WA2K Radio is now on the air

edgar, my oldest sister loves that song. I like it as well. Thanks, Texas. If I recall correctly, Imur's dad loved it, too, and Imur wanted to dedicate it to him.

Dutchy, I had no idea that John had a downunder connection. All this time I thought Mel Gibson was an Aussie, and come to find out he was NOT, but Russell Crowe is.

Another from John.

Almost heaven, west virginia
Blue ridge mountains
Shenandoah river -
Life is old there
Older than the trees
Younger than the mountains
Growin like a breeze

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West virginia, mountain momma
Take me home, country roads

All my memories gathered round her
Miners lady, stranger to blue water
Dark and dusty, painted on the sky
Misty taste of moonshine
Teardrops in my eye

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West virginia, mountain momma
Take me home, country roads

I hear her voice
In the mornin hour she calls me
The radio reminds me of my home far away
And drivin down the road I get a feelin
That I should have been home yesterday, yesterday

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West virginia, mountain momma
Take me home, country roads

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West virginia, mountain momma
Take me home, country roads
Take me home, now country roads
Take me home, now country roads

Words and music by bill danoff, taffy nivert and john denver

Letty Russell Ira Crowe is NOT an Australian! he was born: 7 April 1964 in Wellington, New Zealand

Oops, Dutchy. Thanks for the correction.

Gomenasai, I am so sorry, gomenasai. That's Japan's way of eating crow.

Here's Madonna's way.

Je suis désolé = i am sorry (french)
Lo siento = i am sorry (spanish)
Ik ben droevig = i am sad (Dutch)
Sono spiacente = i am sorry (italian)
Perdóname = forgive me (spanish)


I've heard it all before
I've heard it all before
I've heard it all before
I've heard it all before
[repeat]

I don't wanna hear, I don't wanna know
Please don't say you're sorry
I've heard it all before
And I can take care of myself
I don't wanna hear, I don't wanna know
Please don't say 'forgive me'
I've seen it all before
And I can't take it anymore

You're not half the man you think you are
Save your words because you've gone too far
I've listened to your lies and all your stories (Listen to your stories)
You're not half the man you'd like to be

I don't wanna hear, I don't wanna know
Please don't say you're sorry
I've heard it all before
And I can take care of myself
I don't wanna hear, I don't wanna know
Please don't say 'forgive me'
I've seen it all before
And I can't take it anymore

Don't explain yourself 'cause talk is cheap
There's more important things than hearing you speak
You stayed because I made it so convenient(so convenient)
Don't explain yourself, you'll never see

Gomenasai = "Forgive me"/"sorry" in japanese
Mujhe maaf kardo = "Please forgive me" in Hindi
Przepraszam = "Sorry" in Polish
Sleechah = "I am sorry"in Hebrew
Forgive me...

(Sorry, sorry, sorry)
I've heard it all before
I've heard it all before
I've heard it all before
[repeat]

I don't wanna hear, I don't wanna know
Please don't say you're sorry
I've heard it all before
And I can take care of myself
I don't wanna hear, I don't wanna know
Please don't say 'forgive me'
I've seen it all before
And I can't take it anymore

I don't wanna hear, I don't wanna know
Please don't say you're sorry
(Don't explain yourself cause talk is cheap)
I've heard it all before, And I can take care of myself
(There's more important things than hearing you speak)
I don't wanna hear, I don't wanna know
Please don't say 'forgive me'

I've heard it all before
I've heard it all before
I've heard it all before
I've heard it all before

Hank Locklin - Fraulein

Far across deep blue water lives an old German's daughter
By the banks of the old River Rhine
Where I loved her and left her but I can't forget her
Cause I miss my pretty Fraulein
Fraulein Fraulein look up toward the heavens each night when the stars start to shine
By the same stars above you I swear that I love you you are my pretty Fraulein
[ ac.guitar - piano ]
When my memories wander away over yonder to the sweetheart that I left behind
In a moment of glory a face comes before me the face of my pretty Fraulein
Fraulein Fraulein...

Good morning, WA2K radio friends and neighbors.

Well, edgar, I did a lot of research last evening and found out that Hank is the oldest living singer of the Grand Old Opry era. Salute to you, buddy.

Woke up this morning with this song in my head, listeners:


In this world of ordinary people
Extraordinary people
I'm glad there is you

In this world of over-rated pleasures
Of under-rated treasures
I'm so glad there is you

I live to love, I love to live with you beside me
This role so new, I'll muddle through with you to guide me

In this world where many, many play at love
And hardly any stay in love
I'm glad there is you


More than ever, I'm glad there is you.

Isadora Duncan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Isadora Duncan (May 27, 1877 - September 14, 1927) was an American dancer.

Born Dora Angela Duncan in San Francisco, California, she is considered by many to be the mother of Modern Dance. Although never very popular in the United States, she entertained throughout Europe.





Early life

Duncan was born in San Francisco, where she lived with her mother Dora, and her father, Joseph Duncan. Mr. Duncan had walked out on his family, giving the family a reason to convert from Roman Catholicism to strict atheism. Duncan attended school for the early years of her life, but dropped out because she found it to be constricting to her individuality. Her family was very poor, so to earn extra money, both she and her sister gave dance classes to local children. Their mother also taught piano lessons.


Career

Montparnasse's developing Bohemian environment did not suit her. In 1909, she moved to two large apartments at 5 Rue Danton where she lived on the ground floor and used the first floor for her dance school. Barefoot, dressed in clinging scarfs and faux-Grecian tunics, she created a primitivist style of improvisational dance to counter the rigid styles of the time. Isadora believed that classical ballet, with its strict rules of posture and formation, was "ugly and against nature" and gained a wide following that allowed her to set up a school to teach. She became so famous that she inspired artists and authors to create sculpture, jewelry, poetry, novels, photographs, watercolors, prints and paintings. When the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was built in 1913, her face was carved in the bas-relief by sculptor Antoine Bourdelle and painted in the murals by Maurice Denis.

In 1922 she acted on her sympathy for the social and political experiment being carried out in the new Soviet Union and moved to Moscow. She cut a striking figure in the increasingly austere post-revolution capital, but her international prominence brought welcome attention to the new regime's artistic and cultural ferment. The Russian government's failure to follow through on extravagant promises of support for Duncan's work, combined with the country's spartan living conditions, sent her back to the West in 1924.

Throughout her career, Duncan disliked the commercial aspects of public performance, regarding touring, contracts, and other practicalities as distractions from her real mission: the creation of beauty and the education of the young. A gifted if unconventional pedagogue, she was the founder of three schools dedicated to inculcating her philosophy into groups of young girls (a brief effort to include boys was unsuccessful). The first, in Grunewald, Germany, gave rise to her most celebrated group of pupils, dubbed "the Isadorables," who took her surname and subsequently performed both with Duncan and independently. The second had a short-lived existence prior to World War I at a château outside Paris, while the third was part of Duncan's tumultuous experiences in Moscow in the wake of the Russian Revolution.

Duncan's teaching, and her pupils, caused her both pride and anguish. Her sister, Elizabeth Duncan, took over the German school and adapted it to the Teutonic philosophy of her German husband. The Isadorables were subject to ongoing hectoring from Duncan over their willingness to perform commercially (and one, Lisa Duncan, was permanently ostracized for performing in nightclubs); the most notable of the group, Irma Duncan, remained in the Soviet Union after Duncan's departure and ran the school there, again angering Duncan by allowing students to perform too publicly and too commercially.


Personal life

Both in her professional and her private life, she flouted traditional mores and morality. She married the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, who was 18 years her junior. Yesenin accompanied her on a tour of Europe, but his frequent drunken rages, resulting in the repeated destruction of furniture and the smashing of the doors and windows of their hotel rooms, brought a great deal of negative publicity. The following year he left Duncan and returned to Moscow where he soon suffered a mental breakdown and was placed in a mental institution. Released from hospital, he allegedly committed suicide on December 28, 1925. It is still unclear whether the poet was murdered or commited suicide indeed.

Duncan bore two children -- one by theatre designer Gordon Craig, and another by Paris Singer, one of the many sons of sewing machine magnate Isaac Singer. Her private life was subject to considerable scandal, especially following the tragic and horrific drowning of her children Deirdre and Patrick in an accident on the Seine River in 1913. The children were in the car with their nanny for a day out, while Isadora stayed at home. The car was driving up a hill, when suddenly the engine stalled. The chauffeur got out of the car to fix the engine, but he had forgotten to use the emergency brake, and so once he got the car to start, it proceeded to roll down the hill, and into the river below. The children and the nanny drowned. Following the accident, she spent several weeks at the Viareggio seaside resort with actress Eleonora Duse. The fact that Duse was just coming out of a lesbian relationship with rebellious young lesbian feminist Lina Poletti fuelled speculation as to the nature of Duncan and Duse's relationship. However, there has never been definite proof that the two were involved romantically.[1]

She was a classical dancer. She rejected traditional ballet steps to stress improvisation, emotion, and the human form.

In her last United States tour in 1922-23, she waved a red scarf and bared her breast on stage in Boston, proclaiming, "This is red! So am I!". She was bisexual, which was not uncommon in early Hollywood circles. She had a lengthy and passionate affair with poet Mercedes de Acosta, and was possibly involved with writer Natalie Barney.

Duncan and de Acosta wrote regularly in often revealing letters of correspondence. In one, written in 1927, Duncan wrote; (quoted by Hugo Vickers in "Loving Garbo") ".....A slender body, hands soft and white, for the service of my delight, two sprouting breasts round and sweet, invite my hungry mouth to eat, from whence two nipples firm and pink, persuade my thirsty soul to drink, and lower still a secret place where I'd fain hide my loving face....."[2]

In another letter, written to de Acosta by Duncan, she writes; "Mercedes, lead me with your little strong hands and I will follow you - to the top of a mountain. To the end of the world. Wherever you wish." Isadora, June 28, 1926.[3]

De Acosta had once proclaimed that from the moment she first saw Isadora Duncan, she looked upon her as a great genius, taken by her completely.[4]


Later life

By the end of her life, Duncan's performing career had dwindled, and she became as notorious for her financial woes, scandalous love life, and all-too-frequent public drunkenness as for her contributions to the arts. She spent her final years moving between Paris and the Mediterranean, running up debts at hotels or spending short periods in apartments rented on her behalf by an ever-decreasing number of friends and supporters, many of whom attempted to assist her in writing an autobiography, in the hope that it would be sufficiently successful to support her. In a reminiscent sketch, Zelda Fitzgerald recalled how she and Scott sat in a Paris cafe watching a somewhat drunk Duncan. Scott Fitzgerald would speak of how memorable it was, but what Zelda recalled was that while all eyes were watching Duncan, Zelda was able to steal the salt and pepper shakers (shaped like miniature taxicabs) from the table.

In the book Isadora, an Intimate Portrait the author, Sewell Stokes, who met her in the last years of her life when she was penniless and alone, describes her extravagant waywardness. Duncan's autobiography My Life was published in 1927.


Death

A habitual wearer of flowing scarves which trailed behind her, Duncan's fashion preferences were the cause of her death in a freak automobile accident in Nice, France, on the night of September 14, 1927 at the age of 50. The accident gave rise to Gertrude Stein's mordant remark that "affectations can be dangerous."

Duncan was a passenger in the Amilcar automobile of a handsome young Italian mechanic, Benoît Falchetto, whom she had ironically nicknamed 'Buggatti' [sic]. (The marque of the automobile is open to dispute but the informed opinion is that it was an Amilcar, a 1924 GS model. It was regularly described and filmed as a more glamorous Bugatti). Before getting into the car, she said to a friend, Mary Desti, and some companions, "Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire!" ("Goodbye, my friends, I am off to glory!") However, according to the diaries of the American novelist Glenway Wescott, who was in Nice at the time and visited Duncan's body in the morgue (his diaries are in the collection of the Beineke Library at Yale University), Desti admitted that she had lied about Duncan's last words. Instead, she told Wescott, the dancer actually said, "Je vais à l'amour" ("I am off to love"), which Desti considered too embarrassing to go down in history as the legend's final utterance, especially since it suggested that Duncan hoped that she and Falchetto were going to her hotel for a sexual assignation. Whatever her actual last words, when Falchetto drove off, Duncan's immense handpainted silk scarf, which was a gift from Desti and was large enough to be wrapped around her body and neck and flutter out of the car, became entangled around one of the vehicle's open-spoked wheels and rear axle. Duncan died on the scene.

As the New York Times noted in its obituary of the dancer on 15 September 1927, "The automobile was going at full speed when the scarf of strong silk began winding around the wheel and with terrific force dragged Miss Duncan, around whom it was securely wrapped, bodily over the side of the car, precipitating her with violence against the cobblestone street. She was dragged for several yards before the chauffeur halted, attracted by her cries in the street. Medical aid was summoned, but it was stated that she had been strangled and killed instantly."

Isadora Duncan was cremated, and her ashes were placed in the columbarium of Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France.


Isadora Duncan in culture

John Dos Passos devotes a section of his panoramic 1936 novel The Big Money to Duncan, called "Art and Isadora".
Vivian Pickles played Isadora Duncan in Ken Russell's astonishingly inventive 1966 biopic for the BBC. Subtitled 'The Biggest Dancer in the World' it is was introduced by Isadora's biographer, Sewell Stokes, and it probably unmatched as a portrait of the pain and the glory that come with being an artist.
The 1968 film of her life, Isadora, starred Vanessa Redgrave in the title role.
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events books contained the Quagmire triplets named Isadora, Duncan, and Quigley. Isadora and Duncan are quite unlucky, which is a reference to Isadora Duncan's ill-fated life.
In a deleted scene of James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic, the character Rose DeWitt Bukater mentions that she wishes that she could escape her horrid life as a wealthy, restricted young woman and become an artist, or a sculptor, or a dancer like Isadora Duncan.
She is featured in the opening theme song to the popular 1970s show Maude. "Isadora was the first bra burner, ain't you glad she showed up."
In the romantic comedy film How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, a diamond necklace supposedly once having belonged to Isadora Duncan is featured.
Salsa diva Celia Cruz sang a song in Isadora Duncan's honor, titled "Isadora".
In the Pixar animated movie The Incredibles Edna Mode refuses to make a cape for Mr. Incredible's new uniform, citing Isadora's tragic tangling and death from her scarf. The villain, Syndrome, is later killed in a similar way when his cape is caught in a jet engine.
In the Mage: The Ascension supplement Cult of Ecstasy, Duncan is considered an important figure in the Cult's history.
Isadora Duncan is referenced in the poem Fever 103 by Sylvia Plath.
In Mikhail Bulgakov's story Heart of a Dog professor Preobrazhensky compares his life with Duncan's life in Moscow.
In the 1997 animated film Anastasia, Isadora Duncan makes a cameo during the "Paris Hold the Key to her Heart" number, singing the line "Come dance through the night!" with a long scarf dangling behind her.
Duncan is the "poor dancing girl" alluded to in The Libertines' song 'Radio America.'
Isadora Duncan is mentioned in an episode of The Mighty Boosh' talking of her death and then subsequently Vince's scarf gets caught up in the wheel of the van.
Frank Serpico (Al Pacino) mentioned reading "My Life", by Isodora Duncun in the movie Serpico.
In the animated Disney cartoon The Weekenders, Tish went into a discount costume shop looking for an Isadora Duncan costume. However, all the costume shop had was legionnaire breastplates and feather boas.

Al Jolson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Billed as the 'World's Greatest Entertainer".
Background information
Birth name Asa Yoelson
Born May 26, 1886, Seredžius, Lithuania, Russian Empire
Died October 23, 1950, San Francisco, California
Genre(s) Vaudeville
Pop standards
Jazz
Pop
Years active 1911-1950
Label(s) Columbia
Brunswick
Decca
Website The Al Jolson Society

Al Jolson (born Asa Yoelson, May 26, 1886 - October 23, 1950) was an acclaimed European singer and actor whose career lasted from 1911 until his death in 1950. He was one of the most popular entertainers of the 20th century whose influence extended to other popular performers, including Bing Crosby and Eddie Fisher.





Early life and career

Asa Yoelson was born in Seredzius, Lithuania. In his early childhood, his Jewish parents, Moshe Reuben Yoelson and Naomi Ettas Cantor, emigrated to the United States. The family name originally had been Hesselson. Al's father became the Rabbi of the Talmud Torah Synagogue (now Ohev Sholom Talmud Torah), in Washington, D.C.

Young Asa became a popular singer in New York City, beginning as early as 1898, when he and his brother entertained troops during the Spanish American War. Adopting the stage name Al Jolson, he gradually developed the key elements of his performance: blackface makeup; exuberant gestures; operatic-style singing; whistling; and directly addressing his audience.

By 1911, he had parlayed a supporting appearance in the Broadway musical, La Belle Paree, into a starring role. He began recording and was soon internationally famous for his extraordinary stage presence and personal rapport with audiences. His Broadway career is unmatched for its length and popularity, spanning close to thirty years (1911-1940). Audiences shouted, pleaded, and often would not allow the show to proceed; such was the power of Jolson's presence. At one performance in Boston, the usually staid and conservative audience stopped the show for 45 minutes. He was said to have had an "electric" personality, along with the ability to make each member of the audience believe that he was singing only for them.

Among the many songs he popularized were "You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do It)", "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody", "Swanee" (songwriter George Gershwin's first success), "April Showers", "Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye", "California, Here I Come", "When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin' Along", "Sonny Boy", and "Avalon".

Jolson was the first music artist to sell over ten million records. While no official Billboard magazine chart existed during his career, its staff archivist Joel Whitburn used a variety of sources, such as Talking Machine World's list of top-selling recordings and Billboard's own sheet music and vaudeville charts, to estimate the hits of 1890-1954. By his reckoning, Jolson had the equivalent of twenty-three No. 1 hits, the fourth-highest total ever, trailing only Bing Crosby, Paul Whiteman, and Guy Lombardo. Whitburn calculates that Jolson would have topped one chart or another for 114 weeks.


Movies

Al Jolson is best known today for his appearance in one of the first "talkies", The Jazz Singer, the first feature film with sound to enjoy wide commercial success. The film was produced in 1927 by Warner Brothers, using its revolutionary Vitaphone sound process. Much of the film is silent, with song sequences appearing only occasionally, but Jolson's dynamic voice captured the moviegoers' attention. Jolson's singing should not be considered as jazz, as his style remained forever rooted in the vaudeville stage at the turn of 20th century. His song hit in The Jazz Singer was "My Mammy," sung by Jolson in blackface. His performance was so galvanizing that it became a pop-culture legend, often quoted and imitated.


Signing with Warners for a series, Jolson made The Singing Fool (1928) ?- the story of a driven entertainer who insisted upon going on with the show even as his small son lay dying, and its signature tune, "Sonny Boy", became the first American record to sell three million copies. Jolson continued to make features for Warners, cut from the same stencil as The Singing Fool. The sameness of the stories, Jolson's large salary, and changing public tastes in musicals contributed to the films' diminishing returns over the next few years. Warners actually allowed him to make one film elsewhere: Hallelujah, I'm a Bum was released by United Artists in 1933.

Returning to Warners, Jolson submitted to new production ideas, focusing less on the star and more on elaborately cinematic numbers staged by Busby Berkeley and Bobby Connolly. This new approach worked, sustaining Jolson's movie career until the Warner contract lapsed in 1935. Jolson co-starred with his actress-dancer wife, Ruby Keeler, only once, in Go Into Your Dance.

Jolson's last Warner vehicle demonstrated how his star status had slipped: The Singing Kid ostensibly referred to Jolson but applied equally well to child star Sybil Jason, whose name was actually listed first in the advertising materials. Significantly, Jolson did not receive star billing, and Warners released the film under its less prestigious First National trademark.

Jolson did not return to films until 1939, when Twentieth Century-Fox hired him to re-create a scene from The Jazz Singer in the Alice Faye-Don Ameche film Hollywood Cavalcade. Guest appearances in two more Fox films followed that same year, but Jolson never starred in a full-length feature film again.


Radio

After leaving the Broadway stage, Jolson starred on radio. The Al Jolson Show aired 1933-1939, 1942-1943 and 1947-1949. These programs were typically rated in the top ten. In 1950, Jolson signed with CBS Television, but died in October of that year before any broadcasts could be initiated.


Personal life

Jolson was a political and economic conservative, supporting Calvin Coolidge for President of the United States in 1924 (with the ditty "Keep Cool with Coolidge"), unlike most other Jewish performers, who supported the losing Democratic candidate, John William Davis.

Jolson was married to Ruby Keeler from 1928 to 1939, when they divorced. The couple had adopted a son, Al Jolson Jr., during their marriage, but when he was fourteen, the boy changed his name to Peter Lowe after his mother's second husband, John Lowe.

A lifelong devotion to entertaining American servicemen (he first sang for servicemen of the Spanish-American War as a boy in Washington, D.C.) led Jolson to entertain American troops during World War Ii, and again (against the advice of his doctors) in Korea.


The Jolson Story

After the success of the George M. Cohan film biography Yankee Doodle Dandy, Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky believed that a similar film could made about Al Jolson -- and he knew just where to pitch the project. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, may have seemed to a lot of people in Hollywood like a crude, loud vulgarian, but he had one soft spot: he loved the music of Al Jolson.

Skolsky pitched the idea of an Al Jolson biopic and Cohn agreed to it. Directed by Alfred E. Green (best known today for the pre-Code masterpiece Baby Face,) with musical numbers staged by the imaginative Joseph H. Lewis, The Jolson Story is one of the most entertaining of the musical biopics of that era -- an era that included Yankee Doodle Dandy, Till the Clouds Roll By, Words and Music, and Three Little Words.

With Jolson providing almost all the vocals, and actor Larry Parks playing Jolson, The Jolson Story (1946) became one of the biggest hits of the year. Parks received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and the film became one of the highest grossing films of the year. Although Jolson was too old to play himself in the film, he persuaded the studio to let him appear in one musical sequence, shot entirely in long shot, with Jolson in blackface.

The Jolson Story and its sequel Jolson Sings Again (1949) led to a whole new generation who became enthralled with Jolson's voice and charisma. Jolson, who had been a popular guest star on radio since its earliest days, now had his own show, hosting the Kraft Music Hall from 1947-1949, with Oscar Levant as a sardonic piano-playing sidekick. Despite such singers as Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Perry Como being in their primes, Jolson was voted the "Most Popular Male Vocalist" in 1948 by a poll in the show biz newspaper Variety. The next year, Jolson was named "Personality of the Year" by the Variety Clubs of America. When Jolson appeared on Bing Crosby's radio show, he attributed his receiving the award to his being the only singer not to make a record of Mule Train, which had been a widely covered hit of that year (four different versions, one of them by Crosby, had made the top ten on the charts). Jolson even joked that he had tried to sing the hit song: "I got the clippetys all right, but I can't clop like I used to."


Jolson's legacy is considered by many to be severely neglected today because of his use of stage blackface. The make-up had roots in minstrel shows (where Jolson got his start, though it should be noted he was never considered a minstrel performer) and is today viewed by many as racially insensitive. It can also be disputed that Jolson wore blackface to act as if he was in fact an African-American singer. Jolson was billed as "The World's Greatest Entertainer", which is how many of the greatest stars (including Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Rod Stewart, and Jackie Wilson) referred to him. Charles Chaplin wrote in his autobiography that Jolson was one of the most electrifying entertainers he had ever seen.


Death

While playing cards, Jolson collapsed and died of a massive heart attack on October 23, 1950; his last words were said to be "Boys, I'm going." At time of his death, he was staying at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Jolson was 64. He was interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California, where a statue of Jolson beckons visitors to his crypt. His grave is extraordinarily ostentatious, even by Hollywood standards. On the day he died, Broadway lowered its lights for ten minutes in Jolson's honor.

Al Jolson has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame:

For his contribution to the motion picture industry at 6622 Hollywood Blvd.;
For his contribution to the recording industry at 1716 Vine St.;
For his contribution to the radio industry at 6750 Hollywood Blvd.

Forty-four years after Jolson's death, the United States Postal Service acknowledged his contribution by issuing a postage stamp in his honor. The 29-cent stamp was unveiled by Erle Jolson Krasna, Jolson's fourth wife, at a ceremony in New York City's Lincoln Center on September 1, 1994. This stamp was one of a series honoring popular American singers, which included Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Ethel Merman, and Ethel Waters.


Trivia


Jolson was the focus of the highly successful, award-winning West End production Jolson The Musical.
Al Jolson is one of Mr. Burns' (from The Simpsons) favorite actors. Burns believes that Jolson is still alive.
A song that Jolson helped make famous, "I'm Sitting on Top of the World", was played during the opening montage of 1930s New York City in the 2005 remake of King Kong and during the closing sequence of the 1995 U.S. - U.K. film Richard III.
In August 2006, Al Jolson had a street in New York named in his honor after nine years of attempts by the international Al Jolson Society [1].
Al Jolson is mentioned in Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress at Walt Disney World.
Jolson ad-libbed his best-known catchphrase, "You ain't heard nothing yet!", in The Jazz Singer. It is also the name of a song he co-wrote earlier.
Charles Chaplin wanted Jolson to record "This is My Song" from his film The Countess from Hong Kong. It wasn't until he was shown a photo of his grave that he was convinced Jolson had died and he offered the tune to his neighbor Petula Clark instead.
In the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie (musical) features a re-written version of My Mammy sung by Mrs. Meers, and she uses it to get Bun Foo and Ching Ho back under her thumb.

John Wayne
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Birth name Marion Robert Morrison
Born 26 May 1907
Winterset, Iowa, United States
Died June 11, 1979 (aged 72)

Other name(s) Marion Michael Morrison; Duke
Official site Wayne Enterprises
Notable roles Thomas Dunson in
Red River
Ethan Edwards in
The Searchers
Rooster Cogburn in
True Grit
John Bernard Books in
The Shootist
Academy Awards

Best Actor:
1969 True Grit
Golden Globe Awards

Cecil B. DeMille Award (1966)
Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama
1970 True Grit

John Wayne (May 26, 1907 - June 11, 1979), born Marion Robert Morrison[1] and later changed to Marion Michael Morrison, popularly known as the "Duke," was an iconic, Academy Award-winning, American film actor. He epitomized rugged individualistic masculinity, and has become an enduring American icon. He is famous for his distinctive voice, walk and height.

In 1999, the American Film Institute named Wayne thirteenth among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time. A Harris Poll released in 2007 placed Wayne third among America's favorite film stars, the only deceased star on the list and the only one who has appeared on the poll every year.

His career began in silent movies in the 1920s and he was a major star from the 1940s to the 1970s. He is closely associated with Westerns and World War II epics, but he also made a wide range of films from various genres, biographies, romantic comedies, police dramas, and more.




Early life

John Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, but his name was changed to Marion Michael Morrison when his parents decided to name their next son Robert. His family was Presbyterian (though Wayne himself reportedly converted to Catholicism at the end of his life); father Clyde Leonard Morrison was of Irish and Scottish descent and the son of an American Civil War veteran, while mother Mary Alberta Brown was of Scots-Irish descent.

Wayne's family moved to Palmdale, California, and then Glendale, California, in 1911. It was local firemen at the firehouse that was on his way to school in Glendale who started calling him "Little Duke" because he never went anywhere without his huge Airedale Terrier dog, "Big Duke."[2][3] He preferred "Duke" to "Marion," and the name stuck for the rest of his life.


As a teen, Wayne worked in an ice cream shop for an individual who shoed horses for local Hollywood studios. He was also active as a member of the Order of DeMolay, a youth organization associated with the Freemasons, whom he would also join when he came of age. He played football for the 1924 champion Glendale High School team.

Wayne applied to the U.S. Naval Academy, but was not accepted. He instead attended the University of Southern California (USC), majoring in pre-law. He was a member of the Trojan Knights and joined the Sigma Chi fraternity. Wayne also played on the USC football team under legendary coach Howard Jones. An injury curtailed his athletic career; Wayne would later note he was too terrified of Jones' reaction to reveal the actual cause of his injury, which was bodysurfing at the infamous "Wedge" off Balboa Pier in Newport Beach. He lost his athletic scholarship and without funds had to leave school.[4]

While at the university, Wayne began working at the local film studios. Western star Tom Mix got him a summer job in the prop department in exchange for football tickets, and Wayne soon moved on to bit parts, establishing a long friendship with director John Ford. During this period, Wayne appeared with his USC teammates as one of the featured football players in Columbia Pictures' Maker of Men (filmed in 1930 and released in 1931), which starred Richard Cromwell and Jack Holt. [5]


Acting career

After two years working as a prop man at the Fox Film Corporation for $75 a week, his first starring role was in the 1930 movie The Big Trail. The first western epic sound motion picture established his screen credentials, although it was a commercial failure. The director Raoul Walsh, who "discovered" Wayne, gave him the stage name "John Wayne," after Revolutionary War general "Mad Anthony" Wayne. His pay was raised to $105 a week.

Wayne continued making westerns, most notably at Monogram Pictures, and serials for Mascot Pictures Corporation, including a modernized version of The Three Musketeers (1933). He was tutored by stuntmen in riding and other western skills.[6] He and famed stuntman Yakima Canutt developed and perfected stunts still used today.

Beginning in 1928 and extending over the next 35 years, Wayne appeared in more than twenty of John Ford's films, including Stagecoach (1939), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1956), The Wings of Eagles (1957), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). His performance in Stagecoach made him a star.

His first color film was Shepherd of the Hills (1941), in which he co-starred with his longtime friend Harry Carey. The following year he appeared in his only film directed by Cecil B. DeMille, the Technicolor epic Reap the Wild Wind, in which he co-starred with Ray Milland and Paulette Goddard; it was one of the rare times he played a character with questionable values.

In 1949, director Robert Rossen offered the starring role of All the King's Men to Wayne. Wayne refused, believing the script to be un-American in many ways. Broderick Crawford, who eventually got the role, won the 1949 Oscar for best male actor, ironically beating out Wayne, who had been nominated for Sands of Iwo Jima.

He lost the leading role in The Gunfighter to Gregory Peck because of his refusal to work for Columbia Pictures after Columbia chief Harry Cohn had mistreated him years before as a young contract player. Cohn had bought the project for Wayne, but Wayne's grudge was too deep, and Cohn sold the script to Twentieth Century Fox, which cast Peck in the role Wayne badly wanted but refused to bend for.

One of Wayne's most popular roles was in The High and the Mighty (1954), directed by William Wellman and based on a novel by Ernest K. Gann. His portrayal of a heroic airman won widespread acclaim.


The Searchers continues to be widely regarded as perhaps Wayne's finest and most complex performance. In 2006 Premiere Magazine ran an industry poll in which his portrayal of Ethan Edwards was rated the 87th greatest performance in film history. He named his youngest son Ethan after the character.

John Wayne won a Best Actor Oscar for True Grit (1969). Wayne was also nominated as the producer of Best Picture for The Alamo, one of two films he directed. The other was The Green Berets (1968), the only major film made during the Vietnam War to support the war.[7] During the filming of Green Berets, the Degar or Montagnard people of Vietnam's Central Highlands, fierce fighters against communism, bestowed on Wayne a brass bracelet that he wore in the film and all subsequent films.

According to the Internet Movie Database, Wayne played the lead in 142 of his film appearances.

Batjac, the production company co-founded by Wayne, was named after the fictional shipping company Batjak in Wake of the Red Witch. (A spelling error by Wayne's secretary was allowed to stand, accounting for the variation.) Batjac (and its predecessor, Wayne-Fellows Productions) was the arm through which Wayne produced many films for himself and other stars. Its best-known non-Wayne production was the highly-acclaimed Seven Men From Now, which started the classic collaboration between director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott.


Illness

In 1964, Wayne was diagnosed with lung cancer, and underwent surgery to remove his entire left lung and four ribs. Despite rumors that the cancer was caused by filming The Conqueror in Utah where the U.S. government had tested nuclear weapons (following which a surprising percentage of the cast and crew developed cancer), Wayne himself believed his five-pack-a-day cigarette habit was the cause. [8]


Politics

Wayne was politically a right-wing conservative. He took part in creating the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1943, and was elected president of that organization in 1947. He was an ardent anti-communist, and vocal supporter of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1951, he made Big Jim McLain to show his support for the anti-communist cause. He was also instrumental in having Carl Foreman blacklisted from Hollywood after the release of the anti-McCarthyism western High Noon, and later teamed up with Howard Hawks to make Rio Bravo as a right-wing response. Wayne used his iconic status to support conservative causes, including rallying support for the Vietnam War by producing, co-directing, and starring in the critically panned The Green Berets (1968). In 1978 however, he enraged conservatives by supporting liberal causes such as the Panama Canal Treaty [9] and the innocence of Patty Hearst[10].

Due to his enormous popularity, and his status as the most famous Republican star in Hollywood, wealthy Texas Republican Party backers asked Wayne to run for national office in 1968, as had his friend and fellow actor, Senator George Murphy. He declined, joking that he did not believe the public would seriously consider an actor in the White House. However, he did support his friend Ronald Reagan's runs for Governor of California in 1966 and 1970. He was also asked to be the running mate for Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1968. Wayne vehemently rejected the offer[11]. Wayne greatly admired Wallace and sent him three checks for $10,000 with a note reading, "Sock it to 'em George!"[citation needed]. Nonetheless, Wayne actively campaigned for Richard Nixon[12].

Wayne's strong anti-communist politics led to a particularly unnerving situation. Information from Soviet archives, reported in 2003, indicates that Joseph Stalin ordered Wayne's assassination, but died before the murder could be accomplished. His successor, Krushchev, reportedly told Wayne during a 1958 visit to the United States that he had personally rescinded the order.[13][14]


Personal life

Wayne was married and divorced three times. His wives, all of them Hispanic women, were Josephine Alicia Saenz, Esperanza Baur, and Pilar Pallete. He had four children with Josephine and three with Pilar, including the producer Michael Wayne and actor Patrick Wayne. Wayne is also the great-uncle of boxing heavyweight Tommy Morrison.

Wayne had several high-profile affairs, including one with Marlene Dietrich that lasted for three years.[citation needed]

In the years prior to his death, Wayne was romantically involved with his former secretary Pat Stacy.[15] She wrote a biography of her life with him, DUKE: A Love Story (1983). Stacy married Los Angeles businessman Richard Donahugh in 1981 and died of lung cancer in April 1995 at the age of 53.

During the early 1960s John Wayne traveled extensively to Panama. During this time, the actor reportedly purchased the island of Taborcillo off the main coast of Panama. It was sold by his estate at his death and changed many hands before being opened as a tourist attraction.



Death

John Wayne died of stomach cancer on June 11, 1979 and was interred in the Pacific View Memorial Park cemetery in Corona del Mar. According to his son Patrick, he converted to Roman Catholicism shortly before his death.[16] He requested his tombstone read "Feo, Fuerte y Formal," a Spanish epitaph meaning he was ugly, strong, and had dignity. However, the grave, unmarked for twenty years in case it was destroyed, is now marked with a quotation from his highly controversial 1971 Playboy interview: "Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday."

Various public locations have been named in memory of John Wayne. They include John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, where his life-size statue graces the entrance; the John Wayne Marina near Sequim, Washington; John Wayne Elementary School (P.S. 380) in Brooklyn, NY, which boasts a 38 foot mosaic mural commission by New York artist Knox Martin[17] entitled "John Wayne and the American Frontier"; and a 100-plus mile trail named the "John Wayne Pioneer Trail" in Washington state's Iron Horse State Park.


Military service controversy

The outbreak of World War II saw a deluge of support for America's war effort from all sectors of society, and Hollywood was no different. Established stars such as Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (USN, Silver Star), Henry Fonda (USN, Bronze Star), and Clark Gable (USAAC) as well as emerging actors such as Eddie Albert (USN, Bronze Star) and Tyrone Power (USMC) rushed to sign up for military service. As the majority of male leads left Hollywood to serve overseas, John Wayne saw an opportunity to vault into stardom. Despite enormous pressure from his inner circle of friends, he resisted. Wayne's fans have proffered a number of erroneous excuses over the years to explain away his lack of military service, but the facts are clear. The physical problems such as the football injury or damaged hearing were non-existent; Wayne himself never mentioned them. Others claim that Wayne was exempted from service due to his age (34) and family status. It is true that at the outbreak of World War II, Wayne was classified as 3-A (family deferment), but many of his contemporaries who signed up (such as Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, and Ronald Reagan) were around his age, and married with families of their own. Gene Autry, who was also Wayne's age, gave an interview in 1942 that chastised Wayne for his refusal to enlist and provide an example for younger actors in Hollywood: "I think the He-men in the movies belong in the Army, Marine, Navy or Air Corps. All of these He-men in the movies realize that right now is the time to get into the service. Every movie cowboy ought to devote time to the Army winning, or to helping win, until the war is over - the same as any other American citizen. The Army needs all the young men it can get, and if I can set a good example for the young men I'll be mighty proud." As the war dragged on and Wayne's affair with Esperanza Baur alienated him from his family, Wayne's family deferment status appeared to be the first of many attempts to stave off the overwhelming pressure to enlist. During the early years of the war, his excuses varied: he once claimed that Herbert J. Yates (the head of Republic) threatened him with a lawsuit if he walked away from his contract, despite the fact that no such thing ever happened to any actor, director, or cameraman throughout the entire war. In 1944, Wayne was reclassified as 1-A (draft eligible), but his lawyers convinced the draft board to change his status to 2-A (deferred for reasons national interest). He remained 2-A until the war's end.

The foregoing facts clearly influenced the direction of Wayne's later life. By all accounts, Wayne's failure to serve in the military during World War II was the most painful experience of his life.[18] Clearly, there were some other stars who, for various reasons, did not enlist. But Wayne, by virtue of becoming a celluloid war hero in scores of patriotic war films, became the focus of particular disdain from both himself and certain portions of the public, particularly in later years. The rampant patriotism with which he was so identified in the decades to come sprang, it appears, not from hypocrisy but from guilt. Wayne's third wife, Pilar, wrote, "He would become a 'superpatriot' for the rest of his life trying to atone for staying home."[19]


American icon

John Wayne rose beyond the typical recognition for a famous actor to that of an enduring icon who symbolized and communicated American values and ideals. By the middle of his career, Wayne had developed a larger-than-life image. Wayne selected roles that would not compromise his off-screen image. In his last film The Shootist (1976), Wayne refused to allow his character to shoot a man in the back as was originally scripted. [20]

Wayne's rise to being the quintessential movie war hero began to take shape four years after World War II when Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) was released. His footprints at Grauman's Chinese theater in Hollywood were laid in cement that contained sand from Iwo Jima.[21] His status grew so large and legendary that when Japanese Emperor Hirohito visited the United States in 1975, he asked to meet John Wayne, the symbolic representation of his country's former enemy.

Wayne was a popular visitor to the war zones in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. By the 1950s, perhaps in large part due to films such as the Sands of Iwo Jima, Flying Tigers, They Were Expendable, The Longest Day, his cavalry trilogy (which was more war than western), and many other films, Wayne had become an icon to all the branches of the U.S. Military, even in light of his actual lack of military service. Many veterans have said their reason for serving was in some part related to watching Wayne's movies. His name is attached to various pieces of gear, such as the P-38 "John Wayne" can-opener, so named because "it can do anything", paper towels known as "John Wayne Toilet Paper" because "it's rough and it's tough and don't take **** off no one," and C-Ration crackers are called "John Wayne crackers" because presumably only someone as tough as Wayne could eat them.


Congressional Gold Medal

John Wayne's enduring status as an iconic American was formally recognized by the United States Congress on May 26, 1979 when he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.[22][23] Numerous actors, including Elizabeth Taylor, and politicians testified to Congress of the merit and deservedness of this award, most notably Maureen O'Hara, who requested the words that would be placed onto the medal: "It is my great honor to be here. I beg you to strike a medal for Duke, to order the President to strike it. And I feel that the medal should say just one thing, 'John Wayne, American.'" Robert Mitchum notably declined to write a testimony.[citation needed] The medal crafted by the United States Mint has on one side John Wayne riding on horseback and the other side has a portrait of Wayne with the words, "John Wayne, American." This Congressional Gold Medal was presented to the family of John Wayne in a ceremony held on March 6, 1980 at the United States Capitol. This medal is now at the John Wayne Museum in Winterset, Iowa. Copies were made, and the public made it a best-seller.


Celebrations and Landmarks

John Wayne's 100th birthday will be on May 26, 2007 with several celebrations taking place for this event.

In his birthtown of Winterset, Iowa, the John Wayne Birthday Centennial Celebration will be held on May 25-27, 2007. The celebration will include chuckwagon suppers, concerts by Michael Martin Murphey and Riders in the Sky, a Wild West Revue in the style of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, symposia with John Wayne co-stars, cavalry and trick horse demonstrations as well as many of John Wayne's films shown again on a movie theatre screen. This event also will include the groundbreaking for the John Wayne Museum and Learning Center at his birthplace house.

Missed roles

Wayne was approached by Mel Brooks to play the part of Mr. Taggert in the film Blazing Saddles. After reading the script he said, "I can't be in this picture, it's too dirty...but I'll be the first in line to see it."[24] The part eventually went to another cowboy actor, Slim Pickens.
Wayne's film "McQ" was the result of having turned down the role of "Dirty Harry", first oftered to Frank Sinatra.
Wayne also refused the role that Lee Marvin played in the Dirty Dozen and chose instead the part in the Green Berets.[25]

Character deaths

Contrary to popular belief, Wayne's character did die in seven of his films. His death is seen in the following films:
The Shootist ?- After winning a seemingly hopeless gunfight with three opponents simultaneously, he is shot in the back by the bartender, played by Charles G. Martin, and is then avenged by Ron Howard's character.
The Cowboys ?- He is killed by Bruce Dern's character.
The Alamo ?- Playing Davy Crockett, he's stabbed with a lance, then staggers into the ammunition room with a lit torch and blows it up.
Sands of Iwo Jima ?- He is killed at the end of the film by a bullet fired by a Japanese sniper.
Wake of the Red Witch ?- He drowns when the sunken ship he is trying to salvage shifts and drops further into the ocean, carrying him with it.
The Fighting Seabees ?- He is shot by a sniper as he attempts to dismount from a bulldozer loaded with TNT aimed at a fuel depot.
Reap the Wild Wind ?- He is trapped inside the wreck of a sunken ship after a fight with a giant squid and drowns.
His character death is not shown in the following:
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ?- His character is dead at the beginning of the film and the story is told in flashback by James Stewart, who is attending his funeral.
The Sea Chase ?- Lana Turner and Wayne are on a ship when it sinks, but the possibility that the characters survived is left open.
The Deceiver ?- Ian Keith's character died, but the corpse was played by John Wayne.
Central Airport ?- John Wayne has a very minor role as the co-pilot of an aircraft that crashes into the ocean.

Famous movie quotes

Speaking to his young cavalry lieutenants: "Don't ever apologize?-it's a sign of weakness." (She Wore a Yellow Ribbon)
"Fill your hand, you sonofabitch!"(True Grit)
"That'll be the day!" (The Searchers)
"I won't be wronged; I won't be insulted and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people and I require the same from them." (The Shootist)

Robert Morley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Birth name Robert Adolph Wilton Morley
Born May 26, 1908
Semley, Wiltshire, England, UK
Died June 3, 1992 (aged 84)
Wargrave, Berkshire, England, UK
Spouse(s) Joan Buckmaster (1940-3 June 1992) (his death) 3 children
Notable roles King Louis XVI in Marie Antoinette
Max in Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?
Atkins in Istanbul
Academy Awards

Nominated: Best Actor in a Supporting Role (1938) for Marie Antoinette
Golden Globe Awards

Nominated: Best Motion Picture Actor in a Supporting Role (1979) for Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?

Robert Morley CBE (May 26, 1908 - June 3, 1992) was an Oscar-nominated British actor who, often in supporting roles, was usually cast as a pompous English gentleman representing the Establishment. In his Movie Encyclopedia, film critic Leonard Maltin describes Morley as "recognizable by his ungainly bulk, bushy eyebrows, thick lips, and double chin, […] particularly effective when cast as a pompous windbag".




Life and work

He was born Robert Adolph Wilton Morley in Semley, Wiltshire, England. Morley attended Wellington College, RADA and made his West End stage debut in 1929 and his Broadway debut in 1938 in the title role of Oscar Wilde and although soon won over to the big screen, Morley remained both a busy West End star and successful author, as well as tirelessly touring.

A versatile actor, especially in his younger years, he played roles as divergent as those of Louis XVI, for which he received an Academy Award Nomination as Best Supporting Actor (Marie Antoinette 1938). He also received Oscar nominations for Oscar Wilde (1960) and a missionary in The African Queen (1951).

As a playwright he co-wrote and adapted several plays for the stage, having outstanding success in London and New York with Edward, My Son, a gripping family drama written in 1947 (with Noel Langley) in which he played the central role of Arnold Holt. But the disappointing film version, directed by George Cukor at MGM Elstree in 1949, instead starred the miscast Spencer Tracy, who turned Holt, an unscrupulous English businessman, into a blustering Canadian expatriate.

Morley also personified the conservative Englishman in many comedy and caper films. Later in his career, he received numerous critical accolades for Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?. Renowned for repartee and generally being an eloquent conversationalist, Morley gained the epitheton of being a "wit".

He married Joan Buckmaster (1910-2005), a daughter of Dame Gladys Cooper. Their elder son, Sheridan Morley was a well-known writer and critic. They also had a daughter Annabel and another son Wilton. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1957 New Year's Honours List. He died in Reading, Berkshire from a stroke, aged 84.

Ben Alexander
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ben Alexander (Nicholas Benton Alexander IV) alias Bennie Alexander, (May 26, 1911 - July 5, 1969) was an American motion picture actor, who started out as a child actor in 1915.




Life and career

Born in Goldfield, Nevada and raised in California, Alexander made his screen debut at age of five in Every Pearl a Tear. He went on to portray Lillian Gish's young brother in D.W. Griffith's Hearts of the World. It was in another WW I classic, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), that Alexander made his first positive impression as an adult actor in the role of Kemmerick, the tragic amputation victim. When Alexander's acting career slowed down in the mid 1930s, he found a new career as a successful radio announcer, and in 1952, Jack Webb chose him to replace Herbert Ellis in the role of Officer Frank Smith in the TV series Dragnet. In 1966, Alexander returned to police work as Sergeant Dan Briggs on the weekly ABC cop series Felony Squad.

Jay Silverheels
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Born May 26, 1919
Six Nations Indian Reserve, Brantford, Ontario
Died March 5, 1980
Woodland Hills, California
Notable roles Tonto in The Lone Ranger

Jay Silverheels (May 26, 1919 - March 5, 1980) was a Canadian Mohawk Indian actor.




Early history

Born Harold J. Smith on the Six Nations Indian Reserve, in Brantford, Ontario, Canada, Silverheels excelled in athletics and lacrosse as a boy before leaving home to travel around North America, appearing in boxing and wrestling tournaments. In 1938 Silverheels placed second in the middleweight section of the Golden Gloves tournament.


Film career

Following World War II, Silverheels moved to Hollywood and made his film debut in 1947's Captain from Castille, starring Tyrone Power. He followed this with roles in Key Largo (1948), Broken Arrow (1950) with Jimmy Stewart, War Arrow (1953) with Maureen O'Hara, Jeff Chandler and Noah Beery, Jr., Walk the Proud Land (1956) with Audie Murphy and Anne Bancroft, Alias Jesse James (1959) with Bob Hope and Indian Paint (1964) with Johnny Crawford.


TV career

Silverheels was best known for his appearances as the Lone Ranger's friend Tonto. In addition to starring in the Lone Ranger television series from 1949 to 1957, Silverheels appeared in the films The Lone Ranger (1956) and The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold (1958).

Following the end of the Lone Ranger television series, Silverheels found himself typecast as Tonto and had trouble finding further acting work. Silverheels was also hindered by a changing attitude, as some felt that the Tonto character was equivalent to a Native American Uncle Tom. Subsequently, Silverheels was forced to work as a salesman to supplement his acting income. He also began to concentrate on writing poetry influenced by his youth on the Six Nations Indian Reserve and appeared on television reciting his poetry.

In the early 1960s he helped to establish the Indian Actors Workshop in Echo Park, California as a place where Native American actors could develop their acting skills. It is still active.


Personal life

Silverheels was also quite fond of raising, breeding and racing horses in his spare time. Once, when asked about possibly running Tonto's famous Pinto horse Scout in a race, Jay laughed off the idea: "Heck, I can outrun Scout!"

Married in 1945, Silverheels was the father of two boys and a girl. He died of stroke in Woodland Hills, California and was cremated. His ashes were returned home and scattered in Canada. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6538 Hollywood Boulevard.


Legacy

In 1993, Silverheels was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Peter Cushing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Born 26 May 1913
Kenley, Surrey, England
Died 11 August 1994 (81)
Canterbury, Kent, England

Peter Cushing, OBE, (26 May 1913 - 11 August 1994) was an English actor, best known for his many appearances in Hammer Films, in which he played Baron Frankenstein and Dr. Van Helsing, often appearing opposite his close friend Christopher Lee. He was also asked, because he was such a familiar face on both sides of the Atlantic, to appear as Grand Moff Tarkin in the original Star Wars film.




Biography

Early life

Cushing was born in Kenley, Surrey and was raised there and in Dulwich, South London. He left his first job as a surveyor's assistant to take up a scholarship at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. After working in repertory theatre, he left for Hollywood in 1939, but returned in 1941 after roles in several films, one of them A Chump at Oxford (1940) appearing alongside Laurel and Hardy. His first major film part was as Osric in Hamlet (1948) with Laurence Olivier.


Early career

In the 1950s he worked in television, most notably as Winston Smith in the BBC's 1954 adaptation of the George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, scripted by Nigel Kneale. Cushing drew much praise for his performance in this production, although he always felt that his performance in the existing version of the play ?- it was performed twice in one week and only the second version survives in the archives ?- was inferior to the first. During many of his small screen performances, Cushing also starred as Fitzwilliam Darcy in the BBC's 1952 production of Pride and Prejudice and as King Richard II in Richard of Bordeaux in 1955.


Hammer Horror

His first appearances in his two most famous roles were in Terence Fisher's films The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958).

Cushing will always be associated with playing Victor Frankenstein and Van Helsing in a long string of horror films produced by Hammer Horror. These provided him with 20 years of steady employment despite being of often middling quality. Although talented as an actor, he admitted that career decisions for him meant choosing roles where he knew the audience would accept him. "Who wants to see me as 'Hamlet'? Very few. But millions want to see me as Frankenstein so that's the one I do." He also said "If I played Hamlet, they'd call it a horror film."[citation needed]

Reportedly, he thought The Blood Beast Terror (1968) to be the worst film in which he participated.[citation needed] A shade under 6' tall, a mane of increasingly iron-grey hair and wiry, his unemotional, meticulous delivery gave him an energetic onscreen presence, and he often performed his own stunts. Cushing was often cast opposite the 6'5" actor Christopher Lee, with whom he became best friends.

"People look at me as if I were some sort of monster, but I can't think why. In my macabre pictures, I have either been a monster-maker or a monster-destroyer, but never a monster. Actually, I'm a gentle fellow. Never harmed a fly. I love animals, and when I'm in the country I'm a keen bird-watcher," he said in an interview published in ABC Film Review in November 1964.[citation needed]


In the mid-1960s, he played the eccentric Dr. Who in two movies (Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks ?- Invasion Earth 2150 AD) based on the television series Doctor Who. He made a conscious decision to play the part as a lovable, avuncular figure, as a conscious effort to escape from his perceived image as a "horror" actor. "I do get terribly tired with the neighbourhood kids telling me 'My mum says she wouldn't want to meet you in a dark alley'." he said in an interview in 1966. He also appeared in the cult series The Avengers and then again in its successor, The New Avengers. In 1986 he played the role of Colonel William Raymond in 'Biggles'. In Space: 1999 he appeared as a Prospero-like character called Raan.

He was one of many stars to guest on The Morecambe and Wise Show ?- the standing joke in his case being the idea that he was never paid for his appearance. He would appear, week after week, wearily asking hosts Eric and Ernie "Have you got my five pounds yet?" (A ludicrously low price for an artists fee, even in the 1970s). Delightfully, when Cushing was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1989, one of the guests was Ernie Wise ... who promptly presented him with a five pound note, but then, with typical dexterity, extorted it back from him. Peter was absolutely delighted with this, and cried: "All these years and I still haven't got my fiver!"

Cushing played Sherlock Holmes many times, starting with Hammer's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), the first colour Holmes film. Cushing, whose features resembled those of classic Holmes portrayer Basil Rathbone, seemed a natural for the part. He followed this up with a performance in 16 episodes of the BBC series Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes (1968), of which only six episodes survive. Finally, Cushing played the detective in old age, in The Masks of Death (1984) for Channel 4.


Death of his wife

In 1971, Cushing withdrew from the film Blood from the Mummy's Tomb when his wife died (Hammer stalwart Andrew Keir inherited the role). He and actress Helen Beck had been married since 1943. The following year, he was quoted in the Radio Times as saying "Since Helen passed on I can't find anything; the heart, quite simply, has gone out of everything. Time is interminable, the loneliness is almost unbearable and the only thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that my dear Helen and I will be united again some day. To join Helen is my only ambition. You have my permission to publish that... really, you know dear boy, it's all just killing time. Please say that."[citation needed]

Six years later, his feelings were unchanged: "When Helen passed on six years ago I lost the only joy in life that I ever wanted. She was my whole life and without her there is no meaning. I am simply killing time, so to speak, until that wonderful day when we are together again."[citation needed]

In his autobiography, he says he attempted suicide the night that Helen died, by running up and down stairs in the vain hope that it would induce a heart attack.

In 1986, Cushing appeared on the British TV show Jim'll Fix It. His "wish", "granted" by Jimmy Savile, was to have a strain of rose named after his late wife. Cushing's letter to the show, in copperplate handwriting, was shown, as was the identification and naming of a rose named "Helen Cushing" ([1]).


Star Wars

In 1976, he was cast in Star Wars, which was shooting at Elstree Studios, Boreham Wood, London. He appeared as one of his (now) most recognized characters, Grand Moff Tarkin despite having originally been considered for the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Cushing found accepting the role in a science fiction fantasy easy. "My criterion for accepting a role isn't based on what I would like to do. I try to consider what the audience would like to see me do and I thought kids would adore Star Wars."

Costuming difficulties resulted in an endearing piece of trivia about Star Wars. He was presented with ill-fitting riding boots for the Moff Tarkin role and they pinched his feet so much that he was given permission by George Lucas to play the role wearing his slippers. The camera operators filmed him above the knees or standing behind the table of the conference room set. Also, during filming of Star Wars, a star-struck Carrie Fisher found it hard to deliver her lines to him and seem terrified in the presence of a charming, polished man who smelled of 'linen and lavender' when in their first scene together, her character speaks of Cushing's as having a 'foul stench'.

For Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, George Lucas wanted Cushing, now deceased, to reprise his role as Tarkin through the use of archive footage and digital technology, but poor film quality made this impossible. Instead, Wayne Pygram took the role, though he underwent extensive prosthetic makeup for his brief cameo.


Later career

After Star Wars, he continued appearing in films and television sporadically, as his health allowed. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer but without surgery managed to survive several years, though his health was precarious.

In 1989 Cushing was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. He retired to Whitstable, where he had bought a seafront house in 1959, and continued his hobby of birdwatching, and to write two autobiographies. Cushing also worked as a painter, specializing in watercolors, and wrote and illustrated a children's book of Lewis Carroll style humor, The Bois Saga.

His final professional engagement was as co-narrator of Flesh and Blood, the Hammer Heritage of Horror, produced by American writer/director Ted Newsom. As co-narrator, Cushing thus took his "last bow" with friend Christopher Lee, the BBC and Hammer Films. The narration was recorded in Canterbury near Cushing's home. The show was first broadcast in 1994, the week before Cushing's death from cancer in a Canterbury hospice, aged 81.

Lee remarked on his friend's death: "I don't want to sound gloomy, but, at some point of your lives, every one of you will notice that you have in your life one person, one friend whom you love and care for very much. That person is so close to you that you are able to share some things only with him. For example, you can call that friend, and from the very first maniacal laugh or some other joke you will know who is at the other end of that line. We used to do that with him so often. And then when that person is gone, there will be nothing like that in your life ever again".[citation needed]

Peggy Lee
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Background information

Birth name Norma Deloris Egstrom
Born May 26, 1920
Origin Jamestown, North Dakota
Died January 21, 2002 (age 81)
Genre(s) Traditional Pop, Jazz
Occupation(s) Singer, Actress
Years active 1941- 1996
Label(s) Decca Records
Capitol Records
Associated
acts Jo Stafford, Patti Page, Rosemary Clooney

Peggy Lee (May 26, 1920 - January 21, 2002) was an American Jazz and Traditional Pop singer and songwriter and Oscar-nominated performer. She was born Norma Deloris Egstrom and was famous for her "soft and cool" singing style, which she is thought to have developed in response to noisy nightclub audiences. Though she recorded dozens of hit songs (many written or cowritten by herself), Miss Lee might be best known for her interpretation of the Davenport/Cooley composition "Fever" and the song written by her and Dave Barbour, "It's a Good Day".





Early life

Lee was born Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota, the youngest child of seven. After her mother died, her father remarried and her stepmother was very cruel to her. She took solace in the music she heard on the radio. She first sang professionally with KOVC radio in Valley City, North Dakota. She soon landed her own series on a radio show sponsored by a local restaurant that paid her "salary" in food. Both during and after her high school years, she took whatever jobs she could find, waitressing and singing for paltry sums on other local stations. The program director of WDAY in Fargo (the most widely listened to station in North Dakota) changed her name from Norma to Peggy Lee. Tiring of the abuse from her stepmother, she left home and traveled to Los Angeles at the age of seventeen.

She returned to North Dakota for a tonsillectomy and, while there, lined up a gig at The Buttery Room, a nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel West in Chicago, home of Benny Goodman, the jazz clarinetist and band leader. According to Lee, "Benny's then-fiance, Lady Alice Duckworth, came into the Buttery, and she was very impressed. So the next evening she brought Benny in, because they were looking for replacement for Helen Forrest. And although I didn't know, I was it. He was looking at me strangely, I thought, but it was just his preoccupied way of looking. I thought that he didn't like me at first, but it just was that he was preoccupied with what he was hearing." She joined his band in 1941 and stayed for two years, with the band then at the height of its popularity.


Recording career

In early 1942, Lee had her first # 1 hit, "Somebody Else Is Taking My Place," followed by 1943's "Why Don't You Do Right?," which sold over a million copies and made her famous. She sang with Goodman in two 1943 films, Stage Door Canteen and The Powers Girl.

In March 1943, Lee married Dave Barbour, the guitarist in Goodman's band. Peggy said, "David joined Benny's band and there was a ruling that no one should fraternize with the girl singer. But I fell in love with David the first time I heard him play, and so I married him. Benny then fired David, so I quit, too. Benny and I made up, although David didn't play with him anymore. Benny stuck to his rule. I think that's not too bad a rule, but you can't help falling in love with somebody."

When Lee and Barbour left the band, the idea was that he would work in the studios and she would keep house and raise their daughter, Nicki. But she drifted back towards songwriting and occasional recording sessions for the fledgling Capitol Records in 1944, for whom she produced a long string of hits, many of them with lyrics and music by Lee and Barbour, including "I Don't Know Enough About You" and "It's a Good Day" (1946). With the release of the smash-hit #1-selling record of 1948, "Mañana," her "retirement" was over.

In 1948, she joined Perry Como and Jo Stafford as one of the rotating hosts of the NBC musical radio program Chesterfield Supper Club.

She left Capitol for a few years in the early 1950s, but returned in 1957. She is most famous for her cover version of the Little Willie John hit "Fever" and her rendition of Leiber and Stoller's gloomy "Is That All There Is?" Her relationship with the Capitol label spanned almost three decades, aside from her brief but artistically rich detour (1952-1956) at Decca Records, where she recorded one of her most acclaimed albums Black Coffee (1956). While recording for Decca, Miss Lee had hit singles with the songs "Lover" and "Mr. Wonderful."


Songwriting

She was also known as a songwriter with such hits as the songs from the Disney movie Lady and the Tramp, which she also sang. Her many songwriting collaborators, in addition to Dave Barbour, included Laurindo Almeida, Harold Arlen, Sonny Burke, Cy Coleman, Gene DiNovi, Duke Ellington, Dave Grusin, Dick Hazard, Quincy Jones, Francis Lai, Jack Marshall, Johnny Mandel, Marian McPartland, Willard Robison, Lalo Schifrin, Hubie Wheeler, and Victor Young.

During a time when youths began turning to rock and roll music, she was one of the mainstays of Capitol recordings. From 1957 until her final disc for the company in 1972, she routinely produced a steady stream of two or three albums per year. Her mastery of the blues form, which is far in advance of virtually any other jazz singer (many other great ladies of jazz, like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, visited the blues only sporadically), let alone pop star, produced her signature readings of "Fever" and "I'm a Woman".


Acting career

Lee also acted in several films. In 1952, she played opposite Danny Thomas in a remake of the early Al Jolson film, The Jazz Singer. In 1955, she played a despondent and alcoholic blues singer in Pete Kelly's Blues (1955), for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

Lee was nominated for twelve Grammy Awards, winning Best Contemporary Vocal Performance for her 1969 hit "Is That All There Is?" In 1995 she was given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

In the early 1990s, she retained famed entertainment attorney Neil Papiano, who, on her behalf, successfully sued Disney for royalties on Lady and the Tramp. Lee's lawsuit claimed that she was due royalties for video tapes, a technology that did not exist when she agreed to write and perform for Disney.


Retirement and death

She continued to perform into the 1990s and still mesmerized audiences and critics alike. As was the case with fellow musical legends Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, Lee turned to acting skills and showmanship as her voice diminished.[citation needed]

After years of poor health, Lee died from complications from diabetes and cardiac disease at the age of 81 in 2002. She is survived by Nicki Lee Foster, her daughter with Dave Barbour. She is interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, California.


Legacy

She was not featured in Memoriam Tribute during the Academy Awards ceremony. When her family requested she be featured in the following year's ceremony, the Academy stated they did not honor requests and Lee was omitted because her contribution to film and her legacy were not deemed significant enough. The Lee family pointed out that, although she had been omitted, R&B singer/actress Aaliyah, who died a few months earlier, was included though having been in only one moderately successful film, Romeo Must Die (Queen of the Damned had yet to be released). The Academy provided no comment on the oversight.

Peggy Lee is a recipient of the state of North Dakota's Roughrider Award; the Pied Piper Award from The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP); the Presidents Award, from the Songwriters' Guild of America; the Ella Award for Lifetime Achievement, from the Society of Singers; and the Living Legacy Award, from the Women's International Center. In 1999 she was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

In 2003, "There'll Be Another Spring: A Tribute to Miss Peggy Lee" was held at Carnegie Hall. Produced by recording artist Richard Barone, the sold-out event included performances by Cy Coleman, Debbie Harry, Nancy Sinatra, Rita Moreno, Marian McPartland, Chris Connor, Petula Clark and many others. In 2004, Barone brought the event to the Hollywood Bowl and Chicago's Ravinia Festival, with expanded casts including Maureen McGovern and Bea Arthur. The Carnegie Hall concert was broadcast as on NPR's "Jazz Set."


Trivia

"Peggy Lee" is also a character in Victory Gundam, one of the five (of the six) original members of the Shrike Team named in homage to famous 20th century female singers.

James Arness
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia




Birth name James Aurness
Born May 26, 1923 (1923-05-26) (age 83)
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Spouse(s) Virginia Chapman (1948-1960)
Janet Surtrees (1978-)

James Arness (born May 26, 1923 in Minneapolis, Minnesota as James Aurness) is an actor best known for portraying Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke for 20 years, a record length for a character on a single prime time show (though the length of time in a role is shared with Kelsey Grammer's portrayal of Dr. Frasier Crane, Grammer played the same role on three different programs, Cheers, Frasier, and Wings), however, James Arness has played the part of Marshal Matt Dillon in 5 separate decades. 1955 to 1975 in the weekly series. Then in the decade of the 80's (1987)Return to Dodge, and 4 more made for tv Gunsmoke movies in the 90's giving him the distinct honor of playing the same character over 5 decades. Arness's parents were Rolf Cirkler Aurness and Ruth Duesler, descendants of German and Norwegian immigrants. Arness is the older brother of actor Peter Graves. He was the tallest actor ever to play a lead role, standing 6' 7" (2.01 m)[citation needed].





Military service in World War II

James Arness served in the United States Army during World War II, and was severely wounded at the Battle of Anzio, leading to a lifelong slight limp. He was reported to have been first off his landing craft at the landing beaches at Anzio because of his height.[citation needed]After the war Arness entered Beloit College where he was initiated into Beta Theta Pi, under his original last name.


Acting career

Though primarily identified with Westerns, he also is remembered for appearing in two science fiction films, The Thing from Another World and Them!. He was a close personal friend of John Wayne's and co-starred with him in Big Jim McLain, and Island in the Sky. Wayne said that when he imagined Marshal Dillon, he saw Arness. Wayne even did a television spot introducing Arness in the role.

After Gunsmoke ended, Arness performed primarily in western-themed movies and television series, including How the West Was Won, and five made-for-television Gunsmoke reunion movies between 1987 and 1994. A notable exception was a brief turn as a big city police officer in the short-lived 1981 series, McClain's Law.

For his contribution to the television industry, James Arness has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1751 Vine Street. In 1981, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

SPECIAL POEM FOR SENIOR CITIZENS!!

A row of bottles on my shelf
Caused me to analyze myself.
One yellow pill I have to pop
Goes to my heart so it won't stop.
A little white one that I take
Goes to my hands so they won't shake.
The blue ones that I use a lot
Tell me I'm happy when I'm not.
The purple pill goes to my brain
And tells me that I have no pain.
The capsules tell me not to wheeze
Or cough or choke or even sneeze.
The red ones, smallest of them all
Go to my blood so I won't fall.
The orange ones, very big and bright
Prevent my leg cramps in the night.
Such an array of brilliant pills
Helping to cure all kinds of ills.
But what I'd really like to know..........
Is what tells each one where to go!

There's always a lot to be thankful for if
you take time to look for it. For example
I am sitting here thinking how nice it is
that wrinkles don't hurt...

Do Nothin' 'Til You Hear From Me
Woody Herman

[Music and Lyrics by Duke Ellington and Bob Russell]

Do nothin' till you hear from me
Pay no attention to what's said
Why people tear the seams of anyone's dream
Is over my head
Do nothin' till you hear from me
At least consider our romance
If you should take the word of others you've heard
I haven't a chance
True I've been seen with someon new
But does that mean that I'm untrue
when we're apart the words in my heart
Reveal how I feel about you
some kiss may cloud my memory
And other arms may hold a thrill
But please do nothin' till you hear it from me
And you never will

Time Waits For No One
Helen Forrest

[Words and Music by Cliff Friend and Charlie Tobias]

Time waits for no one
It passes you by
It rolls on forever
Like the clouds in the sky
Time waits for no one
Goes on endlessly
It's just like a river
Flowing out to the sea
You'll find that love is like this
Each precious moment we miss
Will never ever return again
So don't let us throw one
Sweet moment away
Time waits for no one
Let's make love while we may

Good morning WA2K.

Wow, lots of work cut out for me today.
Here goes! Jolson, Wayne, Morley, Alexander, Silverheels, Cushing, Lee and Arness.





Do your thang, Letty.

Ok, Raggedy, here's my "thang"

First, folks, we would like to thank our Bob for the marvelous bio's. I had no idea that James was still with us, Boston.

edgar, know both those tunes, thanks to my sis and her imitation of Woody Herman. (long story, folks) Great,Texas.

And last but by no means Least, even though she's just a tiny little puppy, we honor our Raggedy for those faces that match her acumen so very well.

Here's an answer from Peggy to Bob's "special poem."


Yes, it's a good day for singing a song,
and it's a good day for moving along,
Yes, it's a good day, how could anything go wrong,
A good day from morning' till night

Yes, it's a good day for shining your shoes,
and it's a good day for losing the blues;
Everything go gain and nothing' to lose,
`Cause it's a good day from morning' till night

I said to the Sun, " Good morning sun
Rise and shine today"
You know you've gotta get going
If you're gonna make a showin'
And you know you've got the right of way.

`Cause it's a good day for paying your bills;
And it's a good day for curing your ills,
So take a deep breath and throw away your PILLS,
`Cause it's a good day from morning' till night.

A line from an old war movie caught my ear and I think it's a true definition.

Courage is when you are afraid and still face the danger. That's a paraphrase, and it does say quite a bit about true heroes, right?

Stand By Me

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we'll see
No I won't be afraid, no I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

And darlin', darlin', stand by me, oh now now stand by me
Stand by me, stand by me

If the sky that we look upon
Should tumble and fall
And the mountains should crumble to the sea
I won't cry, I won't cry, no I won't shed a tear
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

And darlin', darlin', stand by me, oh stand by me
Stand by me, stand by me, stand by me-e, yeah

Whenever you're in trouble won't you stand by me, oh now now stand by me
Oh stand by me, stand by me, stand by me

Darlin', darlin', stand by me-e, stand by me
Oh stand by me, stand by me, stand by me


Ben E. King