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- Martin Shakar was born on 1 January 1940 in Detroit, Michigan, USA. He is an actor, known for Saturday Night Fever (1977), Invasion U.S.A. (1985) and Uptown Girls (2003). He is married to Diane R Stern. They have two children.
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Thelma Schoonmaker was born on 3 January 1940 in Algiers, Algeria. She is an editor and producer, known for The Departed (2006), Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) and The Irishman (2019). She was previously married to Michael Powell.- Sardonic-looking English character actor, often seen in sullen or nefarious roles. John Michael Frederick Castle was born one of four siblings in Croydon, Surrey, and educated at Brighton College and Trinity College, Dublin. He did not, at first, pursue acting as his chosen profession. Instead, he held down diverse short-term jobs, including as clerks, a hotel waiter, travel agent, salesman, landscape gardener and geography teacher. Eventually persuaded by his wife to resume acting training, he enrolled at RADA on a scholarship, graduating in 1964. Castle made his theatrical debut that year as Westmoreland in Henry V and as Lucentio in The Taming of the Shrew, both at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in London. He then went on a six months-long tour of the Far East with the New Shakespeare Company. Upon his return, he acted for a season with the Royal Court Theatre (1965-1966) and, in later years, with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Bristol Old Vic. He headlined as Gandhi in a 1982 stage production at the Tricycle Theatre (Richard Attenborough's motion picture was also released that same year). On screen from 1965, Castle has appeared in many a prestige production. However, despite his considerable screen presence and acting acumen, he has not been able to attain the stature of a Derek Jacobi or a Michael Gambon.
Castle's early screen credits included the powerful Oscar-winning acting piece The Lion in Winter (1968), in which he excelled as the cold, manipulative Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany, fourth of the five sons of Peter O'Toole's Henry II. He portrayed Octavius in Charlton Heston's unsuccessful adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra (1972) and the brutish Agrippa Postumus (grandson of Octavius) in BBC's I, Claudius (1976). A natural casting choice for the classics and for period drama, Castle has appeared in Man of La Mancha (1972) (as the student Sanson Carrasco, who joins in the 'quest'), The Shadow of the Tower (1972) (as Thomas Flamank, co-leader of the 1497 Cornish rebellion), Lillie (1978) (as Prince Louis of Battenberg), The Life and Death of King John (1984) (the Earl of Salisbury) King David (1985) (as Abner, the cousin of King Saul and commander-in-chief of his army) and Gods and Generals (2003) (Confederate Brigadier General William N. Pendleton, nicknamed 'Old Penn').
Castle has been most typically cast in cold, unsympathetic parts, best exemplified by the likes of lecherous art teacher Teddy Lloyd (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1978)), hit man Peter Crabbe (The Professionals (1977)), ruthless 'Rehab' commander Paul Mc Daggett (RoboCop 3 (1993)) and as the scowling, hard-hearted stage conjurer Nick Ollanton (Lost Empires (1986)) (a character whom the actor himself described as "a ghastly desolate creature whose only redeeming qualities are his love for his nephew and his total rejection of any authority other than his own." More recently, Castle appeared in a leading role as a rival heir to the estate of a deceased clergyman in The Tractate Middoth (2013), adapted from a short ghost story by M.R. James. He has, on occasion, worn the white hat, notably as Detective Inspector Craddock in Agatha Christie's Miss Marple: A Murder Is Announced (1985) and Miss Marple: The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (1992). Very much the serious, dramatic thespian, he has rarely ventured into comedy.
Castle retired from acting in 2016. He has been married since 1963 to the novelist and screenwriter Maggie Wadey. - Actor
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Born in Los Angeles but raised in Manhattan and educated at Middlebury College and Carnegie-Mellon University, James Cromwell is the son of film director John Cromwell and actress Kay Johnson. He studied acting at Carnegie-Mellon, and went into the theatre (like his parents) doing everything from Shakespeare to experimental plays. He started appearing on television in 1974, gaining some notice in a recurring role as Archie Bunker's friend Stretch Cunningham on All in the Family (1971), made his film debut in 1976, and goes back to the stage periodically. Some of his more noted film roles have been in Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Star Trek: First Contact (1996) and the surprise classic about a charming pig, Babe (1995). He garnered some of the best reviews of his career (many of which said he should have received an Oscar) for his role as a corrupt, conniving police captain in L.A. Confidential (1997).- Actress
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Katharine Juliet Ross was born January 29, 1940, in Hollywood, CA, to Katherine (née Mullen) and Dudley Tying Ross. Her father, who had also worked as a reporter for the Associated Press, was a commander in the US Navy when she was born. His navy career shuttled the family around to Virginia, then Palo Alto, and finally to Walnut Creek, outside of San Francisco, where Ross grew up.
Ross graduated from Las Lomas High School in Walnut Creek in 1957 and attended Santa Rosa Junior College and Diablo Valley College in the Bay Area, where she took part in her first onscreen work in a student film. Moving to San Francisco, into an apartment on Stockton Street above a grocery store, she began her acting career as an understudy in Actor's Workshop productions, and was soon auditioning for roles. She was also married in 1960 to college sweetheart Joel Fabiani, the first of five husbands.
Work came steadily for Ross, at first mainly in television westerns, and indeed Westerns would make up the majority of her best-known work, her natural beauty being a strong asset in that genre. She made her TV debut in an episode of Sam Benedict (1962), and her first film role was in the Civil War era Shenandoah (1965) starring James Stewart. Ross' career as a leading actress began in earnest in 1967, with her strong turn co-starring with James Caan and Simone Signoret in Games (1967), and with The Graduate (1967). Ross' performance as Elaine earned her a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination.
A disappointing, formulaic John Wayne vehicle, Hellfighters (1968), followed but she soon returned to form with two films with Robert Redford. As Etta Place in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Ross was part of the most memorable scene from that hit film, precariously perched barefoot on the bumper of that newfangled contraption, the bicycle, as Paul Newman's Butch Cassidy takes her for a ride. The compelling Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969) was less of a box office success but more highly regarded by the critics, and Ross won a BAFTA Award for her work as Lola, a Paiute Indian who flees with her boyfriend, played by Robert Blake, after he kills her father in self-defense.
Swept up into a whirlwind of fame, widely idealized as the symbol of beauty for the Woodstock generation, Ross had accomplished so much so quickly that it seemed her entire career had happened almost all at once, in that frenzy of activity between 1967 and 1969. Sure enough, there followed a long dry spell in which she was mostly cast in forgettable roles; her next strong film wasn't for another six years. In The Stepford Wives (1975), an intriguing black comedy-cum-horror film, Ross plays a independent, free-spirited wife newly relocated to a suburb where the other wives all seem to be just a little too perfect, too submissive; it was arguably her strongest performance to date, but Stepford Wives would prove to be but a temporary resurgence for Ross, and her work in the decade and a half to follow would include such star-studded duds as The Betsy (1978), and a return to TV, including a part in primetime soap opera The Colbys (1985). Along the way, however, Ross found love. After four failed marriages (the second, third and fourth were to John Marion, Conrad L. Hall and Gaetano Lisi respectively), she met her current husband Sam Elliott, while working on The Legacy (1978). They married in May 1984; that September, just four months short of her 45th birthday, Ross gave birth to a daughter, Cleo Rose.
In 1991, Ross and Elliott adapted the Louis L'Amour novel, Conagher (1991), for television in a remarkably affecting Western tale which showcases both actors' remarkable talents. Ross continues to take roles on occasion and, as usual, her work is strong -- something that was sometimes overlooked in her youth due to her famous beauty. For instance, Ross turned up in Donnie Darko (2001), in a solid performance as Donnie's psychiatrist.
Ross and Elliott live on their ranchito in Malibu.- Actor
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David Jason was born in Edmonton, London, in 1940. He has become one of Britain's most famous, versatile and respected actors, who is most famous for his role in Only Fools and Horses (1981) as Del Boy. He made his debut in the series in 1981 and was still playing the same role up to the Christmas special in 2002. His big break came in the 1967 children's comedy show Do Not Adjust Your Set (1967) starring alongside members of the Monty Python team: Terry Jones; Eric Idle, and Michael Palin.
Sadly, in 1990, he spent time away from work to nurse Myfanwy Talog, the Welsh actress who was his long time partner, before she died of cancer at the age of 49. He has come a long way from his days as an electrician and has won numerous awards for his work. He has managed to combine the comedy aspect of his career with rather more serious roles, such as that of Jack Frost in the highly-rated detective series A Touch of Frost (1992) and has proved that he is a man of many talents. In the mid 1970s, he performed as Blanco, an elderly prisoner, in episodes of Porridge (1974) with Ronnie Barker. He has also done voice work in children's TV.
He has not really concentrated on films, although he was very impressive in the TV film All the King's Men (1999), playing Frank Beck, the Commander of the Sandringham Company who mysteriously disappeared whilst in action in The Great War campaign in Gallipoli in 1915.
He lives in Buckinghamshire with his wife, Gill Hinchcliffe and their daughter, Sophie Mae, who was born in 2001. His hobbies are a little DIY and gardening. He was knighted in 2005, becoming Sir David Jason.- Kent Broadhurst was born on 4 February 1940 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for Léon: The Professional (1994), Silver Bullet (1985) and The Verdict (1982).
- Judd Omen was born on 4 February 1940 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is an actor, known for Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), Dune (1984) and Red Dawn (1984).
- Of English and German heritage, lumbering, oval-faced John Schuck was born Conrad John Schuck, Jr. in Boston, Massachusetts on February 4, 1940, the son of an English professor who taught at, among others, both Princeton College and SUNY Buffalo while John was growing up. Following graduation from Denison University, where he appeared in a number of plays, John turned to regional theatre work ("Marat/Sade," etc.), including the Cleveland Playhouse, Baltimore Center Stage, and American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco.
Discovered at ACT for film by Robert Altman, the director featured him as Captain Walter "Painless Pole" Waldowski, the virginal army camp dentist, in the classic Korean War film M*A*S*H (1970), giving him a memorable "deflowering" scene with sexy Jo Ann Pflug. Altman continued to use John in Brewster McCloud (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and, most assuredly, in Thieves Like Us (1974), arguably his best movie role as a bank robber on the lam.
On 70's television, in addition to guest spots on such programs as "Gunsmoke," "Mission: Impossible," "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Room 222," "Bonanza," "Ironside" and "Love, American Style," "Schuck won a regular part as an inept but altruistic sergeant alongside Rock Hudson's police commissioner for six seasons on McMillan & Wife (1971). Following this, however, he found himself somewhat stereotyped as simple-minded, lovable lugs such as the robot on the silly short-lived comedy Holmes and Yoyo (1976), as buddy Murray in the revamped series The New Odd Couple (1982) and as Herman Munster on The Munsters Today (1987), a revisit to the ghoulish 1960s television family. He also kept his name alive on such popular games shows as "The $25,000 Pyramid," "Hollywood Squares" and "Password."
More challenging guest role work has come to him on occasion with television series such as NYPD Blue (1993), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993), Star Trek: Voyager (1995) and Babylon 5 (1993) and in the historically acclaimed TV movie Roots (1977). In the popular films Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), John appeared in various roles and earned himself a place in the hearts of Trekkie fans all over the nation. Other film roles over time have included Blade (1973), Just You and Me, Kid (1979), Earthbound (1981), Finders Keepers (1984), Outrageous Fortune (1987), The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking (1988), My Mom's a Werewolf (1989) and Dick Tracy (1990).
The musical stage also took a shine to him. An accomplished singer, John appeared semi-regularly (from 1979 until 2006) as the bald-domed, gruff-speaking Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks in the hit musical "Annie," not only on Broadway but on tours and in smaller theater venues. He also garnered success playing Frank Butler in "Annie Get Your Gun" with Bernadette Peters on tour. Other roles over time have included the musicals "The Sound of Music", "Peter Pan", "The Most Happy Fella" and "She Loves Me." He co-starred in the original premiere of "Grumpy Old Men" in 2011 and then returned to Broadway in 2013 as a replacement in the Gershwin musical "Nice Work If You Can Get It."
Into the millennium, on TV John played a police captain on an episode of "Diagnosis Murder," had a recurring role as a Chief of Detectives in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999), and had another recurring role as shop keeper Carl in the skateboarding adventure series Zeke and Luther (2009). He also appeared in the films Closer to God (2014) and All Light Will End (2018).
A sailor on the sly, John Schuck is father to son Aaron via his first marriage (1978-1983) to former actress Susan Bay Nimoy. He married his current wife, painter Harrison Houlé, in 1990. - Victor Lobl was born on 5 February 1940 in New York City, New York, USA. He is a director, known for American Playhouse (1980), V (1984) and Star Trek: Voyager (1995). He was previously married to Christina Pickles.
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Dick Warlock was born on 5 February 1940 in Oakley, Ohio, USA. He is an actor, known for Firestarter (1984), Escape from New York (1981) and Innerspace (1987). He has been married to Cathy M Coleman since 25 February 1990. He was previously married to Elizabeth A Phillips, Sally L Swann and Janet Rae Ballentine.- Writer
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Tom Brokaw was born on 6 February 1940 in Webster, South Dakota, USA. He is a writer and actor, known for NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (1970), Dateline NBC (1992) and Toots (2006). He has been married to Meredith Lynn Auld since 17 August 1962. They have four children.- Actor
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Russsell Streiner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is still his hometown. He has three children who live nearby. He continues to work in the film business as an independent producer, director and filmmaking instructor at John A. Russo's Movie Academy in Pittsburgh. Although Night of the Living Dead (1968) has been Russ' biggest "movie" success, he has been extremely successful in producing and directing other types of films as well.- Editorial Department
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Ted Koppel was born on 8 February 1940 in Lancashire, England, UK. He is a producer and writer, known for Koppel on Discovery (2006), ABC News Nightline (1980) and CBS News Sunday Morning with Jane Pauley (1979). He has been married to Grace Anne Koppel since 17 May 1963. They have four children.- Actor
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James Laurenson was born on 17 February 1940 in Marton, New Zealand. He is an actor, known for Boney (1972), One Day (2011) and State of Play (2003).- Music Artist
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Multi-talented performer/writer/producer Smokey Robinson's career, and life, is inextricably tied up with Motown Records' founder Berry Gordy (his first two children are named Tamla, for the Gordy-owned label Smokey recorded for, and Berry, for Gordy himself). He and Gordy have had a professional and personal relationship since the late 1950s, when Robinson went to work for Gordy's budding musical empire not only as a performer with his group, The Miracles, but also as a songwriter/producer. Robinson and The Miracles began turning out an almost unbroken string of hits in the early 1960s on Gordy's Tamla label (although they had minor hits on a few labels before they signed with Gordy). Robinson's high, warm tenor was perfect for the romantic ballads that he wrote for the group (one of the music industry's most prolific songwriters, Robinson was also such an imaginative one that Bob Dylan once called him "America's greatest living poet"), although they could also do hard, driving dance records (i.e., "Mickey's Monkey"). In addition to his writing/performing/producing chores for The Miracles, Robinson also turned out hit after hit for other Motown acts: Mary Wells ("My Guy"), The Temptations ("My Girl"), and others for The Marvelettesand Marvin Gaye. He left The Miracles to go solo in 1972, and met with even more success, turning out hit record after hit record all through the 1970s and 1980s. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.- Most famous for her supporting role as Daisy, the sister of Patricia Routledge's Hyacinth Bucket in the hugely popular BBC sitcom Keeping Up Appearances (1990), Judy Cornwell's grandmother was the music hall singer Sarah Bonner. The London-born actress grew up in England, where she attended a convent school before moving to Australia where her parents, Darcy Nigel Barry and Irene McCullen Cornwell, emigrated. She became a classical stage actress whose theatrical career began as a dancer and singer in pantomime, vaudeville, cabaret and musical revues. She has written a number of novels including "Cow and Cow Parsley" (1985), "Fishcakes at the Ritz" (1989), "The Seventh Sunrise" (1994) and "Fear and Favour" (1996). According to Cornwell, John Nathan-Turner was hoping to make a film of "Fear and Favour" before his untimely death at the age of 54 in 2002.
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E.J. (short for Edra Jean) portrayed the role of Minnie Fay in the motion picture Hello, Dolly! (1969). Originally from Oklahoma, E.J. had numerous experience in high school plays, and studied drama at the University of New Mexico as well as experiencing Drama training in Vienna. She also played Broadway in "Bye Bye Birdie". E.J. has made over fifty-two television commercials and starred with Robert Morse in a musical series, That's Life (1968). After the picture, E.J. went on to do a lot of Broadway and various other films. Renowned for her sweet giggle, E.J. recently moved into the role of producer and lives with her husband and their 11 yr. old son in Los Angeles.- James Joseph Sloyan was born on February 24, 1940 in Indianapolis, Indiana; his family moved to Europe when he was a young boy, living in Rome, Capri, Milan, Switzerland, and Ireland.
When he was 17, his family moved back to the United States and settled in upstate New York, where he managed a theater. He received a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and after two years he went to work for Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival.
In 1962, he was drafted into the United States Army; after four years he returned to the NYSF and performed in 28 plays and choreographed all the onstage fights. He also appeared in the original off-Broadway stage version of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". - Actor
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Popular stage, film and TV actor Harvey Jason was born on Leap Year's Day, 1940 in London, England. From childhood he aspired to a career as an actor. His efforts, and his substantial talent, paid off. At 19 he was in New York, ready to go. A year later, he was appearing in Joseph Papp's prestigious Shakespeare in the Park.
Other shows followed: off-Broadway, national tours, Broadway: A Taste of Honey, Hostile Witness with Ray Milland, Marat/Sade and others, his reviews always excellent. With the late Peter Cook and the fames satirical revue, The Establishment, he toured the U.S and Canada. Jason's incredible facility with dialects, his ability to do with total authenticity, any accent imaginable, made him a truly sought after actor. Soon he was film and TV.
Oscar-winning director Robert Wise brought him out to California for the Julie Andrews film, Star. Then it was non-stop work. Guest star roles on TV, one after the other; a season with James Whitmore in My friend Tony: a season on the famed Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, co-starring with Bruce Boxleitner on the series run of Bring 'Em Back Alive - show after show. Jason became a national favorite as Harry Zeff in the hugely successful all-star NBC mini-series Captains and the Kings. Movies to: With Michael Caine in Robert Aldrich's in Too Late the Hero, Lost in the Stars, Save the Tiger with Jack Lemmon, Stanley Kramer's Oklahoma Crude with George C. Scott, the zany Lapchik in Gumball Rally, Air America, then as Ajay Sidhu, one of the stars in Steven Spielberg's The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Yet it was in Necromancy, starring Orson Wells and Pamela Franklin, that he met Pamela, the woman who would become his wife. They have been married since 1970 and have two sons, Joshua and Louis.
Jason retired for acting in 1997 to open, with his son Louis, the famed exclusively First Edition collectible literature bookshop, Mystery Pier Books, called One of the Most Important First Edition Bookshops in the U.S.- Kaz Garas was born on 4 March 1940 in Kaunas, Lithuania. He is an actor, known for Mean Creek (2004), Strange Report (1969) and Most Wanted (1976).
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Joanna Miles, the Emmy Award-winning American actress, was born on March 6, 1940 in Nice, France to expatriate American abstract painter Jeanne Miles and French painter-museum curator Johannes Schiefer. Escaping the war, she was relocated to the United States in 1941. She graduated from the progressive Putney School in 1958. She began her career in New York, acting in a number of plays, television shows and films. On receiving numerous rewards, she reached the apogee of her career, playing "Laura Wingfield" in the 1973 TV production of "The Glass Menagerie", with co-stars Katharine Hepburn, Sam Waterston and Michael Moriarty, for which Mrs. Miles and Michael Moriarty won Emmy Awards. In 1990, for nine years, Mrs. Miles founded and was the Artistic Director of the Playwright's Group in LA. She also is the vice-president of "Brandman Productions". Mrs. Miles has continued to work steadily in TV, films and theater. She is a lifetime member of the Actors Studio and the Motion Picture Academy. Most recently, in 2012, she starred in "Women In Shorts", at the Working Stage Theater, "Women On Time" in 2015 and "Front Door Open" at the Greenway Court Theater in 2016 in which she won The Edon Award for best actress, among a few other play readings around town "The Widow Kinsky"" at the Blank Theater. An ex-New Yorker, she lives in LA with her husband, writer, producer and novelist Michael Brandman. Her son, Miles Brandman, is a film writer, director and playwright. Her stepson, Steven J. Brandman, is a television producer. In 2018 Joanna received The Marquis Who's Who Lifetime Achievement Award.- Actor
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The highly regarded actor Daniel J. Travanti was born Danielo Giovanni Travanty in the southeastern part of Wisconsin on March 7, 1940, but raised for a time in Iowa before returning to his native state. The youngest son of an American Motors auto worker, he showed both athletic and academic prowess in high school on both the football and debate teams.
It was during the course of his studies at the University of Wisconsin that Dan first developed a strong, abiding interest in drama, appearing in many college plays while there. He, in fact, turned down top football scholarships in order to pursue his acting dream. Following training at the Yale School of Drama, he was glimpsed on stage as a messenger (billed as Dan Travanty) in the New York Shakespeare Festival's production of "Othello" starring James Earl Jones. The following year he co-starred as Nick with Colleen Dewhurst in a touring company of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" in 1965 and he was off and running. He later returned to Shakespeare in a much bigger role in 1977 as Petruchio in "The Taming of the Shrew." National tours of "Twigs" (1972, opposite Sada Thompson) and "I Never Sang for My Father" (1987, opposite Harold Gould and Dorothy McGuire) would highlight his theatrical career.
The following year Travanti relocated to Los Angeles, appearing in scores of TV roles as assorted buddies and villains while still billing himself under his actual last name of Travanty (until the early 1970s). Starting with his film debut in the sordid stalker drama Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965) starring Sal Mineo and Juliet Prowse, he found a sturdy, if routine, niche in drama with supporting roles in the films The Organization (1971) and St. Ives (1976), and TV guest spots on The Defenders (1961), Perry Mason (1957), Judd for the Defense (1967), The F.B.I. (1965), Mannix (1967), Cannon (1971), and Barnaby Jones (1973).
A consummate professional and chronic overachiever, he quickly approached burnout when he obtained only a measure of the success he expected of himself. Travanti turned to drinking to combat his career dissatisfaction. He finally was forced to seek professional help in 1973 after a collapse and breakdown on stage during the middle of a show in Indianapolis.
Following extensive treatment, Travanti did an about-face. In 1978 he earned a master's degree in English literature at Loyola of Marymount in Los Angeles and the following year nabbed a six-month stint on the ABC daytime soap General Hospital (1963). This renewed resurgence came to a peak came after being cast as the serious, somber-looking Capt. Frank Furillo for six seasons on the classic drama Hill Street Blues (1981). The actor not only won both Emmy (twice) and Golden Globe awards, but developed unlikely sex-symbol status at the age of 41.
This major showcase led to a host of highly acclaimed TV mini-movie parts, notably that of John Walsh, the father who turned activist after his child was murdered, in Adam (1983) and its sequel, Adam: His Song Continues (1986), and the title role of broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow in Murrow (1986), earning a Cable ACE award nomination. Other penetrating TV-movies starring or co-starring Travanti included A Case of Libel (1983), Howard Beach: Making a Case for Murder (1989), Eyes of a Witness (1991), Weep No More, My Lady (1992), With Harmful Intent (1993),My Name Is Kate (1994), To Sir, with Love II (1996) and Murder in My House (2006).
Avoiding the limelight and focusing on theater endeavors, he found major stage roles both in London ("Les liaisons dangereuses" (1990), "The Aspern Papers") and here ("Wicked Songs (2000), All My Sons" (2002), "Major Barbara" (2003), "The Last Word..." (2007), The Touch of the Poet (2008)). Daniel eventually returned to guest dramatics on both TV crimers ("Prison Break," "Criminal Minds" and "The Defenders") and medical shows ("Grey's Anatomy," "Chicago Med").
Travanti returned to series TV sporting a police badge briefly on Missing Persons (1993), and had recurring roles on Poltergeist: The Legacy (1996), Boss (2011) and NCIS: Los Angeles (2009). Sporadic filming in later years has included the moving drama Something Sweet (2000), the dark-edged dramedy Design (2002) and the romantic film comedy One Small Hitch (2013).- Actor
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Chuck Norris is familiar to fans worldwide as the star of action films such as The Hitman (1991), The Delta Force (1986) and Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection (1990). He also starred in Missing in Action (1984) and its sequels, Firewalker (1986) and Sidekicks (1992). He was an executive producer of Walker, Texas Ranger (1993) as well as the star.
Chuck Norris was born in Ryan, Oklahoma, to Wilma (Scarberry) and Ray Norris, who was a truck driver, mechanic, and bus driver. The eldest of three children, he helped his mother raise his two younger brothers in Torrance, CA, where his family moved when he was 12. Norris attended North Torrance High School from its inception in September, 1955 until his graduation in June, 1958. He is one of several storied alumni from the school. Other NHS alumni include Bob Hite (1943-1981), who was the lead singer of "Canned Heat," Chris Demaria, who was a professional baseball player in the Kansas City Royals and Milwaukee Brewers organizations, Chris Mortensen, an analyst with ESPN, Hip-Hop DJ "Key-Kool" (Kikuo Nishi), and Wee-Man (Jason Acuna) of "JackAss fame."
Norris joined the Air Force after graduating from high school. During a stint in Korea, he began to study the Asian martial art of Tang Soo Do. After returning home, he worked for Northrop Aviation and moonlighted as a karate instructor. Two years later he was teaching full-time and running a number of martial-arts schools. His students included Steve McQueen, Priscilla Presley and the Osmonds.
Norris's fight career lasted from 1964-1974. Norris started off by losing his first three tournaments but, by 1966, he was almost unbeatable. Among the numerous titles he won were The National Karate Championships (1966), All-Star Championships (1966), World Middleweight Karate Championship (1967), All-American Karate Championship (1967), Internationals (1968), World Professional Middleweight Karate Championship (defeating Louis Delgado on 24 November 1968), All-American Championship (1968), National Tournament of Champions (1968), American Tang Soo Championship, and the North American Karate Championship. Norris compiled a fight record of 65-5 with wins over champions Joe Lewis, Skipper Mullins, Arnold Urquidez, Ronald L. Marchini, Victor Moore, Louis Delgado, and Steve Sanders. Of the five men to beat Norris, three were Allen Steen, Joe Lewis, and Norris's last career defeat to Louis Delgado in 1968. Norris retired as undefeated Professional Full-Contact Middleweight Champion in 1974.
Norris, who was urged to get into acting by his friend Steve McQueen, skillfully incorporates his martial-arts knowledge into his series and feature film projects, stressing action and technique over violence. He is the author of the books "The Secret of Inner Strength" and "The Secret Power Within - Zen Solutions to Real Problems". He works for many charities, including the Funds for Kids, Veterans Administration National Salute to Hospitalized Veterans, the United Way, Make-a-Wish Foundation and KickStart, a nonprofit organization he created to help battle drugs and violence in schools. He also starred in the television movie Blood In, Blood Out (1993), broadcast on CBS.
He lives on a ranch when not filming.- Actor
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Actor Austin Pendleton was born March 27, 1940 in Warren, Ohio to Frances and Thorn Pendleton. He graduated from Yale University. He later became an ensemble member of the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, and acted in several of the theater's productions. His first film appearance was in Petulia (1968), a minor and uncredited role. Since, he has made over 100 appearances in television and film.- Actress
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Early in her career she worked in repertory in Manchester and while there obtained occasional television roles. When offered scripts she can usually tell within 5 pages if it is suitable for her. When it came to 'To the Manor Born' which was intended for a radio series, she considered it one of the best scripts that she'd read and asked to show it to BBC television light entertainment head John Howard Davis and the rest is history.- Actor
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Wolf Kahler is a German born character actor who, thanks to his height (6'2") and blue eyes was often cast as a Nazi or unsympathetic German characters in his career. He has appeared in several successful franchises (Indiana Jones, The Dirty Dozen), both playing a Nazi officer named Dietrich, and most recently was cast as Dr. Hoffmanstahl in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.- Music Department
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Herbie Hancock is an American actor that was born. Herbert Jeffery Hancock, on April 12, 1940, Chicago, IL. He is best known as a piano player, jazz star, and a composer. He has won many Grammy Awards and has performed with many famous musicians beginning with Miles Davis in the 1960s. He achieved fame with the Mtv generation in the 1980s with his instrumental hit, "Rock it". He and his wife Gigi, have been married since 1968. Later in life, Herbie returned to fame by acting in movies such as. Hitters, Round Midnight, and "Valerarian, World of a Thousand Cities" (2017).- Actress
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Julie Christie, the British movie legend whom Al Pacino called "the most poetic of all actresses," was born in Chabua, Assam, India, on April 14, 1940, the daughter of a tea planter and his Welsh wife Rosemary, who was a painter. The young Christie grew up on her father's plantation before being sent to England for her education. Finishing her studies in Paris, where she had moved to improve her French with an eye to possibly becoming a linguist (she is fluent in French and Italian), the teenager became enamored of the freedom of the Continent. She also was smitten by the bohemian life of artists and planned on becoming an artist before she enrolled in London's Central School of Speech Training. She made her debut as a professional in 1957 as a member of the Frinton Repertory of Essex.
Christie was not fond of the stage, even though it allowed her to travel, including a professional gig in the United States. Her true métier as an actress was film, and she made her debut in the science-fiction television series A for Andromeda (1961) in 1961. Her first film was a girlfriend part in the Ealing-like comedy Crooks Anonymous (1962), which was followed up by a larger ingénue role in another comedy, The Fast Lady (1962). The producers of the James Bond series were sufficiently intrigued by the young actress to consider her for the role that subsequently went to Ursula Andress in Dr. No (1962), but dropped the idea because she was not busty enough.
Christie first worked with the man who would kick her career into high gear, director John Schlesinger, when he choose her as a replacement for the actress originally cast in Billy Liar (1963). Christie's turn in the film as the free-wheeling Liz was a stunner, and she had her first taste of becoming a symbol if not icon of the new British cinema. Her screen presence was such that the great John Ford cast her as the young prostitute in Young Cassidy (1965). Charlton Heston wanted her for his film The War Lord (1965), but the studio refused her salary demands.
Although Amercan magazines portrayed Christie as a "newcomer" when she made her breakthrough to super-stardom in Schlesinger's seminal Swinging Sixties film Darling (1965), she actually had considerable work under her professional belt and was in the process of a artistic quickening. Schlesinger called on Christie, whom he adored, to play the role of mode Diana Scott when the casting of Shirley MacLaine fell through. (MacLaine was the sister of the man who would become Christie's long-time paramour in the late 1960s and early '70s, Warren Beatty, whom some, like actor Rod Steiger, believe she gave up her career for. Her "Dr. Zhivago" co-star, Steiger -- a keen student of acting -- regretted that Christie did not give more of herself to her craft.)
As played by Christie, Diana is an amoral social butterfly who undergoes a metamorphosis from immature sex kitten to jaded socialite. For her complex performance, Christie won raves, including the Best Actress Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the British Film Academy. She had arrived, especially as she had followed up "Darling" with the role of Lara in two-time Academy Award-winning director David Lean's adaptation of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1965), one of the all-time box-office champs.
Christie was now a superstar who commanded a price of $400,000 per picture, a fact ruefully noted in Charlton Heston's diary (his studio had balked at paying her then-fee of $35,000). More interested in film as an art form than in consolidating her movie stardom, Christie followed up "Zhivago" with a dual role in Fahrenheit 451 (1966) for director François Truffaut, a director she admired. The film was hurt by the director's lack of English and by friction between Truffaut and Christie's male co-star Oskar Werner, who had replaced the the more-appropriate-for-the-role Terence Stamp. Stamp and Christie had been lovers before she had become famous, and he was unsure he could act with her, due to his own ego problems. On his part, Werner resented the attention the smitten Truffaut gave Christie. The film is an interesting failure.
Stamp overcame those ego problems to sign on as her co-star in John Schlesinger's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), which also featured two great English actors, Peter Finch and Alan Bates. It is a film that is far better remembered now than when it was received in 1967. The film and her performance as the Hardy heroine Bathsheba Everdene was lambasted by film critics, many of whom faulted Christie for being too "mod" and thus untrue to one of Hardy's classic tales of fate. Some said that her contemporary Vanessa Redgrave would have been a better choice as Bathsheba, but while it is true that Redgrave is a very fine actress, she lacked the sex appeal and star quality of Christie, which makes the story of three men in love with one woman more plausible, as a film.
Although no one then knew it, the period 1967-68 represented the high-water mark of Christie's career. Fatefully, like the Hardy heroine she had portrayed, she had met the man who transformed her life, undermining her pretensions to a career as a movie star in their seven-year-long love affair, the American actor Warren Beatty. Living his life was always far more important than being a star for Beatty, who viewed the movie star profession as a "treadmill leading to more treadmills" and who was wealthy enough after Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to not have to ever work again. Christie and Beatty had visited a working farm during the production of "Madding Crowd" and had been appalled by the industrial exploitation of the animals. Thereafter, animal rights became a very important subject to Christie. They were kindred souls who remain friends four decades after their affair ended in 1974.
Christie's last box-office hit in which she was the top-liner was Petulia (1968) for Richard Lester, a film that featured one of co-star George C. Scott's greatest performances, perfectly counter-balanced by Christie's portrayal of an "arch-kook" who was emblematic of the '60s. It is one of the major films of the decade, an underrated masterpiece. Despite the presence of the great George C. Scott and the excellent Shirley Knight, the film would not work without Julie Christie. There is frankly no other actress who could have filled the role, bringing that unique presence and the threat of danger that crackled around Christie's electric aura. At this point of her career, she was poised for greatness as a star, greatness as an actress.
And she walked away.
After meeting Beatty, Julie Christie essentially surrendered any aspirations to screen stardom, or at maintaining herself as a top-drawer working actress (success at the box office being a guarantee of the best parts, even in art films.) She turned down the lead in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) and Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), two parts that garnered Oscar nominations for the second choices, Jane Fonda and Geneviève Bujold. After shooting In Search of Gregory (1969), a critical and box office flop, to fulfill her contractual obligations, she spent her time with Beatty in Calfiornia, renting a beach house at Malibu. She did return to form in Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (1971), a fine picture with a script by the great Harold Pinter, and she won another Oscar nomination as the whore-house proprietor in Robert Altman's minor classic McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) that she made with her lover Beatty. However, like Beatty himself, she did not seek steady work, which can be professional suicide for an actor who wants to maintain a standing in the first rank of movie stars.
At the same time, Julie Christie turned down the role of the Russian Empress in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), another film that won the second-choice (Janet Suzman) a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Two years later, she appeared in the landmark mystery-horror film Don't Look Now (1973), but that likely was as a favor to the director, Nicolas Roeg, who had been her cinematographer on "Fahrenheit 451," "Far From the Madding Crowd" and "Petulia." In the mid '70s, her affair with Beatty came to an end, but the two remained close friends and worked together in Shampoo (1975) (which she regretted due to its depiction of women) and Heaven Can Wait (1978).
Christie was still enough of a star, due to sheer magnetism rather than her own pull at the box-office, to be offered $1 million to play the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis character in The Greek Tycoon (1978) (a part eventually played by Jacqueline Bisset to no great acclaim). She signed for but was forced to drop out of the lead in Agatha (1979) (which was filled by Vanessa Redgrave) after she broke a wrist roller-skating (a particularly southern Californian fate!). She then signed for the female lead in American Gigolo (1980) when Richard Gere was originally attached to the picture, but dropped out when John Travolta muscled his way into the lead after making twin box-office killings as disco king Tony Manera in Saturday Night Fever (1977) and greaser Danny Zuko in Grease (1978). Christie could never have co-starred with such a camp figure of dubious talent. When Travolta himself dropped out and Gere was subbed back in, it was too late for Christe to reconsider, as the part already had been filled by model-actress Lauren Hutton. It would take 15 years for Christie and Gere to work together.
Finally, the end of the American phase of her movie career was realized when Christie turned down the part of Louise Bryant in Reds (1981), a part written by Warren Beatty with her in mind, as she felt an American should play the role. (Beatty's latest lover, Diane Keaton, played the part and won a Best Actress Oscar nomination.) Still, she remained a part of the film, Beatty's long-gestated labor of love, as it is dedicated to "Jules."
Julie Christie moved back to the UK and become the UK's answer to Jane Fonda, campaigning for various social and political causes, including animal rights and nuclear disarmament. The parts she did take were primarily driven by her social consciousness, such as appearing in Sally Potter's first feature-length film, The Gold Diggers (1983) which was not a remake of the old Avery Hopwood's old warhorse but a feminist parable made entirely by women who all shared the same pay scale. Roles in The Return of the Soldier (1982) with Alan Bates and Glenda Jackson and Merchant-Ivory's Heat and Dust (1983) seemed to herald a return to form, but Christie -- as befits such a symbol of the freedom and lack of conformity of the '60s -- decided to do it her way. She did not go "careering," even though her unique talent and beauty was still very much in demand by filmmakers.
At this point, Christie's movie career went into eclipse. Once again, she was particularly choosy about her work, so much so that many came to see her, essentially, as retired. A career renaissance came in the mid-1990s with her turn as Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh's ambitious if not wholly successful Hamlet (1996). As Christie said at the time, she didn't feel she could turn Branagh down as he was a national treasure. But the best was yet to come: her turn as the faded movie star married to handyman Nick Nolte and romanced by a younger man in Afterglow (1997), which brought her rave notices. She received her third Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance, and showed up at the awards as radiant and uniquely beautiful as ever. Ever the iconoclast, she was visibly relieved, upon the announcement of the award, to learn that she had lost!
Christie lived with left-wing investigative journalist Duncan Campbell (a Manchester Guardian columnist) since 1979, first in Wales, then in Ojai, California, and now in London's East End, before marrying in January 2008. In addition to her film work, she has narrated many books-on-tape. In 1995, she made a triumphant return to the stage in a London revival of Harold Pinter's "Old Times", which garnered her superb reviews.
In the decade since "Afterglow," she has worked steadily on film in supporting roles. Christie -- an actress who eschewed vulgar stardom -- proved to be an inspiration to her co-star Sarah Polley, the remarkably talented Canadian actress with a leftist political bent who also abhors Hollywood. Of her co-star in No Such Thing (2001) and The Secret Life of Words (2005), Polley says that Christie is uniquely aware of her commodification by the movie industry and the mass media during the 1960s. Not wanting to be reduced to a product, she had rebelled and had assumed control of her life and career. Her attitude makes her one of Polley's heroes, who calls her one of her surrogate mothers. (Polley lost her own mother when she was 11 years old.)
Both Christie and Polley are rebels. Sarah Polley had walked off the set of the big-budget movie that was forecast as her ticket to Hollywood stardom, Almost Famous (2000), to have a different sort of life and career. She returned to her native Canada to appear in the low-budget indie The Law of Enclosures (2000), a prescient art film in that director John Greyson offset the drama with a background of a perpetual Gulf War three years before George W. Bush invaded Iraq, touching off the second-longest war in U.S. history. Taking a hiatus from acting, Polley went to Norman Jewison's Canadian Film Centre to learn to direct, and direct she has, making well-regarded shorts before launching her feature film debut, Away from Her (2006), which was shot and completed in 2006 but held for release until 2007 by its distributor.
Polley, who had longed to be a writer since she was a child actress on the set of the quaint family show Avonlea (1990) wrote the screenplay for her adaptation of Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Went Over the Mountain" with only one actress in mind: Julie Christie. Polley had first read the short story on a flight back from Iceland, where she had made "No Such Thing" with Christie, and as she read, it was Julie whom she pictured as Fiona, the wife of a one-time philandering husband, who has become afflicted with Alzheimer's disease and seeks to save her hubby the pain of looking after her by checking herself into a home.
After finishing the screenplay, it took months to get Christie to commit to making the film. Julie turned her down after reading the script and pondering it for a couple of months, saying "No" even though she liked the script. Polley then had to "twist her arm" for another couple of months. But alas, Julie has a weakness for national treasures: Just like with Branagh a decade ago, the legendary Julie Christie could not deny the Great White North's Sarah Polley, and commit she did. Polley then found out why Christie is so reticent about making movies:
"She gives all of herself to what she does. Once she said yes, she was more committed than anybody."
According to David Germain, a cinema journalist who interviewed Christie for the Associated Press, "Polley and Christie share a desire to do interesting, unusual work, which generally means staying away from Hollywood.
"'It's been a kind of greed and a kind of egotism, but it's not necessarily wanting to avoid the Hollywood thing, but in fact, it incorporates wanting to avoid the Hollywood thing, because the Hollywood thing is so inevitably not original,' Christie said. 'It's avoiding non-originality, so that means you're really down to a very small choice.'"
The collaboration between the two rebels yielded a small gem of a film. Lions Gate Films was so impressed, it purchased the American distribution rights to the film in 2006, then withheld it until the following year to build up momentum for the awards season.
Julie Christie's performance in "Away From Her" is superb, and already has garnered her the National Board of Review's Best Actress Award. She will likely receive her fourth Academy Award nomination, and quite possibly her second Oscar, for her unforgettable performance, a labor of love she did for a friend.
We, the Julie Christie fans who have waited decades for the handful of films made by the numinous star: Would we have wanted it any other way? We are the Red Sox fans of the movies, once again rewarded with a world-class masterpiece by our heroine. Perhaps, like all human beings, we want more, but we have learned over the last thirty-five years to be content with the diamonds that are Julie's leading performances that she gives just once a decade, content to feel that these are a surfeit of riches, our surfeit of riches, so great is their luminescence.- Julie Sommars was born in Fremont, Nebraska to a government grain inspector and schoolteacher. She attended schools in Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. While a student in Onawa, Iowa, her father, without her knowledge, entered her name in a worldwide talent hunt. Fifteen-year-old Julie found herself in Chicago auditioning for Otto Preminger for the lead role in his film "Saint Joan." She didn't get that part, but as a high school senior she did win the American Legion State Oratory Contest in Aberdeen, South Dakota. She was the only female winner in all of, what was then, the 48 states.
After graduation from high school, Julie took the Greyhound bus to California for a summer job teaching horseback riding and swimming, and attended San Bernardino Valley College. Her appearance in the play, "Our Town" led to her playing Loretta Young's daughter in an episode of the "Loretta Young Show." She was 19.
Her big break came in another talent hunt. She competed for and won the female lead in Ross Hunter's talent hunt for unknowns to play in his 1966 black comedy, "The Pad and How to Use It," based on the Peter Shaffer play, "The Private Ear."
In 1969 she starred in the comedy series, "The Governor and J.J." playing Dan Dailey's daughter, J. J. In 1970 she won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy, tying with Carol Burnett, as well as the Best New Star Award from the Television Critics Association for her role as J. J.
Julie also starred with Dean Jones and Don Knotts in the Disney movie "Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo." Episodic television work includes roles in "Get Smart," "Barnaby Jones," "Harry O," "The Rockford Files," "McMillan and Wife," "McCloud," and "Magnum P.I." In the 1970s Julie starred in many movies for television, including "The Harness," "Five Desperate Women," "Cave-In," and "Centennial."
From 1987-1994 Julie joined Andy Griffith in "Matlock," playing his love interest Assistant District Attorney, Julie March. In 1990 she received her second Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama for the role.
Upon retiring, from March 1999 to March 2000, she served as a public member on the California Judicial Performance Commission. From 2000 to 2003, she served as a public member on The Board of Governors for the State of California.
In 2021 Julie lives in California with John Karns, her husband of 38 years. Between them they have three children, Jacey Erwin, Mike Karns, and Bill Karns. - Actor
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Richard Balin was born on 22 April 1940 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He is an actor and director, known for Graduation Day (1981), Through a Veil of Knowledge: The Legacy of Paul Maxwell (2007) and The 2007 Palm Dog Awards (2008). He has been married to Rochelle Balin since 10 October 1971. They have two children.- Actor
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Alfredo James "Al" 'Pacino established himself as a film actor during one of cinema's most vibrant decades, the 1970s, and has become an enduring and iconic figure in the world of American movies.
He was born April 25, 1940 in Manhattan, New York City, to Italian-American parents, Rose (nee Gerardi) and Sal Pacino. They divorced when he was young. His mother moved them into his grandparents' home in the South Bronx. Pacino found himself often repeating the plots and voices of characters he had seen in the movies. Bored and unmotivated in school, he found a haven in school plays, and his interest soon blossomed into a full-time career. Starting onstage, he went through a period of depression and poverty, sometimes having to borrow bus fare to succeed to auditions. He made it into the prestigious Actors Studio in 1966, studying under Lee Strasberg, creator of the Method Approach that would become the trademark of many 1970s-era actors.
After appearing in a string of plays in supporting roles, Pacino finally attained success off-Broadway with Israel Horovitz's "The Indian Wants the Bronx", winning an Obie Award for the 1966-67 season. That was followed by a Tony Award for "Does the Tiger Wear a Necktie?" His first feature films made little departure from the gritty realistic stage performances that earned him respect: he played a drug addict in The Panic in Needle Park (1971) after his film debut in Me, Natalie (1969). The role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972) was one of the most sought-after of the time: Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Ryan O'Neal, Robert De Niro and a host of other actors either wanted it or were mentioned, but director Francis Ford Coppola wanted Pacino for the role.
Coppola was successful but Pacino was reportedly in constant fear of being fired during the very difficult shoot. The film was a monster hit that earned Pacino his first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. However, instead of taking on easier projects for the big money he could now command, Pacino threw his support behind what he considered tough but important films, such as the true-life crime drama Serpico (1973) and the tragic real-life bank robbery film Dog Day Afternoon (1975). He was nominated three consecutive years for the "Best Actor" Academy Award. He faltered slightly with Bobby Deerfield (1977), but regained his stride with And Justice for All (1979), for which he received another Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Unfortunately, this would signal the beginning of a decline in his career, which produced flops like Cruising (1980) and Author! Author! (1982).
Pacino took on another vicious gangster role and cemented his legendary status in the ultra-violent cult film Scarface (1983), but a monumental mistake was about to follow. Revolution (1985) endured an endless and seemingly cursed shoot in which equipment was destroyed, weather was terrible, and Pacino fell ill with pneumonia. Constant changes in the script further derailed the project. The Revolutionary War-themed film, considered among the worst films ever made, resulted in awful reviews and kept him off the screen for the next four years. Returning to the stage, Pacino did much to give back and contribute to the theatre, which he considers his first love. He directed a film, The Local Stigmatic (1990), but it remains unreleased. He lifted his self-imposed exile with the striking Sea of Love (1989) as a hard-drinking policeman. This marked the second phase of Pacino's career, being the first to feature his now famous dark, owl eyes and hoarse, gravelly voice.
Returning to the Corleones, Pacino made The Godfather Part III (1990) and earned raves for his first comedic role in the colorful adaptation Dick Tracy (1990). This earned him another Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and two years later he was nominated for Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). He went into romantic mode for Frankie and Johnny (1991). In 1992, he finally won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his amazing performance in Scent of a Woman (1992). A mixture of technical perfection (he plays a blind man) and charisma, the role was tailor-made for him, and remains a classic.
The next few years would see Pacino becoming more comfortable with acting and movies as a business, turning out great roles in great films with more frequency and less of the demanding personal involvement of his wilder days. Carlito's Way (1993) proved another gangster classic, as did the epic crime drama Heat (1995) directed by Michael Mann and co-starring Robert De Niro. He directed the film adaptation of Shakespeare's Looking for Richard (1996). During this period, City Hall (1996), Donnie Brasco (1997) and The Devil's Advocate (1997) all came out. Reteaming with Mann and then Oliver Stone, he gave commanding performances in The Insider (1999) and Any Given Sunday (1999).
In the 2000s, Pacino starred in a number of theatrical blockbusters, including Ocean's Thirteen (2007), but his choice in television roles (the vicious, closeted Roy Cohn in the HBO miniseries Angels in America (2003) and his sensitive portrayal of Jack Kevorkian, in the television movie You Don't Know Jack (2010)) are reminiscent of the bolder choices of his early career. Each television project garnered him an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie.
Never wed, Pacino has a daughter, Julie Marie, with acting teacher Jan Tarrant, and a set of twins with former longtime girlfriend Beverly D'Angelo. His romantic history includes Jill Clayburgh, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Carole Mallory, Debra Winger, Tuesday Weld, Marthe Keller, Carmen Cervera, Kathleen Quinlan, Lyndall Hobbs, Penelope Ann Miller, and a two-decade intermittent relationship with "Godfather" co-star Diane Keaton. He currently lives with Argentinian actress Lucila Solá, who is 36 years his junior.
As of 2022, Pacino is 82-years-old. He has never retired from acting, and continues to appear regularly in film.- Actor
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Steve Lander was born on 28 April 1940 in Oslo, Norway. He is an actor, known for Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre (1963), The Gallant Men (1962) and Combat! (1962). He was previously married to Ellie Shkolnik and Theresa Lander.- Actress
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Born in Flushing, New York, the impressively endowed Patty Jo Harmon was discovered as a guest on You Bet Your Life (1950) by Groucho Marx and later was invited to work with him on Tell It to Groucho (1961). The TV exposure parlayed into roles in such obscure films as Village of the Giants (1965) and more famous fare like Cool Hand Luke (1967), but she was used mostly for eye candy. With only a handful of television appearances to her name, she made a bigger career as a pin-up girl during the late 1960s and early 1970s, but she ultimately retired from acting to get married and start a family. Baking has always been a favorite pastime and she since started Aunt Joy's Cakes. She first started sharing her treats while working at Disney Studios and runs a wholesale bakery based in Burbank, California.- Jo Ann Pflug was born on 2 May 1940 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. She is an actress, known for M*A*S*H (1970), Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) and The Fall Guy (1981). She has been married to Charles Stuck Young since 14 May 1988. She was previously married to Chuck Woolery.
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An intense, versatile actor as adept at playing clean-cut FBI agents as he is psychotic motorcycle-gang leaders, who can go from portraying soulless, murderous vampires to burned-out, world-weary homicide detectives, Lance Henriksen has starred in a variety of films that have allowed him to stretch his talents just about as far as an actor could possibly hope. He played "Awful Knoffel" in the TNT original movie Evel Knievel (2004), directed by John Badham and executive produced by Mel Gibson. Henriksen portrayed "Awful Knoffel" in this project based on the life of the famed daredevil, played by George Eads. Henriksen starred for three seasons (1996-1999) on Millennium (1996), Fox-TV's critically acclaimed series created by Chris Carter (The X-Files (1993)). His performance as Frank Black, a retired FBI agent who has the ability to get inside the minds of killers, landed him three consecutive Golden Globe nominations for "Best Performance by a Lead Actor in a Drama Series" and a People's Choice Award nomination for "Favorite New TV Male Star".
Henriksen was born in New York City. His mother, Margueritte, was a waitress, dance instructor, and model. His father, James Marin Henriksen, who was from Tønsberg, Norway, was a boxer and merchant sailor. Henriksen studied at the Actors Studio and began his career off-Broadway in Eugene O'Neill's "Three Plays of the Sea." One of his first film appearances was as an FBI agent in Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (1975), followed by parts in Lumet's Network (1976) and Prince of the City (1981). He then appeared in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) with Richard Dreyfuss and François Truffaut, Damien: Omen II (1978) and in Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff (1983), in which he played Mercury astronaut Capt. Wally Schirra.
James Cameron cast Henriksen in his first directorial effort, Piranha II: The Spawning (1982), then used him again in The Terminator (1984) and as the android Bishop in the sci-fi classic Aliens (1986). Sam Raimi cast Henriksen as an outrageously garbed gunfighter in his quirky western The Quick and the Dead (1995). Henriksen has also appeared in what has developed into a cult classic: Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark (1987), in which he plays the head of a clan of murderous redneck vampires. He was nominated for a Golden Satellite Award for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in the TNT original film The Day Lincoln Was Shot (1998).
In addition to his abilities as an actor, Henriksen is an accomplished painter and potter. His talent as a ceramist has enabled him to create some of the most unusual ceramic artworks available on the art market today. He resides in Southern California with his wife Jane and their five-year-old daughter Sage.- Director
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John Irvin is a British director who has made more than thirty motion pictures in his career so far.
Born in England, Irvin began his career working for British Movietone News. He directed his first film "Gala Day" a documentary financed by the British Film Institute which was bought by the BBC. Within the same year his documentary "Inheritance" was released, winning a British Film Academy Award.
Throughout the Sixties, Irvin made numerous award-winning documentaries for his own company Mithras Films, the BBC and ITV; culminating in the Omnibus film "Beautiful, Beautiful" (1969) about war photographers, featuring Don McCullen, Larry Burrows, and Eugene Smith shot in Vietnam and New York.
At the start of the Seventies Irvin began a career in Television Drama with "Captain Cook" for Time-Life BBC, the pilot for the BAFTA award-winning series "Explorers". Irvin then directed the multi-award winning TV Dramas "The Nearly Man" and "Hard Times" for Granada TV and the hugely successful "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" for the BBC starring Alec Guinness. At this time Hollywood beckoned.
For the next thirty years Irvin made, and is still making, feature films for cinema and television release, he has worked for most of the major studios. His first theatrical motion picture "Dogs Of War" (1980) starring Christopher Walken and Tom Berenger, concerns a military coup in an African country. Irvin followed this with the successful horror film "Ghost Story (1981) starring Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and John Houseman. The film was the third highest grossing horror film of its year.
Next, Irvin made the biographical film "Champions" (1984) starring John Hurt. "Turtle Diary" (1985) was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter and starred Ben Kingsley, Glenda Jackson and Michael Gambon. Then "Raw Deal" (1986) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Hamburger Hill (1987) starring Don Cheadle, Dylan McDermott, Michael Boatman, Steven Weber and Courtney B. Vance was a very realistic interpretation of one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War and is considered one of the most visually effective Vietnam War films. Irvin then made the crime thriller "Next Of Kin" (1989) starring Patrick Swayze and Liam Neeson. "Eminent Domain" (1991) starred Donald Sutherland and Anne Archer. Next "Robin Hood" (1991) starred Patrick Bergin and Uma Thurman. "Widows Peak" (1993) starring Mia Farrow, Joan Plowright, Natasha Richardson Jim Broadbent and Adrian Dunbar. Then "A Month By The Lake" (1994) starring Vanessa Redgrave, Edward Fox and Uma Thurman. etc... In a newly published anthology of war films, Irvin's "Hamburger Hill" and "When Trumpets Fade"(HBO) were cited as two of the greatest war films ever made.
More recently Irvin has been making indie pictures in Europe. These include "Shiner" (2000) starring Michael Caine, "The Boys and Girl from County Clare" (2003) starred Andrea Corr and Colm Meaney. "The Moon And The Stars" (2006) starring Alfred Molina, Catherine McCormack and Jonathan Pryce.
Irvin now lives in London and is co-founder with producer Claire Evans of DearHeart Productions. "Mandela's' Gun" was their first feature. Developed and researched by John and Claire, it took five years to produce and was shot in 6 countries. It is now a major feature film due for release in the autumn of 2018. DearHeart Productions have a three picture slate of films in development and have just completed pre-production on their next feature "Goose Green" an epic British war film about the battle for Goose green during the Falklands War of 1982.- Writer
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James L. Brooks was born on 9 May 1940 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Broadcast News (1987), As Good as It Gets (1997) and Terms of Endearment (1983). He was previously married to Holly Holmberg Brooks and Marianne Catherine Morrissey.- Actor
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Born in The Bronx, New York, the youngest child of Ruth and Abraham Harry Goldenberg (his sisters Gilda and Lael were six and four years his senior, respectively). He attended P.S. 90 in New York before his family moved to Fair Lawn, New Jersey, when he was 12. He attended Fair Lawn High, where he was co-editor of the school paper, a member of the Pen and Quill Society and in his senior year was elected to Phi Theta, the school's drama society. Upon graduation in 1958 he received a partial scholarship.
Harvey's first appearance in a play was in Warren Point Secondary School, where he played the title role in "The King in the Kitchen". His appearances in high school plays included Bottom in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the Captain of the Guard in "The Pirates of Penzance" and, in his senior year, the title role in "The Doctor from Dunsmore." He graduated from Boston University's College of Liberal Arts in 1962. In his freshman year at BU he studied under David Pressman, the Neighborhood Playhouse maven. Then he taught elementary school for two years in Paterson, New Jersey. While teaching he did appeared in the softcore film The Love Statue (1965), which dealt with LSD. Soon afterward he made his New York stage debut in The Peppermint Players musical "Jack and the Beanstalk", playing the Giant. That was followed by the short-lived "Village Blues" at the 42nd Street Theater. At Fairleigh Dickenson University in Teaneck, New Jersey, he studied creative writing under Marguerite Young, author of "Miss McIntosh, My Darling." He had a story published in the Watchung (NJ) Weekly and is the author of the book "How to Succeed in the Business There's No Business Like" and five "first" novels. After appearing as the Nephew in the Traveler's Insurance award-winning commercial called "The Reading of the Will", a 60-second spot that co-starred Lou Jacobi as the Attorney and 'Maureen Arthur' as the surprise heiress, Harvey went on to appear in over 100 other commercials, notably the award-winning spoof of Stagecoach (1939) and several Doritos spots starring Avery Schreiber ("The Reading of the Will" was directed by Howard Zieff, who shortly afterward found success directing films like Hearts of the West (1975) and Private Benjamin (981)_).
In 1968 he moved to Hollywood, where he appeared in films with 'George C. Scott', Natalie Wood and Michael Caine and appeared opposite 'Kathleen Freeman' (v) in _The Malibu Bikini Shop (198)_. He also played the marriage license clerk in Phil Alden Robinson's directorial debut, In the Mood (1987). His television appearance go back to N.Y.P.D. (1967) in New York, but extend to shows like That Girl (1966), M*A*S*H (1972), The Golden Girls (1985) and Mr. Belvedere (1985). He also appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962) three times at a member of the Mighty Carson Arts Players.- Pretty, appealing and energetic blonde actress Jennifer Billingsley was born in Honolulu in 1940. An army brat who grew up all over the world, she graduated with honors from Fort Smith (Arkansas) Senior High School in 1958. Her initial claim to fame was her striking resemblance to Brigitte Bardot. She garnered plenty of favorable critical notices for her lively performance in the hit Broadway musical, "Carnival". She made her film debut as James Caan's wild teenage moll girlfriend in the harrowing thriller, Lady in a Cage (1964). Billingsley had a recurring part on the popular daytime soap opera, General Hospital (1963).
She then appeared in a handful of hugely entertaining low-budget drive-in features throughout the 1970s: a scruffy motorcycle mama in the biker romp, C.C. & Company (1970); a sexy hippie hitchhiker in the sleazy Brute Corps (1971); a brash young lass in the Vietnam vets exploitation flick, Welcome Home Soldier Boys (1971); a sassy Southerner in the immensely enjoyable Burt Reynolds vehicle, White Lightning (1973); an American tourist who runs afoul of an evil cult in the Filipino horror dud, The Thirsty Dead (1974); and another more bitter motorcycle mama in the fine Hollywood Man (1976). On television, she had guest spots on are Naked City (1958), Gunsmoke (1955), Route 66 (1960), Dr. Kildare (1961), Wagon Train (1957), The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964), Mannix (1967), Hawaii Five-O (1968), Police Story (1973), Alice (1976), Baretta (1975) and The Amazing Spider-Man (1977). - Writer
- Actor
- Producer
He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, raised in Lloyd Neck, Long Island, graduated from Yale University in 1962 (BA, English) and Tulane University in 1967, (MA, Theatre and Speech). He was co-founder of The American Shakespeare Theatre's Center for Theatre Techniques in Education, attended Herbert Berghof's playwriting class in New York City.- Peter Gerety was born on 17 May 1940 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. He is an actor, known for Flight (2012), Charlie Wilson's War (2007) and Public Enemies (2009). He has been married to Natalie Burton since 27 November 2000.
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Veteran stage and TV actor David Ackroyd was born on May 30, 1940 in Orange, New Jersey, the son of Arthur, an insurance adjuster, and Charlotte (nee Henderson) Ackroyd. He studied at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania where he received his BA in 1962 as a ROTC student. Following his graduation he appeared in community theater productions while serving in Arizona with the military. He then focused on the arts as a career after enrolling at the Yale Drama School where he earned his Masters of Fine Arts in 1968.
Ackroyd garnered early credits at Yale Repertory Theatre (for three seasons) and Williamstown Theatre Festival (for six seasons). He also found challenging and varied stage work outside the U.S., in Taiwan, Russia, Poland, Germany, France, and the former Czechoslovakia. Dark and handsome, he extended his stage career onscreen in the early 1970s, beginning with the daytime soap operas The Secret Storm (1954) and Another World (1964). He progressed to prime-time work as Gary Ewing in Dallas (1978) until Ted Shackelford successfully took over the role when the character moved front and center with the spin-off drama Knots Landing (1979).
A durable guest star for decades on such popular TV series as Lou Grant (1977), Trapper John, M.D. (1979), St. Elsewhere (1982), Cagney & Lacey (1981), MacGyver (1985), Highway to Heaven (1984), Doogie Howser, M.D. (1989), Murder, She Wrote (1984), Walker, Texas Ranger (1993), and Xena: Warrior Princess (1995), Ackroyd had recurring roles as Dr. Boyer in AfterMASH (1983) and Dr. Bart Langley in A Peaceable Kingdom (1989). He provided strong support in the two-part TV special The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978) (starring Bette Davis) as well as such made-for-television movies as And I Alone Survived (1978), Women in White (1979), Deadly Lessons (1983), When Your Lover Leaves (1983), The Children of Times Square (1986), Hell Hath No Fury (1991), The Fear Inside (1992), and Against the Wall (1994) and four exceptional mini-series (The Word (1978), Nutcracker: Money, Madness & Murder (1987), Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story (1987), and Windmills of the Gods (1988)). Ackroyd also appeared in feature films, including The Mountain Men (1980), The Sound of Murder (1982), Wrestling with God (1990), Dark Angel (1990), Love, Cheat & Steal (1993), Dead On (1994), Raven (1996), and No Strings Attached (1997).
Prone to playing intelligent, upscale types or white-collar professionals (senators, doctors, lawyers, etc.), David continued to prevail on the stage with potent performances in 'Unlikely Heroes' (his 1971 Broadway debut), 'The Rivals', 'Juno and the Paycock', 'Hamlet' (as Rosencrantz), 'Private Lives', 'Children of a Lesser God' (replacing original star John Rubinstein), 'A Soldier's Play', 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?', 'Six Characters in Search of an Author', and an 2003 off-Broadway appearance in 'It Just Catches'. A well-seasoned narrator in documentary stories for the History Channel, he has sometimes utilized his well-modulated vocals for such animated cartoons as 'Johnny Quest' and 'Captain Planet and the Planeteers'. Much of his most recent professional work has been voice work.
Long married to wife Ruth Liming, a college admissions officer, the couple has two daughters, Jessica and Abigail. He is a professor of drama at Flathead Valley Community College (Kalispell, Montana) and a founding member of the Alpine Theatre Project which produces plays for the Whitefish Theatre Company.- Music Artist
- Music Department
- Actor
Tom Jones was born Thomas Jones Woodward in Pontypridd, South Wales, to a traditional coal-mining family, the son of Freda (Jones) and Thomas Woodward. His father was of English descent and his mother was of Welsh and English ancestry. He began singing at an early age in church and in the school choir. Left school at 16 and was married, having a son a year later. He brought in money for his family from an assortment of jobs, singing in pubs at night. By 1963, he was playing regularly with his own group in the demanding atmosphere of working mens clubs. Gordon Mills, a performer who had branched out into songwriting and management went to see him. He became his manager and landed him a record contract in 1964. They made a great team and had huge international success with their second single, a song penned by Mr Mills -- "It's Not Unusual." An avalanche of gold singles and albums followed. Mr Jones, a vocal powerhouse, has sustained his popularity for over three decades, and his recordings have spanned the spectrum of musical styles.- Actress
- Producer
- Music Department
Nancy Sandra Sinatra was born the first child of Frank Sinatra and Nancy Barbato Sinatra on June 8, 1940 in Jersey City, New Jersey. Her first television appearance was with her father and Elvis Presley in 1959. She first appeared as a film actress in For Those Who Think Young (1964) and Get Yourself a College Girl (1964). Nancy appeared alongside Elvis in the musical comedy Speedway (1968). She also had a successful career as a singer with two United States chart-toppers ("These Boots Are Made for Walking" and the duet with her father called "Somethin' Stupid") as well as numerous other chart entries including the John Barry / Leslie Bricusse penned theme song to the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967). Lee Hazlewood wrote many of her songs and sang with her on some of them. By the early 1970s, she was covering new ground by recording songs from other writers such as Bob Dylan, Smokey Robinson, Lynsey de Paul and Roy Wood. In recent years, Nancy has made a comeback also not hindered by the recent successful re-recording of "Somethin' Stupid" by Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman.- Carole Ann Ford was born in June 1940 and first appeared in a film at the age of eight. Following acting and elocution lessons, she started doing commercials and walk-on work, and her first proper role was in the play "Women of the Streets." She continued working in theatre, film (including The Day of the Triffids (1963)) and television (including Emergency-Ward 10 (1957), Moonstrike (1963), Compact (1962) and Z Cars (1962)). Aftering leaving Doctor Who (1963), Carole worked mainly in the theatre. Her second daughter, Tara, was born in 1977. The same year she hurt her back filming a commercial, and suffered an extreme reaction to the pain-killers she was given. She subsequently became very ill, and has acted only occasionally since - though she did reprise her role as Susan in the twentieth-anniversary story The Five Doctors (1983). She is currently teaching voice, presentation skills and dialogue coaching to politicians, businessmen, after dinner speakers and actors.
- Actress
- Writer
- Producer
Mariette Hartley was born Mary Loretta, a name she dislikes, in Weston, Connecticut. She was raised in accordance with the principles espoused by her behavioral psychologist grandfather, John B. Watson, who believed that children should never be held or cuddled. She says that the lack of warmth at home is what drove her to the theatre. She studied with John Houseman at the Repertory Stratford and with Eva Le Gallienne at Lucille Lortel's White Barn Theatre. It took her six years to get her first movie, Ride the High Country (1962) with Joel McCrea. She then made a series of TV appearances and sitcoms. She is most known, however, for her series of Polaroid commercials with James Garner. Mariette's father committed suicide with a self-inflicted gunshot in 1962. Her family kept it a secret for 25 years, but she eventually revealed the incident. This brought her considerable acclaim for speaking out about her devastation. She co-founded a suicide prevention foundation based on her own past situation. She continues to work in the theatre and, in 2000, was hosting the syndicated Wild About Animals (1995). Her children, Justine E. Boyriven (b. 1978) is an actress and singer, and Sean Boyriven (b. 1975) is a film-school graduate.- Director
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- Producer
Víctor Erice was born on 30 June 1940 in Karrantza, Vizcaya, País Vasco, Spain. He is a director and writer, known for Close Your Eyes (2023), El Sur (1983) and The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).- Actress
- Soundtrack
Inga Neilsen was born on 1 July 1940 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. She is an actress, known for Funny Girl (1968), In Like Flint (1967) and The Invisible Man (1975). She was previously married to Dick Orr.- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
Joshua Bryant is an American actor, director, author and speaker and the founder, in 1995, of the Taos Talking Pictures Film Festival and Media Forum in Taos, New Mexico. After attending the Pasadena Playhouse College of Theater Arts and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London (RADA) and serving for three years in the US Army Signal Corps he began a career in the theater that eventually led to his starring, guest-starring and appearing in many dozens of television shows. Bryant also appeared in Barnaby Jones; episode titled, "Fantasy of Fear".- Actress
- Soundtrack
Kelly Jean Peters was born on 2 July 1940 in Columbus, Ohio, USA. She is an actress, known for Little Big Man (1970), Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) and Quincy M.E. (1976). She was previously married to Tim McIntire.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Michael Cole was born on 3 July 1940 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. He is an actor, known for It (1990), Mr. Brooks (2007) and Police Story (1973). He has been married to Shelley Funes since 1996. He was previously married to Paula Kelly Jr..- At age 6, Karolyn Grimes played the role of Zuzu Bailey in the holiday film It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Her childhood film career spanned 16 movies, but she is best remembered for playing the daughter of George and Mary Bailey (James Stewart and Donna Reed). The petals from her rose symbolize the values of family, friends and life itself in the 1946 classic, and it is Zuzu who speaks the movie's most memorable line, "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings." In recent years, Karolyn has carried on the spirit of It's a Wonderful Life (1946), serving as the film's most active and appealing ambassador.
- Music Artist
- Actor
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Ringo Starr is a British musician, actor, director, writer, and artist best known as the drummer of The Beatles who also coined the title 'A Hard day's Night' for The Beatles' first movie.
He was born Richard Starkey on July 7, 1940, in a small two-storey house in the working class area of Liverpool, Merseyside, England. His father, Richard Starkey, was a former dockworker turned baker; his mother, Elsie (Gleave) Starkey, was a bakery worker. His parents divorced when he was three and he and his mother, Elsie, moved to another home in Liverpool. While attending Silas Infants' Schools he suffered from many afflictions that basically ruined his education: he had constant abdominal pains, was once diagnosed with a ruptured appendix that led to an inflamed peritoneum, which also led to one of his first surgeries. Ringo was in a coma, and his recovery took a couple of months, during which more operations were performed, and he was known to be accident-prone. Shortly after he came out of the coma, he was trying to offer a toy bus to another boy in an adjoining bed, but fell and suffered from a concussion. When he finally was able to go back to school, he learned that he was far behind in his studies. At age 13 he caught a cold that turned into chronic pleurisy, causing him another stay at a hospital in Liverpool. A few lung complications followed, which resulted in a treatment in yet another children's hospital, this time until 1955. Meanwhile, Richard's mother Elsie had married Harry Graves, the man who her son referred to as a "step-ladder".
At the age of 15 he could barely read or write, although he had aptitude for practical subjects such as woodwork and mechanics. At that time he dropped out of school and got his first job was as a delivery boy for British Rail. His second job was a barman on a ferry to New Brighton, and his next was as a trainee joiner at Henry Hunt & Sons. Ringo injured his finger on the first day of his new job, and then he decided to become a drummer. His dream came true, when his stepfather bought him a new drum kit, and Richard promised to be the best drummer ever.
In 1957, together with Eddie Miles, he started his own band called 'Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group'. At that time he became known as Ritchie, and eventually became caught in the Liverpool's Skiffle craze. Although he was self-taught, he was a good time-keeper, and developed an original beat with his signature accentuations, due to his left-handed manner of playing on the right-handed drum set. He traveled from band to band, but he eventually landed a spot with "Raving Texans", which was a backing band for Rory Storm, later known as "Rory Storm & The Hurricanes", a popular band at that time Liverpool. Rory Storm encouraged Richard to enhance his career by legally changing his name to Ringo Starr. The Hurricanes topped the bill at one of Liverpool's clubs, where The Beatles also had a gig. Ringo's group was at times sharing popularity with The Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers. He wanted to leave The Hurricanes to join another group called "The Seniors."
Before Ringo, The Beatles tried several other drummers. At one point they were so desperate, that they even invited strangers from the audience to fill the position. Then came Pete Best who was not considered by the other band members to be the greatest drummer, and they were keen to recruit Ringo as his replacement. On June 6, 1962, at the Abbey Road studios, The Beatles passed Martin's audition with the exception of Pete Best. George Martin liked them, but recommended the change of a drummer. Being asked by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison; Epstein fired Pete Best. After a mutual decision the band was completed with Ringo Starr. Ringo contributed to their first hit in September of 1962, when The Beatles recorded Love Me Do, which charted in UK, and reached the top of the US singles chart.
Ringo's steady and reliable drumming became essential in their studio sessions, as well as in their numerous and exhausting live performances across the world. Ringo's positive disposition as well as his drumming style played the pivotal role in shaping the famous image and music style of The Beatles as they are now known to the world, under the management of Brian Epstein and music producer George Martin. Ringo filled the position of a drummer for The Beatles in the most critical time of the band's formation. He quickly connected with the other three members of The Beatles, and contributed to their music and creativity with his easy-going personality, light humour, reliable drumming and inventive musicianship. All four members were charismatic and individually talented artists, they sparked each other from the beginning. Eventually they made a much better group effort under the thorough management by Brian Epstein whose coaching helped consolidate their talents and mutual stimulation into beautiful teamwork.
Starr had dreamed of becoming a professional actor since his younger years. He wanted to be in movies probably more so than the other members of The Beatles. In 1964, during the first months of Beatlemania, Ringo coined the phrase 'A Hard Day's Night' which soon became the official title of the Beatles' first movie, in replacement for the working title 'Beatlemania'. Ringo received great reviews for his performance in A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965). At first, Ringo did not have a songwriting career, although he had no problem with his name recognition, however, he had a problem with getting his songs noticed. At that time he got help from his friends; John and Paul wrote a song or two for him to sing on their albums, such as "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "Yellow Submarine". He also sang on "Boys" (by Luther Dixon and Wes Farrell) and "Honey Don't (by Carl Perkins), During his eight-year career with The Beatles, Ringo wrote two original songs: "Don't Pass Me By" and "Octopus' Garden" for which he also sang the lead vocals. He is listed as co-writing "What Goes On" from Rubber Soul with Lennon and McCartney. Besides his drumming, Ringo's voice was recorded on many of the most popular Beatle's songs, contributing to their unique sound and tight harmonies.
He had a hectic solo career during the 1970s, after the breakup of The Beatles. However, Ringo eventually emerged as a steady performer, and sustained a very popular solo career, turning out a dozen chart-topping hit songs and eight best-selling albums. He made a famous appearance together with George Harrison, Ravi Shankar, and other popular musicians in the landmark 'Concert for Bangladesh' in 1971. His 1973 solo release "Ringo" was the last album to feature all four living Beatles, although not on the same song. He also appeared in various TV shows, including his own special, Ringo (1978), and a TV mini-series, Princess Daisy (1983), with his wife Barbara. In 1984 he did narration for the children's series Thomas & Friends (1984). During the 1980s, after having a long period of troubles with alcohol, Ringo and his wife attended a rehabilitation clinic, and came back to the scene sober. He made the All-Starr Band tour of America and Japan. The tour was so popular that he formed another All-Starr Band lineup in 1992, and began an American and European tour in June of that year. Since then Ringo Starr has been enjoying a continuous career as the leader of the All-Starr Band. In 1994, along with George Harrison and Paul McCartney, the three surviving members of The Beatles, reunited and produced Lennon's previously unknown song 'Free as a Bird'. It was preserved by 'Yoko Ono' on a tape recording made by John Lennon in 1977. The song was re-arranged and re-mixed with the voices of three surviving members, and became an international hit. 'Free as a Bird' was also included in The Beatles Anthology TV documentary which was watched by 420 million people in 1995. Ringo, Paul and George sang their new songs, in addition to mixing their voices and music arrangements to John Lennon demos.
Ringo's old friend and band-mate George Harrison passed away on November 29, 2001, after a long battle against lung cancer. The following year, on the anniversary of Harrison's death, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton appeared in a Concert For George, to raise money for the support of Harrison's legacy in exploration of alternative lifestyles, views and philosophies. Starr also supported charitable organizations with consideration to those who have special needs.
Ringo Starr updated the role of a drummer in popular music, he made drummer an equal partner to the lead musicians, thus changing the whole paradigm in how the public saw drummers. His original performing style evolved from adjusting his natural left-handed manner of playing to the right-handed drum set, and allowing his left hand lead in weaving a pattern tightly intertwined with the music of other players, and adding such enhancements as unusual accents and stops. Ringo's musical originality as well as his inventive drumming patterns, time signatures and accentuations became essential to the sound of The Beatles. His on-stage presence and acting talent as well as his humor and musicianship was the essential part in formation and remarkable career of The Beatles.
He was married to his long-time girlfriend, Maureen Cox, from 1965 - 1975, and they had three children: Zak Starkey, Jason, and Lee. The couple broke up in July of 1975, and he married actress Barbara Bach. Ringo Starr divides his time between his residences in England, in Switzerland and his home in Los Angeles, California.- Writer
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Carlton J. Albright was born on 8 July 1940 in the USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Luther the Geek (1989), The Children (1980) and Dreams Come True (1984). He is married to Patricia Albright. They have three children.- Mills Watson was born on 10 July 1940 in Oakland, California, USA. He is an actor, known for Cujo (1983), Up in Smoke (1978) and The Six Million Dollar Man (1974). He is married to Sue. He was previously married to Caroline Mary Mason.
- Actor
- Producer
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Brian Avery is a native of Los Angeles, California and attended Loyola High School where he was awarded the Bing Crosby Drama Medal at Graduation and then attended Loyola University on scholarship. He received a B.A. from the Liberal Arts College of Loyola University majoring in English with minors in Philosophy and Languages. Brian's stellar artistic career began in New York City when he co-starred on Broadway in the dramatic musical of the great John Ford Film, "How Green Was My Valley". A talent scout for Universal Studios saw him onstage and convinced the studio to offer him a movie contract. He began work at Universal Studios with Harrison Ford and Katharine Ross, also under contract. Harrison and Brian did "Journey To Shiloh" together and Katherine and Brian were chosen by director, Mike Nichols, to be the wedding couple in his classic film The Graduate (1967). Brian is also featured as Diane Keaton's boyfriend in Woody Allen's Sleeper (1973), as well as roles in numerous other motion pictures, television shows and theatrical plays.
Upon the release of The Graduate (1967), 'Gregory Peck (1916-2003)' offered to recommend Brian to the Board of Governors of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) for membership in the Actors Branch which then invited him to join. Brian has been a very active participant in The Academy's activities and has been invited to serve on multiple committees. Brian was initially invited to join The Academy's Foreign Language Film Committee (FLFC) and thereafter invited to serve on the Executive Committee with some of the most prestigious people in the entertainment business like 'Robert Wise (I) (1914-2005)', 'Fay Kanin (1917-2013)' and Mark Johnson. As a member of the Executive Committee of the FLFC he was asked to be the Official Academy Host to incoming directors for The Academy Awards. Among the directors he has hosted are: Ang Lee, Giuseppe Tornatore, Sergei Bodrov, Paula van der Oest, 'Sven Nykvist (1922-2006)' and Walter Salles among others. He served for some years on The Documentary Committee. He now serves on the Executive Committee for The Student Academy Awards which fosters the great filmmakers of the future and the Membership Screening Committee which selects the films Academy members will see from all the films the studios and distributors submit for Academy Award consideration. He also serves as an Academy judge for AMPAS's Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting Competition which fosters the screenwriters of tomorrow and which has helped to develop the careers of many of the top screenwriters creating films today. Serving on these committees has put Brian in direct contact with some of the world's greatest international directors, the filmmakers of the future and extraordinary screenwriters.
The high level of contacts provided by The Academy prompted Brian to transition into producing. He brought Crash (2004) to the Yari Film Group where he is based and the film won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Subsequently, he is credited on Shortcut to Happiness (2003) the re-make of "The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)", starring Sir Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin, Where the Red Fern Grows (2003) starring Dave Matthews and Flashbacks of a Fool (2008) starring Daniel Craig as an Executive Producer.
Brian is producing the action drama, "Venice Pier", which came via AMPAS Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting program that Creative Artists Agency (CAA) is packaging.
Brian has been invited to participate for the past several years in several film festivals which include: the American Film Institute (AFI) FEST as a part of their Kodak Connect which connects outstanding film professionals with the AFI filmmakers. He has connected and collaborated with many excellent international filmmakers. The Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA) has invited Brian to be introduced to the incoming Indian filmmakers to advise them and collaborate with them. He has also been invited to be a judge for The Polish Film Festival of Los Angeles for their narrative film competition. Polish Cinema has given us some of the greatest filmmakers like Krzysztof Kieslowski, Agnieszka Holland and Roman Polanski, so this is an esteemed honor and put him in contact with the Polish filmmakers of today.
Brian is a member of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the Actors Equity Association (AEA) and AMPAS. He has also taught as a private teacher of voice and a public teacher of English as a Second Language, Mathematics and Cultural Studies for the Los Angeles Unified School District, Adult Division. He is married to Nicole Avery, a psychotherapist. They have two children, Eric, the co-founder and world-renowned original bassist of JANE'S ADDICTION, and Rebecca, a gifted actress and mother of their first grand-child, Henry.- Visual Effects
- Animation Department
- Special Effects
Jim Danforth was born on 13 July 1940 in the USA. He is known for They Live (1988), Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) and The Prophecy (1995).- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Sir Patrick Stewart was born in Mirfield, Yorkshire, England, to Gladys (Barrowclough), a textile worker and weaver, and Alfred Stewart, who was in the army. He was a member of various local drama groups from about age 12. He left school at age 15 to work as a junior reporter on a local paper; he quit when his editor told him he was spending too much time at the theatre and not enough working. Stewart spent a year as a furniture salesman, saving cash to attend drama school. He was accepted by Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in 1957.
He made his professional debut in 1959 in the repertory theatre in Lincoln; he worked at the Manchester Library Theatre and a tour around the world with the Old Vic Company followed in the early 1960s. Stewart joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, to begin his 27-year association. Following a spell with the Royal National Theatre in the mid 1980s, he went to Los Angeles, California to star on Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987), which ran from 1987-1994, playing the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. After the series ended, Stewart reprised his role for a string of successful Star Trek films: Star Trek: Generations (1994), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998), and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002). Stewart continues to work on the stage and in various films. He was awarded Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire in the 2010 Queen's New Year's Honours List for his services to drama.- Actor
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James Brolin is an American actor. Brolin has won two Golden Globes and an Emmy. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on August 27, 1998. He is the father of actor Josh Brolin.
He is best known for his TV roles such as Stephen Kiley on Marcus Welby, M.D.(1969-1976), Peter McDermott on Hotel (1983-1988), and John Short in Life in Pieces (2015-2019), and his film roles such as Sgt. Jerome K. Weber in Skyjacked (1972), John Blane in Westworld (1973), General Ralph Landry in Traffic (2000), Jack Barnes in Catch Me If You Can (2002) and Emperor Zurg in the 2022 Toy Story spin-off film Lightyear.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Dan Hedaya is a familiar face from his work in films and on TV, where he often plays a villain (although he had a good comic turn as the charmingly sleazy Nick Tortelli, Carla's ex-husband, in Cheers (1982) and its short-lived spin-off The Tortellis (1987)). He has also done much stage work, appearing opposite Alien: Resurrection (1997) star Sigourney Weaver in "The Conjuring an Event" at the American Place Theater. Other stage performances include Broadway roles such as "The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel" and many New York Shakespeare Festival productions.- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Writer
Member of 1970's comedy troupe Firesign Theater, along with Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and Phil Austin. LPs include All Hail Marx and Lennon (or, How Can You Be In Two Places at Once, When You're Not Anywhere at All), featuring on side two The Further Adventures of Nick Danger (third eye). Additional LPs include Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers; I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus; Everything You Know Is Wrong; as well as many other titles of original material released on albums or recorded from broadcast radio shows.- Sandra Ellis Lafferty is best known for her roles in Walk the Line (2005), Hunger Games (2012), Prisoners (2013) Self/Less (2015) and A Walk in the Woods (2015). Over the past three decades, she has received national and international acclaim for playing pivotal characters in film and television. Sandra began her career as a stage actor and was named best actress for a season by the Denver drama critics, when she was a member of The Denver Center Theatre Company. She also was named best actress by Westword magazine. With years of theater experience, Sandra begin her film career at age 50. After a small role in the movie Dogfight, filmed in Seattle, she moved to Los Angeles. Over the next few years, she found steady work in regular guest roles in television shows including NYPD Blue, Melrose Place, Baywatch and Boy Meets World. Concurrently, she began earning roles on the silver screen. In the early 2000s, Sandra returned to Alabama to help care for her mother. With the movie industry expanding its Hollywood roots to the East Coast, the move accelerated her career with key roles in blockbusters like Walk the Line and The Hunger Games. She followed with A Walk in the Woods, starring Robert Redford; Self/less, starring Ryan Reynolds; and Prisoners with Jake Gyllenhaal. While movies with A-list actors and award-winning directors have helped increase her visibility to larger audiences, she also finds excitement in working on independent films -- Buster's Mal Heart (Rami Melak) Steel County (Andrew Scott) and Starbright (John Rhys-Davies) and other projects - regular role on the television series Containment -- that stimulate her love of acting. Sandra volunteers with the Mentone Arts & Cultural Center, where she serves as artistic director mentoring high school theater students.
- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Multiple Emmy- and Golden Globe-winner Martin Sheen is one of America's most celebrated, colorful, and accomplished actors. Moving flawlessly between artistic mediums, Sheen's acting range is striking.
Sheen was born Ramón Antonio Gerard Estevez in Dayton, Ohio, to Mary-Ann (Phelan), an Irish immigrant (from Borrisokane, County Tipperary), and Francisco Estevez, a Spanish-born factory worker and machinery inspector (from Parderrubias, Galicia). On the big screen, Sheen has appeared in more than 65 feature films including a star turn as Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard in Francis Ford Coppola's landmark film Apocalypse Now (1979), which brought Sheen worldwide recognition. The film also starred Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper and Robert Duvall. Other notable credits include Wall Street (1987) (with son Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas), Academy Award-winning film Gandhi (1982) (with Sir Ben Kingsley), Catch Me If You Can (2002) (with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks), The American President (1995) (with Michael Douglas and Annette Bening) and a Golden Globe nominated breakthrough performance as Timmy Cleary in The Subject Was Roses (1968), a role he originated on Broadway and for which he received a Tony Award nomination as Best Featured Actor.
In 2006, the actor played ill-fated cop Oliver Queenan in Martin Scorsese's Academy Award-winning film The Departed (2006) opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin.
The same year, Sheen joined another all-star ensemble cast for the highly acclaimed feature Bobby (2006), written and directed by his son, Emilio Estevez. Bobby was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and a SAG Award; and starred Anthony Hopkins, Harry Belafonte, Laurence Fishburne, Sharon Stone, William H. Macy, Elijah Wood, Demi Moore and Heather Graham.
For television audiences, Sheen is best recognized for his six-time Emmy nominated performance as President Josiah Bartlet in The West Wing (1999). Sheen won six of his eight Golden Globe nominations as well as an ALMA Award; and two individual SAG Awards; for the White House series. He won the Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actor TV Series Drama in 2001.
Of his ten Primetime Emmy nominations, Sheen won for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series on the long-running sitcom Murphy Brown (1988) (starring Candice Bergen) in 1994. In addition, he has garnered a Daytime Emmy Award for directing and another for performance.
In 2006, Sheen was again nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series; this time for the CBS hit comedy Two and a Half Men (2003), starring his son Charlie Sheen.
In addition to series television, Sheen has appeared in several important made-for-television movies and mini-series including playing President John F. Kennedy in the television mini-series Kennedy (1983) for which he received a Golden Globe nomination.- A flashy, aggressive, cold and calculating villainess and eternally hopeless meddler on a number of daytime soap operas, Louise Sorel has given her opulent, show-stopping characters major doses of humor and grit that have allowed her to become one of daytime's more popular figures for over six decades.
Of Jewish heritage, Louise, whose roots are in theatre, was born on August 6, 1940 in Los Angeles to entertainment professionals. Studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, she made her Broadway debut playing a teenager in the 1961 comedy "Take Her, She's Mine" starring Art Carney and also had subsequent roles in "Lorenzo" (1963) and "Man and Boy" (1963). Her initial interest obviously was sparked by her actress/concert pianist mother Jeanne Sorel, and father Albert J. Cohen, who produced films in the 1940s and 1950s. Louise went on to co-star on Broadway with Rita Moreno in "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window" in 1964 and appeared with George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst as Princess Alais in the 1967 Bucks County Playhouse production of "The Lion in Winter."
Given a bit part (billed as Jacqueline Sorel) in the exploitation teen film Eighteen and Anxious (1957), Louise, in 1964, married comic actor Herb Edelman, best known for his recurring role of Bea Arthur's ex husband Stan in The Golden Girls (1985). Around this time, she began setting her sights on TV drama, appearing on various dramatic shows including "Dr. Kildare," "The Defenders," "The Trials of O'Brien," "Route 66," "The Rat Patrol," "The Virginian," "Run for Your Life," "Star Trek," "The Big Valley," "The Fugitive," "Night Gallery," "The Bold Ones," "Banacek," "Hawaii Five-0," "Owen Marshall," "Kojak," "Hart to Hart," "The Incredible Hulk," "Ironside" and several episodes of "Medical Center," as well as a recurring part on the short-lived nighttime soap opera The Survivors (1969) starring Lana Turner and George Hamilton. In a change of pace, Louise turned to comedy as Don Rickles' wife on his poorly-received series The Don Rickles Show (1972).
Though she divorced Edelman in 1972, Louise nevertheless co-starred with him again in the failed sitcom Ladies' Man (1980). She met second husband actor Ken Howard in 1972 while appearing with him in a Philadelphia stage production of "Volpone." They married a year later but divorced a couple of years later in 1975.
Appearing in support in the films Plaza Suite (1971), Every Little Crook and Nanny (1972), Airplane II: The Sequel (1982), Where the Boys Are (1984), and Crimes of Passion (1984), Louise moved quite steadily ahead not only with a regular role in the short-lived comedy series Ladies' Man (1980), but with co-star/featured roles in the TV movies The Girl Who Came Gift-Wrapped (1974), The Mark of Zorro (1974), When Every Day Was the Fourth of July (1978), Mazes and Monsters (1982), Sunset Limousine (1983) and A Masterpiece of Murder (1986).
Various daytime soap operas reinvigorated Louise's career tenfold in the late 1980s. She began her road to sudsy infamy in 1984 as the eccentric archvillainess Augusta Lockridge for the entire run of Santa Barbara (1984). From there she was given recurring roles as Judith Sanders on One Life to Live (1968) and as Donatella Stewart Port Charles (1997). In 1992, Louise joined the cast of Days of Our Lives (1965) as the manipulative Vivian Alamain. By the time she left in 2000, she had won five Soap Opera Digest Awards.
More recently, Louise has had devilish fun in the quirky soap Passions (1999) and in a recurring role on the political drama Beacon Hill (2014). - Actress
- Producer
- Writer
Bright, vivacious leading lady Marlyn Mason was born on August 7, 1940, in San Fernando, California, and began performing at the age of 5. Encouraged and inspired by her parents, she was given singing and piano lessons while young and appeared on the local "Doye O'Dell Show" at age 9. As a young teenager, she was cast in several stage shows with the Players' Ring Theatre troupe in Hollywood, including musical versions of "Tom Sawyer" and "Heidi," as well as the legit plays as "Pick Up Girl" and "The Crucible".
In 1956, the 16-year-old Marlyn moved into TV work with multiple episodes of "Matinee Theatre". Throughout the 1960s, she would establish herself firmly into in the medium with guest parts on all the popular shows at the time. Blessed with an inviting, effervescent smile, she added spark and sparkle to such lightweight sitcoms as "My Three Sons," "Father Knows Best," "Gomer Pyle," "Hey Landlord" and "Occasional Wife," while showing off her dramatic mettle on "Burke's Law," "Ben Casey" (a seven part story), "Dr. Kildare," "Laredo," "Bonanza," "Run for Your Life," "The Invaders" and "Perry Mason" (the original series' final episode). Seldom pigeon-holed, Marlyn offered a palatable range of "good girl" and "bad girl" interpretations during this productive time -- from the sensual and alluring to the offbeat and freewheeling. One of her more notable "bad girl" roles came in the form of a faithless wife who schemes to murder her lover's wife and set up David Janssen's Richard Kimble character in the process.
Marlyn's early singing lessons paid off later when she was signed to co-star with Robert Goulet, Sally Ann Howes and Peter Falk in a special TV-musical version of Brigadoon (1966), following that with the role of Carrie in Carousel (1967) again with Goulet. This, in turn, led to her casting in the George Abbott Broadway musical production of "How Now, Dow Jones," which starred Tony Roberts and Brenda Vaccaro. Though it was only moderately received when it opened in December of 1967 (it lasted 220 performances), Marlyn herself walked away with enthusiastic reviews.
Although the actress made her film debut at the beginning of the 1960s with an uncredited role in Because They're Young (1960) starring Dick Clark and Victoria Shaw, Marlyn would not perk up the large screen again until the very end of the decade when she nabbed her best known cinematic part as Elvis Presley's girl in one of his final films. While shooting The Trouble with Girls (1969), she was given the opportunity to share a duet with the legend on the novelty song "Sign of the Zodiac".
The early 1970s brought Marlyn a regular role in the short-lived (one season) but critically acclaimed series _"Longstreet" (1972), as a love interest to James Franciscus. It also presented her with a highly revealing change-of-pace movie role in Making It (1971) as a cougar-type housewife who seduces one of her teacher/husband's students (Kristoffer Tabori), and the second female lead in the Barbara Parkins mystery Christina (1974). An abundance of guest star parts continued pouring in with roles on "Love, American Style," "The Odd Couple," "Vegas" and "Wonder Woman" and others. TV mini-movies became quite the rage as well and Marlyn graced a number of them -- A Storm in Summer (1970), Harpy (1971), Escape (1971), the Emmy Award-winning That Certain Summer (1972), Outrage (1973), Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan (1975), Last of the Good Guys (1978), and The New Adventures of Heidi (1978).
Since the 1980s, Marlyn has continued her career with appearances in film and TV, albeit at a slimmer pace. She earned her first grandmother role on the TV movie Fifteen and Pregnant (1998), and, most recently, has been seen in a few short films in which she worked in front and behind the camera: Model Rules (2008) (also writer/producer), Big (2009) and The Bag (2010) (also writer/producer).
A brief marriage (1960-1962) to composer/conductor musical director J. Raymond Henderson (1929-1988) preceded a 6 year marriage (1972-1978) to Hollywood make-up artist Lee Harman.- Actor
- Writer
Lou Wagner was born on 14 August 1940 in San Jose, California, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for Planet of the Apes (1968), Airport (1970) and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972).- Actress
- Soundtrack
An incredible piece of 1960s eye candy, Jill St. John absolutely smoldered on the big screen, a trendy presence in lightweight comedy, spirited adventure and spy intrigue who appeared alongside some of Hollywood's most handsome male specimens. Although she was seldom called upon to do much more than frolic in the sun and playfully taunt and tempt as needed, this tangerine-topped stunner managed to do her job very, very well. A remarkably bright woman in real life, she was smart enough to play the Hollywood game to her advantage and did so for nearly two decades before looking elsewhere for fun and contentment.
Jill St. John was actually born Jill Oppenheim in 1940 in Los Angeles. On stage and radio from age five, she was pretty much prodded by a typical stage mother. Making her TV debut in The Christmas Carol (1949), Jill began blossoming and attracting the right kind of attention in her late teens. She signed with Universal Pictures at age 16 and made her film debut as a perky support in Summer Love (1958) starring then-hot John Saxon. Moving ahead, she filled the bill as a slightly dingy love interest in such innocuous fun as The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (1959), Holiday for Lovers (1959), Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed? (1963), Who's Minding the Store? (1963) and Honeymoon Hotel (1964).
Whether the extremely photogenic Jill had talent (and she did!) or not never seemed to be a fundamental issue with casting agents. By the late '60s she had matured into a classy, ravishing redhead who not only came equipped with a knockout figure but some sly, suggestive one-liners as well that had her male co-stars (and audiences) more than interested. She skillfully traded sexy quips with Anthony Franciosa in the engaging TV pilot to the hit series The Name of the Game (1968) and scored a major coup as the ever-tantalizing Tiffany Case, a ripe and ready Bond girl, in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) opposite Sean Connery's popular "007" character. She also co-starred with Bob Hope in the dismal Eight on the Lam (1967), but the connection allowed her to be included in a number of the comedian's NBC specials over the years. A part of Frank Sinatra's "in" crowd, she worked with him on both Come Blow Your Horn (1963) and Tony Rome (1967).
On camera, Jill's glossy femme fatales had a delightfully brazen, tongue-in-cheek quality to them. Off-camera, she lived the life of a jet-setter and was known for her romantic excursions with such eligibles as Jack Nicholson, David Frost, Joe Namath, Bill Hudson, Roman Polanski and even Henry Kissinger. Of her four marriages, which included laundry heir Neil Dubin, the late sports car racer Lance Reventlow, son of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, and easy-listening crooner Jack Jones, she seems to have found her soulmate in present husband Robert Wagner, whom she married in 1990 after an eight-year courtship. Jill first met Wagner when they were both just beginning their careers as contract players at 20th Century Fox. The couple share credits on several productions, notably Banning (1967) as well as the top-tier TV movies How I Spent My Summer Vacation (1967) and Around the World in 80 Days (1989).
Abandoning acting out of boredom, she has returned only on rare occasions. She played against type as a crazed warden in the prison drama The Concrete Jungle (1982) and has had some fun cameos alongside Wagner both on film (The Player (1992)) and even TV (Seinfeld (1989)). In the late 1990s they started touring together in A.R. Gurney's popular two-person stage reading of "Love Letters." Jill's lifelong passion for cooking (her parents were restaurateurs) has turned profitable over the years. She has written a cookbook and appeared as a TV chef and "in-house" cooking expert on Good Morning America (1975). She also served as a food columnist for the USA Weekend newspaper. On the philanthropic front, she is founder of the Aunts Club, a Rancho Mirage-based group of special women who contribute at least $1,000 per year to provide financial support for a child.
She was glimpsed more recently in the films The Calling (2002) and The Trip (2002) and she and Wagner had small roles as Santa and Mrs. Claus in the TV movie Northpole (2014). The Wagners make their home in Aspen.- Actor
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- Producer
He graduated in 1962 from the University of Notre Dame with majors in English and Art. Tony began his career in the film industry as an actor. His acting years were distinguished by the quality of the directors who chose him for their films, including Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola. Tony wanted to become a filmmaker, however, and made the transition to producer in 1971. In 1973, his feature The Sting (1973) became one of the highest grossing films in history and brought him an Academy Award for Best Picture. Tony made his directorial debut in 1980 with My Bodyguard (1980). He has since directed a number of other pictures, as well as numerous commercials and episodes of television series. Tony has shared his unique experience by teaching and lecturing at various universities. He has served on the Motion Picture Association of America's Board of Governors and Board of Trustees and on the board of the Public Justice Foundation, while also remaining active in many community services. He is married to 'Helen Bartlett', his producer/partner in Barnstorm Films, and has two daughters, Madeline and Daphne.- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
Richard Sanders was born on 23 August 1940 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for WKRP in Cincinnati (1978), Men of Honor (2000) and Day of the Tentacle (1993). He is married to Marilynn Marko-Sanders.- Actor
- Soundtrack
A versatile veteran of film, television and theater, Ken Jenkins began his acting career performing in high school theater productions in his hometown of Dayton, Ohio. "I was fortunate to discover the world through the words of William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and to discover in myself a love for the theater that has shaped my life", says Jenkins. Jenkins went on to study acting at Antioch College while continuing to perform on Broadway and in regional companies throughout his college years. In 1969, he co-founded and served for three years as Associate Artistic Director for the prestigious Actor's Theatre of Louisville, which became known as a breeding ground for some of America's best new playwrights, including Beth Henley and Marsha Norman. Jenkins continued to work with the theater as an actor, director and writer through 1983.
Over his 30 years in the theater, Jenkins has been associated with an average of 10 plays a year as an actor, director or playwright. He has portrayed "Hamlet" and "Cyrano" and performed in other classics by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw and Molière. One of his favorite roles, however, was "The Duke", which he played opposite his son, Daniel Jenkins, in the 1985 Broadway musical, "Big River".
In 1987, Jenkins appeared in John Sayles' critically acclaimed feature film, Matewan (1987) which opened the actor to the joys of acting for the camera. Most recently seen in The Sum of All Fears (2002) with Morgan Freeman and I Am Sam (2001) with Sean Penn, his other feature-film credits include Courage Under Fire (1996), The Abyss (1989), Air America (1990) and Last Man Standing (1996).
Jenkins' television credits include a co-starring role for two seasons on Homefront (1991), two seasons on Wiseguy (1987), nine seasons on Scrubs (2001) and guest-star roles on The X-Files (1993), Family Law (1999) and Chicago Hope (1994). He has also appeared in the television movies Thirst (1998), Hiroshima (1995), And the Band Played On (1993).
Jenkins is an avid woodworker and a skilled dog trainer. He is married to Katharine Hepburn's niece, actress Katharine Houghton, probably best remembered as playing Hepburn & Tracy's daughter in the classic Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967).- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Hugo Stiglitz was born on 28 August 1940 in Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico. He is an actor and producer, known for Instructions Not Included (2013), Code... Death: Frontera Sur (1993) and Robinson y Viernes en la isla encantada (1973).- Graduate of Pomfret School, Pomfret, Connecticut, 1958, where Tony not only acted on the school's stage, but was, also, the star quarterback on the football team. Among his fellow classmates was Jeffrey Paul Hopkins, who went on to learn the Tibetan language while following severe Buddhist monastic training. He later became a translator for the Dalai Lama.
- Actor
- Producer
- Additional Crew
Australian actor Jack Thompson was born John Hadley Payne on August 31, 1940 in Manly, New South Wales, a suburb of Sydney. Outside of Oz, he is best known for his appearances in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), Breaker Morant (1980), The Man from Snowy River (1982), Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) and Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002). 'Breaker' Morant in which he played a military defense attorney defending three soldiers accused of murder during the Boer War, won him internationally renown. Thompson was cited as Best Supporting Actor at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Australian Film Institute's Best Actor award for the role.
In the early part of his career, Thompson balanced a career with the United Nations with his acting: The acting won out. At 65 years old, his career has been recognized by the Critics Circle of Australia, which awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award, and by the Cinema Owners Association of Australia, which gave him its Award for Outstanding Contribution to Australian Film Entertainment. Thompson lived for a while in a menage a trois with his wife Leona King, by whom he has a son, and her sister Bunkie. Though the living arrangement came to an end after several years, Thompson has no regrets, saying "I wouldn't have missed it for quids." He was awarded Member of the Order of Australia in the 1986 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to the film industry.- Actress
- Additional Crew
Lois Red Elk was born on 1 September 1940 in the USA. She is an actress, known for Skins (2002), Christmas in the Clouds (2001) and Bigfoot (1970).- Though she was born in Detroit, Michigan, Judee Morton's family moved a great deal, living in Shawnee, Oklahoma; Dallas, Texas; Akron, Ohio; Allentown, Pennsylvania; and Los Angeles, California. Her mother was a waitress, telephone operator and radio parts technician, who worked overtime to provide dance lessons for her daughter. Her father was a mechanical engineer, insurance salesman, airplane pilot, boat captain and gambler. The middle child in between two brothers, Judee acted out plots from Tarzan movies in which she was Jane, her older brother was Tarzan and her younger brother played Cheetah, the chimpanzee. She auditioned for dance troupes in Canada and New York, and danced in clubs in order to save enough money to attend Oklahoma State University and later U.C.L.A. After a number of stage and screen roles, she met and married Ian Fraser, an Emmy-Award-winning composer and musical director. Since then, she has been known as Judith Morton Fraser. She left film acting for two decades while raising a family and earning an M.A. in educational psychology from California State University at Northridge and became a marriage and family therapist. (California is one of a handful of states that license this designation). She has returned to film acting but is also a practicing psychotherapist in Los Angeles. She is the author of the self-help book, "What's So 'Good' About 'Bad' Feelings?". Her daughter, Tiffany Fraser, is a Los Angeles-based, certified Yoga instructor and her son, Neal Fraser, is a prize-winning Los Angeles chef.
- Actress
- Executive
- Producer
Adriana Shaw was born on 1 September 1940 in the USA. She is an actress and executive, known for Altered States (1980), Blue Sunshine (1977) and The New Centurions (1972).- Harry E. Northup has made a living as an actor for 30 years, acting in 37 films, including Mean Streets (1973), Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), Taxi Driver (1976) (1976 Palme d'Or winner at Cannes), Fighting Mad (1976) (starring role), Citizens Band (1977), Blue Collar (1978), Over the Edge (1979) (starring role), Tom Horn (1980), Used Cars (1980), Kansas (1988), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) (Oscar winner for Best Picture), Philadelphia (1993), Bad Girls (1994), Beloved (1998), and a remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004).
Harry has acted in 43 television shows, including ER (1994) (guest star), The Court (2002) (recurring role), "In Cold Blood" (CBS mini-series), The Deliberate Stranger (1986), The Day the Bubble Burst (1982), and Knots Landing (1979) (recurring role).
Harry has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1976.
Harry is that rare American actor who is also an accomplished poet. He has had nine books of poetry published: Amarillo Born (Victor Jiminez Press, 1966); the jon voight poems (Mt. Alverno Press, 1973); Eros ASsh (Momentum Press, 1976); Enough The Great Running Chapel (Momentum Press, 1982); the images we possess kill the capturing (the jesse press, 1988); The Ragged Vertical (Cahuenga Press, 1996); Reunions (Cahuenga Press, 2001); Greatest Hits, 1966-2001 (Pudding House Press, 2002); and Red Snow Fence (Cahuenga Press, 2006).
Harry received his B.A. in English from California State University, Northridge, where he studied verse with Ann Stanford.
Harry Northup's professional and private papers, manuscripts, journals, scripts, correspondence, ephemera, etc., were purchased by U.C.S.D., La Jolla, on Nov. 18, 2002, and are housed in the Mandeville Special Collections Library, U.C.S.D., 0175-S, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, Ca. 92093-0175, for instruction, research and preservation.
His son Dylan lives in Wisconsin.
Harry lives in East Hollywood with his wife Holly Prado Northup, a writer and teacher. - Actress
- Soundtrack
Collins entered motion pictures as a stripper in the exploitation film, Secrets of a Windmill Girl (1966), and television, as a maid in the British drama series Upstairs, Downstairs (1971). In 1988, she starred in the one-woman play 'Shirley Valentine' in London, and soon after, brought the role to Broadway, winning a Tony Award. She collected a BAFTA Film Award and was nominated an Academy Award for her performance in the film version, Shirley Valentine (1989). Several stage, film and television performances followed.- Actress
- Producer
- Director
Macha Méril was born on 3 September 1940 in Rabat, French Protectorate in Morocco [now Morocco]. She is an actress and producer, known for Deep Red (1975), Belle de Jour (1967) and Vagabond (1985). She was previously married to Michel Legrand and Gian Vittorio Baldi.- Producer
- Actor
- Production Manager
Joseph Stern is a veteran of film, television, and stage. He has produced over 250
episodes of television, as well as numerous long form specials and films. He has had
several overall deals and has worked for four studios and six networks. His development
for them amounted to over twenty pilot scripts, eleven of which were shot and six that
made it to series. Stern produced the pilot of the long running hit show "Law & Order,"
and served as the Executive Producer for the first three seasons. It garnered him two of
his six Emmy nominations and an additional two Golden Globes.
His groundbreaking CBS special, "Other Mothers," about alternative lifestyles, was
honored with seven Emmy nominations and three wins. Most recently Mr. Stern
produced "Our America," for Showtime. It was selected to play at Sundance and it went
on to win the coveted Humanitas Award and four Emmy nominations. During this time
he also produced "Judging Amy" and served as Executive Producer for the pilot and the
entire six year run.
Mr. Stern's film work includes "Dad," for Steven Spielberg, which starred Academy
Award winners Jack Lemmon, Olympia Dukakis, and Kevin Spacey and the cult hit "No
Man's Land," with Charlie Sheen.
No producer has been honored as much in Los Angeles theater. His over 200 awards,
40 of which are Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards, are the most in history. He has
produced over 45 plays and is the recipient of several lifetime achievement awards; one
from the LADCC and the James A. Doolittle Award for leadership, that he received with
August Wilson. His landmark production of "Orphans" moved from his Matrix Theatre,
where he is the Producing Artistic Director, to The Steppenwolf and then on to
Broadway, before becoming a feature film.- Writer
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- Producer
Dario Argento was born on September 7, 1940, in Rome, Italy, the first-born son of famed Italian producer Salvatore Argento and Brazilian fashion model Elda Luxardo. Argento recalls getting his ideas for filmmaking from his close-knit family from Italian folk tales told by his parents and other family members, including an aunt who told him frighting bedtime stories. Argento based most of his thriller movies on childhood trauma, yet his own--according to him--was a normal one. Along with tales spun by his aunt, Argento was impressed by stories from The Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen and Edgar Allan Poe. Argento started his career writing for various film journal magazines while still in his teens attending a Catholic high school. After graduation, instead of going to college, Argento took a job as a columnist for the Rome daily newspaper "Paese Sera". Inspired by the movies, he later found work as a screenwriter and wrote several screenplays for a number of films, but the most important were his western collaborations, which included Cemetery Without Crosses (1969) and the Sergio Leone masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). After its release Argento wrote and directed his first movie, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), which starred Tony Musante and and British actress Suzy Kendall. It's a loose adoption on Fredric Brown's novel "The Screaming Mimi", which was made for his father's film company. Argento wanted to direct the movie himself because he did not want any other director messing up the production and his screenplay.
After "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage" became an international hit, Argento followed up with two more thrillers, The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971), starring 'Karl Madlen' (qv" and 'James Fransiscus', and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) ("Four Flies On Black Velvet"), both backed by his father Salvatore. Argento then directed the TV drama Testimone oculare (1973) and the historical TV drama The Five Days (1973). He then went back to directing so-called "giallo" thrillers, starting with Deep Red (1975), a violent mystery-thriller starring David Hemmings that inspired a number of international directors in the thriller-horror genre. His next work was Suspiria (1977), a surreal horror film about a witch's coven that was inspired by the Gothic fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson, which he also wrote in collaboration with his girlfriend, screenwriter/actress Daria Nicolodi, who acted in "Profondo Rosso" ("Deep Red") and most of Argento's films from then to the late 1980s. Argento advanced the unfinished trilogy with Inferno (1980), before returning to the "giallo" genre with the gory Tenebrae (1982), and then with the haunting Phenomena (1985).
The lukewarm reviews for his films, however, caused Argento to slip away from directing to producing and co-writing two Lamberto Bava horror flicks, Demons (1985) and Demons 2 (1986). Argento returned to directing with the "giallo" thriller Opera (1987), which according to him was "a very unpleasant experience", and no wonder: a rash of technical problems delayed production, the lead actress Vanessa Redgrave dropped out before filming was to begin, Argento's father Salvatore died during filming and his long-term girlfriend Daria broke off their relationship. After the commercial box-office failure of "Opera", Argento temporarily settled in the US, where he collaborated with director George A. Romero on the two-part horror-thriller Two Evil Eyes (1990) (he had previously collaborated with Romero on the horror action thriller Dawn of the Dead (1978)). While still living in America, Argento appeared in small roles in several films and directed another violent mystery thriller, Trauma (1993), which starred his youngest daughter Asia Argento from his long-term relationship with Nicolodi.
Argento returned to Italy in 1995, where he made a comeback in the horror genre with The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) and then with another version of "The Phantom of the Opera", The Phantom of the Opera (1998), both of which starred Asia. Most recently, Argento directed a number of "giallo" mystery thrillers such as Sleepless (2001), The Card Player (2003) and Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005), as well as two gory, supernatural-themed episodes of the USA TV cable anthology series Masters of Horror (2005).
Having always wanted to make a third chapter to his "Three Mothers" horror films, Argento finally completed the trilogy in 2007 with the release of Mother of Tears (2007), which starred Asia Argento as a young woman trying to identify and stop the last surviving evil witch from taking over the world. In addition to his Gothic and violent style of storytelling, "La terza madre" has many references to two of his previous films, "Suspiria" (1997) and "Inferno" (1980), which is a must for fans of the trilogy.
His movies may be regarded by some critics and opponents as cheap and overly violent, but second or third viewings show him to be a talented writer/director with a penchant for original ideas and creative directing.- Actor
- Composer
- Music Department
Murray MacLeod was born on 9 September 1940 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He is an actor and composer, known for Borderline (1980), The Strawberry Statement (1970) and Stingray (1978). He has been married to Stephanie Edwards since 14 June 1975.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Handsome, chameleon character actor and sometimes lead, best known for his performances in Paint Your Wagon (1969), the TV series The Young and the Restless (1973), and Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) in which he also sang the title song. Ligon created the role of Orson in the prize-winning Off-Broadway musical 'Your Own Thing', and starred on Broadway opposite Geraldine Page in "Angela" and with Sandy Duncan in "Love is a Time of Day." While attending St. Alban's School in Washington, DC, he broke his leg playing football, and his interest turned from sports to theatre. At Yale, where he graduated as an English major, he was discovered by Tennessee Williams, who saw his performance as Kilroy in Williams' play, "Camino Real." Ligon became one of the most sought after young actors in New York in the 1960s.- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Brian De Palma is one of the well-known directors who spear-headed the new movement in Hollywood during the 1970s. He is known for his many films that go from violent pictures, to Hitchcock-like thrillers. Born on September 11, 1940, De Palma was born in Newark, New Jersey in an Italian-American family. Originally entering university as a physics student, De Palma became attracted to films after seeing such classics as Citizen Kane (1941). Enrolling in Sarah Lawrence College, he found lasting influences from such varied teachers as Alfred Hitchcock and Andy Warhol.
At first, his films comprised of such black-and-white films as To Bridge This Gap (1969). He then discovered a young actor whose fame would influence Hollywood forever. In 1968, De Palma made the comedic film Greetings (1968) starring Robert De Niro in his first ever credited film role. The two followed up immediately with the films The Wedding Party (1969) and Hi, Mom! (1970).
After making such small-budget thrillers such as Sisters (1972) and Obsession (1976), De Palma was offered the chance to direct a film based on Stephen King's classic novel "Carrie". The story deals with a tormented teenage girl who finds she has the power of telekinesis. The film starred Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie and John Travolta, and was for De Palma, a chance to try out the split screen technique for which he would later become famous.
Carrie (1976) was a massive success, and earned the two lead females (Laurie and Spacek) Oscar nominations. The film was praised by most critics, and De Palma's reputation was now permanently secured. He followed up this success with the horror film The Fury (1978), the comedic film Home Movies (1979) (both these films featured Kirk Douglas), the crime thriller Dressed to Kill (1980) starring Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson, and another crime thriller entitled Blow Out (1981) starring John Travolta.
His next major success was the controversial, ultra-violent film Scarface (1983). Written by Oliver Stone and starring Al Pacino, the film concerned Cuban immigrant Tony Montana's rise to power in the United States through the drug trade. While being a critical failure, the film was a major success commercially.
Moving on from Scarface (1983), De Palma made two more movies before landing another one of his now-classics: The Untouchables (1987), starring old friend Robert De Niro in the role of Chicago gangster Al Capone. Also starring in the film were Kevin Costner as the man who commits himself to bring Capone down, and Sean Connery, an old policeman who helps Costner's character to form a group known as the Untouchables. The film was one of De Palma's most successful films, earning Connery an Oscar, and gave Ennio Morricone a nomination for Best Score.
After The Untouchables (1987), De Palma made the Vietnam film Casualties of War (1989) starring Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn. The film focuses on a new soldier who is helpless to stop his dominating sergeant from kidnapping a Vietnamese girl with the help of the coerced members of the platoon. The film did reasonably well at the box office, but it was his next film that truly displayed the way he could make a hit and a disaster within a short time. The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) starred a number of well-known actors such as Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman, however it was still a commercial flop and earned him two Razzie nominations.
But the roller coaster success that De Palma had gotten so far did not let him down. He made the horror film Raising Cain (1992), and the criminal drama Carlito's Way (1993) starring Al Pacino and Sean Penn. The latter film is about a former criminal just released from prison that is trying to avoid his past and move on. It was in the year 1996 that brought one of his most well-known movies. This was the suspense-filled Mission: Impossible (1996) starring Tom Cruise and Jon Voight.
Following up this film was the interesting but unsuccessful film Snake Eyes (1998) starring Nicolas Cage as a detective who finds himself in the middle of a murder scene at a boxing ring. De Palma continued on with the visually astounding but equally unsuccessful film Mission to Mars (2000) which earned him another Razzie nomination. He met failure again with the crime thriller Femme Fatale (2002), the murder conspiracy The Black Dahlia (2006), and the controversial film Redacted (2007) which deals with individual stories from the war in Iraq.
Brian De Palma may be down for the moment, but if his box office history has taught us anything, it is that he always returns with a major success that is remembered for years and years afterwards.- Actress
- Director
- Producer
Linda Gray was born on 12 September 1940 in Santa Monica, California, USA. She is an actress and director, known for Dallas (1978), Oscar (1991) and Star of Jaipur (1998). She was previously married to Ed Thrasher.- Judy Lang was born on 14 September 1940 in Los Angeles, California, USA. She is an actress, known for Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), Get Smart (1965) and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964). She was previously married to Keith Wegeman.
- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
One of a spate of teen idols to come out of Philadelphia in the 1950s and 1960s, Frankie Avalon--unlike many of the others--actually had a musical background, having been taught to play the trumpet at a very young age by his father. As a youth Avalon performed in local clubs and theaters. He won a local TV talent contest playing a trumpet solo. In 1951, at age 12, he was in a band called Rocco and the Saints, which included another soon-to-be famous teen singer, Bobby Rydell. In 1952 he was performing at a private party held for singer Al Martino. A talent scout who was also at the party was impressed enough by Avalon to get him an appearance on Jackie Gleason's TV show, which led to more television appearances. In 1954 he made two singles for "X" Records, an RCA Victor subsidiary. Both were instrumentals featuring Avalon playing his trumpet: "Trumpet Sorrento" and ""Trumpet Tarantella." He eventually landed a recording contract with Philadelphia's Chancellor Records, and he recorded "Cupid" and "Teacher's Pet". These records got him his first movie role, a small part in Jamboree! (1957) designed to promote "Teacher's Pet." His next record was "DeDe Dinah", a song written by his managers (and one for which he had so little respect that he pinched his nose while recording it, resulting in its extremely nasal sound). After an appearance on Dick Clark's teen dance show American Bandstand (1952), sales of the record zoomed and it eventually sold more than a million copies. In 1959, after two more big hits ("Ginger Bread" and "I'll Wait for You") he recorded the song he is probably best known for, the million-selling "Venus." However, as 1960 rolled around his career began to wane and his record sales dropped precipitously. He soon began taking small parts in movies, most notably in John Wayne's The Alamo (1960). He began to get somewhat bigger parts and had his first starring role in Drums of Africa (1963). His movie career really took off, however, when he was paired with former Mousketeer Annette Funicello in Beach Party (1963) and its string of sequels. These films, with their combination of surfing, low comedy, dancing and "beach bunnies" in bikinis, struck a nerve with teenage audiences, were produced for peanuts and made a fortune. Avalon still recorded songs for Chancellor and other labels, but now he was far better known among younger audiences for his movies than for his records. In 1985 he began touring with fellow teen idols Rydell and Fabian in an oldies show called "The Golden Boys of Bandstand," which was a rousing success. In 1987 he and Funicello were reunited in Back to the Beach (1987), an homage to, and parody of, their earlier "beach" movies. Avalon still makes personal appearances and tours, many with and for his old friend and mentor Dick Clark.- Music Department
- Actor
- Composer
Known for timeless classics such as "We've Only Just Begun," "Rainy Days and Mondays," "Evergreen," "Just an Old Fashioned Love Song," and "Rainbow Connection," Paul Williams is responsible for what will remain part of our popular culture for many years to come. His music has been recorded by some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry.
Three Dog Night's versions of "Just an Old Fashioned Love Song," "Out in the Country," and "Family of Man" have sold millions of copies, worldwide. Karen Carpenter's rich vocals made "We've Only Just Begun," "Rainy Days and Mondays," "Let Me Be the One," and "I Won't Last a Day Without You," a part of our lives. Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Barbra Streisand, Willie Nelson, Kermit the Frog and Luther Vandross are among the hundreds of artists who have recorded Paul's songs.
Neal McCoy recently recorded Paul's "Party On," while Diamond Rio recorded and took "You're Gone" to the top of the charts. The video for "You're Gone" became Pick of the Week on Country Music Television. In 1997, Paul went back into the recording studio and recorded his CD, "Back to Love Again," which includes remakes of some of Paul's more classic hits such as "Rainbow Connection" and "I Won't Last a Day Without You," as well as new songs which contain the same quality, passion and depth that was heard and felt in his hits from the past. Richard Carpenter and Graham Nash appear as guest artists on the album, bringing to it a richness and a quality all its own. Critics, fans and the most famous in the music industry have all had positive reactions and reviews to the album.
No one sings a song like the songwriter who wrote it, and the same holds true for Paul's music. No one captures the emotion within the songs the way he can and does time and time again. Paul is one of the most celebrated songwriters of our time having won Academy, Grammy and Golden Globe Awards. His most recent accomplishments include his induction into the American Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Paul's reputation as a motion picture songwriter took hold in 1973, with an Academy Award nomination for "Nice to Be Around" (co-written with John Williams) from Cinderella Liberty (1973). 1975 brought Paul's second nomination for the soundtrack from Brian De Palma's cult classic, Phantom of the Paradise (1974). He not only wrote the words and music and produced the album for the rock cantata, but also held the audience captive with his devious portrayal of the evil Swan.
Paul went on to become the Music Supervisor for A Star Is Born (1976), bringing with it the challenge of working with three different composers to produce its award-winning score. Williams and Kenny Ascher won a Golden Globe Award for "Best Motion Picture Score." "Evergreen," co-written with Barbra Streisand, won the 1976 Oscar for "Best Song of the Year." In 1980, Paul was once again nominated by the Academy for the score from the box office smash hit, The Muppet Movie (1979), for "Best Original Score" as well as the song "Rainbow Connection" being nominated for "Best Song." "The Muppet Movie" soundtrack went on to win two Grammy Awards and became the biggest soundtrack album of the year, exceeding sales of one million units. Paul reunited with Henson Productions for the Disney feature film, The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992). He wrote and produced the songs for the soundtrack which brought with it yet another Grammy Award nomination for "Best Musical Album for Children."
Paul's other film credits include the songs and score for Bugsy Malone (1976), which starred Jodie Foster and Scott Baio. "Bugsy Malone" continues to be a favorite of children's playhouses and theaters, worldwide. He co-wrote the title song for "Flying Dreams" from The Secret of NIMH (1982), which was recently recorded as a duet by Kenny Loggins and Olivia Newton-John, and has written songs for The End (1978), Rocky IV (1985) and Ishtar (1987). Paul collaborated with Jerry Goldsmith on the title song for The Sum of All Fears (2002). The song is featured in the beginning of the movie with a Latin translation and again at the end in English, performed by Electra recording artist, Yolanda Adams. This may very well be the first time in entertainment history where a song has been presented in a film in two different languages. Paul Williams began his career as an actor with his portrayal of a 12-year-old prodigy in The Loved One (1965), playing opposite Jonathan Winters. He is probably best-known for his roles as Little Enos in the "Smokey and the Bandit" movies, as well as the orangutan Virgil in Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973).
In 1995, Paul received stellar reviews for his starring role as a wheelchair-bound hostage in Headless Body in Topless Bar (1995). Paul is also remembered for his roles in Oliver Stone's The Doors (1991), People Like Us (1990) (the NBC miniseries based on the Dominick Dunne bestseller), as the fun-loving amphibian Gus in Frog (1988) and Frogs! (1993) and Freddie the Bomb in Solar Crisis (1990). He rarely passes up the opportunity to return to his early roots of acting and played an emergency room doctor in Roger Avary's The Rules of Attraction (2002). Paul is no stranger to the small screen. He has appeared on Picket Fences (1992), Dream On (1990), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show (1997), Boston Common (1996), Walker, Texas Ranger (1993) and The Bold and the Beautiful (1987).
Many people are unaware that Paul has provided voice-overs for countless animated series, some of which include his role as the Penguin in Batman: The Animated Series (1992), and his recurring appearances in Phantom 2040 (1994). Having obtained his certification from UCLA as a drug and alcohol counselor, Paul is very active on the speaker's circuit across the country. Speaking from his personal experiences with his own addiction and the knowledge that he gained through his education and his experience as a counselor, Paul continues to touch the lives and hearts of many people whose lives have been affected by drug abuse and/or alcoholism. He is actively involved with the Musician's Assistance Program and is on the Board of Directors for Community High School, a sober high school in Nashville, Tennessee which offers the teens assistance with their recovery as well as the education that they both strive for and deserve.
Paul has appeared on Prime Time Country (1996), The Geraldo Rivera Show (1987) and Primetime (1989), talking about the devastating effects of drugs and alcohol and the increased use of them amongst teens and pre-teens. Paul has been presented with the Global Arts Award from the Friendly House for his efforts on their behalf, the Spirit of Youth Award from the Pacific Boys Lodge for his efforts and contributions and the "Celebration of Hope" award given to him by Hazelden for his overall contribution in the recovery field. Recovery is not simply a field that Paul is active in, it is one that he is passionate about... this is just one way in which Paul gives of himself to others.- Actor
- Writer
- Director
Jesse Lee Vint III was born and raised in Tulsa. While at Oklahoma University he decided that the film business is where he should be, so he left for NYC to study acting. Within a year after arriving in L.A. he was on location for the film "Little Big Man", about Custer's last stand. He also played principal parts in the film classics, "Chinatown", and "Earthquake." Following these he starred in the film MACON COUNTY LINE with his brother Alan Vint, which broke box office records throughout America and Europe. He won the World Celebrity Chess Tournament held at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles in 1988 and is still the reigning champion. After over a hundred films and television shows he moved to the culturally rich Portland, Oregon - where he currently enjoys the extraordinary outdoor life of the pacific northwest. Jesse was just awarded the 2016 PORTLAND INDIE LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD at a ceremony of Portland, Oregon filmmakers. He is one of eight hundred members in the world of the actor's branch of the Motion Picture Academy -- he votes on and attends the Academy Awards and the Emmy's every year. He is the proud father of Jesse Lee Vint IV.- Jean Peloquin was born on 29 September 1940 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, USA. He is an actor, known for The Virginian (1962), My friend Joe (1971) and The Mike Douglas Show (1961).
- Actress
- Soundtrack
Blonde bombshell Jeannine Brooke Riley was born in Madera, California on October 1, 1940 and started her movie and TV career in 1962 with an unbilled movie part in the Rosalind Russell drama Five Finger Exercise (1962) and roles on the TV shows "Father of the Bride" and "Route 66," not to mention an episode of "My Three Sons" aptly entitled "The Beauty Contest." The next year she co-starred with Gary Clarke and Steve Ihnat in the low-budget suspense drama Strike Me Deadly (1963); later that year she and Ihnat also appeared together in the stage play "The Fourposter."
While showing off her allure in western series "Wagon Train" and "The Virginian," Jeannine came to the attention of CBS producers who were on a TV rural roll with the huge series hits "The Andy Griffith Show" and "The Beverly Hillbillies". At the time, Hillbilly cast member Bea Benaderet (as Cousin Pearl) had just been given the green light to star in her own bucolic series, Petticoat Junction (1963), playing Kate Bradley, a hotel-owning widowed mother of three beautiful nubile daughters. The flirty role of daughter Billie Jo Bradley was at first given to actress Sharon Tate, but when word came out that she had posed nude in photo shoots, they were forced to dismiss her from the wholesome Ivory-Soap-sponsored series before scandal and controversy could cause damage. The part was recast and Jeannine won the role.
The actress was ideal as the Daisy Mae-like eldest daughter who attracted men like bees to honey, much to the envy of her impressionable younger sisters. Jeannine played the role for two years before both she and Pat Woodell (as sister Bobbie Jo) opted out of the series. While Jeannine wanted to move into film work, Woodell, who went on to marry and divorce Gary Clarke, Jeannine's film co-star in Strike Me Deadly (1963), desired a singing career. Jeannine and Pat were replaced in 1965 by Gunilla Hutton and Lori Saunders.
While the actress continued on with TV guest roles on "Ozzie and Harriet," "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.," and "Occasional Wife," and as a on "The sometimes-sexy foil on "The Smothers Brothers Show," she found breaking away from her bombshell trappings too difficult and was soon appearing as sexpot Bambi Berman in the Jerry Lewis film vehicle The Big Mouth (1967), and in unsold pilots of Sheriff Who (1967) and Li'l Abner (1967); in this latter she finally got to play the voluptuous Daisy Mae character. Guest episodes of "The Wild, Wild West" and "Gomer Pyle" also showed a return to familiar territory.
After starring with Nick Adams in one of his last films before his untimely death, the action drama Fever Heat (1968), Jeannine showed up in her first quality film showcase, albeit a smaller part, with The Comic (1969), a moving showcase for nimble Dick Van Dyke as a silent screen star. She found an even better role as dancer/barmaid babe Jolene opposite biker Robert Blake in the cult film Electra Glide in Blue (1973), sharing some potent nude scenes.
Back in the country fold on series TV, she appeared in two seasons of the cornpone musical variety show Hee Haw (1969), in which she was featured as a Daisy Mae-like foil in silly skits. A couple years later she was cast in the "Gilligan's Island"-inspired TV western Dusty's Trail (1973) with Bob Denver and Forrest Tucker co-starring as Gilligan/Skipper-like characters; Jeannine's Lulu McQueen was a dead-on take on the pneumatic Ginger Grant role. Petticoat Junction (1963) co-star Lori Saunders co-starred in the series as innocent Betsy McGuire, a variation of the Mary Ann character. It lasted one season.
Since then, however, the availability of parts has sharply declined; Jeannine's last credits were the films Lone Star Bar & Grill (1983) and Timebomb (1991).- Thom Christopher was born on 5 October 1940 in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City, New York, USA. He is an actor, known for One Life to Live (1968), Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979) and Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell (1988). He was previously married to Judith Leverone.
- Music Artist
- Actor
- Music Department
Cliff Richard burst onto the rock'n'roll world in 1958 with his hit single 'Move It'. He was then known as Britain's answer to Elvis Presley. His first film was Serious Charge (1959) followed by Expresso Bongo (1959), Wonderful to Be Young! (1961) and Summer Holiday (1963).
The latter two films were both massive hits for Cliff in Britain and overseas where Cliff was now a major pop star. His next film, Swingers' Paradise (1964) was not as successful as his other films. His later films were Finders Keepers (1966), Two a Penny (1967) and Take Me High (1973). Cliff has retained his popularity in most parts of the world (except the US) and has had nearly 150 hit singles in the UK charts.- Actor
- Director
- Producer
Christopher Timothy was born on 14 October 1940 in Bala, Merionethshire, Wales, UK. He is an actor and director, known for Doctors (2000), Othello (1965) and All Creatures Great and Small (1978). He has been married to Annie Veronica Swatton since 1982. They have one child. He was previously married to Susan Boys.- Actor
- Producer
- Additional Crew
Barry's full given name is Leonard Barrie Corbin, and he was born on October 16, 1940 in Lamesa, Texas, to Kilmer Blain Corbin, an attorney & TX State Senator, and Alma Corbin, an elementary school teacher. Barry and his wife Jo share a ranch in Fort Worth, Texas. He says when he isn't working, he rides horses there every chance he gets.- Diana Lorys was born on 20 October 1940 in Madrid, Spain. She is an actress, known for O.K. Yevtushenko (1967), Proceso a Jesús (1974) and Residencia para espías (1968).
- Rhoda Gemignani was born on 21 October 1940 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. She is an actress, known for The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), Ghostbusters (1984) and Who's the Boss? (1984).
- Rudolph Willrich was born on 26 October 1940 in New Jersey, USA. He is an actor, known for 9½ Weeks (1986), Alice, Sweet Alice (1976) and Because I Said So (2007).
- Toby Michaels was born on 2 November 1940 in Los Angeles, California, USA. She is an actress, known for The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Bonanza (1959) and Love in a Goldfish Bowl (1961).