronkite. Of large importance is his screenplay for the dark comedy about blacklisted screenwriters, The Front (1976) starring Woody Allen. The blacklisted writers in the deli are based on a composite of him, Manoff & Polonsky. After he graduated from Dartmouth, he wrote for The New Yorker magazine and also the G.I. weekly "Yank" during World War II. He had barely started working in Hollywood when he was blacklisted. He is a recipient of The Writers Guild of America East Lifetime Achievement Award and he also wrote the book "Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist". Though unfairly blacklisted by Hollywood for his political alliances, luckily he recovered to have a long remarkable career.- Director
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Martin Ritt, one of the best and most sensitive American filmmakers of all time, was a director, actor and playwright who worked in both film and theater. He was born in New York City. His films reflect, like almost none other, a profound and intimate humane vision of his characters.
He originally attended and played football for Elon College in North Carolina. The stark contrasts of the Depression-era South compared to his New York City upbringing instilled in him a passion for expressing the struggles of inequality, which is clearly present in the films he directed. After leaving St. John's University, he found work with a theater group, and began acting in plays. His first performance was as Crown in "Porgy and Bess". After his performance drew favorable reviews, Ritt concluded that he could "only be happy in the theater." He then went to work with the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration's New Deal agency the Works Progress Administration as a playwright for the Federal Theater Project, a government-funded theater support program. With work hard to find and the Depression in full effect, many WPA theater performers, directors and writers became heavily influenced by the radical left and Communism, and Ritt was no exception (years later he would state that he had never been a member of the Communist Party, although he considered himself a leftist and found common ground with some Marxist principles)
Ritt moved on from the WPA to the Theater of Arts, then to the Group Theatre of New York City. It was at the Group Theatre that he met Elia Kazan, then a director. Kazan cast Ritt as an understudy in his play "Golden Boy". Ritt's social consciousness and political views continued to mature during his time with the Group, and would influence the social and political viewpoint that he would later express in his films (he would continue his association with Kazan for well over a decade, later assisting, and sometimes filling in for, his erstwhile mentor at The Actors Studio, eventually becoming one of the Studio's few non-performing life members). During World War II Ritt served with the U.S. Army Air Forces and appeared as an actor in the Air Force's Broadway play "Wiinged Victory" (also in the film version, Winged Victory (1944)). During the Broadway run of the play, Ritt directed a production of Sidney Kingsley's play "Yellow Jack", using actors from "Winged Victory" and rehearsing between midnight and 3 a.m. after "Winged Victory" performances. The play had a brief Broadway run and was performed again in Los Angeles when the "Winged Victory" troupe moved there to make the film version.
After working as a playwright with the Works Progress Administration, acting on stage and directing hundreds of plays, Ritt became a successful television director. In 1952 he was acting, directing and producing teleplays and television programs when he was caught up in what became known as the "Red Scare", which was an attempt by ultra-conservatives in Congress to "root out" what they saw as Commuist influence in films and on Broadway, championed by Wisconsin Repubican Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Although not directly named by the committee conducting the investigation--The House Committee on Un-American Activities, aka HUAC--Ritt was mentioned in a right-wing newsletter called "Counterattack", published by American Business Consultants, a group formed by three former FBI agents. "Counterattack" alleged that Ritt had helped Communist Party-affiliated locals of the New York-based Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union stage their annual show. He was finally blacklisted by the television industry when a Syracuse grocer charged him with donating money to Communist China in 1951. Unable to work in the television industry, Ritt returned to the theater for several years.
By 1956 the "Red Scare" had begun to fade away, and Ritt turned to film directing. His first film as a director was Edge of the City (1957), an important film for Ritt and an opportunity to give voice to his experiences. Based on the story of a union dock worker who faced intimidation by a corrupt boss, the film is a virtual laundry list of themes influencing Ritt over the years: corruption, racism, intimidation of the individual by the group, defense of the individual against government oppression and, most notable, the redeeming quality of mercy and the value of shielding others from evil, including sacrificing one's own reputation, career and even life if necessary. Ritt went on to direct 25 more films, including such classics as The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Hud (1963), The Great White Hope (1970), Norma Rae (1979) and Murphy's Romance (1985).- Director
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Patrick Keiller was born in 1950 in Blackpool, Lancashire, England, UK. He is a director and writer, known for London (1994), Robinson in Space (1997) and Robinson in Ruins (2010).- Producer
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- Actor
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Jack Lemmon was born in Newton, Massachusetts, to Mildred Lankford Noel and John Uhler Lemmon, Jr., the president of a doughnut company. His ancestry included Irish (from his paternal grandmother) and English. Jack attended Ward Elementary near his Newton, MA home. At age 9 he was sent to Rivers Country Day School, then located in nearby Brookline. After RCDS, he went to high school at Phillips Andover Academy. Jack was a member of the Harvard class of 1947, where he was in Navy ROTC and the Dramatic Club. After service as a Navy ensign, he worked in a beer hall (playing piano), on radio, off Broadway, TV and Broadway. His movie debut was with Judy Holliday in It Should Happen to You (1954). He won Best Supporting Actor as Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts (1955). He received nominations in comedy (Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960)) and drama (Days of Wine and Roses (1962), The China Syndrome (1979), Tribute (1980) and Missing (1982)). He won the Best Actor Oscar for Save the Tiger (1973) and the Cannes Best Actor award for "Syndrome" and "Missing". He made his debut as a director with Kotch (1971) and in 1985 on Broadway in "Long Day's Journey into Night". In 1988 he received the Life Achievement Award of the American Film Institute.- Actor
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Robin McLaurin Williams was born on Saturday, July 21st, 1951, in Chicago, Illinois, a great-great-grandson of Mississippi Governor and Senator, Anselm J. McLaurin. His mother, Laurie McLaurin (née Janin), was a former model from Mississippi, and his father, Robert Fitzgerald Williams, was a Ford Motor Company executive from Indiana. Williams had English, German, French, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish ancestry.
Robin briefly studied political science at Claremont Men's College and theater at College of Marin before enrolling at The Juilliard School to focus on theater. After leaving Juilliard, he performed in nightclubs where he was discovered for the role of "Mork, from Ork", in an episode of Happy Days (1974). The episode, My Favorite Orkan (1978), led to his famous spin-off weekly TV series, Mork & Mindy (1978). He made his feature starring debut playing the title role in Popeye (1980), directed by Robert Altman.
Williams' continuous comedies and wild comic talents involved a great deal of improvisation, following in the footsteps of his idol Jonathan Winters. Williams also proved to be an effective dramatic actor, receiving Academy Award nominations for Best Actor in a Leading Role in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Dead Poets Society (1989), and The Fisher King (1991), before winning the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in Good Will Hunting (1997).
During the 1990s, Williams became a beloved hero to children the world over for his roles in a string of hit family-oriented films, including Hook (1991), FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992), Aladdin (1992), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Jumanji (1995), Flubber (1997), and Bicentennial Man (1999). He continued entertaining children and families into the 21st century with his work in Robots (2005), Happy Feet (2006), Night at the Museum (2006), Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009), Happy Feet Two (2011), and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014). Other more adult-oriented films for which Williams received acclaim include The World According to Garp (1982), Moscow on the Hudson (1984), Awakenings (1990), The Birdcage (1996), Insomnia (2002), One Hour Photo (2002), World's Greatest Dad (2009), and Boulevard (2014).
On Monday, August 11th, 2014, Robin Williams was found dead at his home in Tiburon, California USA, the victim of an apparent suicide, according to the Marin County Sheriff's Office. A 911 call was received at 11:55 a.m. PDT, firefighters and paramedics arrived at his home at 12:00 p.m. PDT, and he was pronounced dead at 12:02 p.m. PDT.- Writer
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Son of a small shopkeeper, he attended Manchester Grammar School. He later said that he made poor uses of his opportunities there. He went to work in an insurance office, but later entered Manchester University, taking a degree in History. A post-graduate year at Exeter University led to a schoolmaster's position, first at a village school in Devon, then for seven years at Millfield. During this time he wrote a dozen radio plays, which were broadcast. Encouraged by the London success of his stage play "Flowering Cherry" he left teaching for full-time writing. 1960 saw two of his plays ("The Tiger And The Horse" and "A Man For All Seasons") running concurrently in the West End.- Actor
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Hart Matthew Bochner was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to Ruth (Roher), a concert pianist, and Lloyd Bochner, an actor. He is of Russian Jewish and Ukrainian Jewish descent. Hart made his feature film debut portraying George C. Scott's son in Ernest Hemingway's Islands in the Stream (1977) and would go on to gain notice for his role in the Academy award-winning, Breaking Away (1979). However, it was his role in Die Hard (1988), opposite Bruce Willis, that would earn him pop culture status. His performance as the obnoxiously sleazy Harry ("Hans, Bubby") Ellis was bestowed the #2 spot on Maxim's "The Greatest Movie Sleazeballs Of All Time" list. Other films also include playing opposite Susan Sarandon in Wayne Wang's Anywhere But Here (1999), Break Up (1998) with Bridget Fonda, the cult hit Apartment Zero (1988) opposite Colin Firth, George Cukor's Rich and Famous (1981), with Jacqueline Bisset, and John Schlesinger's The Innocent (1993), opposite Anthony Hopkins.
On television, Bochner starred in the Emmy award-winning epic miniseries, War and Remembrance (1988), Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1984), John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1981), And the Sea Will Tell (1991), Children of the Dust (1995), and Haywire (1980).
He would inevitably transition to behind-the-scenes work as a director, making his debut with the cult comedy, PCU (1994), for Twentieth Century Fox, and High School High (1996) for Columbia Pictures. Just Add Water (2008) for Sony Pictures is his latest directorial effort, which he also wrote, and stars Danny DeVito, Dylan Walsh, Jonah Hill, and Justin Long.
He will next be seen starring in the upcoming Campbell Scott film, Company Retreat (2009), as well as Spread (2009) opposite Ashton Kutcher. Most recently was seen starring as Debra Messing's love interest in the USA Network series, The Starter Wife (2008).
Bochner lives in Los Angeles and is actively involved in several causes, sitting on the board of directors for the Environmental Media Association as well as the DGA-PAC Leadership Council, and L.A.'s Green Ribbon Commission. In 2008, Bochner was named Time Magazine's "Greenest Celebrity in Hollywood".- Director
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Robert Markowitz was born on 7 February 1935 in Irvington, New Jersey, USA. He is a director and producer, known for The American Parade (1974), Nicholas' Gift (1998) and Amazing Stories (1985).- Writer
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- Script and Continuity Department
Andrew Davies was born on 20 September 1936 in Rhiwbina, Cardiff, Wales, UK. He is a writer and producer, known for Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) and The Three Musketeers (2011). He has been married to Diana Huntley since 1960. They have two children.- Richard Spence was born in 1957 in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, England, UK. He is a director, known for Different for Girls (1996), Screen Two (1985) and Poirot (1989).
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Tommy Lee Jones was born in San Saba, Texas, the son of Lucille Marie (Scott), a police officer and beauty shop owner, and Clyde C. Jones, who worked on oil fields. Tommy himself worked in underwater construction and on an oil rig. He attended St. Mark's School of Texas, a prestigious prep school for boys in Dallas, on a scholarship, and went to Harvard on another scholarship. He roomed with future Vice President Al Gore and played offensive guard in the famous 29-29 Harvard-Yale football game of '68 known as "The Tie." He received a B.A. in English literature and graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1969.
Following college, he moved to New York and began his theatrical career on Broadway in "A Patriot for Me" (1969). In 1970, he made his film debut in Love Story (1970). While living in New York, he continued to appear in various plays, both on- and off-Broadway: "Fortune and Men's Eyes" (1969); "Four on a Garden" (1971); "Blue Boys" (1972); "Ulysses in Nighttown" (1974). During this time, he also appeared on a daytime soap opera, One Life to Live (1968) as Dr. Mark Toland from 1971-75. He moved with wife Kate Lardner, granddaughter of short-story writer/columnist Ring Lardner, and her two children from a previous marriage, to Los Angeles.
There he began to get some roles on television: Charlie's Angels (1976) (pilot episode); Smash-Up on Interstate 5 (1976); and The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977). While working on the movie Back Roads (1981), he met and fell in love with Kimberlea Cloughley, whom he later married. More roles in television--both on network and cable--stage and film garnered him a reputation as a strong, explosive, thoughtful actor who could handle supporting as well as leading roles. He made his directorial debut in The Good Old Boys (1995) on TNT. In addition to directing and starring in the film, he co-wrote the teleplay (with J.T. Allen). The film, based on Elmer Kelton's novel, is set in west Texas where Jones has strong family ties. Consequently, this story of a cowboy facing the end of an era has special meaning for him.- Actor
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Actor, producer and humanitarian Danny Glover has been a commanding presence on screen, stage and television for more than 35 years.
Glover was born in San Francisco, California, to Carrie (Hunley) and James Glover, postal workers who were also active in civil rights. Glover trained at the Black Actors' Workshop of the American Conservatory Theater. It was his Broadway debut in Fugard's Master Harold...and the Boys, which brought him to national recognition and led director Robert Benton to cast Glover in his first leading role in 1984's Oscar®-nominated Best Picture Places in the Heart.
The following year, Glover starred in two more Best Picture nominees: Peter Weir's Witness and Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple. In 1987, Glover partnered with Mel Gibson in the first Lethal Weapon film and went on to star in three hugely successful Lethal Weapon sequels. Glover has also invested his talents in more personal projects, including the award-winning To Sleep With Anger, which he executive produced and for which he won an Independent Spirit Award for Best Actor; Bopha!; Manderlay; Missing in America; and the film version of Athol Fugard's play Boesman and Lena. On the small screen, Glover won an Image Award and a Cable ACE Award and earned an Emmy nomination for his performance in the title role of the HBO movie Mandela. He has also received Emmy nominations for his work in the acclaimed miniseries Lonesome Dove and the telefilm Freedom Song. As a director, he earned a Daytime Emmy nomination for Showtime's Just a Dream.
Glover's film credits range from the blockbuster Lethal Weapon franchise to smaller independent features, some of which Glover also produced. He co-starred in the critically acclaimed feature Dreamgirls directed by Bill Condon and in Po' Boy's Game for director Clement Virgo. He appeared in the hit feature Shooter for director Antoine Fuqua, Honeydripper for director John Sayles, and Be Kind, Rewind for director Michel Gondry.
Glover has also gained respect for his wide-reaching community activism and philanthropic efforts, with a particular emphasis on advocacy for economic justice, and access to health care and education programs in the United States and Africa. For these efforts, Glover received a 2006 DGA Honor. Internationally, Glover has served as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Program from 1998-2004, focusing on issues of poverty, disease, and economic development in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and serves as UNICEF Ambassador.
In 2005, Glover co-founded Louverture Films dedicated to the development and production of films of historical relevance, social purpose, commercial value and artistic integrity. The New York based company has a slate of progressive features and documentaries including Trouble the Water, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Africa Unite, award winning feature Bamako, and most recent projects Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan.- Actor
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Pierce Brendan Brosnan was born in Drogheda, County Louth, Ireland, to May (Smith), a nurse, and Thomas Brosnan, a carpenter. He lived in Navan, County Meath, until he moved to England, UK, at an early age (thus explaining his ability to play men from both backgrounds convincingly). His father left the household when Pierce was a child and although reunited later in life, the two have never had a close relationship. His most popular role is that of British secret agent James Bond. The death, in 1991, of Cassandra Harris, his wife of eleven years, left him with three children - Christopher and Charlotte from Cassandra's first marriage and Sean from their marriage. Since her death, he has had two children with his second wife, Keely Shaye Brosnan.
Brosnan is most famous for starring in the TV series Remington Steele (1982) as the title character, as well as portraying famous movie character James Bond in GoldenEye (1995), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World Is Not Enough (1999) and Die Another Day (2002).- Actor
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Since his screen debut as a young Amish farmer in Peter Weir's Witness (1985), Viggo Mortensen's career has been marked by a steady string of well-rounded performances.
Mortensen was born in New York City, to Grace Gamble (Atkinson) and Viggo Peter Mortensen, Sr. His father was Danish, his mother was American, and his maternal grandfather was Canadian. His parents met in Norway. They wed and moved to New York, where Viggo, Jr. was born, before moving to South America, where Viggo, Sr. managed chicken farms and ranches in Venezuela and Argentina. Two more sons were born, Charles and Walter, before the marriage grew increasingly unhappy. When Viggo was seven, his parents sent him to the St. Paul's boarding school, in the Córdoba Sierras, in Argentina. Then, at age eleven, his parents divorced. His mother moved herself and the children back to her home state of New York.
Viggo attended Watertown High School, and became a very good student and athlete. He graduated in 1976 and went on to St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. After graduation, he moved to Denmark - driven by the need for a defining purpose in life. He began writing poetry and short stories while working many odd jobs, from dock worker to flower seller. In 1982, he fell in love and followed his girlfriend back to New York City, hoping for a long romance and a writing career. He got neither. In New York, Viggo found work waiting tables and tending bar and began taking acting classes, studying with Warren Robertson. He appeared in several plays and movies, and eventually moved to Los Angeles, where his performance in "Bent" at the Coast Playhouse earned him a Drama-logue Critic's Award.
He made his film debut with a small part in Witness (1985). He appeared in Salvation! (1987) and married his co-star, Exene Cervenka. The two had a son, Henry Mortensen. But after nearly eleven years of marriage, the couple divorced.
In 1999, Viggo got a phone call about a movie he did not know anything about: "The Lord of the Rings." At first, he didn't want to do it, because it would mean time away from his son. But Henry, a big fan of the books, told his father he shouldn't turn down the role. Viggo accepted the part and immediately began work on the project, which was already underway. Eventually, the success of "The Lord of the Rings" made him a household name - a difficult consequence for the ever private and introspective Viggo.
Critics have continually recognized his work in over thirty movies, including such diverse projects as Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Sean Penn's The Indian Runner (1991), Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way (1993), Ridley Scott's G.I. Jane (1997), Tony Scott's Crimson Tide (1995), Andrew Davis's A Perfect Murder (1998), Ray Loriga's My Brother's Gun (1997), Tony Goldwyn's A Walk on the Moon (1999), and Peter Farrelly's Green Book (2018).
Mortensen is also an accomplished poet, photographer and painter.- Actor
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- Music Department
Humanitarian and actor Richard Gere was born on August 31, 1949, in Philadelphia, the second of five children of Doris Anna (Tiffany), a homemaker, and Homer George Gere, an insurance salesman, both Mayflower descendants. Richard started early as a musician, playing a number of instruments in high school and writing music for high school productions. He graduated from North Syracuse Central High School in 1967, and won a gymnastics scholarship to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he majored in philosophy. He left college after two years to pursue acting, landing a lead role in the London production of the rock musical "Grease" in 1973. The following year he would be in other plays, such as "Taming of the Shrew." Onscreen, he had a few roles, and gained recognition in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). Offscreen, he spent 1978 meeting Tibetans when he traveled to Nepal, where he spoke to many monks and lamas. Returning to the US, on Broadway he portrayed a concentration-camp prisoner in "Bent," for which he received the 1980 Theatre World Award. Back in Hollywood, he played the title role in American Gigolo (1980), establishing himself as a major star; this status was reaffirmed by An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). In the early 1980s, Richard went to Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador (amidst ongoing wars and political violence); he traveled with a doctor and visited refugee camps. It is said that Richard was romantically linked with Tuesday Weld, Priscilla Presley, Barbra Streisand and Kim Basinger. In 1990 Richard teamed up with Julia Roberts to star in the blockbuster Pretty Woman (1990); his cool reserve was the perfect complement to Julia's bubbling enthusiasm. The film captured the nation's heart, and won the People's Choice award for Best Movie. Fans clamored for years for a sequel, or at least another pairing of Julia and Richard. They got that with Runaway Bride (1999), which was a runaway success (Richard got $12 million, Julia made $17 million, the box office was $152 million, which shows what happens when you give the public what it wants!). Offscreen, Richard and Cindy Crawford got married December 12, 1991 (they were divorced in 1995). Afterwards, Richard started dating actress Carey Lowell. They had a son, Homer James Jigme Gere, on February 6, 2000. Richard was picked by People magazine as one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the world in 1991, and as their Sexiest Man Alive in 1999. He is an accomplished pianist and music writer. Above all, Richard is a humanitarian. He's a founding member of "Tibet House," a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of Tibetan culture. He has been an active supporter of "Survival International" for several years, a worldwide organization supporting tribal peoples, affirming their right to decide their own future and helping them protect their lives, lands and human rights (these tribes are global, including the natives of the Amazon, the Maasai of East Africa, the Wichi of Argentina, and others). In 1994 Richard went to London to open Harrods' sale, donating his £50,000 appearance fee to Survival. He has been prominent in their charity advertising campaigns.- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Danny DeVito has amassed a formidable and versatile body of work as an actor, producer and director that spans the stage, television and film.
Daniel Michael DeVito Jr. was born on November 17, 1944, in Neptune, New Jersey, to Italian-American parents. His mother, Julia (Moccello), was a homemaker. His father, Daniel, Sr., was a small business owner whose ventures included a dry cleaning shop, a dairy outlet, a diner, and a pool hall.
While growing up in Asbury Park, his parents sent him to private schools. He attended Our Lady of Mount Carmel grammar school and Oratory Prep School. Following graduation in 1962, he took a job as a cosmetician at his sister's beauty salon. A year later, he enrolled at New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts so he could learn more about cosmetology. While at the academy, he fell in love with acting and decided to further pursue an acting career. During this time, he met another aspiring actor Michael Douglas at the National Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Connecticut. The two would later go on to collaborate on numerous projects. Soon after he also met an actress named Rhea Perlman. The two fell in love and moved in together. They were married in 1982 and had three children together.
In 1968, Danny landed his first part in a movie when he appeared as a thug in the obscure Dreams of Glass (1970). Despite this minor triumph, Danny became discouraged with the film industry and decided to focus on stage productions. He made his Off-Broadway debut in 1969 in "The Man With the Flower in His Mouth." He followed this up with stage roles in "The Shrinking Bride," and "Lady Liberty." In 1975, he was approached by director Milos Forman and Michael Douglas about appearing in the film version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), which would star Jack Nicholson in the leading role. With box office success almost guaranteed and a chance for national exposure, Danny agreed to the role. The movie became a huge hit, both critically and financially, and still ranks today as one the greatest movies of all time. Unfortunately, the movie did very little to help Danny's career. In the years following, he was relegated to small movie roles and guest appearances on television shows. His big break came in 1978 when he auditioned for a role on an ABC sitcom pilot called Taxi (1978), which centered around taxi cab drivers at a New York City garage. Danny auditioned for the role of dispatcher Louie DePalma. At the audition, the producers told Danny that he needed to show more attitude in order to get the part. He then slammed down the script and yelled, "Who wrote this sh**?" The producers, realizing he was perfect for the part, brought him on board. The show was a huge success, running from 1978 to 1983.
Louie DePalma, played flawlessly by Danny, became one of the most memorable (and reviled) characters in television history. While he was universally hated by TV viewers, he was well-praised by critics, winning an Emmy award and being nominated three other times. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Danny maintained his status as a great character actor with memorable roles in movies like Romancing the Stone (1984), Ruthless People (1986), Throw Momma from the Train (1987) and Twins (1988). He also had a great deal of success behind the camera, directing movies like The War of the Roses (1989) and Hoffa (1992). In 1992, Danny was introduced to a new generation of moviegoers when he was given the role of The Penguin/Oswald Cobblepot in Tim Burton's highly successful Batman Returns (1992). This earned him a nomination for Best Villain at the MTV Movie Awards. That same year, along with his wife Rhea Perlman, Danny co-founded Jersey Films, which has produced many popular films and TV shows, including Pulp Fiction (1994), Get Shorty (1995), Man on the Moon (1999) and Erin Brockovich (2000). DeVito has many directing credits to his name as well, including Throw Momma from the Train (1987), The War of the Roses (1989), Hoffa (1992), Death to Smoochy (2002) and the upcoming St. Sebastian.
In 2006, he returned to series television in the FX comedy series It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005). With a prominent role in a hit series, Devito's comic talents were now on display for a new generation of television viewers. In 2012, he provided the title voice role in Dr. Seuss' The Lorax (2012).
These days, he continues to work with many of today's top talents as an actor, director and producer.- Composer
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
John E. Keane was born on 17 April 1952 in Pancras, London, England, UK. He is a composer, known for A Very British Coup (1988), Horatio Hornblower: The Duel (1998) and Kavanagh QC (1995).- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
- Music Department
Born in Jarrow in 1935, Alan Plater was brought up in Hull, and trained as an architect in Newcastle. He has been a full-time writer since 1961, with over two hundred assorted credits in radio, television, theatre and film - plus six novels, occasional journalism, broadcasting and teaching. His first plays were written for radio, a medium he still loves. His play, THE JOURNAL OF VASILUE BOGDANOVIC, won the 1983 Sony Radio Award, justifying his faith in eccentric titles. Recent works include a three part dramatisation of ALL THINGS BETRAY THEE the classic novel by Gwyn Thomas about the early days of the Industrial revolution, a radical new version of Gorki's LOWER DEPTHS and a new play, ONLY A MATTER OF TIME, heard in February of this year. His television career began with a string of single plays as well as contributions to the pioneering Z CARS series. Subsequent work has included BARCHESTER CHRONICLES, the BEIDERBECKE TRILOGY, FORTUNES OF WAR and A VERY BRITISH COUP - accumulating Awards from, among others, BAFTA, the Broadcasting Press Guild and the Royal Television Society - plus an International Emmy (USA), the Golden Fleece of Georgia (USSR) and the Grand Prix of the Banff Festival (Canada). His film, SELECTED EXITS, about Gwyn Thomas and starring Anthony Hopkins, was screened on Christmas Day 1993, wining the BAFTA Cymru Writing Award and the Royal Television Society Award for Best Regional Programme. DOGGIN' AROUND, about a jazz pianist adrift in the North of England, was shown in the BBC Screen One season in the Autumn of 1994, starring Eillot Gould and Geraldine James. His work in the theatre includes the musical, CLOSE THE COALHOUSE DOOR, written with Alex Glasgow and Sid Chaplin, a key work in the development of British political drama and triumphantly revived by Live Theatre, Newcastle in October 1994; two celebrated adaptations of Bill Tidy's FOSDYKE SAGA for London's Bush Theatre: RENT PARTY and 1 THOUGHT 1 HEARD A RUSTLING for the Theatre Royal, Stratford East; SWEET SORROW, a celebration of the poet Phillip Larkin for Hull Truck and GOING HOME, a celebration of Tyneside, Australia, forgotten footballers and cool jazz for Newcastle Playhouse. His stage play, SHOOTING THE LEGEND, was seen at at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle in September 1995, where it played to packed houses and rave reviews and won him a nomination for the Lloyd's Playwright of the Year Award. In 1998 he made his debut at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre with ALL CREDIT TO THE LADS, starring Roy Marsden. His first film for the big screen was THE VIRGIN AND THE GYPSY, from D. H. Lawrence's novel, and he later worked with Richard Lester on JUGGERNAUT. He wrote the screenplay for KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING (A MERRY WAR in the U.S.) from George Orwell's novel, released in 1997, directed by Robert Bierman, starring Richard E. Grant and Helens Bonham Carter. He has also written at least twenty abandoned projects of surpassing brilliance, has been fired by some eminent people and can be very boring about all this in conversation. His latest television work includes contributions to the DALZIEL AND PASCOE series for the BBC, dramatised from the novels by Reginald Hill, starring Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan. He Lives very contentedly in London with his wife, Shirley. When he remembers where he left his spare time, he spends it adoring his grandchildren, juggling with crazy projects, hanging around jazz clubs and willing Hull City to show some form. He was president of the Writer's Guild of Great Britain from September 1991 until April 1995. He has received honorary degrees from the University of Hull and, in November 1997, from the University of Northumbria in his beloved Newcastle.- Writer
- Director
- Producer
Although his name is often linked to that of the "movie brat" generation (Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, etc.) Paul Schrader's background couldn't have been more different than theirs. His strict Calvinist parents refused to allow him to see a film until he was 18. Although he more than made up for lost time when studying at Calvin College, Columbia University and UCLA's graduate film program, his influences were far removed from those of his contemporaries--Robert Bresson, Yasujirô Ozu and Carl Theodor Dreyer (about whom he wrote a book, "Transcendental Style in Film") rather than Saturday-morning serials. After a period as a film critic (and protégé of Pauline Kael), he began writing screenplays, hitting the jackpot when he and his brother, Leonard Schrader (a Japanese expert), were paid the then-record sum of $325,000, thus establishing his reputation as one of Hollywood's top screenwriters, which was consolidated when Martin Scorsese filmed Schrader's script Taxi Driver (1976), written in the early 1970s during a bout of drinking and depression. The success of the film allowed Schrader to start directing his own films, which have been notable for their willingness to take stylistic and thematic risks while still working squarely within the Hollywood system. The most original of his films (which he and many others regard as his best) was the Japanese co-production Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985).- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
Jim Henson never thought that he would make a name of himself in puppetry; it was merely a way of getting himself on television. The vehicle that achieved it was Sam and Friends (1955), a late-night puppet show that was on after the 11:00 news in Washington DC. It proved to be very popular and inspired Jim to continue using puppets for his work. He made many commercials, developing the signature humor that Henson Productions is known for. A key reason for the success of his puppets is that Jim realized he didn't need to hide puppeteers behind a structure when they were in front of a camera. All he had to do was instruct the camera operators to focus on the puppets and keep the puppeteers out of the frame. This allowed the puppets to dominate the image and make them more lifelike. This work on puppets and television would lead to separate projects that had different goals. The first one was his work on the The Jimmy Dean Show (1963) with the character Rowlf the Dog, the oldest clearly identified character that Henson Productions still uses. This show provided an income that allowed Jim to work on a pet project. That project was Time Piece (1965), a surrealistic short about time which was nominated for best live-action short Oscar. Henson shot to prominence when he was approached to use his muppets for the revolutionary educational show Sesame Street (1969). The show was a smash hit and his characters have become staples on public television. Unforetunately, this also led to Henson being typecast as only an entertainer for children. He sought to disprove that by being part of the initial crew of Saturday Night Live (1975), but his style and that of the creative staff simply didn't jibe. It was this circumstance that encouraged him to develop a variety show format that had the kind of sophisticated humor that "Sesame Street (1969)" didn't work with. No American broadcaster was interested, but British producer Lew Grade was. This led to The Muppet Show (1976). It initially struggled both in the ratings and in the search for guest stars, but in the second season it became a smash hit and would eventually become the most widely watched series in television history. Hungry for a new challenge, Henson made The Muppet Movie (1979), defying the popular industry opinion that his characters would never work in a movie. The film became a hit and spawned a series of features which included the moody fantasy The Dark Crystal (1982), which was a drastic and bold departure from the amiable tone of his previous work. The most successful TV work in the 1980s was Fraggle Rock (1983), a fantasy series specifically designed to appeal to as many cultural groups as possible. During this time he also established the Creature Shop, a puppet studio that became renowned for being as brilliant with puppetry as ILM was at special effects. When he died all too soon in 1990, he was indisputably one of the geniuses of puppetry. More importantly, he was a man who achieved his phenomenal success while still retaining his social conscience and artistic integrity as his work in promoting environmentalism and his brilliant The Storyteller (1987) series respectively attest to.- Actor
- Producer
- Additional Crew
John Garfield was born Jacob Julius Garfinkle on the Lower East Side of New York City, to Hannah Basia (Margolis) and David Garfinkle, who were Jewish immigrants from Zhytomyr (now in Ukraine). Jules was raised by his father, a clothes presser and part-time cantor, after his mother's death in 1920, when he was 7. He was sent to a special school for problem children, where he was introduced to boxing and drama. He won a scholarship to Maria Ouspenskaya's drama school. He joined the Civic Repertory Theatre in 1932, changing his name to Jules Garfield and making his Broadway debut in that company's Counsellor-at-Law. Joined the Group Theatre company, winning acclaim for his role in Awake and Sing. Embittered over being passed over for the lead in Golden Boy, which was written for him, he signed a contract with Warner Brothers, who changed his name to John Garfield. Won enormous praise for his role of the cynical Mickey Borden in Four Daughters (1938). Appeared in similar roles throughout his career despite his efforts to play varied parts. Children Katherine (1938-1945), David Garfield (1942-1995) and Julie Garfield (1946-). Active in liberal political and social causes, he found himself embroiled in Communist scare of the late 1940s. Though he testified before Congress that he was never a Communist, his ability to get work declined. While separated from his wife, he succumbed to long-term heart problems, dying suddenly in the home of a woman friend at 39. His funeral was mobbed by thousands of fans, in the largest funeral attendance for an actor since Rudolph Valentino.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Zero Mostel was born Samuel Joel Mostel on February 28, 1915 in Brooklyn, New York, one of eight children of an Orthodox Jewish family. Raised in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the young Zero, known as Sammy, developed his talent for painting and drawing at art classes provided by the Educational Alliance, an institution serving Jewish immigrants and their children. Sammy often would go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to copy the paintings.
Sam Mostel matriculated at the City College of New York, then entered a master's program in art at New York University after graduating from CCNY in 1935. He dropped out after a year and worked at odd jobs before being hired by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project to teach drawing and painting at the 92nd Street "Y", the famous Young Men and Young Women's Hebrew Association located on Manhattan's 92nd St., in 1937.
Mostel married Clara Sverd, a CCNY classmate, in 1939, but the marriage was troubled due to personality conflicts. The couple separated in 1941 and divorced in 1944. While still teaching, Mostel supplemented his income by providing gallery lectures at various museums under the aegis of the WPA. His lectures were full of jokes as Mostel personally was a clown, and subsequently he was hired to perform at private parties.
Mostel auditioned as a comedian at the downtown nightclub Cafe Society in late 1941, a jazz club. Initially rejected, owner Barney Josephson hired Mostel after Pearl Harbor, figuring his patrons, now at war, could use some laughs. It was Ivan Black, the club's press agent, who gave Sam Mostel the nickname Zero, explaining, "Here's a guy who's starting from nothing."
Debuting at the Cafe Society on February 16, 1942, Zero was a hit with audiences and the critics, Simultaneously, Zero began appearing in the play "Cafe Crown" at the Cort Theatre, which opened on January 23, 1942 and played through May 23rd, closing after 141 performances. Zero made some impromptu appearances on stage, but he wasn't officially part of the cast of the play, which was staged by Elia Kazan and starred Morris Carnovsky, Sam Jaffe (a future blacklistee), Whit Bissell, and Sam Wanamaker. Zero made his formal Broadway debut in "Keep 'em Laughing" on April 24, 1942 at the 44th Street Theatre. The show ran for 77 performances.
Within a year, he was touring the national nightclub circuit and appearing on radio. He had a brief stint in the Army in 1943, but was quickly discharged due to an unspecified physical disability. Zero spent the rest of the war entertaining the troops overseas.
Zero married Kathryn Harkin, a former Radio City Music Hall Rockette, on July 2, 1944, an act that ruined his relationship with his Orthodox Jewish parents as his new wife was a gentile. The two remained a married couple until his death and produced two sons: Josh Mostel, who was born in 1946, and Tobias, who was born in 1949.
In the post-war years, Zero began to branch-out as a straight actor. On October 19, 1948, he made his television debut in the series "Off the Record," which was broadcast on the DuMont network, following it up with an appearance on October 26, 1948. He later appeared in the The Ford Theatre Hour (1948) episode "The Man Who Came to Dinner," which was broadcast on January 16, 1949 on NBC. He was reunited with his "Cafe Crown" director Elia Kazan in the Oscar-winner's movie Panic in the Streets (1950) (1950). In the movies, Zero often played heavies due to his physique, roles that downplayed his unique gift for comedy.
Zero had long been a leftist politically, and had made contributions to progressive causes. His nightclub act lampooned the red-baiters rampant at the time, and featured the character of a pompous senator called Polltax T. Pellagra. When he and the wife of his good friend 'Jack Gilford' were named by Jerome Robbins before the House Un-American Activities Committee as being communists, Zero was subpoenaed to testify by HUAC.
Mostel testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee on October 14, 1955. In a playful mood, he told the Committee that he was employed by "19th Century-Fox." Zero denied he was a Communist, but refused to name names. He told the Committee that he would gladly discuss his own conduct but was prohibited by religious convictions from naming others. Consequently, he was blacklisted during the 1950s. Shut-out from the movies, he also lost many lucrative nightclub gigs, and he had to make due by playing gigs for meager salaries and by selling his paintings.
In the 1950s, Mostel bumped into Elia Kazan on the street in New York City, and the two reminisced. Kazan said Mostel chided him for putting Mostel through the paces in "Panic in the Streets," forcing him to run more than he ever had. The two retired to a bar, and as they began to drink, s Mostel kept muttering, in reference to Kazan's naming names before HUAC, "Ya shouldn't a done that. Ya shouldn't a done that."
There was no blacklist in the theater, and his friend Burgess Meredith, a noted liberal, offered Zero the lead role in his 1958 Off-Broadway production of "Ulysses in Nighttown," based on the Nighttown episode of James Joyce's novel "Ulysses," that Meredith was directing. Mostel's performance as Leopold Bloom, Joyce's Jewish Everyman, was a great hit with audiences and critics alike, and he won an "Obie," the Off-Broadway equivalent of a Tony. Zero also starred in productions of "Nighttown" in London and Paris.
By the end of 1959, Zero again was appearing on television, cast in the "Play of the Week" episode "The World of Sholom Aleichem," which was broadcast on December 14, 1959 in syndication. He also was cast in a Broadway play, "The Good Soup."
Zero never opened in the play as he was hit by a bus on January 13, 1960. His left leg was severely injured, and required four operations. Zero was in the hospital for five months but regained the use of the leg.
He made a triumphant return to Broadway in the fall of 1960, starring in Ionesco's absurdist tour-de-force "Rhinoceros," for which he won a Tony award. He was cast in another "Play of the Week" episode, this time in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," which was broadcast on April 3, 1961 in syndication.
Zero and his friend Jack Gilford, who had also been blacklisted due to Jerome Robbins having named names and hadn't worked for many years, were both cast in the Broadway musical "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." However, the show, under director George Abbott, was troubled. When Stephen Sondheim pitched Robbins to producer Harold Prince as the savior of "Forum," which was floundering in its out-of-town tryouts, Prince phoned Mostel to ask whether he would be prepared to work with Robbins.
"Are you asking me to eat with him?" asked Mostel.
"I'm just asking you to work with him," Prince replied.
"Of course I'll work with him," Mostel said. "We of the left do not blacklist."
When Robbins showed up at his first rehearsal, everyone was terrified of him because of his reputation as a tough taskmaster and perfectionist. Robbins made the rounds of the cast, shaking hands. When he got to Mostel, there was silence. Then Mostel boomed, "Hiya, Loose Lips!"
Everyone burst out laughing, including Robbins, and the show went on. Robbins was uncredited for staging and choreographing "Forum," which opened at the Alvin Theatre on May 8, 1962. "Forum" was a great hit, running for 964 performances at the Alvin and at the Mark Hellinger Theatre and later at the Majestic, closing on August 29, 1964. "Forum" won six Tony awards, including Best Musical and Best Director for George Abbott. Mostel won his second Tony and Gilford was nominated for the Tony for Best Featured Actor.
Zero followed up this triumph with his legendary turn as Tevye, the milkman with marriageable daughters in "Fiddler on the Roof," based on the stories of Sholom Aleichem. With direction and choreography credited to Jerome Robbins, "Fiddler on the Roof" opened at the Imperial Theatre on September 22, 1964 and did not close until almost eight years later, at the Broadway Theatre on July 2, 1972, with a stop at the Majestic in between during the late '60s. After seven previews, "Fiddler" racked up a total of 3,242 performances, making it one of the greatest Broadway smashes ever. After wining nine Tony awards in 1965, including Best Musical, Best Director, and Best Actor in A Musical (Zero's third Tony), the show was awarded a 10th Tony, a Special Award in 1972 when "Fiddler" became the longest-running musical in Broadway history.
Zero was cast in the 1966 movie version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), and then concentrated on movies and television for the rest of his career. Most of his projects, with the exception of Mel Brooks' The Producers (1967), did not fully utilize his talents. It was a major blow when director Norman Jewison cast the Israeli actor Topol as Tevye in his movie adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof (1971), passing over the legend who had created the role. Topol got an Oscar nomination, but faded quickly out of American movies. The movie of "Fiddler," a huge roadshow hit in 1971, also faded out of American consciousness. One wonders if with Zero in the role, the movie would now be considered a classic and constantly revived on television.
In 1974, Zero reprised his Leopold Bloom in a Broadway production of "Ulysses in Nighttown," again directed by Burgess Meredith, which netted him a Tony Award nomination as Best Actor in a Play. He turned in an affecting performance as a blacklisted comedian in Martin Ritt's movie about the blacklist, The Front (1976). He also had a success with a Broadway revival of "Fiddler on the Roof" in December 1976.
Zero was cast as Shylock in Arnold Wesker's "The Merchant," a pro-Jewish reimagining of 'William Shakespeare''s "The Merchant of Venice." Mostel had great hopes that his Shylock would be the crowning achievement of his career and put him back on top. His huge talent and larger-than-life persona seemed to do better on stage.
This was not to come to pass. He fell ill after a tryout performance in Philadelphia in September and was hospitalized. On September 8, 1977, Zero Mostel died from an aortic aneurysm at the age of sixty-two. One of the greatest, most unique, and definitely irreplaceable talents to grace the American stage and movies had passed away. We are unlikely to look on his likes again.- Julian Zimet was born on 4 July 1919 in The Bronx, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Horror Express (1972), Crack in the World (1965) and The Naked Dawn (1955). He died on 9 March 2017 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.
- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Nedrick Young was born on 23 March 1914 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for The Defiant Ones (1958), Inherit the Wind (1960) and Gun Crazy (1950). He was married to Elizabeth MacRae and Frances Sage. He died on 16 September 1968 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Michael Wilson was born on 1 July 1914 in McAlester, Oklahoma, USA. He was a writer, known for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and 5 Fingers (1952). He was married to Zelma Wilson. He died on 9 April 1978 in Los Angeles County, California, USA.
- John Wexley was born on 14 September 1907 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), The Last Mile (1932) and Hangmen Also Die! (1943). He died on 4 February 1985 in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, USA.
- Producer
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Hannah Weinstein was born on 23 June 1911 in New York City, New York, USA. She was a producer, known for Stir Crazy (1980), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955) and Claudine (1974). She died on 9 March 1984 in New York City, New York, USA.- Writer
- Actor
- Producer
Richard Weil was born on 29 October 1893 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Shine on Harvest Moon (1944), The Great Flamarion (1945) and Talk About a Lady (1946). He was married to Isabelle Keith. He died on 16 August 1971 in Los Angeles, California, USA.