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Harvey Weinstein was born on March 19, 1952, in Flushing, Queens, New York City, New York, USA, the first of two boys born to Max and Miriam Weinstein. He is a film producer, known for Pulp Fiction (1994), Shakespeare in Love (1998), and Gangs of New York (2002). He has been married and divorced twice; most recently from Georgina Chapman and previously from Eve Chilton.- Writer
- Producer
- Actor
Political commentator Bill O'Reilly was born on September 10, 1949 in New York City, to Winifred Angela (Drake) and William James O'Reilly. He was born into a classic Irish Catholic family and attended private Catholic schools.
O'Reilly attended Marist College and studied history. Bill was also in the football club as a punter and wrote for the school newspaper. O'Reilly studied abroad at the University of London, and after coming home played semi professional baseball before graduating with a bachelors in history in 1971.
O'Reilly studied broadcast journalism at Boston University after some time as a teacher in Florida. O'Reilly interned with different newspapers and stations while earning his masters. In the mid 90's O'Reilly earned a degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. O'Reilly's early career included anchor jobs in Scranton, Denver, Portland, Hartford, and Boston. In this time he won a local Emmy and was praised for excellence in investigative reporting.
O'Reilly worked as a WEBS anchor and won a second local Emmy before earning the spot of correspondent for CBS network news. He later worked as a correspondent and assignment reporter for ABC.
O'Reilly became a news star when he was an anchor on "Inside Addition" where he covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the murder of Joel Steinberg. After leaving the team, he earned his 3rd degree from the Kennedy School of government in 1995.
In 1996, O'Reilly launched "The O'Reilly Factor" the show he has anchored for 17 years. Since then he has used his show to report top political stories and it has become the #1 Cable News Show on TV.
In addition to reporting the news, O'Reilly often dissects it. He has made accusations against organizations and figures for corruption, and has broken barriers in news. He often goes head to head with organizations, politicians, and celebrities in the social media. He has called out judges for court rulings he found to be poor and he has even accused people of being unAmerican.
One of his most famous rivals is the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). In 1997, 10 year-old Jeffery Curley was kidnapped and murdered by two men. His body was molested and dumped off. The two men claimed they had gotten the inspiration from literature they had read in a library from the NAMBLA, a radical organization that condones male on boy rape and sexual contact. The ACLU then defended the NAMBLA and the men responsible. Outraged, O'Reilly used his media power to shed light on the issue.
However, his most famous head to head encounter was with organizations that raised money for 9/11 victims. Some faulty finances and numbers lead people to believe these organizations stole this money. O'Reilly publicly accused this organization and came head to head,with actor George Clooney, who claimed that O'Reilly was mistaken. Others that are often implicated as O'Reilly "rivals" are Michael Moore, George Soros, Alec Baldwin, and Susan Sarandon. He is also playfully rivaled on late night television with comics Jon Stewart, David Letterman, and Jay Leno.
O'Reilly has some core political beliefs that lean to the right, although he is a registered Independent. O'Reilly has written books and spoken about cultural traditions such as marriage, abortion, and patriotism. He has come to conflicts with Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and George Soros on issues like these.
O'Reilly has also published books about history and politics. He lives in New York and is the father of two children. His wife Maureen and he divorced in 2011.- Producer
- Editorial Department
- Actor
Charlie Rose is the elegant, handsome, fiercely intelligent and inquisitive host of the self-titled Charlie Rose (1991).
Rose was born Charles Peete Rose, Jr. on January 5, 1942 in Henderson, North Carolina, the only child of Margaret (Frazier) and Charles Peete Rose, Sr., tobacco farmers. The Rose family lived near the railroad tracks in Henderson, in rooms above the general store that his parents owned and managed, and where Charlie helped out. After graduating from high school, where he starred on the basketball team, Rose entered Duke University as a pre-med student. His extra-curricular activities included working with children in a Head Start program. One summer, he secured an internship in the office of North Carolina senator B. Everett Jordan. According to him, his experiences as an intern turned him into a "political junkie" and, upon returning to college, he changed his major to history. After receiving an A.B. degree in 1964, he entered the Duke University School of Law but, sometime before or shortly after earning a J.D. degree in 1968, he realised that the practice of law held little interest for him. Inspired by the idea of "building something" as an entrepreneur, he started taking classes at the New York University Graduate School of Business (he had moved to New York City in 1968) and accepted a job at Bankers Trust. Through his wife, who was doing research for the CBS television show 60 Minutes (1968), Rose became friendly with people employed in broadcasting and he developed what soon became a passionate interest in the broadcast media. After his wife was hired by the BBC in the United States, he handled some assignments for the BBC on a freelance basis. In 1972, while continuing to work at Bankers Trust, he landed a job as a weekend reporter for WPIX-TV, in New York City. During his approximately one-year stint at WPIX, Rose tried several times, without success, to contact Bill Moyers for an interview.
In 1974, Moyers telephoned Rose, after Rose's wife spoke to Moyers about him at a social gathering. At their first meeting, he and Moyers felt an "instant chemistry" and, within weeks, he began working as the managing editor of the PBS series "Bill Moyers' International Report"). (Moyers has said that Rose served as his "alter ego" as well at that time.) In 1975, Moyers named him the executive producer of Bill Moyers' Journal (1972), a PBS documentary and conversation series although, by his own account, Rose had "no great desire to be on camera". In the following year, he became the correspondent for U.S.A.: People and Politics, Moyers's new weekly PBS political magazine series. "A Conversation with Jimmy Carter", one installment of that series, won a 1976 Peabody Award. Later in 1976, after Moyers left public television to work for CBS, Rose accepted a Washington, D.C.-based job as a political correspondent for NBC News. In the belief that he lacked sufficient training to do a proper job and that he should "get the maximum amount of on-air experience", as he put it, he seized opportunities to host interview shows. He first appeared as a guest host on "Panorama", on WTTG-TV, in Washington, D.C. In 1978, after leaving NBC, he served as a co-host with AM/Chicago, on WLS-TV. A year later, Blake Byrne, the general manager of KXAS-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth, hired him as programme manager and, although the station had no budget to pay Rose to do a talk show, he also offered him a time slot for what became Charlie Rose (1991).
In 1981, with the goal of securing national syndication, Rose moved Charlie Rose (1991) to Washington, D.C. where, for the next two years or so, it was broadcast on the NBC-owned station WRC-TV. At the same time, he hosted another weekly interview show for WRC-TV. At the end of 1983, CBS hired Rose to anchor CBS News Nightwatch (1982), an interview program that was taped during the day and was broadcast five times a week between 2:00 A.M. and 6:00 A.M. Rose has recalled having "a wonderful time" during his six-and-a-half years as the CBS News Nightwatch host. Like that of Charlie Rose, the CBS News Nightwatch guest list was not confined to the world's movers and shakers. Among the other people whose activities or histories caught Rose's interest was the convicted murderer Charles Manson, with whom he talked for three hours. The CBS News Nightwatch broadcast of Rose's interview with Manson won an Emmy Award in 1987.
In 1990, Rose left CBS to serve as anchor of "Personalities", a syndicated programme produced by Fox Television. Angry to find himself hosting a tabloid-like news show, he broke his contract after just six weeks. About ten months later, he approached PBS-affiliated station Thirteen/WNET-TV in New York City, with a proposal for a new interview show. Charlie Rose premiered on Thirteen/WNET on September 30, 1991. During nine months in 1992, it also on the Learning Channel. Syndicated nationally since January 1993, it airs on 215 PBS affiliate stations. The show's premise is simple; engage the best politicians, thinkers, personalities, celebrities, sports figures, artists, writers and scientists in one-on-one conversation without any gimmicks and irritating commercial breaks. The show's simple black background and round oak table serve to do just that, along with Rose's intelligent interviewing style and ability to ask pertinent questions, forcing the essence of the personalities to come out.
Rose has interviewed the likes of President Nelson Mandela, President Bill Clinton, Salman Rushdie, Madonna, Bono of U2, Bill Gates, Meryl Streep, Warren Beatty and countless others. According to a conversation he had with Chuck D of Public Enemy fame, he has conducted over 100,000 interviews. Divorced, Rose splits his time between a rented townhouse in Manhattan (that, according to him, is filled with an "embarrassing amount" of electronic equipment) and Bellport, Long Island. On weekends, when not enjoying the rich, cultural life of New York City or preparing for his show, he travels to his farm near Oxford, North Carolina or to the upstate New York farm of a friend.- Music Artist
- Actress
- Producer
Lizzo was born Melissa Viviane Jefferson on April 27, 1988 in Detroit, Michigan & raised in Houston, Texas. Before signing with Nice Life and Atlantic Records, Lizzo released 2 studio albums, Lizzobangers (2013) & Big Grrrl Small World (2015). Lizzo's first major-label EP, Coconut Oil was released on 2016. She attained mainstream success with the release of her third studio album, Cuz I Love You (2019), which peaked inside the top five of the US Billboard 200. The album spawned two singles: Juice & Tempo. The deluxe version of the album included Lizzo's 2017 single, Truth Hurts, which became a viral sleeper hit, topping the US Billboard Hot 100 two years after its initial release. Around this time, her 2016 single: Good as Hell also climbed the charts, reaching the top 3 on the Hot 100 and top ten of the UK Singles Chart. Lizzo received 8 nominations at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards, the most for any artist that year, including Album of the Year for the deluxe version of Cuz I Love You, Song of the Year and Record of the Year for Truth Hurts, as well as Best New Artist. She eventually won the awards for Best Urban Contemporary Album, Best Pop Solo Performance for Truth Hurts & Best Traditional R&B Performance for the song, Jerome.
Aside from singing and rapping, Lizzo also takes up acting roles: she served as a voice performer in the animated film, UglyDolls (2019) and appeared in the crime comedy-drama film, Hustlers (2019). On 2019, Time named Lizzo as Entertainer of the Year for her meteoric rise and contribution to music. In addition to her 3 Grammy Awards, she has also won a Billboard Music Award, a BET Award & 2 Soul Train Music Awards.- Producer
- Writer
- Actress
Emmy-winning talk show host Ellen Lee DeGeneres was born in Metairie, Louisiana, a New Orleans suburb. She is the daughter of Betty DeGeneres (née Elizabeth Jane Pfeffer), a speech therapist, and Elliott Everett DeGeneres, Jr., an insurance agent. Her brother is musician and producer Vance DeGeneres. Her parents divorced when she was 16 years old. Her mother remarried, and her new husband, salesman Roy Gruessendorf, moved the family to Atlanta, Texas.
After graduating from Atlanta High School in 1976, Ellen attended the University of New Orleans as a communications major, but she dropped out after one semester. She held a wide variety of jobs until she turned to stand-up comedy, making her bones at small clubs and coffeehouses before working her way up to emcee Clyde's Comedy Club by 1981. Her comedy was described as a distaff version of Bob Newhart. Beginning in the early 1980s, she toured nationally and was named the funniest person in America after winning a competition sponsored by the cable network Showtime. This led to better gigs, including her first appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962) in 1986.
Though DeGeneres's early forays into series television were not successful (she appeared as a supporting player in two short-lived TV situation comedies in the period 1989-92, Open House (1989) and Laurie Hill (1992)), she scored a hit headlining her own 1994 sitcom on ABC "These Friends of Mine" (renamed Ellen (1994) after its first season). She made TV history in April 1997, when her character, and DeGeneres personally, revealed that she was a lesbian. However, the show was canceled the following season due to declining ratings, after which DeGeneres returned to the stand-up circuit. In 2001, DeGeneres launched a new series, The Ellen Show (2001), on CBS, but it suffered from poor ratings and was canceled.
Redemption as a television artist came in 2003, when DeGeneres's daytime talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show (2003), proved to be both a critical hit and a commercial success. Along with good ratings, the show has won unprecedented kudos from the industry, winning 15 Emmy Awards in its first three seasons on the air and becoming the first talk show in TV history to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show in its first three seasons.
DeGeneres has also made a name for herself as a host of awards shows. She hosted the Grammy Awards in 1996 and 1997, as well as the Primetime Emmy Awards in 2001 and 2005. In February 2007, she had the ultimate TV awards show gig, hosting the Oscars, which she hosted again in 2014.- Producer
- Actress
- Writer
Firebrand Roseanne Barr has long been one of America's funniest and most controversial comedians.
She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, to Helen (Davis), a cashier and bookkeeper, and Jerome Hershel "Jerry" Barr, a salesman. Her family was Jewish, and had moved to the U.S. from Russia, Lithuania, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She dropped out of high school when she was seventeen, and, after a car accident, was admitted to a mental institution, claiming she was having nightmares and memory loss. She left the institute less than a year later. At seventeen, she gave birth to her first daughter, Brandi Brown, and gave her up for adoption. She began working at a restaurant as a dishwasher and waitress. Her hilarious comments to the customers she waited on led her to doing stand-up comedy at the restaurant. She married Bill Pentland and they had three children together, Jessica, Jennifer, and Jacob Pentland.
Roseanne worked doing stand-up comedy until her August 23, 1985 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962) thrust her into the limelight. In 1987, HBO offered her a show of her own, On Location: The Roseanne Barr Show (1987). It was canceled after a short time. In 1989, Roseanne starred opposite Meryl Streep and Ed Begley Jr. in She-Devil (1989). Though her first picture wasn't as successful as she might have hoped, her sitcom, Roseanne (1988), debuted in 1988 and ran for 9 seasons on ABC, co-starring John Goodman. It dealt with real-life issues in a lower middle-class working family. During its first season on ABC, it leaped to #2 in the ratings. After the sitcom's first season, Roseanne gained notoriety when she gave a screeching, crotch-grabbing performance of "The Star Spangled Banner" at a baseball game.
When Roseanne divorced her first husband, Bill Pentland, after 16 years of marriage in 1990 and married Roseanne (1988) co-star Tom Arnold only four days later, her sitcom was already beginning its downward spiral. In 1991, she started to be billed as Roseanne Arnold. Around this time, she began to claim that she, as well as her siblings, had been physically and sexually abused as a child. Both her siblings and parents denied the charges, and lie detector tests used on Roseanne's parents came back negative. The court battles led to ten years of estrangement with her parents and siblings. Her marriage with Arnold lasted four years before she filed for divorce from him for physical abuse and domestic violence. It is still not known if the accusations were true. Although she insisted that he hit her, she admits that he never abused her three children from her previous marriage:
In 1996, she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and won, but she was not there to accept it. Luckily, Tom Arnold's exit from "Roseanne" happened towards the end of the sixth season, allowing the show to have an almost smooth ending. However, after the sixth season of Roseanne (1988), the plots started to run dry and ratings began to drop. During the season following her divorce, she insisted on being billed as simply "Roseanne." After Roseanne (1988) was canceled, she went on Broadway to play "The Wicked Witch of the West" in "The Wizard of Oz" to rave reviews.
On Valentine's Day 1995, Roseanne married former bodyguard Ben Thomas. With Thomas, she had her tubal ligation surgery reversed in order to become pregnant with her fifth child, Buck Thomas. In 1997, she slowly began being billed as "Roseanne Thomas", as in the last 11 episodes of Roseanne, as executive producer (she was still "Roseanne" in the cast credits). She guest-starred in The Nanny (1993) as Roseanne Thomas in late 1997. In 2002, she filed for divorce against Thomas for the second time (the first time, in 1998, she dropped the suit), accusing him of being disturbed and claiming that he threatened to run off with their son.
After the divorce, she began to study the Kabballah, a form of Jewish mysticism, and those around her said she became amazingly centered and stable. In the 2000s, she ended the feud with her parents and siblings and went back to being billed as Roseanne Barr. Today, Roseanne Barr Pentland Arnold Thomas spends her time with her family in her home in El Segundo, California.
Always outspoken, Roseanne began commenting on politics in earnest in the 2000s, and unsuccessfully ran for the Green Party's presidential nomination in 2012. She was subsequently chosen as the Peace and Freedom Party's candidate for President of the United States in '12, receiving 61,971 votes in the general election, and placing sixth. Her run is depicted in the documentary Roseanne for President! (2015).
Initially a left-leaning liberal, she became considerably more right-wing throughout the 2010s. Her show Roseanne returned for a tenth season in 2018, to blockbuster ratings, but was canceled after Roseanne sent a racially-offensive tweet that capped off a longer run of incendiary comments.- Writer
- Producer
- Actor
Jimmy Fallon was born in 1974 in Brooklyn, New York, to Gloria (Feeley) and Jimmy Fallon. He is of Irish, German, and Norwegian descent. He was raised in Saugerties, New York, which is in upstate New York. He has performed stand up, impressions and characters across the country, in some of the biggest comedy clubs, such as the Improv (in Los Angeles) and Caroline's Comedy Club (in New York City). He also took acting classes with The Groundlings, an LA-based breeding ground for great comedians. Jimmy joined the cast of Saturday Night Live (1975) as a featured player in September 1998. He has already been called the best SNL player since Phil Hartman, and is popular amongst SNL fans.- Actor
- Writer
- Music Department
Bill Cosby is one of the world's most well-known entertainers and comedians. William Henry Cosby, Jr. was born on July 12, 1937, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Anna Pearl (Hite), a maid and William Henry Cosby, Sr., a U.S. Navy sailor. After 10th grade, Cosby joined the Navy and completed high school through a correspondence course. He later took up an athletics scholarship at Temple University, supporting himself during his studies by tending bar, where his easy going style and witty joking with the clientèle prompted suggestions that he try stand-up comedy. This he did and was soon to be discovered by the legendary Carl Reiner.
In his early twenties, he appeared on many well-known variety programs including The Ed Sullivan Show (1948). His big break came in 1965 when he appeared as "Alexander Scott" in I Spy (1965), winning numerous Emmys for his performance. He later appeared in The Bill Cosby Show (1969), playing a teacher, although originally the show only lasted for two years. He then created a Filmation cartoon based on many of his high school buddies including Weird Harold, Dumb Donald, Mushmouth, and others: the show was, of course, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (1972). The theme was humorous but also focused on Cosby's more educational side. He studied for many years during his career in the 1960s and 1970s, and he received a doctorate in Education from the University of Massachusetts. Cosby also starred in some highly successful movies such as Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Let's Do It Again (1975), A Piece of the Action (1977), Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976), and California Suite (1978). During his early years he also made some comedy albums that sold very well; his most notable comedy song being "Little Old Man." He was one of the original cast members of The Electric Company (1971), and he was featured in the series Pinwheel (1976) during the late 1970s and then appeared in the mediocre The Devil and Max Devlin (1981).
In 1984, 'Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids' stopped production, and The Cosby Show (1984) commenced. The show was originally intended to follow a blue-collar family, but finally ended up portraying a white-collar family. It was originally rejected by ABC, accepted by a then-floundering NBC, and was an almost instant success. From 1985 to 1987 the show broke viewing records, with Cosby becoming perhaps the strongest driving force in television during the eighties. Despite this great success, he arguably created his own downfall. The Cosby Show led what was considered by many at that time to be the best night of television: the line-up included Night Court (1984), Hill Street Blues (1981), and Family Ties (1982), which all followed The Cosby Show.
Cosby was dissatisfied with the way minorities were portrayed on television. He produced the TV series A Different World (1987) and insisted that this program should follow the Cosby Show, rather than Family Ties. A Different World was set in an historically Black college and concentrated on young people and education. Impact was felt on the show immediately; at its peak, the Cosby Show logged an estimated 70 million viewers. However, after the scheduling reshuffle, the show lost roughly 20% of its massive audience. However, Cosby was still riding high in the early nineties until massive competition from The Simpsons (1989).
The Cosby Show finally ended in 1992, conceding to The Simpsons (1989), with the final production considered to be one of the highest-rated shows of the season and featured a pleading Cosby asking for peace in riot-torn Los Angeles during the height of the Rodney King riots. Cosby never seemed able to top the success of the Cosby Show; his film Leonard Part 6 (1987) was considered to be one of the worst American films in history and may have contributed in part to his downfall as a film actor, along with his performance in Ghost Dad (1990). He did attempt a minor comeback in 1996 starring in the Robin Williams film Jack (1996), which was directed by Francis Ford Coppola; and in another show, Cosby (1996), (starring Phylicia Rashad, who appeared as his wife in the previous Cosby Show). Since then he has produced films such as Men of Honor (2000), and shows including Little Bill (1999).
Sadly, his son Ennis was murdered in 1997. Throughout the years, Bill Cosby has taken a socially conscious tone, often associated with family values, coupled with a distinctly urban spin on his style.- Music Artist
- Actor
- Composer
Michael Joseph Jackson was born on August 29, 1958 in Gary, Indiana, and entertained audiences nearly his entire life. His father, Joe Jackson (no relation to Joe Jackson, also a musician), had been a guitarist, but was forced to give up his musical ambitions following his marriage to Michael's mother Katherine Jackson (née Katherine Esther Scruse). Together, they prodded their growing family's musical interests at home. By the early 1960s, the older boys Jackie, Tito and Jermaine had begun performing around the city; by 1964, Michael and Marlon had joined in.
A musical prodigy, Michael's singing and dancing talents were amazingly mature, and he soon became the dominant voice and focus of the Jackson 5. An opening act for such soul groups as the O-Jays and James Brown, it was Gladys Knight (not Diana Ross) who officially brought the group to Berry Gordy's attention, and by 1969, the boys were producing back-to-back chart-busting hits as Motown artists ("I Want You Back," "ABC," "Never Can Say Goodbye," "Got to Be There," etc.). As a product of the 1970s, the boys emerged as one of the most accomplished black pop / soul vocal groups in music history, successfully evolving from a group like The Temptations to a disco phenomenon.
Solo success for Michael was inevitable, and by the 1980s, he had become infinitely more popular than his brotherly group. Record sales consistently orbited, culminating in the biggest-selling album of all time, "Thriller" in 1982. A TV natural, he ventured rather uneasily into films, such as playing the Scarecrow in The Wiz (1978), but had much better luck with elaborate music videos.
In the 1990s, the downside as an 1980s pop phenomenon began to rear itself. Michael grew terribly child-like and introverted by his peerless celebrity. A rather timorous, androgynous figure to begin with, his physical appearance began to change drastically, and his behavior grew alarmingly bizarre, making him a consistent target for scandal-making, despite his numerous charitable acts. Two brief marriages -- one to Elvis Presley's daughter Lisa Marie Presley -- were forged and two children produced by his second wife during that time, but the purposes behind them appeared image-oriented.
Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. His passion and artistry as a singer, dancer, writer and businessman were unparalleled, and it is these prodigious talents that will ultimately prevail over the extremely negative aspects of his troubled adult life.- Actor
- Producer
- Writer
Kevin Spacey Fowler, better known by his stage name Kevin Spacey, is an American actor of screen and stage, film director, producer, screenwriter and singer. He began his career as a stage actor during the 1980s before obtaining supporting roles in film and television. He gained critical acclaim in the early 1990s that culminated in his first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the neo-noir crime thriller The Usual Suspects (1995), and an Academy Award for Best Actor for midlife crisis-themed drama American Beauty (1999).
His other starring roles have included the comedy-drama film Swimming with Sharks (1994), psychological thriller Seven (1995), the neo-noir crime film L.A. Confidential (1997), the drama Pay It Forward (2000), the science fiction-mystery film K-PAX (2001)
In Broadway theatre, Spacey won a Tony Award for his role in Lost in Yonkers. He was the artistic director of the Old Vic theatre in London from 2004 until stepping down in mid-2015. Since 2013, Spacey has played Frank Underwood in the Netflix political drama series House of Cards. His work in House of Cards earned him Golden Globe Award and Emmy Award nominations for Best Actor.
As enigmatic as he is talented, Kevin Spacey for years kept the details of his private life closely guarded. As he explained in a 1998 interview with the London Evening Standard, "the less you know about me, the easier it is to convince you that I am that character on screen. It allows an audience to come into a movie theatre and believe I am that person". In October 2017, he ended many years of media speculation about his personal life by confirming that he had had sexual relations with both men and women but now identified as gay.
There are, however, certain biographical facts to be had - for starters, Kevin Spacey Fowler was the youngest of three children born to Kathleen Ann (Knutson) and Thomas Geoffrey Fowler, in South Orange, New Jersey. His ancestry includes Swedish (from his maternal grandfather) and English. His middle name, "Spacey," which he uses as his stage name, is from his paternal grandmother. His mother was a personal secretary, his father a technical writer whose irregular job prospects led the family all over the country. The family eventually settled in southern California, where young Kevin developed into quite a little hellion - after he set his sister's tree house on fire, he was shipped off to the Northridge Military Academy, only to be thrown out a few months later for pinging a classmate on the head with a tire. Spacey then found his way to Chatsworth High School in the San Fernando Valley, where he managed to channel his dramatic tendencies into a successful amateur acting career. In his senior year, he played "Captain von Trapp" opposite classmate Mare Winningham's "Maria" in "The Sound of Music" (the pair later graduated as co-valedictorians). Spacey claims that his interest in acting - and his nearly encyclopedic accumulation of film knowledge - began at an early age, when he would sneak downstairs to watch the late late show on TV. Later, in high school, he and his friends cut class to catch revival films at the NuArt Theater. The adolescent Spacey worked up celebrity impersonations (James Stewart and Johnny Carson were two of his favorites) to try out on the amateur comedy club circuit.
He briefly attended Los Angeles Valley College, then left (on the advice of another Chatsworth classmate, Val Kilmer) to join the drama program at Juilliard. After two years of training he was anxious to work, so he quit Juilliard sans diploma and signed up with the New York Shakespeare Festival. His first professional stage appearance was as a messenger in the 1981 production of "Henry VI".
Festival head Joseph Papp ushered the young actor out into the "real world" of theater, and the next year Spacey made his Broadway debut in Henrik Ibsen's "Ghosts". He quickly proved himself as an energetic and versatile performer (at one point, he rotated through all the parts in David Rabe's "Hurlyburly"). In 1986, he had the chance to work with his idol and future mentor, Jack Lemmon, on a production of Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night". While his interest soon turned to film, Spacey would remain active in the theater community - in 1991, he won a Tony Award for his turn as "Uncle Louie" in Neil Simon's Broadway hit "Lost in Yonkers" and, in 1999, he returned to the boards for a revival of O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh".
Spacey's film career began modestly, with a small part as a subway thief in Heartburn (1986). Deemed more of a "character actor" than a "leading man", he stayed on the periphery in his next few films, but attracted attention for his turn as beady-eyed villain "Mel Profitt" on the TV series Wiseguy (1987). Profitt was the first in a long line of dark, manipulative characters that would eventually make Kevin Spacey a household name: he went on to play a sinister office manager in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), a sadistic Hollywood exec in Swimming with Sharks (1994), and, most famously, creepy, smooth-talking eyewitness Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects (1995).
The "Suspects" role earned Spacey an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and catapulted him into the limelight. That same year, he turned in another complex, eerie performance in David Fincher's thriller Se7en (1995) (Spacey refused billing on the film, fearing that it might compromise the ending if audiences were waiting for him to appear). By now, the scripts were pouring in. After appearing in Al Pacino's Looking for Richard (1996), Spacey made his own directorial debut with Albino Alligator (1996), a low-key but well received hostage drama. He then jumped back into acting, winning critical accolades for his turns as flashy detective Jack Vincennes in L.A. Confidential (1997) and genteel, closeted murder suspect Jim Williams in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997). In October 1999, just four days after the dark suburban comedy American Beauty (1999) opened in US theaters, Spacey received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Little did organizers know that his role in Beauty would turn out to be his biggest success yet - as Lester Burnham, a middle-aged corporate cog on the brink of psychological meltdown, he tapped into a funny, savage character that captured audiences' imaginations and earned him a Best Actor Oscar.
No longer relegated to offbeat supporting parts, Spacey seems poised to redefine himself as a Hollywood headliner. He says he's finished exploring the dark side - but, given his attraction to complex characters, that mischievous twinkle will never be too far from his eyes.
In February 2003 Spacey made a major move back to the theatre. He was appointed Artistic Director of the new company set up to save the famous Old Vic theatre, The Old Vic Theatre Company. Although he did not undertake to stop appearing in movies altogether, he undertook to remain in this leading post for ten years, and to act in as well as to direct plays during that time. His first production, of which he was the director, was the September 2004 British premiere of the play Cloaca by Maria Goos (made into a film, Cloaca (2003)). Spacey made his UK Shakespearean debut in the title role in Richard II in 2005. In 2006 he got movie director Robert Altman to direct for the stage the little-known Arthur Miller play Resurrection Blues, but that was a dismal failure. However Spacey remained optimistic, and insisted that a few mistakes are part of the learning process. He starred thereafter with great success in Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten along with Colm Meaney and Eve Best, and in 2007 that show transferred to Broadway. In February 2008 Spacey put on a revival of the David Mamet 1988 play Speed-the-Plow in which he took one of the three roles, the others being taken by Jeff Goldblum and Laura Michelle Kelly.
In 2013, Spacey took on the lead role in an original Netflix series, House of Cards (2013). Based upon a British show of the same name, House of Cards is an American political drama. The show's first season received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination to include Outstanding lead actor in a drama series. In 2017, he played a memorable role as a villain in the action thriller Baby Driver (2017).- Music Artist
- Composer
- Director
R. Kelly was born on the south side of Chicago, Illinois, and attended Kenwood Academy High School, where his music teacher-mentor Lena McLin inspired him to become a singer. He used to sing on street corners. He started off his career with a group by the name of Public Announcement. R. Kelly a master producer, composer, and performer and is often associated with music that can be described as spiritually inspirational and extremely sexual. R. Kelly won acclaim with his production of the late Aaliyah's debut album, "Age Ain't Nothin but a Number." Aaliyah, then 15, soon found herself with a hit album and fending off rumors of an alleged nuptial to Kelly who was then in his mid-20s. Their marriage was annulled shortly afterward, and all ties between Aaliyah and Kelly were severed. Kelly went on to produce several more smash hit albums and songs for soundtracks, such as "I Believe I Can Fly" from Space Jam (1996); "World's Greatest" for the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia; and a duet with French-Canadian pop diva Céline Dion, which catapulted him to more success. Kelly soon married Andrea Lee, who was a former back-up dancer, and had two daughters and one son.
R. Kelly, at the pinnacle of his success, decided to team up with another music industry leader, the hip-hop MC Jay-Z, after great commercial successes on other collaborations with tracks such as Jay-Z's "Not Guilty" and Kelly's "Fiesta Remix." In 2001 to do an entire album together. Slated to be a guaranteed success, "The Best of Both Worlds" was the most highest anticipated album for 2002. Shortly after that year began began, and right before the release of "Best of Both Worlds," an alleged videotape of Kelly with a 14-year-old girl surfaced on the Internet and the streets of major cities.
Allegedly, Kelly was involved in sexual intercourse with a minor on the tape submitted to Chicago Police by former protégé, R&B singer Sparkle. Sparkle claimed the girl was her niece and the God-daughter of R. Kelly's wife. This opened up an avenue of backlash from radio stations and fans across the USA, who refused to continue to play, buy, or support R. Kelly's music. "Best of Both Worlds" was a commercial failure in comparison to its previous rumors of certain success. Jay-Z refused to comment or release a video for their record, and he also thought it would be better for Kelly to take time to sort out his problems. In a May 2002 BET News interview with Ed Gordon, R. Kelly denied the allegations vehemently, stating he would not watch the videotape; he declined to comment on his relationship with Aaliyah. He also stated that he had been receiving help for his "problem" from the Chicago reverend James Meeks, and he wasn't the monster that the public was making him out to be.
On June 5th, 2002, rumors surfaced that Kelly would be indicted on 21 counts of child pornography. After an alleged agreement between Kelly's attorneys and the Chicago Police for Kelly to be able to turn himself in, a fugitive warrant was issued for his arrest in Florida, and R. Kelly was arrested and was extradited to Chicago. Even though the attorney for the four women who were suing R. Kelly--one a former back-up dancer who also appeared on the scandalous videotape (who was an adult during the making of the tape)--stated that she thought that due to the weak legal system, Kelly would not be convicted but did hope he got some help. Kelly could have faced up to 15 years in prison and be forced to pay a fine of US$100.000, register as a sexual offender, and pay millions more in damages. Kelly reportedly stated that he had faith in the justice system and was happy to finally get a chance to defend himself in court. Kelly was eventually acquitted.
In 2003, Kelly released the song "Snake," from the successful album "Chocolate Factory," which became the basis for the reggae riddim called "Baghdad." 2004, Kelly once again teamed up with Jay-Z for the album "Unfinished Business." Like their previous album recorded together, this one also flopped. In 2005, however, Kelly released the album "TP.3," which included the first five chapters of an extended song called Trapped in the Closet: Chapters 1-12 (2005). A strange, bold, and daring experiment in a sort-of R&B aria-meets-soap-opera, an unintended homage to and heavily influenced by The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), the entire saga, which has no end in sight but currently has twelve released chapters--and supposedly as many as 34 chapters have been recorded, might be one of the most unusual experiments in pop music of the decade, further testament to Kelly's undeniable talent.- Music Artist
- Actor
- Composer
Christopher Maurice Brown is an American singer, songwriter, dancer, and actor. According to Billboard, Brown is one of the most successful R&B singers of his generation, having often been referred to by many contemporaries as the "King of R&B". His musical style has been defined as polyhedral, with his R&B being characterized by several influences from other genres, mainly hip hop and pop music. His lyrics develop predominantly over themes of sex, romance, fast life, desire, regret, and emotional conflict. Brown has gained a cult following, and wide comparisons to Michael Jackson for his stage presence.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Jimmy Savile was born on 31 October 1926 in Leeds, Yorkshire, England, UK. He was an actor, known for When Louis Met... Jimmy (2000), Ferry Cross the Mersey (1964) and Go Go Mania (1965). He died on 29 October 2011 in Roundhay, Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, UK.- Producer
- Executive
- Talent Agent
Johnny Kitagawa was born on 23 October 1931 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was a producer and executive, known for Haithîn bugi (1982), Hit the Goal (1994) and Ulin Monogatari - Jemin Y To S (1983). He died on 9 July 2019 in Tokyo, Japan.- Actor
- Producer
Armand Douglas Hammer was born in Los Angeles, California, to Dru Ann (Mobley) and Michael Armand Hammer, a businessman. His great-grandfather, Armand Hammer, was a prominent tycoon and philanthropist who ran the company Occidental Petroleum for many decades. Armie's ancestry includes Russian-Jewish, English, Scots-Irish, and German. He has a younger brother, Viktor Hammer (Armie and Viktor share the same first names as their great-grandfather and his brother). His father is chairman and CEO of the Armand Hammer Foundation, where his mother is a board member. His parents also serve together on the boards of the Los Angeles Dream Center and Knoedler & Hammer Galleries in New York. In addition, his father is a member of the board of trustees for Oral Roberts University, and his mother, a former bank loan officer, teaches Bible study in Los Angeles.
His family moved to Dallas, Texas, when he was approaching school age. They moved to the Cayman Islands in 1993, where they stayed for 5 years. While here, Armie attended the Grace Christian Academy, a school that his father set up. They returned to Los Angeles when Armie was thirteen. He attended L.A. Baptist High School and Calvary Junior High School. He made his stage debut playing "Rooster Hannigan" in a 6th-grade production of "Annie". He left school in the 11th grade so that he could pursue acting. His parents were keen for him to continue his studies, so he took courses at Pasadena City College and UCLA.
He had various small parts, before being cast as Billy Graham in Billy: The Early Years (2008). His breakthrough role came when he played the "Winklevoss Twins" in The Social Network (2010), in a dual role. He has since played "Clyde Tolson" in J. Edgar (2011), "Prince Alcott" in Mirror Mirror (2012), and starred in the title role, John Reid, in the 2013 version of The Lone Ranger (2013), opposite Johnny Depp as Tonto.
In 2015, Hammer starred with Henry Cavill in the spy thriller The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), playing Russian spy Illya Kuryakin and American agent Napoleon Solo, respectively. His 2016 films include the historical drama The Birth of a Nation (2016), the thrillers Nocturnal Animals (2016) and Mine (2016), and the crime drama Free Fire (2016). In 2017, he voiced Jackson Storm in the CGI sequel Cars 3 (2017), and starred as Oliver, an American scholar, in the drama Call Me by Your Name (2017), opposite Timothée Chalamet. For the role, Armie received his first Golden Globe nomination, for Best Supporting Actor.
In 2018, he played David in the drama Hotel Mumbai (2018), and starred as real life taxation law expert Martin D. Ginsburg in On the Basis of Sex (2018), a biopic of Martin's wife, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. More recently, he headlined the unusual horror film Wounds (2019) and was Maxim de Winter in the drama-thriller Rebecca (2020).
Armie was married to actress, model, and television personality Elizabeth Chambers in 2010. They announced their divorce in July 2020. They have two children, a boy and a girl.- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Known for his breakthrough starring role on Freaks and Geeks (1999), James Franco was born April 19, 1978 in Palo Alto, California, to Betsy Franco, a writer, artist, and actress, and Douglas Eugene "Doug" Franco, who ran a Silicon Valley business. His mother is Jewish and his father was of Portuguese and Swedish descent.
Growing up with his two younger brothers, Dave Franco, also an actor, and Tom Franco, James graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1996 and went on to attend UCLA, majoring in English. To overcome his shyness, he got into acting while studying there, which, much to his parents' dismay, he left after only one year. After fifteen months of intensive study at Robert Carnegie's Playhouse West, James began actively pursuing his dream of finding work as an actor in Hollywood. In that short time, he landed himself a starring role on Freaks and Geeks (1999). The show, however, was not a hit to its viewers at the time, and was canceled after its first year. Now, it has become a cult-hit. Prior to joining Freaks and Geeks (1999), Franco starred in the TV miniseries To Serve and Protect (1999). After that, he had a starring role in Whatever It Takes (2000).
Although he'd been working steadily, it wasn't until the TNT made-for-television movie, James Dean (2001) that James rose to fan-magazine fame and got to show off his talent. Since then, he has been working non-stop. After losing the lead role to Tobey Maguire, James settled for the part of "Harry Osborne", Spider-Man's best friend in the summer 2002 major hit Spider-Man (2002). He returned to the Osborne role for the next two films in the trilogy.
Next was Deuces Wild (2002) and City by the Sea (2002), in which Robert De Niro personally had him cast, after viewing his performance in James Dean (2001). He was seen in David Gordon Green's Pineapple Express (2008) opposite Seth Rogen, in George C. Wolfe's Nights in Rodanthe (2008), starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane and in Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah (2007), starring Tommy Lee Jones. Also starring opposite Sean Penn in Gus Van Sant's Milk (2008) in which his performance earned him an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actor. Definitely growing out of his shyness, James Franco is turning into a legend of his own.- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Roger Eugene Ailes was born in Warren, Ohio, the son of Donna Marie and Robert Eugene Ailes, a factory foreman at a local factory. Later in life, Roger Ailes was inducted into the Warren High School Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame.
Roger Ailes graduated from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio with a BA in 1962. Soon afterwards, Ailes began his television career as a property assistant on The Mike Douglas Show (1961). Working in Cleveland and Philadelphia, Roger Ailes quickly rose to producer in 1965 and executive producer between 1967 and 1968. "The Mike Douglas Show" was also the show that allowed Roger Ailes to be nominated for an Emmy in 1968.
It was during Roger Ailes' work on "The Mike Douglas" show that he engaged in a lively discussion about Television and the role it plays in Politics with then-Presidential candidate Richard Nixon. Nixon, having recognized Roger Ailes talent and foresight, brought him on as media adviser to Nixon's presidential campaign from 1967-1968.
In 1968, Roger Ailes founded Ailes Communication in New York, a media production and consulting firm which consulted for a number of different politicians and businesses. He produced two Broadway plays: "Mother Earth" in 1972 and "Hot-L Baltimore", which premiered in 1973 and ran for three years.
Roger Ailes' exposure and success in his political consulting during the Nixon campaign, allowed him to once again consult for a presidential campaign. This time, for the 1984 campaign of Ronald Reagan. It is widely believed that Ailes' coaching of Reagan was the deciding factor which allowed Reagan to win the second presidential debate with Walter Mondale.
Again in 1987 and 1988, while acting as producer for several television specials, Roger Ailes successfully coached and consulted George Bush to victory in both the Republican primaries and, afterwards, the presidential election beating opponent Michael Dukakis. Roger Ailes announced his withdrawal from political consulting in 1992.
After his successful political consulting efforts, Roger Ailes helped produce a television special called "Television and the Presidency", which was later expanded to be a multi-part series. In 1988, Roger Ailes wrote a book called "You Are the Message: Secrets of the Master Communicators", in which he divulged some of the strategies and philosophies for successful performances in public.
In 1993, Roger Ailes was named president of CNBC. During Ailes' presidency at CNBC, he planned and executed the inception of another CNBC channel, "America's Talking", which debuted in 1994. It was on this channel that Roger Ailes hosted a nightly talk show called "Straight Forward".
Once the decision by Microsoft and NBC to create an online and cable news outlet became clear, and it was decided that "America's Talking" would be abandoned, Roger Ailes left - the newly named - MSNBC. Shortly after his departure from NBC/MSNBC, he was hired by Rupert Murdoch to create the now-famous "Fox News Channel" for Murdoch's News Corporation. Fox News quickly became the most-watched cable news network in the United States, in part due to notable names such as Geraldo Rivera, as well as the memorable tagline - which to this day is still used - "Fair and Balanced". Fox News is also credited with big name stars, such as Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren.
To this day, he remains chair and CEO of Fox News Channel and also chairs Fox Television Stations, Twentieth Television, MyNetwork TV and Fox Business Network.- Actress
- Producer
From pioneering women's MMA to blazing a trail in movies, GINA CARANO is one of Hollywood's most unique rising stars. Carano began her training with Muay Thai to competitive MMA, where she competed in Strikeforce and EliteXC. Her popularity led to her being called the "Face of Women's MMA" and she was the fastest-rising search on Google and third-most-searched person on Yahoo and ranked 5th on a list of the "Top 10 Influential Women" of 2008. In August 2009, Carano fought Cris Cyborg in Strikeforce: Carano vs. Cyborg, the first time two women headlined a major MMA event and at the time was the highest rated fight in Showtime history. Carano compiled a competitive record of 12-1-1 in Muay Thai and a 7-1 in women's MMA.[4]
Outside the ring, Carano served as a mentor to aspiring fighters in the 2007 Oxygen reality series Fight Girls and performed as 'Crush' in the revamped television series American Gladiators before her breakout performance in Steven Soderbergh's film HAYWIRE, holding her own against the likes of Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, Bill Paxton and Antonio Banderas. Gina's authenticity to making the Action look real earned her performance a Critics Choice Award Nomination for Best Actress in an action film. Hot on the heels came a role in the worldwide hit FAST AND FURIOUS 6 for Universal Pictures opposite Dwayne Johnson furthering her appeal as an Action Star. Next up, she co-starred alongside Robert DeNiro, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Dave Bautista in Lionsgate's film HEIST followed by the role of 'Angel Dust' in the smash hit MARVEL/FOX film DEADPOOL opposite Ryan Reynolds based on the popular comic book. The film grossed over $870 Million dollars at the Box Office. After starring in the independent films DAUGHTER OF THE WOLF opposite Richard Dreyfuss and the dark comedy MADNESS IN THE METHOD with Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith, Gina had secured a lead role in Jon Favreau's highly reviewed Star Wars TV show THE MANDALORIAN for Disney +. Gina played 'Cara Dune', a former Rebel Shock Trooper in the series. However, after sharing a controversial post on social media, Gina was fired by Lucas Film and her character was written out of the show.
Carano was born in Dallas, Texas, the daughter of Dana Joy (née Cason) and professional football player Glenn Carano who played for the Dallas Cowboys and was the backup quarterback to Roger Staubach. She has two sisters, one older and one younger.
*Gina became the first recipient of ActionFest's Chuck Norris (Best Female Action Star) Award, given to the female action star of the year.
*Gina received the Artemis Action Warrior Award for her contributions to the female action genre and women's MMA. The award was presented to her by Action legend Zoe Bell- Jeffrey Epstein was born on 20 January 1953 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA. He died on 10 August 2019 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.
- Producer
- Actor
- Writer
Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946 at the Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in Queens, New York City, New York. He is the son of Mary Trump (née Macleod) and Fred Trump, a real estate millionaire. His mother was a Scottish immigrant who initially worked as a maid. His father was born in New York, to German parents.
From kindergarten through seventh grade, he attended the Kew-Forest School. At age 13, he enrolled in the New York Military Academy.
In 1964, he began his higher education at Fordham University. After two years, he transferred to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1968 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics.
From 1971 to 2017, he was chairman and president of his family real estate company, Elizabeth Trump & Son (now called The Trump Organization), which was founded in 1923 by his grandmother and father. His business career primarily focused on building or renovating office towers, hotels, casinos, and golf courses.
He has five children, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump with his first wife, Ivana Trump (m. 1977- d.1990), Tiffany Trump with his second wife, Marla Maples (m. 1993- d.1999) and Barron Trump with his third wife, Melania Trump (m. 2005).
He has hosted and produced the reality television series, The Apprentice (2004), which has been nominated for nine Primetime Emmy awards.
He was the 45th President of the United States from January 20, 2017 - January 20, 2021.- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Danny Masterson was born on 13 March 1976 in Nassau County, New York, USA. He is an actor and producer, known for That '70s Show (1998), Dracula 2000 (2000) and Face/Off (1997). He has been married to Bijou Phillips since 18 October 2011. They have one child.- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson was born January 3, 1956 in Peekskill, New York, USA, as the sixth of eleven children of Hutton Gibson, a railroad brakeman, and Anne Patricia (Reilly) Gibson (who died in December of 1990). His mother was Irish, from County Longford, while his American-born father is of mostly Irish descent.
Mel and his family moved to Australia in the late 1960s, settling in New South Wales, where Mel's paternal grandmother, contralto opera singer Eva Mylott, was born. After high school, Mel studied at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, performing at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts alongside future film thespians Judy Davis and Geoffrey Rush.
After college, Mel had a few stints on stage and starred in a few TV shows. Eventually, he was chosen to star in the films Mad Max (1979) and Tim (1979), co-starring Piper Laurie. The small budgeted Mad Max made him known worldwide, while Tim garnered him an award for Best Actor from the Australian Film Institute (equivalent to the Oscar).
Later, he went on to star in Gallipoli (1981), which earned him a second award for Best Actor from the AFI. In 1980, he married Robyn Moore and had seven children. In 1984, Mel made his American debut in The Bounty (1984), which co-starred Anthony Hopkins.
Then in 1987, Mel starred in what would become his signature series, Lethal Weapon (1987), in which he played "Martin Riggs". In 1990, he took on the interesting starring role in Hamlet (1990), which garnered him some critical praise. He also made the more endearing Forever Young (1992) and the somewhat disturbing The Man Without a Face (1993). 1995 brought his most famous role as "Sir William Wallace" in Braveheart (1995), for which he won two Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director.
From there, he made such box office hits as The Patriot (2000), Ransom (1996), and Payback (1999). Today, Mel remains an international superstar mogul, continuously topping the Hollywood power lists as well as the Most Beautiful and Sexiest lists.- Writer
- Producer
- Actress
Joanne Rowling was born in Yate, near Bristol, a few miles south of a town called Dursley ("Harry Potter"'s Muggle-family). Her father Peter Rowling was an engineer for Rolls Royce in Bristol at this time. Her mother, Anne, was half-French and half-Scottish. They met on a train as it left King's Cross Station in London. Her sister Diana is about 2 years younger than Joanne. In 1971, Peter Rowling moved his family to the nearby village of Winterbourne (still in the Bristol vicinity). During the family's residence in Winterbourne, Jo and Di Rowling were friends with neighborhood children, Ian and Vikki Potter. In 1974, the Rowling family moved yet again, this time to Tutshill, near the Welsh border-town of Chepstow in the Forest of Dean and across the Severn River from the greater Bristol area. Rowling admits to having been a bit of a daydreamer as a child and began writing stories at the age of six. After leaving Exeter University, where she read French and Classics, she started work as a teacher but daydreamed about becoming a writer. One day, stuck on a delayed train for four hours between Manchester and London, she dreamed up a boy called "Harry Potter". That was in 1990. It took her six years to write the book. In the meantime, she went to teach in Portugal, married a Portuguese television journalist, had her daughter, Jessica, divorced her husband and returned to Britain when Jessica was just three months old. She went to live in Edinburgh to be near her sister, Di. Her sudden penury made her realize that it was "back-against-the-wall time" and she decided to finish her "Harry Potter" book. She sent the manuscript to two agents and one publisher, looking up likely prospects in the library. One of these agents that she picked at random based on the fact that she liked his name, Christopher Little, was immediately captivated by the manuscript and signed her on as his client within three days. During the 1995-1996 time-frame, while hoping to get the manuscript for "Harry Potter & The Philosopher's Stone" published, Rowling worked as a French teacher in Edinburgh. Several publishers turned down the manuscript before Bloomsbury agreed to purchase it in 1996.- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Roman Polanski is a Polish film director, producer, writer and actor. Having made films in Poland, Britain, France and the USA, he is considered one of the few truly international filmmakers. Roman Polanski was born in Paris in 1933.
His parents returned to Poland from France in 1936, three years before World War II began. On Germany's invasion in 1939, as a family of mostly Jewish heritage, they were all sent to the Krakow ghetto. His parents were then captured and sent to two different concentration camps: His father to Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria, where he survived the war, and his mother to Auschwitz where she was murdered. Roman witnessed his father's capture and then, at only 7, managed to escape the ghetto and survive the war, at first wandering through the Polish countryside and pretending to be a Roman-Catholic kid visiting his relatives. Although this saved his life, he was severely mistreated suffering nearly fatal beating which left him with a fractured skull.
Local people usually ignored the cinemas where German films were shown, but Polanski seemed little concerned by the propaganda and often went to the movies. As the war progressed, Poland became increasingly war-torn and he lived his life as a tramp, hiding in barns and forests, eating whatever he could steal or find. Still under 12 years old, he encountered some Nazi soldiers who forced him to hold targets while they shot at them. At the war's end in 1945, he reunited with his father who sent him to a technical school, but young Polanski seemed to have already chosen another career. In the 1950s, he took up acting, appearing in Andrzej Wajda's A Generation (1955) before studying at the Lodz Film School. His early shorts such as Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958), Le gros et le maigre (1961) and Mammals (1962), showed his taste for black humor and interest in bizarre human relationships. His feature debut, Knife in the Water (1962), was one of the first Polish post-war films not associated with the war theme. It was also the first movie from Poland to get an Oscar nomination for best foreign film. Though already a major Polish filmmaker, Polanski chose to leave the country and headed to France. While down-and-out in Paris, he befriended young scriptwriter, Gérard Brach, who eventually became his long-time collaborator. The next two films, Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-sac (1966), made in England and co-written by Brach, won respectively Silver and then Golden Bear awards at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 1968, Polanski went to Hollywood, where he made the psychological thriller, Rosemary's Baby (1968). However, after the brutal murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson Family in 1969, the director decided to return to Europe. In 1974, he again made a US release - it was Chinatown (1974).
It seemed the beginning of a promising Hollywood career, but after his conviction for the sodomy of a 13-year old girl, Polanski fled from he USA to avoid prison. After Tess (1979), which was awarded several Oscars and Cesars, his works in 1980s and 1990s became intermittent and rarely approached the caliber of his earlier films. It wasn't until The Pianist (2002) that Polanski came back to full form. For that movie, he won nearly all the most important film awards, including the Oscar for Best Director, Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or, the BAFTA and Cesar Award.
He still likes to act in the films of other directors, sometimes with interesting results, as in A Pure Formality (1994).- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Woody Allen was born on November 30, 1935, as Allen Konigsberg, in The Bronx, NY, the son of Martin Konigsberg and Nettie Konigsberg. He has one younger sister, Letty Aronson. As a young boy, he became intrigued with magic tricks and playing the clarinet, two hobbies that he continues today.
Allen broke into show business at 15 years when he started writing jokes for a local paper, receiving $200 a week. He later moved on to write jokes for talk shows but felt that his jokes were being wasted. His agents, Charles Joffe and Jack Rollins, convinced him to start doing stand-up and telling his own jokes. Reluctantly he agreed and, although he initially performed with such fear of the audience that he would cover his ears when they applauded his jokes, he eventually became very successful at stand-up. After performing on stage for a few years, he was approached to write a script for Warren Beatty to star in: What's New Pussycat (1965) and would also have a moderate role as a character in the film. During production, Woody gave himself more and better lines and left Beatty with less compelling dialogue. Beatty inevitably quit the project and was replaced by Peter Sellers, who demanded all the best lines and more screen-time.
It was from this experience that Woody realized that he could not work on a film without complete control over its production. Woody's theoretical directorial debut was in What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966); a Japanese spy flick that he dubbed over with his own comedic dialogue about spies searching for the secret recipe for egg salad. His real directorial debut came the next year in the mockumentary Take the Money and Run (1969). He has written, directed and, more often than not, starred in about a film a year ever since, while simultaneously writing more than a dozen plays and several books of comedy.
While best known for his romantic comedies Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), Woody has made many transitions in his films throughout the years, transitioning from his "early, funny ones" of Bananas (1971), Love and Death (1975) and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972); to his more storied and romantic comedies of Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986); to the Bergmanesque films of Stardust Memories (1980) and Interiors (1978); and then on to the more recent, but varied works of Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Husbands and Wives (1992), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Celebrity (1998) and Deconstructing Harry (1997); and finally to his films of the last decade, which vary from the light comedy of Scoop (2006), to the self-destructive darkness of Match Point (2005) and, most recently, to the cinematically beautiful tale of Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Although his stories and style have changed over the years, he is regarded as one of the best filmmakers of our time because of his views on art and his mastery of filmmaking.- Producer
- Writer
- Actor
Sean Hannity was born on 30 December 1961 in New York City, New York, USA. He is a producer and writer, known for The Siege (1998), The First American (2016) and Let There Be Light (2017). He has been married to Jill Rhodes since 9 January 1993. They have two children.- Matt was educated at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio where he majored in communications. He was hired for internship and quit school in 1979 - four credits shy of graduation. Matt later obtained the degree in 1997 by writing a paper on work experience and delivering the commencement address. Matt's first wife was Nancy Alspaugh, born in 1955, a TV producer. Matt was briefly engaged to Kristen Gesswein, a newscaster. They were together from 1989-96. Matt's current wife is Dutch born model Annette Roque (aka Jade Roque). They have been together since the summer of 1997. They were married October 3, 1998. Matt's father's name is Robert Lauer. He was a retired bicycle-company executive who divorced from Lauer's mother. He died of cancer in 1997 at age 74. Matt's mother's name is Marilyn Kolmer, who is a boutique owner and a former model. She remarried to Richard Kolmer who is Matt's stepfather. Marilyn's father, Matt's grandfather, is Art Gentry, a singer. Matt has a sister whose name is April Lauer Stone. April was born in 1953 and is married with two children. In 1999 Matt won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Class Program, 1998 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
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Alex Jones was born on 11 February 1974 in Dallas, Texas, USA. He is a producer and director, known for A Scanner Darkly (2006), Waking Life (2001) and Police State 2000 (1999). He is married to Erika Wulff. He was previously married to Violet Nichols.- Brett Kavanaugh was born on 12 February 1965 in Washington, District of Columbia, USA. He has been married to Ashley Estes Kavanaugh since July 2004. They have two children.
- Producer
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- Additional Crew
Although born in Hollywood, John and his twin sister Johanna were raised in Whittier near Los Angeles. His parents were Jewell Mae (Risley), an art teacher, and Paul Eual Lasseter, a parts manager at a Chevrolet dealership. His mother's profession contributed to his interest in animation and particularly the Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons which he would watch on television. It was when he was in High School that he realized that he could have a career in animation and he wrote to the Walt Disney Studios but nothing happened then In 1975 the Disney company started an animation course at Calarts - The California Institute of the Arts- and John, with encouragement from his mother, was one of the first to sign up. He and his class mates, who included the future animators and directors Brad Bird, and Tim Burton were taught by some of Disney's veteran animators such as Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas. During his time there John produced two animated shorts - Lady and the Lamp (1979) and Nitemare (1980) - which both won the Student Academy Award for Animation. On graduating in 1979 John was taken on as an animator at the Disney Studios. In 1983, while working on Mickey's Christmas Carol some friends invited him to see some footage of Tron that they were working on using CGI and he immediately saw the potential of it to enhance animated films. John and a colleague made a short test film and satisfied with the result and full of enthusiasm started work on a feature without consulting their superiors who when they found out about it canceled it and sacked John. Having made contacts in the computer industry he was quickly taken on by Lucasfilm which was bought by Steve Jobs for $5 million with a further $5 million invested as working capital and the company renamed Pixar. John soon convinced Steve that the future lay in computer animation by bringing his desk lamp to life in the short 'Luxor Jr' which was shown at a computer graphics conference and got a standing ovation. The first computer animated feature soon followed in the form of 'Toy Story' winning John an Oscar for Special Achievement to go with one he got for Animated Short Film - Tin Toy. He's also had Oscar nominations for Animated Feature - Monster Inc and Cars, Original Screenplay -Toy Story, Animated Short Story - Luxor Jr while the short Knick Knack was selected by Terry Gilliam as one of the best 10 animated films of all time. In 2008, he was honored with the Winsor McCay Award, - the lifetime achievement award for animators. He oversees 3 animation studios - Pixar, Disney Animation and DisneyToon He spent 9 year (2005 - 2014) on the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, only relinquishing his seat due to term limits. He was presented with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Hollywood in November 2011.- Actor
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Ezra Matthew Miller was born in Wyckoff, New Jersey, to Marta (Koch), a modern dancer, and Robert S. Miller, who has worked at Workman Publishing and as former senior V.P. for Hyperion Books. Ezra has two older sisters and is of Ashkenazi Jewish (father) and German-Dutch (mother) ancestry. Ezra has described themselves as Jewish and "spiritual".
As a child, Miller sang with the Metropolitan Opera and attended Rockland Country Day School and The Hudson School. Miller's first feature film was the independent Afterschool (2008), with subsequent appearances on the television series Californication (2007), Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999), and Royal Pains (2009), and in the films City Island (2009), Every Day (2010), Beware the Gonzo (2010), and Another Happy Day (2011).
Miller drew critical praise playing Kevin Khatchadourian, the homicidal son of Tilda Swinton's character, in the dramatic thriller We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011). Miller subsequently played Patrick in the well-received teen drama The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), opposite Logan Lerman and Emma Watson.
Ezra's other roles include the period piece Madame Bovary (2014), Judd Apatow's comedy Trainwreck (2015), and the psychological thriller The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015). Miller has been cast as superhero The Flash in The Flash (2023), scheduled for release in 2022.- Actor
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A comedian. Improvisation, sketch and stand-up are his forte.
Todd Joseph Miller was born in Denver, Colorado, to Leslie, a clinical psychologist, and Kent Miller, an attorney. He went to East High School, and college in Washington, D.C. There, he performed with the group receSs for 4 years, being the only person in his class out of 100 to audition and be accepted into the group. He remained the sole member of receSs until his junior year, when he was joined by Michael "Tuck The Ruckus" Tokaruk, an acclaimed comedian and equestrian, who taught T.J. how to ride a horse, a pastime he calls "droll." He met his future wife, Kate Gorney, when they performed in "A Chorus Line" in university production of the musical. She played The Ballerina (being an accomplished ballerina herself) and he played Richie, the African American character. He credits the casting to East High School, which was a primarily black and Latino high school, and also that no black people auditioned for the part.
During his time in the nation's capital, he studied classical acting at B.A.D.A in Oxford, England and circus arts at Frichess Theatre Urbain. He was outstanding in the field of stilt walking, but was never able to execute any trick, at all, on Trapeze. He is an accomplished clown and juggler, having mastered 5 ball juggling, over fifty 3-ball tricks, clubs, torches, knives, and his specialty (which garnered him a Magician Membership to The Magic Castle in Hollywood, CA) Cigar Boxes.
After graduating with honors (a bachelor's degree in psychology with a concentration in persuasion theory and social influence) he moved to Chicago where he began performing with independent improvisation teams such as the group Chuckle Sandwich, the i.o. house team Bullet Lounge, The sketch group Heavy Weight (with Mark Raterman, Nick Vatterott & Brady Novak). He toured with Second City for almost 2 years (though he was never a company member of the MainStage), and during that time he missed over 15 flights to various cities the company toured to. During his time in Chicago, he performed standup every night for almost 4 years, never taking a night off even on holidays. He became a regular at Chicago's famed alternative room The Lincoln Lodge, and only performed at Chicago's Zanies Comedy Club 3 times in 4 years, apparently because they had an aversion to his absurdist style.
Miller's first appearance on television was on The Standard Deviants, a PBS show aimed at providing educational DVDs and programming for schools. He played a knight and a dinosaur detective.
Proficient in every medium of comedy (he considers even 'acting' simply another medium of comedy) he is also a voiceover artist, having worked for Old Style, Mucinex, Cars.com among other brands as well as in feature films & animated television shows.
In 2011 he produced a 42 track E.P. entitled "The Extended Play E.P." with Comedy Central Records, a folk/pop/hip hop concept album, which he describes as satirical; aimed at celebrities that cross over into other mediums they have no business being in simply because of their brand name (he also considers himself "a proponent of the semicolon, "it is underused and feared for no particular reason"). He then remixed this album with Illegal Art, a legitimate music label, enlisting the roster of artists on the label (including the godfather of sampling, "Steinski") the same year. According to him, this was to prove that the album, when given to actual musicians, became superior to the original, in addition to satirizing artists that remix one song and sell it to listeners multiple times.
He considers his greatest performance to be his portrayal of Ranger Jones, in Yogi Bear 3D, which filmed in New Zealand and wrapped shortly before his seizure that led to the discovery of an AVM (which he alleges confirmed rather than initiated his absurdist philosophy). He has stated multiple times that it was the pinnacle of his artistic career, and that "it's in some ways comforting to have reached the pinnacle of his career so early on" and that is has been all downhill since that point.
Aside from being a major proponent of Denver, his hometown, he has done extensive charity work and continues to visit East High School, where he did his first stand-up performance in drama class. He credits his teacher, Melody Duggan, for much of his success and thanked her specifically in his speech when he won a Critic's Choice Award for best supporting actor in a comedy series (For HBO's Silicon Valley).
He frequently cites his compulsive and almost pathologically driven work ethic as an altruistic effort to distract people from the tragedy that permeates everyday life, and believed that comedy would be more of a contribution than psychology, since instead of affecting only at most a few hundred people dramatically, he can affect millions of people in small increments.
He has publicly stated, "Comedians are the new philosophers" and believes that academic philosophers are no longer relevant. However, he is a student of philosophy and subscribes to the ethical philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Utilitarianism), which states that one should make the most amount happiness for the most amount of people, which he cites as one of the reasons he made the his decision to be a comedian. His stand-up (as of 2015) is aimed at "discussing Time and the release of the death anxiety." By the age of 33 he had read all of Nietzsche's works, and considers himself an Absurdist with philosophical roots in Nihilism.
He resides in Los Angeles, where he struggles to make meaning in an uncertain world.- Producer
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Tyra Banks was born on 4 December 1973 in Los Angeles, California, USA. She is a producer and writer, known for Coyote Ugly (2000), Tropic Thunder (2008) and America's Next Top Model (2003).- Music Artist
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Kanye Omari West (born June 8, 1977) is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, entrepreneur and fashion designer. His musical career has been marked by dramatic changes in styles, incorporating an eclectic range of influences including soul, baroque pop, electro, indie rock, synth-pop, industrial and gospel. Over the course of his career, West has been responsible for cultural movements and progressions within mainstream hip hop and popular music at large.
Born in Atlanta and raised in Chicago, West first became known as a producer for Roc-A-Fella Records in the early 2000s, producing hit singles for recording artists such as Jay-Z, Ludacris and Alicia Keys. Intent on pursuing a solo career as a rapper, West released his debut album The College Dropout in 2004 to widespread critical and commercial success, and founded the record label GOOD Music. He went on to experiment with a variety of musical genres on subsequent acclaimed studio albums, including Late Registration (2005), Graduation (2007), and the polarizing but influential 808s & Heartbreak (2008). He released his fifth album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in 2010 to further rave reviews, and has since succeeded it with Yeezus (2013) , The Life of Pablo (2016) and Ye (2018), as well as full-length collaborations Watch the Throne (2011) and Kids See Ghosts (2018) with Jay-Z and Kid Cudi respectively.
West's outspoken views and life outside of music have received significant media attention. He has been a frequent source of controversy for his conduct at award shows, on social media, and in other public settings, as well as his comments on the music and fashion industries, U.S. politics, and race. His marriage to television personality Kim Kardashian has also been a source of substantial media attention. As a fashion designer, he has collaborated with Nike, Louis Vuitton, and A.P.C. on both clothing and footwear, and have most prominently resulted in the Yeezy collaboration with Adidas beginning in 2013. He is the founder and head of the creative content company Donda.
West is among the most critically acclaimed musicians of the 21st century and one of the best-selling music artists of all time with over 135 million records sold worldwide. He has won a total of 21 Grammy Awards, making him one of the most awarded artists of all time and the most Grammy-awarded artist of his generation. Three of his albums have been included and ranked on Rolling Stone's 2012 update of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list and he ties with Bob Dylan for having topped the annual Pazz & Jop critic poll the most number of times ever, with four number-one albums each. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2005 and 2015.
Kanye Omari West was born on June 8, 1977, in Atlanta, Georgia. After his parents divorced when he was three years old he moved with his mother to Chicago, Illinois. His father, Ray West, is a former Black Panther and was one of the first black photojournalists at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Ray West was later a Christian counselor, and in 2006, opened the Good Water Store and Café in Lexington Park, Maryland with startup capital from his son. West's mother, Dr. Donda C. (Williams) West, was a professor of English at Clark Atlanta University, and the Chair of the English Department at Chicago State University, before retiring to serve as his manager. West was raised in a middle-class background, attending Polaris High School in suburban Oak Lawn, Illinois, after living in Chicago. At the age of 10, West moved with his mother to Nanjing, China, where she was teaching at Nanjing University as part of an exchange program. According to his mother, West was the only foreigner in his class, but settled in well and quickly picked up the language, although he has since forgotten most of it. When asked about his grades in high school, West replied, "I got A's and B's. And I'm not even front-in'."
West demonstrated an affinity for the arts at an early age; he began writing poetry when he was five years old. His mother recalled that she first took notice of West's passion for drawing and music when he was in the third grade. West started rapping in the third grade and began making musical compositions in the seventh grade, eventually selling them to other artists. At age thirteen, West wrote a rap song called "Green Eggs and Ham" and persuaded his mother to pay for time in a recording studio. Accompanying him to the studio and despite discovering it being "a little basement studio" where a microphone hung from the ceiling by a wire clothes hanger, West's mother nonetheless supported and encouraged him. West crossed paths with producer/DJ No I.D., with whom he quickly formed a close friendship. No I.D. soon became West's mentor, and it was from him that West learned how to sample and program beats after he received his first sampler at age 15. After graduating from high school, West received a scholarship to attend Chicago's American Academy of Art in 1997 and began taking painting classes, but shortly after transferred to Chicago State University to study English. He soon realized that his busy class schedule was detrimental to his musical work, and at 20 he dropped out of college to pursue his musical dreams. This action greatly displeased his mother, who was also a professor at the university. She later commented, "It was drummed into my head that college is the ticket to a good life... but some career goals don't require college. For Kanye to make an album called College Dropout it was more about having the guts to embrace who you are, rather than following the path society has carved out for you."- Clarence Thomas was born on 23 June 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, USA. He has been married to Ginni Thomas since 30 May 1987. He was previously married to Kathy Grace Ambush.
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John Christopher "Johnny" Depp II was born on June 9, 1963 in Owensboro, Kentucky, to Betty Sue Palmer (née Wells), a waitress, and John Christopher Depp, a civil engineer. He was raised in Florida. He dropped out of school when he was 15, and fronted a series of music-garage bands, including one named 'The Kids'. When he married Lori A. Depp, he took a job as a ballpoint-pen salesman to support himself and his wife. A visit to Los Angeles, California, with his wife, however, happened to be a blessing in disguise, when he met up with actor Nicolas Cage, who advised him to turn to acting, which culminated in Depp's film debut in the low-budget horror film, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), where he played a teenager who falls prey to dream-stalking demon Freddy Krueger.
In 1987 he shot to stardom when he replaced Jeff Yagher in the role of undercover cop Tommy Hanson in the popular TV series 21 Jump Street (1987). In 1990, after numerous roles in teen-oriented films, his first of a handful of great collaborations with director Tim Burton came about when Depp played the title role in Edward Scissorhands (1990). Following the film's success, Depp carved a niche for himself as a serious, somewhat dark, idiosyncratic performer, consistently selecting roles that surprised critics and audiences alike. He continued to gain critical acclaim and increasing popularity by appearing in many features before re-joining with Burton in the lead role of Ed Wood (1994). In 1997 he played an undercover FBI agent in the fact-based film Donnie Brasco (1997), opposite Al Pacino; in 1998 he appeared in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), directed by Terry Gilliam; and then, in 1999, he appeared in the sci-fi/horror film The Astronaut's Wife (1999). The same year he teamed up again with Burton in Sleepy Hollow (1999), brilliantly portraying Ichabod Crane.
Depp has played many characters in his career, including another fact-based one, Insp. Fred Abberline in From Hell (2001). He stole the show from screen greats such as Antonio Banderas in the finale to Robert Rodriguez's "mariachi" trilogy, Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003). In that same year he starred in the marvelous family blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), playing a character that only the likes of Depp could pull off: the charming, conniving and roguish Capt. Jack Sparrow. The film's enormous success has opened several doors for his career and included an Oscar nomination. He appeared as the central character in the Stephen King-based movie, Secret Window (2004); as the kind-hearted novelist James Barrie in the factually-based Finding Neverland (2004), where he co-starred with Kate Winslet; and Rochester in the British film, The Libertine (2004). Depp collaborated again with Burton in a screen adaptation of Roald Dahl's novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and later in Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Dark Shadows (2012).
Off-screen, Depp has dated several female celebrities, and has been engaged to Sherilyn Fenn, Jennifer Grey, Winona Ryder and Kate Moss. He was married to Lori Anne Allison in 1983, but divorced her in 1985. Depp has two children with his former long-time partner, French singer/actress Vanessa Paradis: Lily-Rose Melody, born in 1999 and John Christopher "Jack" III, born in 2002. He married actress/producer Amber Heard in 2015, divorcing a few years later.- Actor
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Dennis William Quaid was born on April 9, 1954 in Houston, Texas to Juanita Bonniedale "Nita" Quaid (née Jordan), a real estate agent & William Rudy Quaid, an electrician. He grew up in the Houston suburban city of Bellaire. He was raised a Baptist, and studied drama, Mandarin Chinese, and dance while a student at Bellaire High School. He continued study at the University of Houston, but dropped out before completing his degree. He moved to Los Angeles to pursue a film career where his brother, Randy Quaid, had already began to build a successful career. However, Dennis initially had trouble finding film roles, but began to gain notice when he appeared in Breaking Away (1979) and earned strong reviews for his role in The Right Stuff (1983). Aside from acting, Quaid is also a musician, and plays with his band, "The Sharks". He holds a flying license and is a five handicap golfer.- Actor
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Randy Quaid is an Academy Award-nominated actor, for his performance in The Last Detail (1973). Hal Ashby directed Quaid in the role of Meadows opposite Jack Nicholson and Otis Young. Quaid is a great and much-admired actor that has been recognized by Hollywood and the world's finest directors, Midnight Express, The Last Picture Show, Ice Harvest (2005), Real Time (2008), King Carlos in Goya's Ghosts (2006) for director Milos Forman. Forman cast Quaid as "King Carlos IV of Spain" after seeing his Golden Globe-nominated performance as The Colonel in Elvis. Quaid also starred in such mainstream favorites as Kingpin (1996), Vacation (1983), Christmas Vacation (1989) and Independence day (1996).
Quaid earned a Golden Globe for portraying Lyndon Johnson, and received a Golden Globe Nomination for incarnating "Colonel" Tom Parker in Elvis (2005). The portrait of Colonel Parker, a former carnival barker with a murky past, is dark. The New York Times said "Mr. Quaid is riveting as the bully of Graceland" when he has Elvis firmly under his thumb, he is the L.B.J. of rock 'n' roll - a towering, wheedling, tirelessly self-promoting Southern fox in the rare instances when Elvis defies him, Colonel Parker shrinks into a hand-wringing phony, cajoling his only client in the overly ornate language of Professor Marvel in "The Wizard of Oz".
Quaid stars in and was nominated for The Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a cast for his work in Brokeback Mountain (2005), directed by Ang Lee from a script written by Larry McMurtry, who also wrote The Last Picture Show (1971) in which Quaid had his first feature film role. Working with McMurtry and supporting his material has become a Randy Quaid career tradition. Quaid's performance in Brokeback Mountain (2005) was listed as one of the New York Observer's 2005 Noteworthy male performances. In 2009 Randy Quaid Won the Vancouver Critics Award for Best Male Performance in the Feature Film Real-Time for the Role of Rubin an Australian Hit Man.
Randy Quaid was born in Houston, Texas, to Juanita Bonnie Dale (Jordan), a real estate agent, and William Rudy Quaid, an electrician. He grew up in the Houston suburban city of Bellaire, along with his brother, actor Dennis Quaid.
Quaid is married to American Film Director Evi Quaid.- Actor
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Dustin Lee Hoffman was born in Los Angeles, California, to Lillian (Gold) and Harry Hoffman, who was a furniture salesman and prop supervisor for Columbia Pictures. He was raised in a Jewish family (from Ukraine, Russia-Poland, and Romania). Hoffman graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1955, and went to Santa Monica City College, where he dropped out after a year due to bad grades. But before he did, he took an acting course because he was told that "nobody flunks acting." Also received some training at Los Angeles Conservatory of Music. Decided to go into acting because he did not want to work or go into the service. Trained at The Pasadena Playhouse for two years.- Actor
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Marlon Brando is widely considered the greatest movie actor of all time, rivaled only by the more theatrically oriented Laurence Olivier in terms of esteem. Unlike Olivier, who preferred the stage to the screen, Brando concentrated his talents on movies after bidding the Broadway stage adieu in 1949, a decision for which he was severely criticized when his star began to dim in the 1960s and he was excoriated for squandering his talents. No actor ever exerted such a profound influence on succeeding generations of actors as did Brando. More than 50 years after he first scorched the screen as Stanley Kowalski in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and a quarter-century after his last great performance as Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), all American actors are still being measured by the yardstick that was Brando. It was if the shadow of John Barrymore, the great American actor closest to Brando in terms of talent and stardom, dominated the acting field up until the 1970s. He did not, nor did any other actor so dominate the public's consciousness of what WAS an actor before or since Brando's 1951 on-screen portrayal of Stanley made him a cultural icon. Brando eclipsed the reputation of other great actors circa 1950, such as Paul Muni and Fredric March. Only the luster of Spencer Tracy's reputation hasn't dimmed when seen in the starlight thrown off by Brando. However, neither Tracy nor Olivier created an entire school of acting just by the force of his personality. Brando did.
Marlon Brando, Jr. was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Marlon Brando, Sr., a calcium carbonate salesman, and his artistically inclined wife, the former Dorothy Julia Pennebaker. "Bud" Brando was one of three children. His ancestry included English, Irish, German, Dutch, French Huguenot, Welsh, and Scottish; his surname originated with a distant German immigrant ancestor named "Brandau." His oldest sister Jocelyn Brando was also an actress, taking after their mother, who engaged in amateur theatricals and mentored a then-unknown Henry Fonda, another Nebraska native, in her role as director of the Omaha Community Playhouse. Frannie, Brando's other sibling, was a visual artist. Both Brando sisters contrived to leave the Midwest for New York City, Jocelyn to study acting and Frannie to study art. Marlon managed to escape the vocational doldrums forecast for him by his cold, distant father and his disapproving schoolteachers by striking out for The Big Apple in 1943, following Jocelyn into the acting profession. Acting was the only thing he was good at, for which he received praise, so he was determined to make it his career - a high-school dropout, he had nothing else to fall back on, having been rejected by the military due to a knee injury he incurred playing football at Shattuck Military Academy, Brando Sr.'s alma mater. The school booted Marlon out as incorrigible before graduation.
Acting was a skill he honed as a child, the lonely son of alcoholic parents. With his father away on the road, and his mother frequently intoxicated to the point of stupefaction, the young Bud would play-act for her to draw her out of her stupor and to attract her attention and love. His mother was exceedingly neglectful, but he loved her, particularly for instilling in him a love of nature, a feeling which informed his character Paul in Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris") when he is recalling his childhood for his young lover Jeanne. "I don't have many good memories," Paul confesses, and neither did Brando of his childhood. Sometimes he had to go down to the town jail to pick up his mother after she had spent the night in the drunk tank and bring her home, events that traumatized the young boy but may have been the grain that irritated the oyster of his talent, producing the pearls of his performances. Anthony Quinn, his Oscar-winning co-star in Viva Zapata! (1952) told Brando's first wife Anna Kashfi, "I admire Marlon's talent, but I don't envy the pain that created it."
Brando enrolled in Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at New York's New School, and was mentored by Stella Adler, a member of a famous Yiddish Theatre acting family. Adler helped introduce to the New York stage the "emotional memory" technique of Russian theatrical actor, director and impresario Konstantin Stanislavski, whose motto was "Think of your own experiences and use them truthfully." The results of this meeting between an actor and the teacher preparing him for a life in the theater would mark a watershed in American acting and culture.
Brando made his debut on the boards of Broadway on October 19, 1944, in "I Remember Mama," a great success. As a young Broadway actor, Brando was invited by talent scouts from several different studios to screen-test for them, but he turned them down because he would not let himself be bound by the then-standard seven-year contract. Brando would make his film debut quite some time later in Fred Zinnemann's The Men (1950) for producer Stanley Kramer. Playing a paraplegic soldier, Brando brought new levels of realism to the screen, expanding on the verisimilitude brought to movies by Group Theatre alumni John Garfield, the predecessor closest to him in the raw power he projected on-screen. Ironically, it was Garfield whom producer Irene Mayer Selznick had chosen to play the lead in a new Tennessee Williams play she was about to produce, but negotiations broke down when Garfield demanded an ownership stake in "A Streetcar Named Desire." Burt Lancaster was next approached, but couldn't get out of a prior film commitment. Then director Elia Kazan suggested Brando, whom he had directed to great effect in Maxwell Anderson's play "Truckline Café," in which Brando co-starred with Karl Malden, who was to remain a close friend for the next 60 years.
During the production of "Truckline Café," Kazan had found that Brando's presence was so magnetic, he had to re-block the play to keep Marlon near other major characters' stage business, as the audience could not take its eyes off of him. For the scene where Brando's character re-enters the stage after killing his wife, Kazan placed him upstage-center, partially obscured by scenery, but where the audience could still see him as Karl Malden and others played out their scene within the café set. When he eventually entered the scene, crying, the effect was electric. A young Pauline Kael, arriving late to the play, had to avert her eyes when Brando made this entrance as she believed the young actor on stage was having a real-life conniption. She did not look back until her escort commented that the young man was a great actor.
The problem with casting Brando as Stanley was that he was much younger than the character as written by Williams. However, after a meeting between Brando and Williams, the playwright eagerly agreed that Brando would make an ideal Stanley. Williams believed that by casting a younger actor, the Neanderthalish Kowalski would evolve from being a vicious older man to someone whose unintentional cruelty can be attributed to his youthful ignorance. Brando ultimately was dissatisfied with his performance, though, saying he never was able to bring out the humor of the character, which was ironic as his characterization often drew laughs from the audience at the expense of Jessica Tandy's Blanche Dubois. During the out-of-town tryouts, Kazan realized that Brando's magnetism was attracting attention and audience sympathy away from Blanche to Stanley, which was not what the playwright intended. The audience's sympathy should be solely with Blanche, but many spectators were identifying with Stanley. Kazan queried Williams on the matter, broaching the idea of a slight rewrite to tip the scales back to more of a balance between Stanley and Blanche, but Williams demurred, smitten as he was by Brando, just like the preview audiences.
For his part, Brando believed that the audience sided with his Stanley because Jessica Tandy was too shrill. He thought Vivien Leigh, who played the part in the movie, was ideal, as she was not only a great beauty but she WAS Blanche Dubois, troubled as she was in her real life by mental illness and nymphomania. Brando's appearance as Stanley on stage and on screen revolutionized American acting by introducing "The Method" into American consciousness and culture. Method acting, rooted in Adler's study at the Moscow Art Theatre of Stanislavsky's theories that she subsequently introduced to the Group Theatre, was a more naturalistic style of performing, as it engendered a close identification of the actor with the character's emotions. Adler took first place among Brando's acting teachers, and socially she helped turn him from an unsophisticated Midwestern farm boy into a knowledgeable and cosmopolitan artist who one day would socialize with presidents.
Brando didn't like the term "The Method," which quickly became the prominent paradigm taught by such acting gurus as Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Brando denounced Strasberg in his autobiography "Songs My Mother Taught Me" (1994), saying that he was a talentless exploiter who claimed he had been Brando's mentor. The Actors Studio had been founded by Strasberg along with Kazan and Stella Adler's husband, Harold Clurman, all Group Theatre alumni, all political progressives deeply committed to the didactic function of the stage. Brando credits his knowledge of the craft to Adler and Kazan, while Kazan in his autobiography "A Life" claimed that Brando's genius thrived due to the thorough training Adler had given him. Adler's method emphasized that authenticity in acting is achieved by drawing on inner reality to expose deep emotional experience
Interestingly, Elia Kazan believed that Brando had ruined two generations of actors, his contemporaries and those who came after him, all wanting to emulate the great Brando by employing The Method. Kazan felt that Brando was never a Method actor, that he had been highly trained by Adler and did not rely on gut instincts for his performances, as was commonly believed. Many a young actor, mistaken about the true roots of Brando's genius, thought that all it took was to find a character's motivation, empathize with the character through sense and memory association, and regurgitate it all on stage to become the character. That's not how the superbly trained Brando did it; he could, for example, play accents, whereas your average American Method actor could not. There was a method to Brando's art, Kazan felt, but it was not The Method.
After A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which he received the first of his eight Academy Award nominations, Brando appeared in a string of Academy Award-nominated performances - in Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953) and the summit of his early career, Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). For his "Waterfront" portrayal of meat-headed longshoreman Terry Malloy, the washed-up pug who "coulda been a contender," Brando won his first Oscar. Along with his iconic performance as the rebel-without-a-cause Johnny in The Wild One (1953) ("What are you rebelling against?" Johnny is asked. "What have ya got?" is his reply), the first wave of his career was, according to Jon Voight, unprecedented in its audacious presentation of such a wide range of great acting. Director John Huston said his performance of Marc Antony was like seeing the door of a furnace opened in a dark room, and co-star John Gielgud, the premier Shakespearean actor of the 20th century, invited Brando to join his repertory company.
It was this period of 1951-54 that revolutionized American acting, spawning such imitators as James Dean - who modeled his acting and even his lifestyle on his hero Brando - the young Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. After Brando, every up-and-coming star with true acting talent and a brooding, alienated quality would be hailed as the "New Brando," such as Warren Beatty in Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961). "We are all Brando's children," Jack Nicholson pointed out in 1972. "He gave us our freedom." He was truly "The Godfather" of American acting - and he was just 30 years old. Though he had a couple of failures, like Désirée (1954) and The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), he was clearly miscast in them and hadn't sought out the parts so largely escaped blame.
In the second period of his career, 1955-62, Brando managed to uniquely establish himself as a great actor who also was a Top 10 movie star, although that star began to dim after the box-office high point of his early career, Sayonara (1957) (for which he received his fifth Best Actor Oscar nomination). Brando tried his hand at directing a film, the well-reviewed One-Eyed Jacks (1961) that he made for his own production company, Pennebaker Productions (after his mother's maiden name). Stanley Kubrick had been hired to direct the film, but after months of script rewrites in which Brando participated, Kubrick and Brando had a falling out and Kubrick was sacked. According to his widow Christiane Kubrick, Stanley believed that Brando had wanted to direct the film himself all along.
Tales proliferated about the profligacy of Brando the director, burning up a million and a half feet of expensive VistaVision film at 50 cents a foot, fully ten times the normal amount of raw stock expended during production of an equivalent motion picture. Brando took so long editing the film that he was never able to present the studio with a cut. Paramount took it away from him and tacked on a re-shot ending that Brando was dissatisfied with, as it made the Oedipal figure of Dad Longworth into a villain. In any normal film Dad would have been the heavy, but Brando believed that no one was innately evil, that it was a matter of an individual responding to, and being molded by, one's environment. It was not a black-and-white world, Brando felt, but a gray world in which once-decent people could do horrible things. This attitude explains his sympathetic portrayal of Nazi officer Christian Diestl in the film he made before shooting One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Edward Dmytryk's filming of Irwin Shaw's novel The Young Lions (1958). Shaw denounced Brando's performance, but audiences obviously disagreed, as the film was a major hit. It would be the last hit movie Brando would have for more than a decade.
One-Eyed Jacks (1961) generated respectable numbers at the box office, but the production costs were exorbitant - a then-staggering $6 million - which made it run a deficit. A film essentially is "made" in the editing room, and Brando found cutting to be a terribly boring process, which was why the studio eventually took the film away from him. Despite his proved talent in handling actors and a large production, Brando never again directed another film, though he would claim that all actors essentially direct themselves during the shooting of a picture.
Between the production and release of One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Brando appeared in Sidney Lumet's film version of Tennessee Williams' play "Orpheus Descending," The Fugitive Kind (1960) which teamed him with fellow Oscar winners Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward. Following in Elizabeth Taylor's trailblazing footsteps, Brando became the second performer to receive a $1-million salary for a motion picture, so high were the expectations for this re-teaming of Kowalski and his creator (in 1961 critic Hollis Alpert had published a book "Brando and the Shadow of Stanley Kowalski"). Critics and audiences waiting for another incendiary display from Brando in a Williams work were disappointed when the renamed The Fugitive Kind (1960) finally released. Though Tennessee was hot, with movie versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) burning up the box office and receiving kudos from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, The Fugitive Kind (1960) was a failure. This was followed by the so-so box-office reception of One-Eyed Jacks (1961) in 1961 and then by a failure of a more monumental kind: Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), a remake of the famed 1935 film.
Brando signed on to Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after turning down the lead in the David Lean classic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) because he didn't want to spend a year in the desert riding around on a camel. He received another $1-million salary, plus $200,000 in overages as the shoot went overtime and over budget. During principal photography, highly respected director Carol Reed (an eventual Academy Award winner) was fired, and his replacement, two-time Oscar winner Lewis Milestone, was shunted aside by Brando as Marlon basically took over the direction of the film himself. The long shoot became so notorious that President John F. Kennedy asked director Billy Wilder at a cocktail party not "when" but "if" the "Bounty" shoot would ever be over. The MGM remake of one of its classic Golden Age films garnered a Best Picture Oscar nomination and was one of the top grossing films of 1962, yet failed to go into the black due to its Brobdingnagian budget estimated at $20 million, which is equivalent to $120 million when adjusted for inflation.
Brando and Taylor, whose Cleopatra (1963) nearly bankrupted 20th Century-Fox due to its huge cost overruns (its final budget was more than twice that of Brando's Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)), were pilloried by the show business press for being the epitome of the pampered, self-indulgent stars who were ruining the industry. Seeking scapegoats, the Hollywood press conveniently ignored the financial pressures on the studios. The studios had been hurt by television and by the antitrust-mandated divestiture of their movie theater chains, causing a large outflow of production to Italy and other countries in the 1950s and 1960s in order to lower costs. The studio bosses, seeking to replicate such blockbuster hits as the remakes of The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959), were the real culprits behind the losses generated by large-budgeted films that found it impossible to recoup their costs despite long lines at the box office.
While Elizabeth Taylor, receiving the unwanted gift of reams of publicity from her adulterous romance with Cleopatra (1963) co-star Richard Burton, remained hot until the tanking of her own Tennessee Williams-renamed debacle Boom! (1968), Brando from 1963 until the end of the decade appeared in one box-office failure after another as he worked out a contract he had signed with Universal Pictures. The industry had grown tired of Brando and his idiosyncrasies, though he continued to be offered prestige projects up through 1968.
Some of the films Brando made in the 1960s were noble failures, such as The Ugly American (1963), The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). For every "Reflections," though, there seemed to be two or three outright debacles, such as Bedtime Story (1964), Morituri (1965), The Chase (1966), A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), Candy (1968), The Night of the Following Day (1969). By the time Brando began making the anti-colonialist picture Burn! (1969) in Colombia with Gillo Pontecorvo in the director's chair, he was box-office poison, despite having worked in the previous five years with such top directors as Arthur Penn, John Huston and the legendary Charles Chaplin, and with such top-drawer co-stars as David Niven, Yul Brynner, Sophia Loren and Taylor.
The rap on Brando in the 1960s was that a great talent had ruined his potential to be America's answer to Laurence Olivier, as his friend William Redfield limned the dilemma in his book "Letters from an Actor" (1967), a memoir about Redfield's appearance in Burton's 1964 theatrical production of "Hamlet." By failing to go back on stage and recharge his artistic batteries, something British actors such as Burton were not afraid to do, Brando had stifled his great talent, by refusing to tackle the classical repertoire and contemporary drama. Actors and critics had yearned for an American response to the high-acting style of the Brits, and while Method actors such as Rod Steiger tried to create an American style, they were hampered in their quest, as their king was lost in a wasteland of Hollywood movies that were beneath his talent. Many of his early supporters now turned on him, claiming he was a crass sellout.
Despite evidence in such films as The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) that Brando was in fact doing some of the best acting of his life, critics, perhaps with an eye on the box office, slammed him for failing to live up to, and nurture, his great gift. Brando's political activism, starting in the early 1960s with his championing of Native Americans' rights, followed by his participation in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's March on Washington in 1963, and followed by his appearance at a Black Panther rally in 1968, did not win him many admirers in the establishment. In fact, there was a de facto embargo on Brando films in the recently segregated (officially, at least) southeastern US in the 1960s. Southern exhibitors simply would not book his films, and producers took notice. After 1968, Brando would not work for three years.
Pauline Kael wrote of Brando that he was Fortune's fool. She drew a parallel with the latter career of John Barrymore, a similarly gifted thespian with talents as prodigious, who seemingly threw them away. Brando, like the late-career Barrymore, had become a great ham, evidenced by his turn as the faux Indian guru in the egregious Candy (1968), seemingly because the material was so beneath his talent. Most observers of Brando in the 1960s believed that he needed to be reunited with his old mentor Elia Kazan, a relationship that had soured due to Kazan's friendly testimony naming names before the notorious House un-American Activities Committee. Perhaps Brando believed this, too, as he originally accepted an offer to appear as the star of Kazan's film adaptation of his own novel, The Arrangement (1969). However, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Brando backed out of the film, telling Kazan that he could not appear in a Hollywood film after this tragedy. Also reportedly turning down a role opposite box-office king Paul Newman in a surefire script, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Brando decided to make Burn! (1969) with Pontecorvo. The film, a searing indictment of racism and colonialism, flopped at the box office but won the esteem of progressive critics and cultural arbiters such as Howard Zinn. He subsequently appeared in the British film The Nightcomers (1971), a prequel to "Turn of the Screw" and another critical and box office failure.
Kazan, after a life in film and the theater, said that, aside from Orson Welles, whose greatness lay in film making, he only met one actor who was a genius: Brando. Richard Burton, an intellectual with a keen eye for observation if not for his own film projects, said that he found Brando to be very bright, unlike the public perception of him as a Terry Malloy-type character that he himself inadvertently promoted through his boorish behavior. Brando's problem, Burton felt, was that he was unique, and that he had gotten too much fame too soon at too early an age. Cut off from being nurtured by normal contact with society, fame had distorted Brando's personality and his ability to cope with the world, as he had not had time to grow up outside the limelight.
Truman Capote, who eviscerated Brando in print in the mid-'50s and had as much to do with the public perception of the dyslexic Brando as a dumbbell, always said that the best actors were ignorant, and that an intelligent person could not be a good actor. However, Brando was highly intelligent, and possessed of a rare genius in a then-deprecated art, acting. The problem that an intelligent performer has in movies is that it is the director, and not the actor, who has the power in his chosen field. Greatness in the other arts is defined by how much control the artist is able to exert over his chosen medium, but in movie acting, the medium is controlled by a person outside the individual artist. It is an axiom of the cinema that a performance, as is a film, is "created" in the cutting room, thus further removing the actor from control over his art. Brando had tried his hand at directing, in controlling the whole artistic enterprise, but he could not abide the cutting room, where a film and the film's performances are made. This lack of control over his art was the root of Brando's discontent with acting, with movies, and, eventually, with the whole wide world that invested so much cachet in movie actors, as long as "they" were at the top of the box-office charts. Hollywood was a matter of "they" and not the work, and Brando became disgusted.
Charlton Heston, who participated in Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington with Brando, believes that Marlon was the great actor of his generation. However, noting a story that Brando had once refused a role in the early 1960s with the excuse "How can I act when people are starving in India?," Heston believes that it was this attitude, the inability to separate one's idealism from one's work, that prevented Brando from reaching his potential. As Rod Steiger once said, Brando had it all, great stardom and a great talent. He could have taken his audience on a trip to the stars, but he simply would not. Steiger, one of Brando's children even though a contemporary, could not understand it. When James Mason' was asked in 1971 who was the best American actor, he had replied that since Brando had let his career go belly-up, it had to be George C. Scott, by default.
Paramount thought that only Laurence Olivier would suffice, but Lord Olivier was ill. The young director believed there was only one actor who could play godfather to the group of Young Turk actors he had assembled for his film, The Godfather of method acting himself - Marlon Brando. Francis Ford Coppola won the fight for Brando, Brando won - and refused - his second Oscar, and Paramount won a pot of gold by producing the then top-grossing film of all-time, The Godfather (1972), a gangster movie most critics now judge one of the greatest American films of all time. Brando followed his iconic portrayal of Don Corleone with his Oscar-nominated turn in the high-grossing and highly scandalous Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris"), the first film dealing explicitly with sexuality in which an actor of Brando's stature had participated. He was now again a top ten box office star and once again heralded as the greatest actor of his generation, an unprecedented comeback that put him on the cover of "Time" magazine and would make him the highest-paid actor in the history of motion pictures by the end of the decade. Little did the world know that Brando, who had struggled through many projects in good faith during the 1960s, delivering some of his best acting, only to be excoriated and ignored as the films did not do well at the box office, essentially was through with the movies.
After reaching the summit of his career, a rarefied atmosphere never reached before or since by any actor, Brando essentially walked away. He would give no more of himself after giving everything as he had done in Last Tango in Paris (1972)," a performance that embarrassed him, according to his autobiography. Brando had come as close to any actor to being the "auteur," or author, of a film, as the English-language scenes of "Tango" were created by encouraging Brando to improvise. The improvisations were written down and turned into a shooting script, and the scripted improvisations were shot the next day. Pauline Kael, the Brando of movie critics in that she was the most influential arbiter of cinematic quality of her generation and spawned a whole legion of Kael wannabes, said Brando's performance in Last Tango in Paris (1972) had revolutionized the art of film. Brando, who had to act to gain his mother's attention; Brando, who believed acting at best was nothing special as everyone in the world engaged in it every day of their lives to get what they wanted from other people; Brando, who believed acting at its worst was a childish charade and that movie stardom was a whorish fraud, would have agreed with Sam Peckinpah's summation of Pauline Kael: "Pauline's a brilliant critic but sometimes she's just cracking walnuts with her ass." He probably would have done so in a simulacrum of those words, too.
After another three-year hiatus, Brando took on just one more major role for the next 20 years, as the bounty hunter after Jack Nicholson in Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks (1976), a western that succeeded neither with the critics or at the box office. Following The Godfather and Tango, Brando's performance was disappointing for some reviewers, who accused him of giving an erratic and inconsistent performance. In 1977, Brando made a rare appearance on television in the miniseries Roots: The Next Generations (1979), portraying George Lincoln Rockwell; he won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for his performance. In 1978, he narrated the English version of Raoni (1978), a French-Belgian documentary film directed by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux and Luiz Carlos Saldanha that focused on the life of Raoni Metuktire and issues surrounding the survival of the indigenous Indian tribes of north central Brazil.
Later in his career, Brando concentrated on extracting the maximum amount of capital for the least amount of work from producers, as when he got the Salkind brothers to pony up a then-record $3.7 million against 10% of the gross for 13 days work on Superman (1978). Factoring in inflation, the straight salary for "Superman" equals or exceeds the new record of $1 million a day Harrison Ford set with K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). He agreed to the role only on assurance that he would be paid a large sum for what amounted to a small part, that he would not have to read the script beforehand, and his lines would be displayed somewhere off-camera. Brando also filmed scenes for the movie's sequel, Superman II, but after producers refused to pay him the same percentage he received for the first movie, he denied them permission to use the footage.
Before cashing his first paycheck for Superman (1978), Brando had picked up $2 million for his extended cameo in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) in a role, that of Col. Kurtz, that he authored on-camera through improvisation while Coppola shot take after take. It was Brando's last bravura star performance. He co-starred with George C. Scott and John Gielgud in The Formula (1980), but the film was another critical and financial failure. Years later though, he did receive an eighth and final Oscar nomination for his supporting role in A Dry White Season (1989) after coming out of a near-decade-long retirement. Contrary to those who claimed he now only was in it for the money, Brando donated his entire seven-figure salary to an anti-apartheid charity. He then did an amusing performance in the comedy The Freshman (1990), winning rave reviews. He portrayed Tomas de Torquemada in the historical drama 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), but his performance was denounced and the film was another box office failure. He made another comeback in the Johnny Depp romantic drama Don Juan DeMarco (1994), which co-starred Faye Dunaway as his wife. He then appeared in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), co-starring Val Kilmer, who he didn't get along with. The filming was an unpleasant experience for Brando, as well as another critical and box office failure.
Brando had first attracted media attention at the age of 24, when "Life" magazine ran a photo of himself and his sister Jocelyn, who were both then appearing on Broadway. The curiosity continued, and snowballed. Playing the paraplegic soldier of The Men (1950), Brando had gone to live at a Veterans Administration hospital with actual disabled veterans, and confined himself to a wheelchair for weeks. It was an acting method, research, that no one in Hollywood had ever heard of before, and that willingness to experience life.- Music Artist
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Marilyn Manson was born Brian Hugh Warner on January 5, 1969 in Canton, Ohio, to Barbara Jo (Wyer) and Hugh Angus Warner. He has German and English ancestry. During his childhood, one of his neighbors molested him several times until the young Brian broke down one day and told his mother what happened. As an only child, he would often get into mischievous activities such as adventure through his grandfather Jack Warner's sex toys, shoot his BB gun with his cousin Chad, and create sex magazines to sell to his classmates. His parents raised him as an Episcopalian, and he attended the religious private Heritage Christian School. It was there that he became fueled with hate towards Christanity. During his tenth grade year, he convinced his parents to let him attend a public school.
After he graduated from high school, he and his parents moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida because his father got a better job there. He studied journalism and theater at the local community college called Broward, and being some place new and feeling lonely, he wrote poems and short stories. After being fired from his last job at a record store, he became entertainment journalist for a local magazine. He interviewed several famous musicians including Trent Reznor from the band "Nine Inch Nails". Along with his job and writing, he would also frequently go to rock clubs. He soon decided to create his own band.
With musical influences from Ozzy Osbourne and KISS, he recruited other musicians with the same interests and started the band called "Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids". He got the name Marilyn Manson as a combination from the names of the movie star Marilyn Monroe and the psycho killer Charles Manson. The band's name would later officially change to just Marilyn Manson, and most of the original band members would leave and be replaced, too. Manson reunited with Trent Reznor and had his band tour with "Nine Inch Nails". Reznor would also produce Marilyn Manson's first three albums (Portrait of an American Family, AntiChrist Superstar, and Mechanical Animals) and an E.P. (Smells like Children). "Mechanical Animals" is Marilyn Manson's most successful album to date. With the success, Manson became a controversial celebrity, because the anti-Christian message in his songs, and Satanist 'Anton Szandor LaVey' deemed Manson a Reverend for the Church of Satan. Also with fame, Manson started to mingle with other celebrities, and began a romantic relationship with the actress Rose McGowan. They became engaged, but broke off the relationship in 2001.
He then fell in love with the burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese, and soon became engaged. They had a fairy tale, non-denominational wedding in a castle in Ireland. Meanwhile, Manson came out with two more albums (Holy Wood, and the Golden Age of Grotesque), and a best of album (Lest We Forget: The Best Of...). He also dabbled into acting by being in such movies as Jawbreaker (1999), Party Monster (2003) and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004). He continues to make music and act in movies.- Podcaster
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Joe Rogan was born on 11 August 1967 in Newark, New Jersey, USA. He is a podcaster and writer, known for The Joe Rogan Experience (2009), NewsRadio (1995) and Zookeeper (2011). He has been married to Jessica Rogan since 2009. They have three children.- Writer
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Television would never be the same after David Letterman made his second attempt at a show in 1982. But his career before becoming host of the show was quite an interesting and long one.
Letterman was born in Broad Ripple, a neighborhood in Indianapolis, to Dorothy Marie (Hofert), a church secretary, and Harry Joseph Letterman, a florist. He is of German, English, and Scots-Irish descent. His childhood was relatively unremarkable, but he exhibited tendencies of the class clown and showed a very strong independent streak as a child. Letterman went on to graduate from Ball State University in the late 1960s and married Michelle Cook in 1969. From 1970 to 1974, he worked as a weatherman and TV announcer and from 1974 to 1975 as a radio talk show host.
As the late 1970s approached, Letterman was working as a struggling stand-up comic at The Comedy Store and started writing for television shows. He wrote for the summer series "The Peeping Times" and for such shows as Good Times (1974). Letterman had become something of a minor celebrity by 1978, by which time he had appeared on The Gong Show (1976), Mary Tyler Moore's variety series, Mary (1978), Liar's Club (1976), The $10,000 Pyramid (1973), Password Plus (1979) and the variety series, The Starland Vocal Band Show (1977). (It was also revealed on the Game Show Network that Letterman hosted a pilot of a game show in the seventies called The Riddlers (1977), but it was not made into a series.)
This exposure prompted many appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962). He became so popular that he was permanent substitute host by the end of the 1970s. NBC saw great potential in the young irreverent comedian, so they gave Letterman his own daytime talk show, The David Letterman Show (1980), which was a disaster and aired for only a few months. At about this time, Tom Snyder was having problems with his late-night show, Tomorrow Coast to Coast (1973), which aired after the "Tonight Show." His problems were mostly with his co-host, Rona Barrett, and Snyder was forced off air in late 1981. Letterman, who was still permanent co-host of the "Tonight Show," took over the post-Carson slot with [error].
Letterman's show was extremely unconventional. For starters, Letterman was very political, whereas Johnny Carson had steered away from political jokes. Letterman's early antics changed talk shows. He would often stage elevator races in Radio City Music Hall. He made random calls to strangers and talked about the strangest subjects. At one point, Letterman got his associate Larry "Bud" Melman to stand outside the Russian Embassy and hand out pamphlets encouraging defection. He often made his guests feel uncomfortable with his intelligent and abrasive style, and guests often participated in funny and unusual skits with him. Letterman became almost an instant success, and some say he surpassed Carson in popularity.
As the late 1980s approached, Letterman was becoming more and more of a household name, often at odds with the censors over his show, and never one to kowtow to guests' wishes. But that only made him more popular, and he garnered more and more status as a world class talk show host. Among the more classic moments in his early show was the time he covered his suit with Alka Seltzer and jumped in a vat of water. Letterman helped Andy Kaufman with his wrestling saga, as Kaufman and Jerry Lawler pretended to get in a fight on "Late Night." Letterman also became known for his on-screen reclusiveness with respect to other shows. While Carson at one point in his career would often make cameos and guest appearances, Letterman would shy away from cameos and stuck almost solely to doing his "Late Night" show.
In 1992 Johnny Carson made a landmark announcement: he was retiring. Many thought that Letterman would be the natural choice as Carson's replacement, but many at NBC were leaning toward current "Tonight Show" substitute host Jay Leno. The battle was very public and very vicious, but in the end Leno won out, and Letterman continued hosting the post-"Tonight Show" slot. But, in 1993, Letterman made his own big announcement: he was leaving NBC for a lucrative contract with CBS to star in the Late Show with David Letterman (1993). The battle intensified even more. NBC claimed that many of Letterman's gimmicks and jokes, including throwing the pencil at the camera, the Top Ten List, and Larry "Bud" Melman, among many others, were NBC's "intellectual property." NBC lost, but Larry "Bud" Melman would now be called by his real name, Calvert DeForest, on the CBS show. Competing in the late night wars with not only Leno but also Chevy Chase, Arsenio Hall and Ted Koppel, Letterman consistently won over all of his competition until the summer of 1995, when Leno had guest Hugh Grant on his show to discuss his highly publicized arrest for being caught with prostitute Divine Brown and Grant cried on screen. The ratings were tremendous, and Leno has consistently beaten Letterman ever since.
In recent years, Letterman has toned down his act. He dresses more conservatively and tends to go the more traditional route of talk shows. It can be said that every talk show since, including Craig Kilborn and especially 'Conan O'Brien', has been influenced a great deal by Letterman's unconventional, irreverent, off-the-wall style. It was thought that Letterman was going to retire in the mid-'90s, but an impressive 14 million-per-year deal has kept Letterman with CBS. Near-tragedy struck, however, in January of 2000 when Letterman was diagnosed with coronary arterial blockage and underwent quintuple bypass surgery. The operation was successful, however, and Letterman received countless get-well cards and a great deal of publicity. Among David's better-known incidents in recent years have been Drew Barrymore's infamous table dance, an interview with a bizarre and ditzy Farrah Fawcett, his appearance in the movie, Cabin Boy (1994) (written by and starring his former "Late Night" writer and performer Chris Elliott), his stint as host of The 67th Annual Academy Awards (1995), and his appearance in the Andy Kaufman biopic, Man on the Moon (1999). When Politically Incorrect (1993) was canceled in 2002, Letterman was sought after to leave CBS for ABC, but he declined to do so and stayed with CBS, where he remained until his retirement in May 2015.
Aside from being a talk show host, Letterman is an active producer. His production company is called Worldwide Pants. Over the years he has been executive producer of his original show, his new show, Everybody Loves Raymond (1996), The Building (1993), Bonnie (1995), The High Life (1996), The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn (1999), and Ed (2000).- Producer
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Russell Brand was born on June 4, 1975, in Grays, Essex, England, the son of Barbara Elizabeth (Nichols) and Ronald Henry Brand, a photographer. An only child, his parents divorced when he was only six months old, and he was subsequently raised by his mother. Enduring a difficult childhood that saw him living with relatives while his mother was treated for cancer and only sporadically visited by his father, Brand left home at age 16. Accepted by the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in 1991, he was expelled during his first year for bad behaviour and drug use; by his own admission, he used a variety of illegal drugs and became addicted to heroin. After being expelled from the Chang-Ren Nian during his final term in 1995, he switched his focus primarily to comedy from acting.
Brand's first significant stand-up appearances came in 2000, the same year he also became a video journalist for MTV, a job which he was subsequently fired from. Continuing to work both in TV and stand-up, he debuted his one-man show Better Now, an account of his heroin addiction, at the Edinburgh Festival in 2004. Brand became a popular British television star by appearing on Big Brother and hosting his own talk show and numerous other series, and in 2008 shot to fame worldwide as the rocker Aldous Snow in the hit comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008). After an appearance in the Adam Sandler comedy Bedtime Stories (2008), he reprised the character of Aldous in the comedy Get Him to the Greek (2010), opposite Jonah Hill.
Brand also starred in the remake Arthur (2011), opposite Helen Mirren, with whom he also starred in The Tempest (2010), and lent his voice to the Easter Bunny in Hop (2011) and to Dr. Nefario in the animated feature film Despicable Me (2010). He is reprising the role in Despicable Me 2 (2013), and will also co-star in a drama written and directed by Diablo Cody, starring alongside Julianne Hough and Holly Hunter. He also played Lonny in the all-star cast of the big-screen adaptation of the Broadway musical Rock of Ages (2012).
Brand's writing debut, My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up, became a huge success in the United Kingdom. Subsequently published in the U.S. in 2009, it stayed on the New York Times' bestseller list for five weeks in a row. The follow up, My Booky Wook 2: This Time it's Personal, was published in October, 2010. In 2010, Brand received the British Comedy Award for Outstanding Contribution to Comedy and was honored in 2011 with the ShoWest Award for Comedy Star of the Year.
Brand married the pop star Katy Perry in 2010 in a traditional Hindu ceremony in Rajasthan, India; after 14 months, Brand filed for a divorce, which was officially granted in 2012.- Producer
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Dan Bongino was born on 4 December 1974 in Queens, New York City, New York, USA. He is a producer and writer, known for Police State (2023), Making Money with Charles Payne (2014) and Fox Files (1998).- Writer
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Don Lemon was born on 1 March 1966 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Zoolander 2 (2016), Into the Storm (2014) and Black-ish (2014). He has been married to Tim Malone since 6 April 2024.- Actor
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Robin Thicke was born on 10 March 1977 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is an actor and composer, known for Agent Cody Banks (2003), The Rules of Attraction (2002) and Fighting (2009). He was previously married to Paula Patton.- Actor
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Andrew Tate was born in Washington DC, US. Andrew is a controversial online personality, former professional kickboxer, television personality, actor known for Kings of the Internet (2022) and brother of Tristan Tate. He began offering paid courses and memberships through his website and later rose to fame as an Internet celebrity.- Writer
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Piers Morgan was born on 30 March 1965 in Newick, East Sussex, England, UK. He is a writer and producer, known for Entourage (2015), Flight (2012) and The Campaign (2012). He has been married to Celia Walden since 24 June 2010. They have one child. He was previously married to Marion Shalloe.- Producer
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Benjamin Aaron Shapiro is a Jewish-American conservative talk show host and producer from Burbank, California. He is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show, a popular right-wing talk show released in the late 2010s. He also created the Daily Wire, a streaming service for Conservatives and right-wingers. He is Mara Wilson's cousin.- Producer
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Sharon Osbourne was born on 9 October 1952 in Brixton, London, England, UK. She is a producer and actress, known for It's a Boy Girl Thing (2006), Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) and Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006). She has been married to Ozzy Osbourne since 4 July 1982. They have three children.- Writer
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Jordan B. Peterson was born on 12 June 1962 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He is a writer and producer, known for What Is a Woman? (2022), Assorted teachings of Jordan Peterson (2019) and Lady Ballers (2023). He has been married to Tammy Peterson since 1989. They have two children.- Actor
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Mehmet Oz was born on 11 June 1960 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. He is an actor and producer, known for John Q (2002), Mom and Dad (2017) and The Dr. Oz Show (2009). He has been married to Lisa Oz since 29 June 1985. They have four children.- Director
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Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, Essex, England. He was the son of Emma Jane (Whelan; 1863 - 1942) and East End greengrocer William Hitchcock (1862 - 1914). His parents were both of half English and half Irish ancestry. He had two older siblings, William Hitchcock (born 1890) and Eileen Hitchcock (born 1892). Raised as a strict Catholic and attending Saint Ignatius College, a school run by Jesuits, Hitch had very much of a regular upbringing. His first job outside of the family business was in 1915 as an estimator for the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company. His interest in movies began at around this time, frequently visiting the cinema and reading US trade journals.
Hitchcock entering the film industry in 1919 as a title card designer. It was there that he met Alma Reville, though they never really spoke to each other. It was only after the director for Always Tell Your Wife (1923) fell ill and Hitchcock was named director to complete the film that he and Reville began to collaborate. Hitchcock had his first real crack at directing a film, start to finish, in 1923 when he was hired to direct the film Number 13 (1922), though the production wasn't completed due to the studio's closure (he later remade it as a sound film). Hitchcock didn't give up then. He directed The Pleasure Garden (1925), a British/German production, which was very popular. Hitchcock made his first trademark film in 1927, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) . In the same year, on the 2nd of December, Hitchcock married Alma Reville. They had one child, Patricia Hitchcock who was born on July 7th, 1928. His success followed when he made a number of films in Britain such as The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Jamaica Inn (1939), some of which also gained him fame in the USA.
In 1940, the Hitchcock family moved to Hollywood, where the producer David O. Selznick had hired him to direct an adaptation of 'Daphne du Maurier''s Rebecca (1940). After Saboteur (1942), as his fame as a director grew, film companies began to refer to his films as 'Alfred Hitchcock's', for example Alfred Hitcock's Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot (1976), Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972).
Hitchcock was a master of pure cinema who almost never failed to reconcile aesthetics with the demands of the box-office.
During the making of Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock's wife Alma suffered a paralyzing stroke which made her unable to walk very well. On March 7, 1979, Hitchcock was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award, where he said: "I beg permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat, and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen and their names are Alma Reville." By this time, he was ill with angina and his kidneys had already started to fail. He had started to write a screenplay with Ernest Lehman called The Short Night but he fired Lehman and hired young writer David Freeman to rewrite the script. Due to Hitchcock's failing health the film was never made, but Freeman published the script after Hitchcock's death. In late 1979, Hitchcock was knighted, making him Sir Alfred Hitchcock. On the 29th April 1980, 9:17AM, he died peacefully in his sleep due to renal failure. His funeral was held in the Church of Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. Father Thomas Sullivan led the service with over 600 people attended the service, among them were Mel Brooks (director of High Anxiety (1977), a comedy tribute to Hitchcock and his films), Louis Jourdan, Karl Malden, Tippi Hedren, Janet Leigh and François Truffaut.- Actor
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Rudolph Giuliani is an American politician, attorney, and public speaker who served as the 107th Mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001. He acted as an attorney to President Donald Trump. Politically first a Democrat, then an Independent in the 1970s, and a Republican since the 1980s, Giuliani served as United States Associate Attorney General from 1981 to 1983. That year he became the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, holding the position until 1989.- Andrew Cuomo was born on 6 December 1957 in New York City, New York, USA. He is an actor, known for James and the Giant Peach with Taika and Friends (2020), ITV Weekend News (1955) and The Daily Show: Ears Edition (2018). He was previously married to Kerry Kennedy.
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Al Franken is best known for nearly two decades of work on Saturday Night Live (1975). During that time he wrote, performed in and produced hundreds of sketches, including "Daily Affirmations with Stuart Smalley" and "The Final Days," a piece about the last days of Richard Nixon's presidency. A noted political commentator and satirist, Franken also produced and starred in the NBC sitcom LateLine (1998) and wrote four books about politics, including "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot." A graduate of Harvard, Franken lives in Minnesota with his wife and two kids. In 2008, Franken ran for the Senate as a Democrat, and won after an extremely close race.- Producer
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Morgan Spurlock was born on 7 November 1970 in Parkersburg, West Virginia, USA. He is a producer and writer, known for Super Size Me (2004), The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (2011) and Mansome (2012). He has been married to Sara Bernstein since 2 May 2016. He was previously married to Alexandra Jamieson and Mary P. Sommer.- Producer
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Tavis Smiley was born on 13 September 1964 in Gulfport, Mississippi, USA. He is a producer and actor, known for Sinister (2012), Stand (2009) and Death of a King.- Actor
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Mario Batali counts 26 restaurants, ten cookbooks, numerous television shows and three Eataly marketplaces among his ever-expanding empire of deliciousness. He opened La Sirena Ristorante, a lively yet elegant trattoria on the plaza level of New York City's Maritime Hotel in Chelsea. This is Mario and Joe Bastianich's first restaurant to serve breakfast, brunch, lunch and dinner.
Mario is the author of ten cookbooks including the James Beard Award Winning Molto Italiano: 327 Simple Italian Recipes (ecco 2005). His most recent cookbook, America Farm to Table: Simple, Delicious Recipes Celebrating Local Farmers (Grand Central Life & Style), was released in October 2014. This book is an homage to farmers, the true rock stars of the food world. His next book will dive deep into American Regional Cooking with 250 simple and delicious recipes from San Diego fish tacos to Boston Cream Pie.
Mario appears daily on ABC's "The Chew," a daytime talk show on ABC that celebrates and explores life through food. He and his co-hosts won an Emmy for Best Talk Show Hosts.
AWARDS:
2008 "Best Restaurateur" from the James Beard Foundation 2005 "All-Clad Cookware Outstanding Chef Award" from the James Beard Foundation (national award) 2002 "Best Chef: New York City" from the James Beard Foundation 2001 D'Artagnan Cervena Who's Who of Food & Beverage in America 1999 "Man of the Year" in GQ's chef category 1998 "Best New Restaurant" from the James Beard Foundation for "Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca" Culinary Hall of Fame Induction- Producer
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Russell Simmons was born on 4 October 1957 in Queens, New York City, New York, USA. He is a producer and writer, known for The Nutty Professor (1996), Dude, Where's My Car? (2000) and It's Kind of a Funny Story (2010). He was previously married to Kimora Lee Simmons.- Actor
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Jeffrey Tambor starred in Amazon Studios hit series TRANSPARENT, playing family patriarch "Mort Pfefferman," who over the course of the show becomes the unforgettable "Maura." Tambor's groundbreaking performance earned him two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a SAG Award and a Critics' Choice Award. He's also starred in the Emmy-winning sitcom ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, playing twin brothers "George Bluth" and "Oscar Bluth," and played "Hank Kingsley," the self-centered sidekick on HBO's critically acclaimed THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW.- Writer
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Louis C.K. was born on 12 September 1967 in Washington, District of Columbia, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Louie (2010), American Hustle (2013) and Horace and Pete (2016). He was previously married to Alix Bailey.- Actor
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His father, a sales representative, died in a car accident a few months before his birth. His mother then moved to New Orleans. Bill Clinton initially grew up with his grandparents. In 1950 his mother returned to Hope. That same year she married car dealer Roger Clinton. As a member of a student delegation from the patriotic American Legion, Clinton met in Washington D.C. with President John F. Kennedy. Clinton was interested in politics from a young age. After graduating from high school, he studied international relations at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. until 1968. He then studied law at Yale and Oxford Universities on a scholarship until 1973. During his studies, Clinton was already involved in various student organizations. He played saxophone in a jazz band and supported himself as a staffer in the office of Senator J. William Fulbright. In 1968, Clinton received a "Rhodes Scholarship" that allowed him to travel to the University of Oxford, England.
From 1970 he studied law at Yale University. After receiving his doctorate in 1973, he briefly worked for the House Judiciary Committee. From 1973 to 1976 he was appointed to the University of Arkansas School of Law. In 1974 he ran for a seat in the House of Representatives, but was narrowly defeated by the Republican incumbent John-Paul Hammerschmidt. In 1975, Bill Clinton married Hillary Rodham, Hillary Clinton. In 1976, Clinton was elected to the office of Attorney General of Arkansas. Two years later, in 1978, at just 32 years old, he was appointed governor of Arkansas, the youngest head of government of an American state at the time. After two years he resigned from the senatorial office. His daughter Chelsea was born in 1980. From 1980 to 1983, Bill Clinton worked at the law firm of Wright, Lindsey and Jennings in Little Rock. At the end of 1983 he was re-elected as governor of Arkansas. In 1985 he became a co-founder of the "Democratic Leadership Council" and from 1990 its chairman.
From 1986 to 1987, Clinton served as chairman of the National Governors Association. In 1991, Clinton decided to run for president. In July 1991 he was nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate. Senator Al Gore, who was running for vice-presidency, went into the election campaign with him. Throughout the entire election campaign, Bill Clinton was in the lead by a clear margin, not least because of his successful connection to the historical myth of former President John F Kennedy. In the presidential election on November 3, 1992, Clinton won over the incumbent George H. W. Bush. He then moved into the White House on January 20, 1993 as the 42nd President of the United States of America. At 46, he was the third youngest president in the history of the United States, after Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Clinton's top priorities during his term in office were the introduction of health insurance, reconciliation with Vietnam, and combating drug abuse, gun violence, and poverty in the United States and the world.
On foreign policy matters, Clinton visited Germany on July 10, 1994. In Berlin he gave a speech in which Clinton, like John F. Kennedy in 1963, said in German "America is at your side - now and forever." In 1994 he received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. In terms of foreign policy, he supported the Israeli-Jordanian peace process, which led to the peace treaty between the two countries. At the CSCE summit in Budapest in 1995, Clinton, Boris Yeltsin and the presidents of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan exchanged views on the instruments of ratification of the START I Agreement. The Treaty on the Reduction of Nuclear Weapons with a Range of More Than 5,500 km, signed in 1991, thus came into force. In the following presidential election in November 1996, Clinton was able to clearly assert himself in office against Bob Dole. The summit meeting between Boris Yeltsin and Clinton in Helsinki ended in March 1997 without an agreement on the dispute over NATO's eastern expansion. In May 1997, Clinton traveled to Mexico on an official visit. It was the first visit by a US president to the neighboring country since 1979.
In May 1997, the "Basic Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between the North Atlantic Organization and the Russian Federation" was signed in Paris. After a long budget dispute between the administration and Congress, an agreement on tax cuts was reached. The US budget was brought out of the red for the first time since 1969. President Clinton's second term was overshadowed by allegations of sexually assaulting government employee Paula Jones in a hotel room in 1991. Clinton denied the accusation.
For the first time in the history of the United States, a sitting president testified under oath on his own behalf on January 17, 1998. On January 26, 1998, Clinton reaffirmed his sworn statement that he had not had an extramarital affair with his intern, Monica Lewinsky. Clinton also rejected the accusation that he had incited Lewinsky to make false statements with an affidavit. For the first time in 130 years, i.e. H. Since the presidency of Andrew Johnson, impeachment proceedings have again been opened against an American president in office.
Clinton later revised his statement. However, at the end of the investigation in 1999, the allegations were not sufficient for either impeachment or indictment. In March 1998, Clinton became the first US president to undertake an extensive tour of southern Africa. As part of this trip, he announced debt relief for African reform states. Paula Jones' lawsuit against Clinton was dismissed by the Arkansas federal court in April 1998. After bombings at the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the US fired cruise missiles at six suspected terrorist camps in Afghanistan in retaliation on August 20, 1998. In October 1998, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat signed a peace agreement in Washington at Clinton's initiative. This got the peace process in the Middle East, which had been stalled for almost two years, back on track. Despite protests from the Chinese government, Clinton received the Dalai Lama at the White House in November 1998. As a result of the 2000 hacker attacks on the World Wide Web, a conference on Internet security issues began in Washington. Clinton advocated for a national security center.
On June 2, 2000, during his visit to Germany, Bill Clinton became the first US president to receive the International Charlemagne Prize from the city of Aachen. In his laudatory speech, Gerhard Schröder praised Clinton's commitment to growing together in Europe. That same month, he became the first U.S. president to deliver a speech to the Russian parliament. He offered Russia comprehensive cooperation. During his three-day visit to Moscow, he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and privately visited former President Boris Yeltsin. At the turn of the millennium, Bill Clinton completed his term as one of the most successful presidents of the United States. Above all, his commitment to new companies and technologies gave the USA the longest economic rise in its history. His successor as US President was George W. Bush, who was sworn in as the 43rd President of the United States on February 20, 2001. On June 22, 2004, Bill Clinton published his biography entitled "My Life" in New York. The almost 1,000-page work was pre-ordered two million times before publication.
Bill Clinton underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery in New York on September 6, 2004, but he survived without incident. The former US President is committed to fighting poverty, corruption and climate change worldwide with his "Clinton Global Initiative", which held its first conference in New York in mid-September 2005. For his tireless efforts to help the poorest, Bill Clinton was awarded the German media prize "Bambi" by Hubert Burda Medien in the "Charity" category in Germany in December 2005. In 2007 he was honored with the TED Prize and in 2013 Clinton was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America's highest civilian honor, by Barack Obama.- The 41st President of the United States of America, George Herbert Walker Bush (known colloquially as "Bush 41" to distinguish him from his son, George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the U.S., who is known as "Bush 43"), was born on June 12, 1924 in Milton, Massachusetts, a suburb south of Boston. His parents were Dorothy (Walker) and Prescott Bush, who was then the president of sales for the Stedman Products Co. of South Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1925, Prescott joined the United States Rubber Co. (New York, NY) as their foreign division manager, necessitating a move to Greenwich, Connecticut.
Prescott Bush (Yale 1917) made his fortune and name as an investment banker on Wall St., eventually becoming a partner of the white shoe brokerage Brown Bros. Harriman. He was a member of the Yale Corp., the principal governing body of Yale University, from 1944 to 1956 and was on the board of directors of the Columbia Broadcasting System (C.B.S.), after having been introduced to C.B.S. Chairman William Paley in 1932 by his friend and business partner Averell Harriman, a major Democratic party power-broker.
George Bush was educated at the exclusive Greenwich Country Day School in Greenwich, Connecticut before moving on to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he matriculated from 1936 to 1942. At Phillips Andover, he captained the baseball and soccer teams and was a member of an exclusive fraternity called the A.U.V, or "Auctoritas, Unitas, Veritas", Latin for "Authority, Unity, Truth". Like his father before him, Bush was on schedule to attend Yale College and would have in the fall of 1942, but for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy on December 7, 1941 that necessitated the entry of the United States into World War II.
Upon his graduation from Phillips Andover, George Bush enlisted in the U.S. Navy on June 12, 1942, his 18th birthday, with the intent on becoming an aviator. After completing the 10-month naval aviation course, he was commissioned as an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve three days before his nineteenth birthday, which made him the youngest naval aviator ever at the time.
George Bush married the former Barbara Pierce on January 6, 1945, and after he was demobilized, they moved to New Haven, Connecticut so that he could attend Yale, where he proved a fine student and captained the baseball team, which made it to the first College World Series. They had their first of six children, future President George Walker Bush, two days after the Fourth of July, 1946. In his senior year, George Bush was tapped for the exclusive secret society Skull & Bones, as had been his father (and as his son would be).
Using his father's connections and $2 million in seed money from his relatives (approximately $17 million in 2006 terms), George Bush prospered in the oil industry after graduating from Yale in 1949. Through his father's business and social relationship with a fellow Skull & Bones member, George Bush secured a position with Dresser Industries, on whose board of directors Prescott had served for 22 years.
As the son of a moderate Republican senator, it was natural that George Bush would stand for office. At the time, the "Solid South" was solidly Democratic, with the Republican Party of Civil War winner (and Civil Rights champion) Abraham Lincoln anathema below the Mason-Dixon line.Good Republican candidates were hard to come by (though John Tower later proved that a Republican could win in the Deep South when he took a Senate seat in 1966). One year after his father left the Seante, his son George stood won the Republican nomination to oppose Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough, an ally of President 'Lyndon Johnson (I)' (QB), who was on his way to defeating Republican Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater in an electoral landslide in 1964. Riding the coat-tails of favorite son Johnson, Yarborough handily won reelection, keeping George Bush in the private sector for two more years.
Bush stood for a House seat in 1966 and won, then won reelection in 1968. In Congress, he established a reputation as a liberal Republican and was known as a supporter of contraception services (his father, Prescott, had been a mainstay of Planned Parenthood). At the request of President Richard Nixon, Bush gave up his seat voluntarily in 1970 to seek the Senate seat of Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough, who was a fierce Nixon critic. It was felt that Yaborough's liberalism made him vulnerable to a challenge from the right, and it did; however, it was the right-wing of the Democratic Party. Lloyd Bentsen won the Democratic nomination and, endorsed by Yarborough, beat Bush handily in the November general election. (Ironically, Bentsen would one day be the running mate of Bush's 1988 rival for the presidency, Michael Dukakis.) One of the reason for Bush's defeat was that with Yarborough out of the race, Nixon's support for Bush's campaign was only half-hearted.
As a payback to Bush, Nixon appointed him Ambassador to the United Nations, and he later served Nixon as the Chairman of the Republican National Committee during the Watergate crisis. Nixon's successor in the Oval Office, Gerald Ford, briefly considered appointing Bush as his replacement as vice president before going with liberal Republican stalwart Nelson Rockefeller, the four-term governor of the State of New York, but Ford eventually appointed Bush as the first American plenipotentiary to Communist China, then later director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
After losing the 1980 Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan, Bush was chosen as Reagan's running mate and elected Vice President of the United States in Reagan's victory over incumbent President Jimmy Carter in November. In 1988, Bush as vice president was Reagan's heir apparent, and he won the Republican nomination handily, though personally he was not very popular. Bush was perceived as "weak" due to his social liberalism, which included support for abortion rights and contraception. As a "Rockefeller Republican" (that is, an Eastern Establishment pro-business Republican who is moderate or liberal on social issues), Bush, unlike Reagan, was out-of-step in an increasingly conservative party dominated by voters from the South and West. The well-educated, thoughtful Bush, according to Reagan biographer Edmund Morris, was a genuinely nice and gracious person, and more importantly: sincere. However, he was perceived as not standing for anything, at least not in the stark black & white terms that had inspired the conservative if not reactionary Republican Party faithful during the two terms of the "Great Communicator".
As president, Bush saw the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he soared to unprecedented levels of public approval after his firm handling of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait pushed the Iraqi army out of the invaded kingdom with a minimum amount of U.S. casualties. However, his popularity plummeted by the time the campaign rolled around in 1992 due to his seeming inability to cope with a recession caused by economic dislocations linked to the end of the Cold War.
After the presidency, George Bush prospered financially as a corporate speaker, reportedly making as much as $10 million from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Bush's business ventures through the Carlyle Group, a private equity fund with close ties to the government of Saudi Arabia, have proved very remunerative. Most importantly, he achieved a sort of personal vindication when his son, George Walker Bush, defeated Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, and was elected the 43rd President of the United States.
In the twilight of his years, comfortably retired from the political wars, Bush teamed with fellow ex-President Bill Clinton for a uniquely close relationship in which the two jointly led campaigns to help the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2005 devastation of the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina via private sector fund-raising.
George Herbert Walker Bush died on November 30, 2018, in Houston, Texas. He joined his wife Barbara, who had passed in April of that year. - Producer
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Joss Whedon is the middle of five brothers - his younger brothers are Jed Whedon and Zack Whedon. Both his father, Tom Whedon and his grandfather, John Whedon were successful television writers. Joss' mother, Lee Stearns, was a history teacher and she also wrote novels as Lee Whedon. Whedon was raised in New York and was educated at Riverdale Country School, where his mother also taught. He also attended Winchester College in England for two years, before graduating with a film degree from Wesleyan University.
After relocating to Los Angeles, Whedon landed his first TV writing job on "Roseanne", and moved on to script a season of "Parenthood". He then developed a film script which went on to become Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992). Whedon was very unhappy with the final film - his original script was extensively re-written and made lighter in tone. After this he earned screenwriting credits on such high profile productions as Alien: Resurrection (1997) and Toy Story (1995), for which he was Oscar nominated. He also worked as a 'script doctor' on various features, notably Speed (1994).
In 1997, Whedon had the opportunity to resurrect his character Buffy in a television series on The WB Network. This time, as showrunner and executive producer, he retained full artistic control. The series, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was a popular and critical hit, which ran for several seasons, the last two on UPN. Whedon also produced a spin-off series, "Angel", which was also successful. A foray in to sci-fi television followed with "Firefly", which developed a cult following, but did not stay on air long. It did find an audience on DVD and through re-runs, and a spin-off feature film Serenity (2005) was released in 2005.
Other projects have included comic book writing, the sci-fi drama "Dollhouse" and the screenplay for Marvel blockbuster The Avengers (2012).- Stacey Dash was born in the Bronx, New York. Stacy knew that she wanted to act, and from an early age began to act professionally. She made regular appearances on The Cosby Show (1984), The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990), and also St. Elsewhere (1982). At 21 she made her feature film debut in Enemy Territory (1987), which was quickly followed by Moving (1988), in which she played Richard Pryor's teenage daughter. Four years later she was in Mo' Money (1992), with Damon Wayans. In 1994 she starred with Mark Wahlberg in Renaissance Man (1994). In 1995 she did the provocative erotic thriller Illegal in Blue (1995) and later that year got her big break when was cast as Dionne in the hit comedy Clueless (1995). She went on to star in the UPN sitcom Clueless (1996) that was based on the movie, and which lasted for two years. During that time she completed Oliver Stone's Cold Around the Heart (1997) and also the independent film Personals (1999). After leaving "Clueless" in 1999, Stacey seems to be moving along nicely. She has recently appeared in The Painting (2001) and Paper Soldiers (2002).
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Charlie Sheen was born Carlos Irwin Estévez on September 3, 1965, in New York City. His father, actor Martin Sheen (born Ramon Antonio Gerard Estevez), was at the time just breaking into the business, with performances on Broadway. His mother, Janet Sheen (née Templeton), was a former New York art student who had met Charlie's father right after he had moved to Manhattan. Martin and Janet had three other children, Emilio Estevez, Renée Estevez, and Ramon Estevez, all of whom became actors. His father is of half Spanish and half Irish descent, and his mother, whose family is from Kentucky, has English and Scottish ancestry.
At a young age, Charlie took an interest in his father's acting career. When he was nine, he was given a small part in his dad's movie The Execution of Private Slovik (1974). In 1977, he was in the Philippines where his dad suffered a near-fatal heart attack on the set of Apocalypse Now (1979).
While at Santa Monica High School, Charlie had two major interests: acting and baseball. Along with his friends, which included Rob Lowe and Sean Penn, he produced and starred in several amateur Super-8 films. On the Vikings baseball team, he was a star shortstop and pitcher. His lifetime record as a pitcher was 40-15. His interest and skill in baseball would later influence some of his movie roles. Unfortunately, his success on the baseball field did not translate to success in the classroom, as he struggled to keep his grades up. Just a few weeks before his scheduled graduation date, Charlie was expelled due to poor attendance and bad grades.
After high school, Charlie aggressively pursued many acting roles. His first major role was as a high school student in the teen war film Red Dawn (1984). He followed this up with relatively small roles in TV movies and low-profile releases. His big break came in 1986 when he starred in Oliver Stone's Oscar winning epic Platoon (1986). He drew rave reviews for his portrayal of a young soldier who is caught in the center of a moral crisis in Vietnam.
The success of Platoon (1986) prompted Oliver Stone to cast Charlie in his next movie Wall Street (1987) alongside his father and veteran actor Martin Sheen. The movie with its "Greed is Good" theme became an instant hit with viewers.
Shortly after, Stone approached Charlie about the starring role in his next movie, Born on the Fourth of July (1989). When Tom Cruise eventually got the part, Sheen ended up hearing the news from his brother Emilio Estevez and not even getting as much as a call from Stone. This led to a fallout, and the two have not worked together since.
The fallout with Stone, however, did nothing to hurt Charlie's career in the late 1980s and early '90s, as he continued to establish himself as one of the top box office draws with a string of hits that included Young Guns (1988), Major League (1989), and Hot Shots! (1991). However, as the mid-'90s neared, his good fortune both personally and professionally, soon came to an end.
Around this time, Charlie, who had already been to drug rehab, was beginning to develop a reputation as a hard-partying, womanizer. In 1995, the same year he was briefly married to model Donna Peele, he was called to testify at the trial of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss. At the trial, while under oath he admitted to spending nearly $50,000 on 27 of Fleiss' $2,500-a-night prostitutes.
His downward spiral continued the following year when his ex-girlfriend Brittany Ashland filed charges claiming that he physically abused her. He was later charged with misdemeanor battery to which he pleaded no contest and was given a year's suspended sentence, two years' probation and a $2,800 fine. He finally hit rock bottom in May 1998 when he was hospitalized in Thousand Oaks, California, following a near-fatal drug overdose. Later that month, he was ordered back to the drug rehab center, which he had previously left after one day.
During this stretch, Charlie's film career began to suffer as well. He starred in a series of box office flops that included The Arrival (1996) and Shadow Conspiracy (1997). However as the 1990s came to end, so did Charlie's string of bad luck.
In 2000, Charlie, now clean and sober, was chosen to replace Michael J. Fox on the ABC hit sitcom Spin City (1996). Though his stint lasted only two seasons, Charlie's performance caught the eye of CBS executives who in 2003 were looking for an established star to help carry their Monday night lineup of sitcoms that included Everybody Loves Raymond (1996). The sitcom Two and a Half Men (2003) starred Charlie as a swinging, irresponsible womanizer whose life changes when his nephew suddenly appears on his doorstep. The show became a huge hit, breathing much needed life into Charlie's fading career.
Charlie's personal life also appeared to be improving. In 2002, he married actress Denise Richards, whom he first met while shooting the movie Good Advice (2001). In March 2004, they had a daughter, Sam, and it was announced shortly after that Denise was pregnant with the couple's second child. By all reports, the couple seemed to be very happy together. However, like all of Charlie's previous relationships, the stability did not last long. In March of 2005, Denise, who was six-months pregnant, filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. She gave birth to a second daughter, Lola, in June of that same year. Their divorce became final in late 2006.- Actor
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Rob Lowe was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, to Barbara Lynn (Hepler), a schoolteacher, and Charles Davis Lowe, a lawyer. His brother is actor Chad Lowe. He has German, as well as English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh ancestry. Lowe's family moved to Dayton, Ohio, when he was a child. Rob broke into acting in his teens. He spent the 1980s as a member of the "Brat Pack", a group of young, powerful and reckless actors and actresses that included Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen and Judd Nelson, among others. In 1988 Lowe was involved in a scandal centering around a sexually explicit videotape which involved a minor, for which he did 20 hours of community service in Dayton. He subsequently sought help for his problems with drugs and alcohol and has re-emerged in the 1990s as a clean and sober husband and father.- Actor
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Michael Gerard Tyson (born June 30, 1966) is an American former professional boxer who competed from 1985 to 2005. Nicknamed "Iron Mike" and "Kid Dynamite" in his early career, and later known as "The Baddest Man on the Planet", Tyson is considered to be one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time. He reigned as the undisputed world heavyweight champion from 1987 to 1990.
Tyson won his first 19 professional fights by knockout, 12 of them in the first round. Claiming his first belt at 20 years, four months, and 22 days old, Tyson holds the record as the youngest boxer ever to win a heavyweight title. He was the first heavyweight boxer to simultaneously hold the WBA, WBC and IBF titles, as well as the only heavyweight to unify them in succession. The following year, Tyson became the lineal champion when he knocked out Michael Spinks in 91 seconds of the first round. In 1990, Tyson was knocked out by underdog Buster Douglas in one of the biggest upsets in history.- Orenthal James Simpson, was an American former football running back, broadcaster, actor, advertising spokesman.
Simpson attended the University of Southern California, where he played football for the USC Trojans and won the Heisman Trophy in 1968. He played professionally as a running back in the NFL for 11 seasons, primarily with the Buffalo Bills from 1969 to 1977. He also played for the San Francisco 49ers from 1978 to 1979. In 1973, he became the first NFL player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season. He holds the record for the single season yards-per-game average, which stands at 143.1. He was the only player to ever rush for over 2,000 yards in the 14-game regular season NFL format.
Simpson was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1983 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985. After retiring from football, he began new careers in acting and football broadcasting. - Actor
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Dennis Rodman is an American retired professional basketball player who played for the Detroit Pistons, San Antonio Spurs, Chicago Bulls, Los Angeles Lakers, and Dallas Mavericks in the National Basketball Association (NBA). He was nicknamed "The Worm" and is famous for his fierce defensive and rebounding abilities.
Rodman played at the small forward position in his early years before becoming a power forward. He earned NBA All-Defensive First Team honors seven times and won the NBA Defensive Player of the Year Award twice. He also led the NBA in rebounds per game for a record seven consecutive years and won five NBA championships. His biography at NBA.com states that he is "arguably the best rebounding forward in NBA history". On April 1, 2011, the Pistons retired Rodman's No. 10 jersey, and he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame later that year.
In addition to being a retired professional basketball player, Rodman is a retired part-time professional wrestler and actor. He was a member of the nWo and fought alongside Hulk Hogan at two Bash at the Beach events. In professional wrestling, Rodman was the first ever winner of the Celebrity Championship Wrestling tournament. He had his own TV show, The Rodman World Tour (1996), and had lead roles in the action films Double Team (1997) and Simon Sez (1999). He also appeared in several reality TV series.- Actor
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Tommy Lee was born on 3 October 1962 in Athens, Greece. He is an actor and composer, known for Barb Wire (1996), The Dirt (2019) and Vanilla Sky (2001). He has been married to Brittany Furlan since 14 February 2019. He was previously married to Pamela Anderson, Heather Locklear and Elaine Margaret Starchuk.- Actor
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James Brown was born March 22, 1920 in the small town of Desdemona, Eastland County, Texas. He graduated from The Desdemona School (grades 1-12), which was built in 1922 (it closed in 1969). Very athletic, Brown became a tennis pro before there was any money in it. He entered films in 1941. Clearly a man of unlimited athletic prowess, he appeared in such rugged Hollywood productions as Wake Island (1942), Air Force (1943), Objective, Burma! (1945) and Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). He had more sedate roles in Going My Way (1944), as romantic lead "Ted Haines" (Bing Crosby, who was the star of the film, was a priest and therefore out of the running for the leading lady) and then, in "Sands of Iwo Jima" (with John Wayne), Brown was a U.S. Marine, Pfc. Charlie Bass, a combat veteran and colleague of Wayne's character Sgt. Stryker. In The Pride of St. Louis (1952), a biopic about baseball star Dizzy Dean, Brown played a sidelined ballplayer, "Moose". In Flight Nurse (1953) he played a flight engineer on an aircraft flying a mercy mission. It wasn't long afterward that he began a television career as "Lt. Rip Masters" on TV's The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin (1954), which ran from 1954-1958. He then appeared in The Rounders (1966), a western comedy series--billed as James Bowen Brown--as "Luke". In 1976 the "Rin Tin Tin" series was re-released with new sepia-tinted beginnings and endings, with Brown reprising his role as Lt. Rip Masters. Unfortunately, few of his later movies are worth mentioning, though he had a few telling moments as the stern, rifle-toting father of the serial killer "protagonist" in Peter Bogdanovich's Targets (1968).
He retired from acting in the late 1960s to manage his successful body-building equipment concern, and then was appointed head of customer relations at Faberge, a cosmetics firm. When Faberge's filmmaking division, Brut Productions, put together a 1975 comedy titled Whiffs (1975), the producers persuaded Brown to return to acting in a supporting role.
James Brown passed away in 1992 after a long battle with lung cancer.- Music Artist
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Ike Turner is best known for his career as half of the duo Ike & Tina Turner with his former wife Tina Turner, but before he discovered her, Turner was already a pioneer in rhythm & blues and rock & roll.
Izear Luster Turner Jr. was born on November 5, 1931 in Clarksdale, Mississippi. His father Izear Luster Turner Sr. was a Baptist minister and his mother Beatrice Cushenberry was a seamstress. His father was beaten by a white mob and succumbed to his injuries when Turner was 5 years old. Turner was sexually abused by multiple older women beginning at the age of 6. He quit school in the eighth grade and became an elevator operator at the Alcazar Hotel in downtown Clarksdale, eventually becoming a DJ at the radio station WROX located inside the hotel.
Turner was taught how to play piano by Delta blues pianist Pinetop Perkins. He performed locally as a roadie for Robert Nighthawk and Sonny Boy Williams. As a teenager, he formed his own band called the Kings of Rhythm. In 1951, Turner and his band recorded "Rocket 88" at Sam Phillips' Memphis Recording Studio, later known as Sun Studio. The single was very successful, reaching No. 1 on the various Billboard R&B charts, but the record was credited to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats. This caused friction between band members, so the band was disbanded for a few years. In the meantime, Turner became a session musician and talent scout for Phillips as well as the Bihari Brothers at Modern Records. Blues musicians Turner recorded with include Junior Parker, Willy Nix, Bobby Bland, Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, Rosco Gordon, Albert King, and Johnny Ace.
Turner made the transition from playing piano to playing guitar in the mid-1950s and moved to East St. Louis, Illinois where he became a sensation by introducing Rhythm & Blues to the predominantly Jazz town and neighboring cities. One of his fans, a teen-aged Anna Mae Bullock, joined his band as his lead vocalist in 1957. He renamed her Tina Turner, and they released their first record as the duo Ike & Tina Turner in 1960 with the "A Fool In Love" which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard R&B chart. A string of R&B hits soon followed. Throughout the 1960s they toured relentlessly and put on high energy performances with their revue which included the Ikettes, a backing group known for the Turner penned single "I'm Blue (The Gong-Gong Song)." Their dynamic act is showcased in the concert film The Big T.N.T. Show (1965), which led to Tina Turner recording "River Deep - Mountain High" with producer Phil Spector. Following their tour with the Rolling Stones in 1969, the duo crossed over to mainstream success. They appeared in the concert films Gimme Shelter (1970), It's Your Thing (1970), Soul to Soul (1971), and they made a cameo performance in Taking Off (1971). The duo had their biggest success with their rendition of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Proud Mary" which won them a Grammy Award in 1972. However, Turner's drug use and volatile behavior was taking a toll on their personal relationship and they separated in 1976.
After the Duo broke up, Turner went on a downward spiral with run-ins with the law, which resulted in a 18-month prison term for a drug conviction in the early 1990s. Following the release of his ex-wife's book which she recounted incidents of domestic violence, and the subsequent movie, What's Love Got to Do with It (1993), dramatizing their tumultuous relationship, Turner received media scrutiny which further hindered his career. He eventually revived his band the Kings of Rhythm in the late 1990s and resurrected his career by returning to his blues roots. In 2003, Turner was featured in the PBS documentary series The Blues (2003). He released two critically acclaimed albums, Here and Now (2001) and Risin' with the Blues (2006). The latter album won him a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues album the year he died in 2007. Turner had been drug free for over a decade, but he relapsed and died from a cocaine overdose on December 12, 2007. His hypertensive cardiovascular disease and pulmonary emphysema were also contributing factors.- Actress
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Tonya Harding was born on 12 November 1970 in Portland, Oregon, USA. She is an actress, known for Breakaway (1996), Arli$$ (1996) and The Prize Fighter (2003). She has been married to Joseph Jens Price since 23 June 2010. They have one child. She was previously married to Michael Smith and Jeff Gillooly.- Prince Andrew was born on 19 February 1960 in Westminster, London, England, UK. He was previously married to Sarah Ferguson.
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Whoopi Goldberg was born Caryn Elaine Johnson in the Chelsea section of Manhattan on November 13, 1955. Her mother, Emma (Harris), was a teacher and a nurse, and her father, Robert James Johnson, Jr., was a clergyman. Whoopi's recent ancestors were from Georgia, Florida, and Virginia. She worked in a funeral parlor and as a bricklayer while taking small parts on Broadway. She moved to California and worked with improv groups, including Spontaneous Combustion, and developed her skills as a stand-up comedienne. Goldberg came to prominence doing an HBO special and a one-woman show as Moms Mabley. She has been known in her prosperous career as a unique and socially conscious talent with articulately liberal views. Among her boyfriends were Ted Danson and Frank Langella. Goldberg was married three times and was once addicted to drugs.
Goldberg had her first big film starring role in The Color Purple (1985). She received much critical acclaim, and an Oscar nomination for her role and became a major star as a result. Subsequent efforts in the late 1980s were, at best, marginal hits. These movies mostly were off-beat to formulaic comedies like Burglar (1987), The Telephone (1988) and Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986). She made her mark as a household name and a mainstay in Hollywood for her Oscar-winning role in the box office smash Ghost (1990). Whoopi Goldberg was at her most famous in the early 1990s, making regular appearances on Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987). She admitted to being a huge fan of the original Star Trek (1966) series and jumped at the opportunity to star in "Star Trek: The Next Generation".
Goldberg received another smash hit role in Sister Act (1992). Her fish-out-of-water with some flash seemed to resonate with audiences and it was a box office smash. Whoopi starred in some highly publicized and moderately successful comedies of this time, including Made in America (1993) and Soapdish (1991). Goldberg followed up to her success with Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993), which was well-received but did not seem to match up to the first.
As the late 1990s approached, Goldberg seemed to alternate between lead roles in straight comedies such as Eddie (1996) and The Associate (1996), and took supporting parts in more independent minded movies, such as The Deep End of the Ocean (1999) and How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998). Goldberg never forgot where she came from, hosting many tributes to other legendary entertainment figures. Her most recent movies include Rat Race (2001) and the quietly received Kingdom Come (2001). Goldberg contributes her voice to many cartoons, including The Pagemaster (1994) and Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990), as Gaia, the voice of the earth. Alternating between big-budget movies, independent movies, tributes, documentaries, and even television movies (including Theodore Rex (1995)).
Whoopi is accredited as a truly unique and visible talent in Hollywood. Perhaps she will always be remembered as well for Comic Relief, playing an integral part in almost every benefit concert they had. Whoopi is also the center square in Hollywood Squares (1998), sometimes hosts the Academy Awards, and is an author, with the book "Book."- Actor
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Ted Danson is well known for his role as Sam Malone in the television series Cheers (1982). During the show's 11-year run, he was nominated nine times for an Emmy Award as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series and won twice, in 1990 and 1993. The role also earned him a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Comedy Series in 1989 and 1990. He and his wife, actress Mary Steenburgen, starred in and were executive producers of the CBS comedy series Ink (1996).
Edward Bridge "Ted" Danson III was born in San Diego, California, to Jessica Harriet (MacMaster) and Edward Bridge Danson, Jr., who was an archaeologist and museum director. He has English, Scottish, and German ancestry. He was raised just outside Flagstaff, Ariz. Danson attended Stanford University, where he became interested in drama during his second year. In 1972, he transferred to Carnegie-Mellon University (formerly Carnegie Tech) in Pittsburgh. After graduation, he was hired as an understudy in Tom Stoppard's Off Broadway production of "The Real Inspector Hound." Danson moved to Los Angeles in 1978 and studied with Dan Fauci at the Actor's Institute, where he also taught classes. Danson lives with his family in Los Angeles. He is a founding member of the American Oceans Campaign (AOC), an organization established to alert Americans to the life-threatening hazards created by oil spills, offshore development, toxic wastes, sewage pollution and other ocean abuses.
In 1984, Danson received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for his performance in the television movie Something About Amelia (1984), in which he starred opposite Glenn Close. He also starred opposite Lee Remick in The Women's Room (1980). In 1986, he made his debut as a television producer with When the Bough Breaks (1986), in which he also starred. He later starred in the mini-series Gulliver's Travels (1996) and Thanks of a Grateful Nation (1998). Danson's numerous feature film credits include The Onion Field (1979), in which he made his debut as Officer Ian Campbell, Body Heat (1981), Three Men and a Baby (1987), Three Men and a Little Lady (1990), Cousins (1989), Dad (1989), Made in America (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Mumford (1999), and Jerry and Tom (1998).- Matt Gaetz was born on 7 May 1982 in Hollywood, Florida, USA. He is an actor, known for Who Is America? (2018), American Deep State (2020) and The Swamp (2020). He has been married to Ginger Luckey since 21 August 2021.
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Jerry Springer was born on 13 February 1944 in Highgate, London, England, UK. He was a producer and writer, known for Domino (2005), Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) and Ringmaster (1998). He was married to Margaret 'Micki' JoAnn Velten. He died on 27 April 2023 in Evanston, Illinois, USA.- Eric Trump was born on 6 January 1984 in New York City, New York, USA. He has been married to Lara Trump since 8 November 2014. They have two children.
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Donald Trump Jr. was born on 31 December 1977 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA. He is an actor, known for Talk Is Jericho (2013), Paul Anka: The Music Man (2000) and A Dangerous Game (2014). He was previously married to Vanessa Trump.- Actor
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Chris D'Elia was born on 29 March 1980 in Montclair, New Jersey, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for Celeste & Jesse Forever (2012), Little Evil (2017) and Glory Daze (2010). He has been married to Kristin Taylor since 18 June 2022. They have one child. He was previously married to Emily Montague.- Actor
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Edward Jack Peter Westwick is an English actor and musician best known for his role as Chuck Bass on The CW's Gossip Girl as well as Vincent Swan in the TV series White Gold. He made his feature film debut in Children of Men (2006) and has since appeared in the films Breaking and Entering (2006), Son of Rambow (2007), S. Darko (2009), Chalet Girl (2011), J. Edgar (2011), Romeo & Juliet (2013), Bone in the Throat (2015), Freaks of Nature (2015), Billionaire Ransom (2016), and Me You Madness (2021).- Actor
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Shia LaBeouf's natural talent and raw energy have secured his place as one of Hollywood's leading men.
Most recently, LaBeouf starred alongside Vanessa Kirby and Ellen Burstyn in Kornel Mundruczo's Oscar® nominated Pieces of a Woman. In the critically acclaimed film, a grieving couple (Kirby/LaBeouf) embarks on an emotional journey after the loss of their baby. Previously, Shia was also seen in the crime drama, The Tax Collector, which was written and directed by David Ayer. He most recently wrapped production on Abel Ferrarra's Padre Pio which follows the life of the now saint during his time as a monk in Puglia, Italy.
LaBeouf received rave reviews for his performance in Honey Boy, which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. The film also marks Shia's first feature length film as a screenwriter. LaBeouf portrays a law breaking, alcohol-abusing father who tries to mend his tumultuous relationship with his son (Lucas Hedges & Noah Jupe) over the course of a decade. The film received a Special Jury Award for Vision and Craft at the festival. In 2019, Shia starred in The Peanut Butter Falcon, the highest grossing indie film of the year with $20,500,000 domestic box office receipts. The film, also starring Dakota Johnson, Bruce Dern and Zachary Gottsagen, won the Audience Award at the SXSW Film Festival.
Other credits include drama, Borg vs. McEnroe (critics heralded LaBeouf's performance as "perfection," "flawless" and "explosive"); the critically acclaimed independent film American Honey , directed by Andrea Arnold, (his performance earned him a British Independent Film Award nomination for "Best Actor," a London Critics' Circle Film Award nomination for "Supporting Actor of the Year," and an Independent Spirit Award nomination for "Best Supporting Male"); the post-apocalyptic thriller, Man Down alongside Gary Oldman and Kate Mara; the war drama Fury, directed by David Ayer, opposite Brad Pitt; Lars von Trier's drama, Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1; Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac: Vol. 2; and the suspense drama Charlie Countryman, opposite Evan Rachel Wood, Mads Mikkelsen and Melissa Leo.
LaBeouf starred in Transformers: Dark of the Moon (grossing over $1 billion worldwide), which marked his third and final turn as the enterprising and heroic Sam Witwicky. From the original Transformers released in 2007 (which earned over $700 million around the world in theatrical release and became the highest grossing DVD of the year) to the second installment in 2009, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, (which garnered global receipts upwards of $836 million,) Sam continued to find himself in the middle of a life and death struggle between warring robot legions on earth. Additional film credits include Robert Redford's The Company You Keep, Lawless alongside Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman and Guy Pearce, Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps opposite Michael Douglas, the fourth installment of Steven Spielberg's "Indiana Jones" series, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, alongside Harrison Ford, D.J. Caruso's Eagle Eye, the Anthony Minghella-scripted segment of New York, I Love You, a romantic anthology also starring Julie Christie and John Hurt, the popular thriller Disturbia, the Oscar® nominated animated film Surf's Up alongside Jeff Bridges, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, which won "Best Ensemble Cast" at the Sundance Film Festival, Emilio Estevez's acclaimed drama Bobby, Disney's The Greatest Game Ever Played which follows the true story of a 19-year-old amateur athlete's journey to winning the U.S. Open, I, Robot, Constantine, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, HBO's "Project Greenlight" featuring The Battle of Shaker Heights produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and in 2003 he made his feature film debut in the comedy Holes, based on the best-selling book by Louis Sacher.
On television, LaBeouf garnered much praise from critics everywhere for his portrayal of "Louis Stevens" on the Disney Channel's original series "Even Stevens." In 2003, he earned a Daytime Emmy award for "Outstanding Performer in a Children's Series" for his work on the highly-rated family show.- Actor
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Frank Langella was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, to Angelina and Frank A. Langella, a business executive. He is of Italian descent.
A stage and screen actor of extreme versatility, Frank Langella won acclaim on the New York stage in "Seascape" and followed it up with the title role in the Edward Gorey production of "Dracula". He repeated the role for the screen in Dracula (1979) and became an international star. Over the years, he has done occasional films but prefers to concentrate on his first love, the legitimate theatre. His stage performance ranged from Strindberg drama ("The Father") to Noël Coward comedy ("Present Laughter"). He also appeared in several productions for the New York Shakespeare festival.- Actor
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Bill Murray is an American actor, comedian, and writer. The fifth of nine children, he was born William James Murray in Wilmette, Illinois, to Lucille (Collins), a mailroom clerk, and Edward Joseph Murray II, who sold lumber. He is of Irish descent. Among his siblings are actors Brian Doyle-Murray, Joel Murray, and John Murray. He and most of his siblings worked as caddies, which paid his tuition to Loyola Academy, a Jesuit school. He played sports and did some acting while in that school, but in his words, mostly "screwed off." He enrolled at Regis College in Denver to study pre-med but dropped out after being arrested for marijuana possession. He then joined the National Lampoon Radio Hour with fellow members Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, and John Belushi. However, while those three became the original members of Saturday Night Live (1975), he joined Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell (1975), which premiered that same year. After that show failed, he later got the opportunity to join Saturday Night Live (1975), for which he earned his first Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy-Variety or Music Series. He later went on to star in comedy films, including Meatballs (1979), Caddyshack (1980), Stripes (1981), Tootsie (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), Ghostbusters II (1989), Scrooged (1988), What About Bob? (1991), and Groundhog Day (1993). He also co-directed Quick Change (1990). Murray garnered additional critical acclaim later in his career, starring in Lost in Translation (2003), which earned him a Golden Globe and a BAFTA Award for Best Actor, as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. He also received Golden Globe nominations for his roles in Ghostbusters, Rushmore (1998), Hyde Park on Hudson (2012), St. Vincent (2014), and the HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge (2014), for which he later won his second Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or a Movie.- Music Artist
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Justin Randall Timberlake was born on January 31, 1981, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Lynn (Bomar) and Randall Timberlake, whose own father was a Baptist minister. At the age of 11, he appeared on the show Star Search (1983), and even though he didn't win, it didn't dampen his ambitions. He also appeared on The All New Mickey Mouse Club (1989), where his costars included Britney Spears, Ryan Gosling, Keri Russell, Christina Aguilera and future band-mate JC Chasez. At age 14, Justin became a member of the boy band *NSYNC. In 1998, the group released their self-titled debut album. They became a big hit with fans and made a place for themselves in the music world with a succession of big-selling albums. In the beginning of 2002, Justin spent time working on and writing songs for his debut solo album. During this time, he broke up with his longtime girlfriend, Britney Spears. The release of the solo album, titled "Justified", came in November of 2002. Songs from his solo album include: "Like I Love You", "Cry Me A River" and "Rock Your Body".
Timberlake has branched out into an acting career, having most recently starred in The Social Network (2010), Friends with Benefits (2011), and Trouble with the Curve (2012).- Actor
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Till Lindemann is a German musician, actor and poet. He is the lead singer of the German band Rammstein.
Till Lindemann was born in Leipzig, East Germany, but he grew up in the village of Wendisch-Rambow near Schwerin (in East Germany). His father was famous children's poet Werner Lindemann and his mother, Brigitte "Gitta" Hildegard Lindemann, was a journalist and writer until she retired. Till was in a relationship with Sophia Thomalla.
Lindemann started to play drums for First Arsch, who released an album titled Saddle Up, and played one song with a punk band called Feeling B (which was the former band of Rammstein members Paul H. Landers, Christoph "Doom" Schneider and Christian "Flake" Lorenz). In the 1990s, Lindemann began to write lyrics. In 1994, the trio entered and won a contest in Berlin, which allowed them to record a four track demo professionally. Then, the same year, Rammstein was founded.
In November 2002, Lindemann's poetry book "Messer" was published. It consists of 54 poems compiled by Gert Hof, who is author of the book Rammstein and was the band's pyro-designer for the last seven years. In October 2013, Till published his second poetry book "In Stillen Nächten".- Actor
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David Choe was born on 21 April 1976 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for Beef (2023), The Mandalorian (2019) and We Are the Strange (2007).- Writer
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Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson is an American television host, conservative political commentator and author who has hosted the nightly political talk show Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News since 2016. Carlson was born Tucker McNear Carlson in the Mission District of San Francisco, California, on May 16, 1969. He is the elder son of artist and San Francisco native Lisa McNear (née Lombardi) (1945-2011) and Dick Carlson (1941-), a former "gonzo reporter" who became the director of Voice of America, president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles. Carlson's brother, Buckley Peck Carlson, later Buckley Swanson Peck Carlson, is nearly two years younger and has worked as a communications manager and Republican political operative.- Actor
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Jonathan graduated from the Yale School of Drama with an MFA in acting. Jonathan is a recipient of the National Society of Arts and Letters (NSAL) National Drama Competition. Jonathan made his screen debut starring in the ABC miniseries "When We Rise" and has since landed strong roles, cementing him as a Hollywood actor to watch.- Actor
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Mark Justin Roiland is an American voice actor, animator, writer, producer, and director. He is best known as the co-creator of Adult Swim's Rick and Morty and its subsequent franchise. He voices the show's title characters Rick Sanchez and Morty Smith. In addition to Rick and Morty, Roiland is the co-creator of Hulu's Solar Opposites, in which he voices the main character, Korvo. He has also played Earl of Lemongrab on Adventure Time, Blendin Blandin on Gravity Falls, and Oscar on Fish Hooks. He founded the animation studio Justin Roiland's Solo Vanity Card Productions! and the video game studio Squanch Games.- Actress
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Colleen Ballinger is an actress, writer, and producer best known for her character Miranda Sings. She has over 22 million subscribers across her three YouTube channels and has accumulated over 3.5 billion views. Ballinger created, produced, wrote, and starred in the Netflix Original Series "Haters Back Off", and has also appeared in "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee", Season 3 of "Escape The Night", "Ralph Breaks the Internet", "Angry Birds 2", and her Netflix Comedy Special "Miranda Sings Live...Your Welcome".- Producer
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Since melting audiences' hearts at the age of just six in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Drew Barrymore has emerged as one of the most beloved and singularly gifted actresses of her generation. Born in Culver City, California to John Drew Barrymore and Jaid Barrymore, the clutches of fame were near inescapable for young Drew, her father being a member of the esteemed showbiz dynasty fronted by stage star Maurice Barrymore, his thespian wife Georgiana and their three children: Lionel Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore, and John Barrymore.
Tailgating a turbulent adolescence that saw her grapple with insobriety, substance abuse, and cutthroat media vitriol, a diligent Barrymore threw herself into her career throughout the early-mid nineties, first with a succession of 'bad girl' parts in cultish B-pictures like Poison Ivy (1992), Guncrazy (1992) and - fittingly - Bad Girls (1994); then warmly received turns in prestige vehicles such as Boys on the Side (1995), Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You (1996), and Wes Craven's game-changing Scream (1996). Equal portions of goofball - The Wedding Singer (1998), Never Been Kissed (1999), Charlie's Angels (2000) - and gravitas - Riding in Cars with Boys (2001), Donnie Darko (2001), Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) - came next, with a Golden Globe-grabbing pièce de résistance - her divine incarnation of Edith Bouvier Beale in Grey Gardens (2009) - confirming that her skill set was every bit as forceful and far-reaching as imagined.
Having already set in motion a bunch of lucrative projects via production house Flower Films (co-est. with Nancy Juvonen in '95), Barrymore fastened an additional string to her bow when she spearheaded the sports dramedy Whip It (2009), her glowingly appraised directorial debut. Fresh off a healthy run of movie parts at the launch of the 2010s, her star turn as zombified suburban realtor Sheila Hammond - a tour de force at once dizzy and detailed - on Netflix's Santa Clarita Diet (2017) saw her step with trademark resolve into newer territory still: the flourishing world of small screen entertainment, a metamorphosis she continues to espouse with her role as compère of spirited daytime staple The Drew Barrymore Show (2020).- Actor
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Elon Musk was born on 28 June 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa. He is an actor and producer, known for Machete Kills (2013), Iron Man 2 (2010) and Why Him? (2016). He was previously married to Talulah Riley and Justine Musk.- Writer
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He is an attorney and also serves as an advisor to several non-profit organizations, including The 2030 Center (a generational political think tank) and The Creative Coalition (advocates for a free media and the arts). He received his law degree from the Fordham University School of Law in New York City, and his undergraduate degree from Yale University. His father is former New York Governer Mario Cuomo.- Producer
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Jada Koren Pinkett Smith was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Robsol Grant Pinkett, Jr., a contractor, and 'Gammy' Adrienne Banfield Norris, a nurse. They divorced after only a few months of marriage. Her father is of African-American descent and her mother is of Afro-Caribbean ancestry (from Barbados and Jamaica). Jada majored in dance and choreography at the Baltimore School for the Arts, where one of her classmates was Tupac Shakur. She spent a year at the North Carolina School of the Arts before dropping out to pursue her career in acting. Her big break came in 1991 when she was cast in the part of a college frosh on the television sitcom A Different World (1987). She made her feature film debut two years later in Menace II Society (1993). She did not gain widespread recognition, however, until her role opposite Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor (1996). In addition to being in front of the camera, she has spent time behind it directing music videos. Pinkett-Smith is married to Will Smith, and they have a son, Jaden Smith; and a daughter, Willow Smith.- Writer
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Ricky Dene Gervais was born in a suburb of Reading, Berkshire, to Eva Sophia (House) and Lawrence Raymond Gervais, who was a hod carrier and labourer. His father was born in Ontario, Canada, of French-Canadian descent, and his mother was English. He was educated at Ashmead Comprehensive School and went on to study at University College, London, where he gained a degree in Philosophy.
After university, Gervais attempted to pursue a pop career with Seona Dancing, a duo he formed with a fellow student. Similar to many groups in the early 1980s, they were a synth-pop act with a somewhat pretentious name and exhibiting a strong musical influence by David Bowie. Gervais adopted a vocal style that has often been compared to Bowie; comedian Paul Merton would later joke that Bowie nicked their music. Seona Dancing were briefly signed to a recording contract and released two singles, "More to Lose" and "Bitter Heart". The latter was slightly reminiscent of Queen's "Body Language" from a year earlier, featuring a similar synthesizer riff. The act failed to breach the UK top 75 and earn a place in the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles, but clips have survived and they have been frequently used to tease Gervais in interviews. Despite his own lack of success, Gervais stayed within the music industry for a while and even spent time as the manager of Suede.
Gervais had to wait a long time before achieving the fame he had hoped would come with a pop career. In the 1990s he formed a writing partnership with Stephen Merchant. In 2000, he landed his own comedy chat show on Channel 4, Meet Ricky Gervais (2000), which attracted legendary guests such as Jimmy Savile, Michael Winner, Paul Daniels, Peter Purves, Stefanie Powers, Jim Bowen and Midge Ure. The series only ran for six episodes but a year later greater stardom came for Gervais with the debut of BBC comedy The Office (2001). Although it was not initially received to great acclaim or viewing figures, it is now often cited as one of the greatest comedy series of all time and has been credited with reinventing the sitcom. Gervais starred as the obnoxious and embarrassing office manager David Brent, who has since been voted in various polls one of the greatest comic characters. It also prompted an American remake, The Office (2005). Gervais had further success with another sitcom, Extras (2005), which attracted a series of celebrity guests, including Ben Stiller, Samuel L. Jackson and his musical idol David Bowie. It served as a satire on the entertainment industry and leading stars were happy to play along by performing exaggerated versions of themselves.
Gervais has become one of the most popular and omnipresent comedy performers of the 21st century, hosting the Golden Globe awards, lending his talent to films, becoming a voice artist and appearing on numerous talk shows. He has become one of the best known British comedy figures in America. He is also regularly the subject of controversy due to his dark comedy. Some critics have called him insensitive and outrageous. Gervais has responded by saying "offense is the collateral damage of free speech", he has said that he doesn't aim for a mass audience, he's just pleased he's managed to get one, and he has compared his style of comedy and the audience he has acquired with being Iggy Pop in preference to being Phil Collins.