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Will Durant
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia




Born November 5, 1885
North Adams, Massachusetts
Died November 7, 1981
Los Angeles, California
Occupation Professor, writer
Nationality American
Spouse Ariel Durant
Children Ethel Durant

William James Durant (November 5, 1885-November 7, 1981) was an American philosopher, historian, and writer. He is best known for his authorship and co-authorship with his wife Ariel Durant of The Story of Civilization.





Life and works

Durant was born in North Adams, Massachusetts of French-Canadian parents Joseph Durant and Mary Allard, who had been part of the Quebec emigration to the United States. He fought for equal wages, women's suffrage and fairer working conditions for the American labor force. Durant not only wrote on many topics but also put his ideas into effect. Durant, it has been said widely, attempted to bring philosophy to the common man. He authored The Story of Philosophy, The Mansions of Philosophy, and, with the help of his wife, Ariel, wrote The Story of Civilization. He also wrote magazine articles.

He tried to improve understanding of viewpoints of human beings and to have others forgive foibles and human waywardness. He chided the comfortable insularity of what is now known as Eurocentrism, by pointing out in Our Oriental Heritage that Europe was only a "a jagged promontory of Asia." He complained of "the provincialism of our traditional histories which began with Greece and summed up Asia in a line" and said they showed "a possibly fatal error of perspective and intelligence."

In 1900, Will was educated by the Jesuits in St. Peter's Preparatory School and, later, Saint Peter's College in Jersey City, New Jersey. In 1905, he became a Socialist. He graduated in 1907. He worked as a reporter for Arthur Brisbane's New York Evening Journal for ten dollars a week. At the Evening Journal, he wrote several articles on sexual criminals.

Following this, in 1907, he began teaching Latin, French, English and geometry at Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. Durant was also made librarian at the college.

In 1911 he left the Seminary. He became the teacher and chief pupil of the Ferrer Modern School, an experiment in libertarian education. Alden Freeman, a supporter of the Ferrer Modern School, sponsored him for a tour of Europe. At the Modern School, he fell in love with and married a pupil, thirteen years his junior, Chaya (Ida) Kaufman, whom he later nicknamed "Ariel". The Durants had one daughter, Ethel, and adopted a son, Louis. Ariel would contribute materially to all the volumes of The Story of Civilization but was given title page credit starting only with Volume VII, The Age of Reason Begins.

In 1913, he resigned his post as teacher. To support themselves, he began lecturing in a Presbyterian church for five- and ten-dollar fees; the material for these lectures became the starting point for The Story of Civilization. Freeman paid his tuition for the graduate school of Columbia University.

In 1917, working on a doctorate in philosophy, Will Durant wrote his first book, Philosophy and the Social Problem. He discussed the idea that philosophy had not grown because it avoided the actual problems of society. He received his doctorate in 1917. He was also an instructor at Columbia University.

The Story of Philosophy originated as a series of Little Blue Books (educational pamphlets aimed at workers) and was so popular it was republished in 1926 by Simon & Schuster as a hardcover book[1] and became a bestseller, giving the Durants the financial independence that would allow them to travel the world several times and spend four decades writing The Story of Civilization. He retired from teaching and began work on the eleven volume Story of Civilization. Will drafted a civil rights "Declaration of Interdependence" in the early 1940s, nearly a full decade before the Brown decision (see Brown v. Board of Education) ignited the Civil Rights Movement. This Declaration was introduced into the Congressional Record on October 1, 1945.

The Durants strove throughout The Story of Civilization to create what they called "integral history." They opposed this to the "specialization" of history, an anticipatory rejection of what some have called the "cult of the expert." Their goal was to write a "biography" of a civilization, in this case, the West, including not just the usual wars, politics and biography of greatness and villainy, but also the culture, art, philosophy, religion, and the rise of mass communication. Much of The Story considers the living conditions of everyday people throughout the twenty-five hundred years their "story" of the West covers. They also bring an unabashedly moral framework to their accounts, constantly stressing the repetition of the "dominance of strong over the weak, the clever over the simple." The Story of Civilization is the most successful historiographical series in history. It has been said that the series "put Simon and Schuster on the map" as a publishing house.

For Rousseau and Revolution, (1967), the 10th volume of The Story of Civilization, they were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature; later followed the highest award granted by the United States government to civilians, the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ford in 1977.

They followed Rousseau and Revolution with a slender volume of observations called The Lessons of History; which was both synopsis of the series as well as analysis. Though they had intended to carry the work into the 20th century, they simply ran out of time and had expected the 10th volume to be their last. However, they went on to published a final volume, their 11th, The Age of Napoleon in 1975. They also left behind notes for a twelfth volume, The Age of Darwin, and an outline for a thirteenth, The Age of Einstein, which would have taken The Story of Civilization through to 1945.

Two posthumous works by Durant have been published in the last several years, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time (2002) and Heroes of History: A Brief History of Civilization from Ancient Times to the Dawn of the Modern Age (2001).

The Durants also shared a love story as remarkable as their scholarship; they detail this in Dual Autobiography. They died within two weeks of each other in 1981 (she on October 25 and he on November 7). Though their daughter, Ethel, and grandchildren strove to keep the death of his Ariel from the ailing Will, he learned of it on the evening news, and he himself died at the age of 96. He was buried beside his wife in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.

More than twenty years after his death, Durant's quote of "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within"[1] appeared as the opening title of Mel Gibson's film Apocalypto, comparing (in Gibson's opinion) the decline of the Maya civilization to the United States' current political and cultural situations.

Joel McCrea
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Birth name Joel Albert McCrea
Born November 5, 1905
South Pasadena, California
Died October 20, 1990
Los Angeles, California
Spouse(s) Frances Dee (1933-1990)

Joel Albert McCrea, (November 5, 1905 - October 20, 1990) was an American film actor.





Film career

Born in South Pasadena, California, McCrea became interested in films after graduating from Pomona College. He worked as an extra in films from 1927 before being cast in a major role in The Jazz Age (1929). A contract with MGM followed, and then another with RKO. He established himself as a handsome leading man who was considered versatile enough to star in both dramas and comedies.

In the 1930s, McCrea starred in two Cecil B. DeMille large-scale westerns, Wells Fargo (1937) with wife-to-be Francis Dee and Union Pacific (1939) with Barbara Stanwyck. He reached the peak of his early career in the early 1940s, in such films as Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940) and two by Preston Sturges, Sullivan's Travels (1941), and The Palm Beach Story (1942).

McCrea also starred in two William A. Wellman westerns, The Great Man's Lady (1942), again with Stanwyck, and Buffalo Bill, with character actor Edgar Buchanan (1944). After the success of The Virginian (1946), McCrea made westerns exclusively for the rest of his career--with the exception of the British-made Rough Shoot (1953). In 1959, Joel McCrea and his son Jody McCrea starred in the NBC-TV series Wichita Town, which lasted one season and was produced by the Mirisch Corp. 1962 saw him united with fellow veteran of westerns Randolph Scott in Ride the High Country (1962), under the direction of Sam Peckinpah.

McCrea preferred to live the remainder of his life as a rancher. In 1969, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Joel McCrea has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6901 Hollywood Blvd. and another star at 6241 Hollywood Blvd. for his contribution to radio.


Personal life

McCrea married actress Frances Dee in 1933. They had three children, David, Peter, and Jody McCrea, who also became an actor. Joel and Frances remained married until his death in Woodland Hills, California from pneumonia at the age of 84 in 1990.

According to David Raban's Stars of the '30s, the McCreas were prodigious savers, accumulating a large estate, which included working-ranch properties. Joel McCrea's work ethic was in part attributed to his Scottish heritage and it also may have stemmed from his friendship in the 1930s with fellow personality and sometime actor, Will Rogers. McCrea recounted that "the Oklahoma Sage" gave him a profound piece of advice: "Save half of what you make, and live on just the other half."

During his lifetime, McCrea and his wife Frances lived, raised their children, and rode their horses on their ranch in what was then an unincorporated area of eastern Ventura County, California. The McCreas ultimately donated several hundred acres of their personal property to the newly formed Conejo Valley YMCA for the city of Thousand Oaks, California, both of which celebrated their 40th anniversaries in 2004. Today, the land on which the Conejo Valley YMCA rests is called "Joel McCrea Park".

Roy Rogers
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Leonard Franklin Slye (November 5, 1911 - July 6, 1998), who became famous as Roy Rogers, was a singer and cowboy actor. He and his third wife Dale Evans, his golden palomino Trigger, and his German shepherd, Bullet, were featured in over one hundred movies and The Roy Rogers Show. The show ran on radio for nine years before moving to television from 1951 through 1957. His productions usually featured two sidekicks, Pat Brady, (who drove a jeep called "Nellybelle"), and the crotchety Gabby Hayes. Roy's nickname was "King of the Cowboys". Dale's nickname was "Queen of the West." For many Americans (and non-Americans), he was the embodiment of the all-American hero.[citation needed]





Early life

Rogers was born to Andrew ("Andy") & Mattie (Womack) Slye in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his family lived in a tenement building on 2nd Street. (Riverfront Stadium was constructed at this location in 1970 and Rogers would later joke that he had been born at second base.) Dissatisfied with his job and city life, Andy Slye and his brother Will built a 12-by-50-foot houseboat from salvage lumber and in July 1912 the Slye family floated up the Ohio River towards Portsmouth, Ohio. Desiring a more stable existence in Portsmouth, Rogers' parents purchased land on which to build a home, but the flood of 1913 allowed them to move the houseboat to their property and continue living in it on dry land.

In 1919 the Slyes purchased a farm about twelve miles north of Portsmouth at Duck Run near Lucasville, Ohio. They there built a six-room home. Rogers' father soon realized that the farm alone would provide insufficient income for his family and he took a job at a shoe factory in Portsmouth, living there during the week and returning home on the weekends, bearing gifts for the family following paydays, one of which was a horse on which Rogers learned his horsemanship.

After completing the eighth grade, Rogers attended high school at McDermott, Ohio. When he was seventeen his family returned to Cincinnati, where his father began work at a shoe factory. Rogers soon decided on the necessity to help his family financially, so he quit high school, joined his father at the shoe factory, and began attending night school. After being ridiculed for falling asleep in class, however, he quit school and never returned.

Rogers and his father felt imprisoned by their factory jobs. In 1929 Rogers' older sister Mary was living at Lawndale, California with her husband. Father and son decided to quit their shoe factory jobs. The family packed their 1923 Dodge for a visit with Mary and stayed four months before returning to Ohio. Almost immediately, Rogers had the opportunity to travel to California with Mary's father-in-law, and the rest of the family followed in the spring of 1930.

The Slyes rented a small house near Mary. Rogers and his father immediately found employment as truck drivers for a highway construction project. They reported to work one morning, however, to learn their employer had gone bankrupt. The economic hardship of the Great Depression had followed them West and the Slyes soon found themselves among the economic refugees traveling from job to job picking fruit and living in worker campsites. (Rogers would later read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and marvel at its accuracy.) One day Andy Slye heard of a shoe factory hiring in Los Angeles and asked Rogers to join him in applying there for work. Rogers, having seen the joy that his guitar and singing had brought to the destitute around the campfires, hesitantly told his father that he was going to pursue a living in music. With his father's blessing, he and cousin Stanley Slye went to Los Angeles and sought musical engagements as The Slye Brothers.

In 1933, Roy married Lucile Ascolese, but they were divorced just three years later. The couple had no children.


Career

Rogers moved to California at eighteen to become a singer. After four years of little success, he formed Sons of the Pioneers, a western cowboy music group, in 1934. The group hit it big with songs like "Cool Water" and "Tumbling Tumbleweeds".

From his first film appearance in 1935, he worked steadily in western films, including a large supporting role as a singing cowboy while still billed as "Leonard Slye" in a Gene Autry movie. In 1938 when Autry temporarily walked out on his movie contract, Slye was immediately rechristened "Roy Rogers"[1] and assigned the lead in Under Western Stars. Rogers became a matinee idol and American legend. A competitor for Gene Autry was suddenly born. In addition to his own movies, Rogers played a supporting role in the John Wayne classic Dark Command (1940), a harrowing fictionalization of Quantrill's Raiders directed by Raoul Walsh, who had discovered Wayne in 1929 and changed his name while casting him in The Big Trail, Wayne's first leading role. Rogers became a major box office attraction, and Dale Evans was cast in a movie with him in 1945. The next year, Roy's wife, Arlene, died of a massive brain embolism from a bloodclot following the birth of Roy Rogers, Jr. (called Dusty).

Roy and Dale fell in love, and Roy proposed to her during a rodeo at Chicago Stadium. They married on New Years Eve in 1947 at the Flying L Ranch in Davis, Oklahoma where a few months earlier they had filmed Home In Oklahoma.

It was Dale's fourth marriage. Roy and Dale lived together until his death.


Rogers was an idol for many children through his films and television show. Most of his films were in color in an era when almost all other B-movies were black and white. There were Roy Rogers action figures, cowboy adventure novels, a comic strip, and a variety of marketing successes. Some of his movies would segue into animal adventures, in which Roy's horse Trigger would go off on his own for a while with the camera following him.

The Sons of the Pioneers continued their popularity through the 1950s. Although Rogers was no longer a member, they often appeared as Rogers' backup group in films and on TV.

Rogers and his second wife, Arlene (Wilkins) had three children: an adopted daughter, Cheryl, and two biological children, Linda Lou and Roy Jr. Dale and Roy had a daughter, Robin Elizabeth, who died of complications of Down Syndrome at age two. Evans wrote about losing their daughter in her book Angel Unawares.

Rogers and Evans were also well known as advocates for adoption and as founders and operators of children's charities. They adopted several children. Both were outspoken Christians. In Apple Valley, California, where they made their home, numerous streets and highways as well as civic buildings have been named after them in recognition of their efforts on behalf of homeless and handicapped children. Roy was an active Freemason and a Shriner and was noted for his support of their charities.

Roy and Dale's famous theme song, which Dale wrote and they sang as a duet to sign off their television show, was "Happy trails to you, Until we meet again...".

For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Roy Rogers has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1752 Vine Street, a second star at 1733 Vine Street for his contribution to radio, and a third star at 1620 Vine Street for his contribution to the television industry.

Roy and Dale were inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1976 and Roy was inducted again as a member of the Sons of the Pioneers in 1995. Roy was also twice elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame, first as a member of The Sons of the Pioneers in 1980 and as a soloist in 1988.


Death

Rogers died of congestive heart failure on July 6, 1998 at age 86. Rogers was residing in Apple Valley, California at the time of his passing. He was buried at Sunset Hills cemetery in Apple Valley, CA.[2]

Vivien Leigh
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Birth name Vivian Mary Hartley
Born November 5, 1913(1913-11-05)
Darjeeling, West Bengal, British India
Died July 8, 1967 (aged 53)
London, England
Years active 1935 - 1967
Spouse(s) Herbert Leigh Holman (1932-1940)
Laurence Olivier (1940-1960)
Children Suzanne Farrington (b.1933)
[show]Awards
Academy Awards
Best Actress
1939 Gone with the Wind
1951 A Streetcar Named Desire
BAFTA Awards
Best Actress
1951 A Streetcar Named Desire
Tony Awards
Best Leading Actress in a Musical
1963 Tovarich
Other Awards
NYFCC Award for Best Actress
1939 Gone with the Wind
1951 A Streetcar Named Desire

Vivien Leigh, Lady Olivier (November 5, 1913 - July 8, 1967) was an English actress. She won two Academy Awards for playing "southern belles": Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had also played in London's West End.

She was a prolific stage performer, frequently in collaboration with her husband, Laurence Olivier, who directed her in several of her roles. During her thirty-year stage career, she played parts that ranged from the heroines of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth.

Lauded for her beauty, Leigh felt that it sometimes prevented her from being taken seriously as an actress, but ill health proved to be her greatest obstacle. Affected by bipolar disorder for most of her adult life, she gained a reputation for being a difficult person to work with, and her career went through periods of decline. She was further weakened by recurrent bouts of tuberculosis, with which she was first diagnosed in the mid-1940s. She and Olivier divorced in 1960, and Leigh worked sporadically in film and theatre until her death from tuberculosis.




Early life and acting career

Leigh was born Vivian Mary Hartley in Darjeeling, West Bengal, British India, to Ernest Hartley, a British Officer in the Indian Cavalry, and Gertrude Robinson Yackje, whose heritage is in question.[1] She claimed to be of Irish descent, but it is likely that she also had Armenian-Parsee Indian ancestry.[2] They were married in Kensington, London in 1912.[3] In 1917, Ernest Hartley was relocated to Bangalore, while Gertrude and Vivian stayed in Ootacamund.[4] Vivian Hartley made her first stage appearance at the age of three, reciting "Little Bo Peep" for her mother's amateur theatre group. Gertrude Hartley tried to instill in her daughter an appreciation of literature, and introduced her to the works of Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, as well as stories of Greek mythology. An only child, Vivian Hartley was sent to the "Convent of the Sacred Heart" in Roehampton in England, in 1920. Her closest friend at the convent was the future actress Maureen O'Sullivan, to whom she expressed her desire to become "a great actress".[5]

Vivian Hartley completed her later education in Europe, returning to her parents in England in 1931. She discovered that one of Maureen O'Sullivan's films was playing in London's West End and told her parents of her ambitions to become an actress. Both were highly supportive, and her father helped her enroll at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London.[6]

In late 1931, she met Herbert Leigh Holman, known as Leigh, a barrister thirteen years her senior. Despite his disapproval of "theatrical people", they were married on December 20, 1932, and upon their marriage she terminated her studies at RADA. On October 12, 1933, she gave birth to a daughter, Suzanne, but felt stifled by her domestic life. Her friends suggested her for a small part in the film Things Are Looking Up, which marked her film debut. She engaged an agent, John Gliddon, who believed that the name "Vivian Holman" was not suitable for an actress, and after rejecting his suggestion, "April Morn", she took "Vivian Leigh" as her professional name. Gliddon recommended her to Alexander Korda as a possible film actress, but Korda rejected her as lacking potential.[7]

Cast in the play The Mask of Virtue in 1935, Leigh received excellent reviews followed by interviews and newspaper articles, among them one from the Daily Express in which the interviewer noted "a lightning change came over her face", which was the first public mention of the rapid changes in mood that became characteristic of her.[8] John Betjeman, the future Poet Laureate, also wrote about her, describing her as "the essence of English girlhood".[9] Korda, who attended her opening-night performance, admitted his error and signed her to a film contract, with the spelling of her name revised to "Vivien Leigh". She continued with the play, but when Korda moved it to a larger theatre, Leigh was found to be unable to project her voice adequately, or to hold the attention of so large an audience, and the play closed soon after.[10] In 1960 Leigh recalled her ambivalence towards her first experience of critical acclaim and sudden fame, commenting, "some critics saw fit to be as foolish as to say that I was a great actress. And I thought, that was a foolish, wicked thing to say, because it put such an onus and such a responsibility onto me, which I simply wasn't able to carry. And it took me years to learn enough to live up to what they said for those first notices. I find it so stupid. I remember the critic very well, and have never forgiven him."[11]


Meeting Laurence Olivier

Laurence Olivier saw Leigh in The Mask of Virtue, and a friendship developed after he congratulated her on her performance. While playing lovers in the film Fire Over England (1937), Olivier and Leigh developed a strong attraction, and after filming was completed, they began an affair. During this time Leigh read the Margaret Mitchell novel Gone with the Wind and instructed her American agent to suggest her to David O. Selznick, who was planning a film version. She remarked to a journalist, "I've cast myself as Scarlett O'Hara", and the film critic C. A. Lejeune recalled a conversation of the same period in which Leigh "stunned us all" with the assertion that Olivier "won't play Rhett Butler, but I shall play Scarlett O'Hara. Wait and see."[12]

Leigh played Ophelia to Olivier's Hamlet in an Old Vic Theatre production, and Olivier later recalled an incident during which her mood rapidly changed as she was quietly preparing to go onstage. Without apparent provocation, she began screaming at him, before suddenly becoming silent and staring into space. She was able to perform without mishap, and by the following day, she had returned to normal with no recollection of the event. It was the first time Olivier witnessed such behaviour from her.[13] They began living together, Holman and Olivier's wife, the actress Jill Esmond, each having refused to grant either a divorce.

Leigh appeared with Robert Taylor, Lionel Barrymore and Maureen O'Sullivan in A Yank at Oxford (1938), the first of her films to receive attention in the United States. During production she developed a reputation for being difficult and unreasonable, and Korda instructed her agent to warn her that her option would not be renewed if her behaviour did not improve.[14] Her next role was in St. Martin's Lane (1938) with Charles Laughton.


Achieving international success

Olivier had been attempting to broaden his film career; despite his success in Britain, he was not well known in the United States and earlier attempts to introduce him to the American market had failed. Offered the role of Heathcliff in Samuel Goldwyn's production of Wuthering Heights (1939), he travelled to Hollywood, leaving Leigh in London. Goldwyn and the film's director, William Wyler, offered Leigh the secondary role of Isabella, but she refused it, saying she would only play Cathy, a role already assigned to Merle Oberon.[15]

Hollywood was in the midst of a widely publicised search to find an actress to portray Scarlett O'Hara in David O. Selznick's production of Gone with the Wind (1939). Leigh's American agent was the London representative of the Myron Selznick Agency (Myron was David's brother), and in February 1938, she asked that her name be placed in consideration for the role of Scarlett. That month, David Selznick watched her in Fire Over England and A Yank at Oxford, and from that time she became a serious contender for the part. Between February and August, Selznick screened all of her English pictures, and by August he was in negotiation with producer Alexander Korda, to whom Leigh was under contract, for her services later that year. On October 18, Selznick wrote in a confidential memo to director George Cukor, "I am still hoping against hope for that new girl."[16] Leigh travelled to Los Angeles, ostensibly to be with Olivier. When Myron Selznick, who also represented Olivier, met Leigh, he felt that she possessed the qualities his brother David O. Selznick was searching for. Myron Selznick took Leigh and Olivier to the set where the burning of the Atlanta Depot scene was being filmed, and introduced Leigh. The following day, Leigh read a scene for Selznick, who organised a screen test and wrote to his wife, "She's the Scarlett dark horse and looks damn good. Not for anyone's ear but your own: it's narrowed down to Paulette Goddard, Jean Arthur, Joan Bennett and Vivien Leigh". The director George Cukor concurred and praised the "incredible wildness" of Leigh, who was given the part soon after.[17]

Filming proved difficult for Leigh; Cukor was dismissed and replaced by Victor Fleming, with whom Leigh frequently quarrelled. She and Olivia de Havilland secretly met with Cukor at night and on weekends for his advice about how they should play their parts. She befriended Clark Gable, his wife Carole Lombard and de Havilland, but she clashed with Leslie Howard, with whom she was required to play several emotional scenes. Adding to her distress, she was sometimes required to work seven days a week, often late into the night, and she missed Olivier, who was working in New York. She wrote to Leigh Holman, "I loathe Hollywood.... I will never get used to this - how I hate film acting."[18]

In 2006, de Havilland responded to claims of Leigh's manic behaviour during filming Gone with the Wind, published in a biography of Laurence Olivier. She defended Leigh, saying, "Vivien was impeccably professional, impeccably disciplined on Gone with the Wind. She had two great concerns: doing her best work in an extremely difficult role and being separated from Larry [Olivier], who was in New York."[19]

Gone with the Wind brought Leigh immediate attention and fame, but she was quoted as saying, "I'm not a film star - I'm an actress. Being a film star - just a film star - is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity. Actresses go on for a long time and there are always marvellous parts to play."[20] Among the ten Academy Awards won by Gone with the Wind was a Best Actress award for Leigh, who also won a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress.


Marriage and joint projects

In February 1940, Jill Esmond agreed to divorce Olivier, and Holman also agreed to divorce Leigh, although they maintained a strong friendship for the rest of Leigh's life. Esmond was granted custody of Tarquin, her son with Olivier, and Holman was granted custody of Suzanne, his daughter with Leigh. On August 30 Olivier and Leigh were married in Santa Barbara, California, in a ceremony attended only by their witnesses, Katharine Hepburn and Garson Kanin.

Leigh hoped to star with Olivier and made a screentest for Rebecca, which was to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock with Olivier in the leading role, but after viewing her screentest Selznick noted that "she doesn't seem right as to sincerity or age or innocence," a view shared by Hitchcock, and Leigh's mentor, George Cukor.[21] Selznick also observed that she had shown no enthusiasm for the part until Olivier had been confirmed as the lead actor, and subsequently cast Joan Fontaine. He also refused to allow her to join Olivier in Pride and Prejudice (1940), and Greer Garson took the part Leigh had envisioned for herself. Waterloo Bridge (1940) was to have starred Olivier and Leigh; however, Selznick replaced Olivier with Robert Taylor, then at the peak of his success as one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's most popular male stars. Leigh's top billing reflected her status in Hollywood, and despite her reluctance to participate without Olivier, the film not only proved to be popular with audiences and critics, but it also became her favorite film.

She and Olivier mounted a stage production of Romeo and Juliet for Broadway. The New York press publicized the adulterous nature that had marked the beginning of Olivier and Leigh's relationship, and questioned their ethics in not returning to England to help with the war effort; and critics were hostile in their assessment of the production. Brooks Atkinson for the New York Times wrote, "Although Miss Leigh and Mr. Olivier are handsome young people they hardly act their parts at all."[22] While most of the blame was attributed to Olivier's acting and direction, Leigh was also criticised, with Bernard Grebanier commenting on the "thin, shopgirl quality of Miss Leigh's voice." The couple had invested almost their entire savings into the project, and its failure was a financial disaster for them.[23]

They filmed That Hamilton Woman (1941) with Olivier as Horatio Nelson and Leigh as Emma Hamilton. With Britain engaged in World War II, it was one of several Hollywood films made with the aim of arousing a pro-British sentiment among American audiences. The film was popular in the United States and an outstanding success in the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill arranged a screening for a party that included Franklin D. Roosevelt and on its conclusion addressed the group, saying, "Gentlemen, I thought this film would interest you, showing great events similar to those in which you have just been taking part." The Oliviers remained favourites of Churchill, attending dinners and occasions at his request for the rest of his life, and of Leigh he was quoted as saying, "By Jove, she's a clinker."[24]

The Oliviers returned to England, and Leigh toured through North Africa in 1943, performing for troops before falling ill with a persistent cough and fevers. In 1944 she was diagnosed as having tuberculosis in her left lung, but after spending several weeks in hospital, she appeared to be cured. In spring she was filming Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) when she discovered she was pregnant, but suffered a miscarriage. She fell into a deep depression which reached its nadir when she turned on Olivier, verbally and physically attacking him until she fell to the floor sobbing. This was the first of many major breakdowns related to bipolar disorder. Olivier came to recognise the symptoms of an impending episode - several days of hyperactivity followed by a period of depression and an explosive breakdown, after which Leigh would have no memory of the event, but would be acutely embarrassed and remorseful.[25]

She was well enough to resume acting in 1946, in a successful London production of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, but her films of this period, Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) and Anna Karenina (1948), were not great successes.

In 1947 Olivier was knighted, and Leigh accompanied him to Buckingham Palace for the investiture. She became Lady Olivier, a title she continued to use after their divorce, until she died.

By 1948 Olivier was on the Board of Directors for the Old Vic Theatre, and he and Leigh embarked on a tour of Australia and New Zealand to raise funds for the theatre. During their six-month tour, Olivier performed Richard III and also performed with Leigh in The School for Scandal and The Skin of Our Teeth. The tour was an outstanding success, and although Leigh was plagued with insomnia and allowed her understudy to replace her for a week while she was ill, she generally withstood the demands placed upon her, with Olivier noting her ability to "charm the press." Members of the company later recalled several quarrels between the couple, the most dramatic occurring in Christchurch when Leigh refused to go onstage. Olivier slapped her face, and Leigh slapped him in return and swore at him before she made her way to the stage. By the end of the tour, both were exhausted and ill, and Olivier told a journalist, "You may not know it, but you are talking to a couple of walking corpses." Later he would comment that he "lost Vivien" in Australia.[26]

The success of the tour encouraged the Oliviers to make their first West End appearance together, performing the same works with one addition, Antigone, included at Leigh's insistence because she wished to play a role in a tragedy.


Leigh next sought the role of Blanche DuBois in the West End stage production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, and was cast after Williams and the play's producer Irene Mayer Selznick saw her in the The School for Scandal and Antigone, and Olivier was contracted to direct. Containing a rape scene and references to promiscuity and homosexuality, the play was destined to be controversial, and the media discussion about its suitability added to Leigh's anxiety, but she believed strongly in the importance of the work. J. B. Priestley denounced the play and Leigh's performance, and the critic Kenneth Tynan commented that Leigh was badly miscast because British actors were "too well-bred to emote effectively on stage". Olivier and Leigh were chagrined that part of the commercial success of the play lay in audience members attending to see what they believed would be a salacious and sensationalist story, rather than the Greek tragedy that they envisioned, but the play also had strong supporters,[27] among them Noël Coward who described Leigh as "magnificent."[28]

After 326 performances, Leigh finished her run; however, she was soon engaged for the film version. Her irreverent and often bawdy sense of humour allowed her to establish a rapport with her co-star Marlon Brando, but she had difficulty with the director Elia Kazan, who did not hold her in high regard as an actress. He later commented that "she had a small talent," but as work progressed, he became "full of admiration" for "the greatest determination to excel of any actress I've known. She'd have crawled over broken glass if she thought it would help her performance." Leigh found the role gruelling and commented to the Los Angeles Times, "I had nine months in the theatre of Blanche DuBois. Now she's in command of me."[29] The film won glowing reviews for her, and she won a second Academy Award for Best Actress, a BAFTA Award and a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. Tennessee Williams commented that Leigh brought to the role "everything that I intended, and much that I had never dreamed of," but in later years, Leigh would say that playing Blanche DuBois "tipped me over into madness."[30]


Continuing illness

In 1951, Leigh and Olivier performed two plays about Cleopatra, William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, alternating the play each night and winning good reviews. They took the productions to New York, where they performed a season at the Ziegfeld Theatre into 1952. The reviews there were also mostly positive, but the critic Kenneth Tynan angered them when he suggested that Leigh's was a mediocre talent which forced Olivier to compromise his own. Tynan's diatribe almost precipitated another collapse; Leigh, terrified of failure and intent on achieving greatness, dwelt on his comments, while ignoring the positive reviews of other critics.[31]

In January 1953, Leigh travelled to Ceylon to film Elephant Walk with Peter Finch. Shortly after filming commenced, she suffered a breakdown, and Paramount Studios replaced her with Elizabeth Taylor. Olivier returned her to their home in England, where between periods of incoherence, Leigh told him that she was in love with Finch, and had been having an affair with him. She gradually recovered over a period of several months. As a result of this episode, many of the Oliviers' friends learned of her problems. David Niven said she had been "quite, quite mad", and in his diary Noel Coward expressed surprise that "things had been bad and getting worse since 1948 or thereabouts."[32]


Leigh recovered sufficiently to play The Sleeping Prince with Olivier in 1953, and in 1955 they performed a season at Stratford-upon-Avon in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Macbeth and Titus Andronicus. They played to capacity houses and attracted generally good reviews, Leigh's health seemingly stable. Noël Coward was enjoying success with the play South Sea Bubble, with Leigh in the lead role, but she became pregnant and withdrew from the production. Several weeks later, she miscarried and entered a period of depression that lasted for months. She joined Olivier for a European tour with Titus Andronicus, but the tour was marred by Leigh's frequent outbursts against Olivier and other members of the company. After their return to London, her former husband Leigh Holman, who continued to exert a strong influence over her, stayed with the Oliviers and helped calm her.

In 1958, considering her marriage to be over, Leigh began a relationship with the actor Jack Merivale, who knew of Leigh's medical condition and assured Olivier he would care for her. She achieved a success in 1959 with the Noël Coward comedy Look After Lulu, with The Times critic describing her as "beautiful, delectably cool and matter of fact, she is mistress of every situation."[33]

In 1960, she and Olivier divorced, and Olivier married the actress Joan Plowright. In his autobiography he discussed the years of problems they had experienced because of Leigh's illness, writing, "Throughout her possession by that uncannily evil monster, manic depression, with its deadly ever-tightening spirals, she retained her own individual canniness - an ability to disguise her true mental condition from almost all except me, for whom she could hardly be expected to take the trouble."[34]


Final years and death

Merivale proved to be a stable influence for Leigh, but despite her apparent contentment she was quoted by Radie Harris as confiding that she "would rather have lived a short life with Larry [Olivier] than face a long one without him".[35] Her first husband, Leigh Holman, also spent considerable time with her. Merivale joined her for a tour of Australia, New Zealand and Latin America that lasted from July 1961 until May 1962, and Leigh enjoyed positive reviews without Olivier sharing the spotlight with her. Though she was still beset by bouts of depression, she continued to work in the theatre and in 1963 won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her role in the Broadway musical Tovarich. She also appeared in the films The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961) and Ship of Fools (1965).[36]

In May 1967, she was rehearsing to appear with Michael Redgrave in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance when she became ill with tuberculosis but, after resting for several weeks, seemed to be recovering. On the night of July 7, Merivale left her as usual, to perform in a play, and returned home around midnight to find her asleep. About thirty minutes later (by now July 8), he returned to the bedroom and discovered her body on the floor.[37] She had been attempting to walk to the bathroom, and as her lungs filled with liquid, she had collapsed.[38] Merivale contacted Olivier, who was receiving treatment for prostate cancer in a nearby hospital. In his autobiography, Olivier described his "grievous anguish" as he immediately travelled to Leigh's residence, to find that Merivale had moved her body onto the bed. Olivier paid his respects, and "stood and prayed for forgiveness for all the evils that had sprung up between us",[39] before helping Merivale make funeral arrangements.

She was cremated, and her ashes were scattered on the lake at her home, Tickerage Mill, near Blackboys, East Sussex, England. A memorial service was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields, with a final tribute read by John Gielgud. In the United States, she became the first actress honoured by "The Friends of the Libraries at the University of Southern California". The ceremony was conducted as a memorial service, with selections from her films shown and tributes provided by such associates as George Cukor.[40]


Critical comments

Vivien Leigh was considered one of the most beautiful actresses of her day, and her directors emphasised this in most of her films. When asked if she believed her beauty had been a handicap, she said, "people think that if you look fairly reasonable, you can't possibly act, and as I only care about acting, I think beauty can be a great handicap, if you really want to look like the part you're playing, which isn't necessarily like you."[41]

George Cukor commented that Leigh was a "consummate actress, hampered by beauty",[42] and Laurence Olivier said that critics should "give her credit for being an actress and not go on forever letting their judgements be distorted by her great beauty."[43] Garson Kanin shared their viewpoint and described Leigh as "a stunner whose ravishing beauty often tended to obscure her staggering achievements as an actress. Great beauties are infrequently great actresses ?- simply because they don't need to be. Vivien was different; ambitious, persevering, serious, often inspired."[44]

Leigh explained that she played "as many different parts as possible" in an attempt to learn her craft and to dispel prejudice about her abilities. She believed that comedy was more difficult to play than drama because it required more precise timing, and said that more emphasis should be placed upon comedy as part of an actor's training. Nearing the end of her career, which ranged from Noël Coward comedies to Shakespearean tragedies, she observed, "It's much easier to make people cry than to make them laugh."[45]

Her early performances brought her immediate success in Britain, but she remained largely unknown in other parts of the world until the release of Gone with the Wind. In December 1939 the New York Times wrote, "Miss Leigh's Scarlett has vindicated the absurd talent quest that indirectly turned her up. She is so perfectly designed for the part by art and nature that any other actress in the role would be inconceivable",[46] and as her fame escalated, she was featured on the cover of Time Magazine as Scarlett. In 1969 critic Andrew Sarris commented that the success of the film had been largely due to "the inspired casting" of Leigh,[47] and in 1998 wrote that "she lives in our minds and memories as a dynamic force rather than as a static presence."[48] Leonard Maltin described the film as one of the all-time greats, writing in 1998 that Leigh "brilliantly played" her role.[49]

Her performance in the West End production of A Streetcar Named Desire, described by the theatre writer Phyllis Hartnoll as "proof of greater powers as an actress than she had hitherto shown", led to a lengthy period during which she was considered one of the finest actresses in British theatre.[50] Discussing the subsequent film version, Pauline Kael wrote that Leigh and Marlon Brando gave "two of the greatest performances ever put on film" and that Leigh's was "one of those rare performances that can truly be said to evoke both fear and pity."[51]

Kenneth Tynan ridiculed Leigh's performance opposite Olivier in the 1955 production of Titus Andronicus, commenting that she "receives the news that she is about to be ravished on her husband's corpse with little more than the mild annoyance of one who would have preferred foam rubber."[52] He was one of several critics to react negatively to her reinterpretation of Lady Macbeth in 1955, saying that her performance was insubstantial and lacked the necessary fury demanded of the role; however, after her death he revised his opinion, describing his earlier criticism as "one of the worst errors of judgement" he had ever made. He came to believe that Leigh's interpretation, in which Lady Macbeth uses her sexual allure to keep Macbeth enthralled, "made more sense ... than the usual battle-axe" portrayal of the character. In a survey of theatre critics conducted shortly after Leigh's death, several named it as one of her greatest achievements in theatre.[53]

In 1969, a plaque to Leigh was placed in the actors' church, St Paul's, Covent Garden, and in 1985 a portrait of her was included in a series of postage stamps, along with Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Chaplin, Peter Sellers and David Niven to commemorate "British Film Year".[54]

The British Library in London purchased the papers of Laurence Olivier from his estate in 1999. Known as The Laurence Olivier Archive, the collection includes many of Vivien Leigh's personal papers, including numerous letters written by her to Olivier. The papers of Vivien Leigh, including letters, photographs, contracts and diaries, are owned by her daughter, Mrs Suzanne Farrington. In 1994 the National Library of Australia purchased a photograph album, monogrammed "L & V O" and believed to have belonged to the Oliviers, containing 573 photographs of the couple during their 1948 tour of Australia. It is now held as part of the record of the history of the performing arts in Australia.[55]

Ike Turner
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Background information

Birth name Ike Wister Turner
Born November 5, 1931 (1931-11-05) (age 76)
Origin Clarksdale, Mississippi, U.S.
Genre(s) R&B
Funk
Soul-blues
Memphis blues
Rock and roll
Occupation(s) musician
Instrument(s) Guitar
Piano
Years active 1951-present
Associated
acts Tina Turner
Website iketurner.com

Ike Turner (born Ike Wister Turner on November 5, 1931 in Clarksdale, Mississippi) is an African American musician, bandleader, talent scout and record producer, best known for his work with his former wife Tina Turner as one half of the Ike & Tina Turner duo. Spanning a career that has lasted half a century, Ike's repertoire has included blues, soul, rock and funk. Alongside his former wife, he was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991 and in 2001 was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.





Biography

Early life and career

Turner was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi on November 5, 1931, to Beatrice Cushenberry and Izear Luster Turner. Ike got his first taste of pleasing an audience at the age of eight working at the local Clarksdale radio station, WROX, located in the Alcazar Hotel in downtown Clarksdale. A man in charge of the station put Turner to work as he watched the record turntables. Said Turner:

" I got a job driving the elevator in the Alcazar and the radio station was on the second floor. It was very exciting to me, a radio station. I'd run up to the second floor and look through the window at the guy spinning records. He saw me and tole me to come in and showed me how to 'hold a record.' I'd sit there and hold it until the one playing stopped, then I'd turn a knob and the one I was holding would play. Next thing I know, he was going across the street for coffee and leaving me in there alone. I was only eight. That was the beginning of my thing with music. "

Turner was soon carrying amplifiers for blues singer Robert Nighthawk, who often played live on WROX. Ike was mesmerized by Nighthawk's playing, but nothing could equal the experience of hearing Pinetop Perkins on piano for the first time. Growing up, his idol Pinetop Perkins helped teach the young Ike to play boogie-woogie on the piano. Ike soon was enamored of other blues artists such as Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), Elmore James, Muddy Waters and Little Walter[1].

Many sources state Turner's real name to be "Izear Luster Turner, Jr." however, in his autobiography Takin' Back My Name, it is stated as "Ike Wister Turner." In the book, Turner explains about this confusion. His father, Izear Luster Turner, was a minister for the local church. Turner had thought he was named Izear Luster Turner, Jr. after his father, until he found out that his name was registered as Ike Wister Turner while applying for his first passport. He never got to discover the origin of his name, as by the time he discovered it, his parents were both dead.


Music career

Ike Turner's actual music career began in earnest in the late-1940s where he formed a group whom he christened The Kings of Rhythm. In 1951, the band recorded what historians have debated as "the first rock and roll record" with "Rocket 88", listed on the charts as Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats. Brenston was both the band's saxophonist and the leading vocalist of the song and Turner was the original writer though credits initially stated that Brenston had written it also. The song was one of the first examples of guitar distortion, which happened by accident when one of the amplifiers dropped before the recording. Ike and the Kings of Rhythm settled into local fame in St. Louis where the band locally recorded for a St. Louis label and even appeared on local television shows. Throughout this early period, Turner became a recording scout and A&R man for independent record companies including Sun Records - where "Rocket 88" was recorded at, helping the likes of Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Elmore James and Otis Rush get signed. He also became a sideman playing guitar for these blues acts and more. Musically, Turner was known for his hard-hitting guitar style. He was known to put the whammy bar of his Fender Stratocaster to frequent use.

Turner's music career changed drastically after meeting a teenage singer from Nutbush, Tennessee named Anna Mae Bullock, who demandingly grabbed a microphone during a singing session at one of St. Louis' nightspots and sung a BB King song in her now-trademark throated raspy vocals. Bullock's performance impressed Ike so much he allowed Anna to join his band as a background singer. However within a year, Ike's plans for Bullock changed after Anna recorded what he originally stated was a demo for a song that was to be sung by a male vocalist. After hearing her vocals, he let it be released under an independent label and in the process changed the name of the singer from Anna Mae Bullock to Tina Turner - naming her after Sheena, and the name of the band to the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. That song, "A Fool In Love", became a national hit reaching the top three of the R&B charts becoming a top thirty pop hit in the process in early 1960. From then until 1976, Ike and Tina Turner became one of the most explosive duos in rock & soul music. The creation of the revue also led to the soul revues of the 1960s. Inspired by Ray Charles, Turner created a trio of sexy background singers and dancers who were named The Ikettes who often had their moves choreographed by Tina and Ike. The Turners eventually scored several hit singles including "It's Gonna Work Out Fine", "River Deep - Mountain High", "I Want To Take You Higher", "Proud Mary" and "Nutbush City Limits" in between thirteen years.

The success the duo contributed eventually led to the creation of the Los Angeles-based Bolic Sounds studio, founded by Ike. However, after Tina abruptly left Ike after a violent altercation in 1976, Ike struggled to find success and after releasing two failed solo albums found himself facing drug and weapons charges throughout the 1980s and 1990s. But shortly after Ike's release from prison in 1993, the musician went back on the road and back into recording music, which has continued to this day. In 2001, Ike released the Grammy-nominated Here & Now album. Three years later, he was awarded with an "Heroes Award" from the Memphis charter of NARAS. In 2005, he appeared on the Gorillaz' album, Demon Days, playing piano on the track, "Every Planet We Reach Is Dead". He played live with the band on the band's world tour to that particular song. In 2007, Ike won his first solo Grammy in the Best Traditional Blues Album category for the album, Risin' With the Blues. A collaboration between Turner and the rock band, The Black Keys, by Gorillaz' producer Danger Mouse, is expected for a release next year.


Personal life

Turner is said to have been married 14 times but he has only been known to have married four times publicly. Turner's first marriage was to Lorraine Taylor, who had two sons with Ike. Although their marriage has been debated, it's believed Ike married Tina in 1962 due to worries over being sued for child support and alimony payments by Taylor. Ike and Tina married in Tijuana, Mexico and Tina had a son with Ike. However, their marriage was overshadowed by Ike's constant abuse towards her. Eventually, Tina left him after an especially violent dispute escalated while riding to a hotel before a show in Dallas in 1976. Tina later filed for divorce and it was finalized in 1978 with Ike keeping every asset attained during the marriage with the obvious exception of her given stage name. Ike openly cheated on Tina with other women, one of which was former Ikette Ann Thomas, whom he had a baby by and later married in 1981. In 1995, he married yet another Ikette, Jeanette Bazzell. Ike has four known children: sons Ike Jr., Michael and Ronald and daughter Mia.[2]

Turner suffered a brush with the law in the mid-1980s when he was convicted of drug-related charges and sentenced to several years in a California state prison. Unfortunately Turner was still in prison pleading parole when he and Tina were inducted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, which Tina accepted on his behalf.

In 2001, Turner's long-awaited autobiography, Takin' Back My Name (ISBN 1-85227-850-1), was published. In Tina Turner's 1986 autobiography I, Tina, later filmed as What's Love Got to Do with It?, Tina accused Ike of violent spousal abuse, which Ike repeatedly denied for many years. However, in his 2001 autobiography Ike admitted, Sure, I've slapped Tina... There have been times when I punched her to the ground without thinking. But I never beat her.

Turner has attributed many problems off the stage to his drug and alcohol addiction and intense use of cocaine, resulting in his abusive behavior and relationship with his wife and children. Since being released from prison in 1993, Turner has maintained sobriety and continues playing music.

In an October 17, 2007 appearance on the phone with Howard Stern, Ike claimed he and Tina Turner were never actually married, though he didn't explain why they shared the same last name.

Elke Sommer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Birth name Elke Schletz
Born November 5, 1940 (1940-11-05) (age 67)
Berlin, Germany
Spouse(s) Joe Hyams (1964-11-19-1981) (divorced)
Wolf Walther (1993-08-29 - present)
[show]Awards
Golden Globe Awards
Most Promising Newcomer Actress
1963 The Prize

Elke Sommer (born 5 November 1940) is a German born actress, entertainer, and artist.

Sommer was born as Baroness Elke Schletz in Berlin. She started appearing in films in Italy in the late 1950s. She quickly became a noted sex symbol and moved to Hollywood in the early 1960s.

She became one of the most popular pin-up girls of the time, and posed for several pictorials in Playboy Magazine.

She became one of the top movie actresses of the 1960s and made 99 movie and television appearances between 1959 and 2005, including A Shot in the Dark (1964) with Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, The Art of Love (1965) with James Garner and Dick Van Dyke, The Oscar (1966) with Stephen Boyd, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! (1966) with Bob Hope, the Bulldog Drummond extravaganza Deadlier Than the Male (1966), and The Wrecking Crew (1969) with Dean Martin; Sommer was the leading lady in each of these films.

In 1964 she won the Golden Globe Awards as Most Promising Newcomer Actress for The Prize , a film she co-starred with Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson.

She also performed as a singer, making several LP records.


In 1975, Peter Rogers cast her in Carry On Behind as the Russian Professor Vrooshka. She became the Carry On's highest paid performer, at £30,000 (a honour shared with Phil Silvers for Follow That Camel).

While continuing to act sometimes, since the 1990s she has concentrated on painting. As an actress she worked in half a dozen countries learning the language (she speaks seven different languages) and storing up images which she would later express on canvas. Her artwork shows strong influence from Marc Chagall.

As of 2004, she lives in Los Angeles, California.

Art Garfunkel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arthur Ira Garfunkel (born November 5, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter and actor, best known as half of the folk duo Simon and Garfunkel.




Early life

Arthur Ira Garfunkel was born in Forest Hills, Queens, in New York City. He is of Romanian Jewish ancestry.

He met his future singing partner, Paul Simon, in the sixth grade. Between 1956 and 1962, the two had performed together as Tom & Jerry. Garfunkel ("Tom Graph") chose his nickname because he liked to track, or "graph" hits, on the pop charts. Garfunkel attended Columbia University in the early sixties, where he sang with the Kingsmen, an all-male a cappella group, and was a Brother in the Alpha Epsilon Pi Fraternity. In 1962, Garfunkel earned a Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in art history, followed by a Master's degree in mathematics.


Simon and Garfunkel

In 1963 he and Simon reformed their duo under their own names as Simon and Garfunkel and released their first album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. on Columbia Records in October 1964. It was not a critical success, and the duo subsequently split again. The next year, producer Tom Wilson lifted the song "The Sound of Silence" from the record, dubbed an electric backing onto it, and released it as a single that went to #1 on the Billboard pop charts. Simon and Garfunkel reunited and went on to become two of the most popular artists of the 1960s, releasing five studio albums. Citing personal differences and divergence in career interests, they split following the release of their most critically acclaimed album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, in 1970.


Solo career

After attending Leicester university, in the 1970s, Garfunkel released several solo albums. He scored hits with "I Only Have Eyes For You." (a 1934 song written by Harry Warren [1]) and "Bright Eyes" (both British #1 hit singles), and "All I Know" (#9 in the United States). A version of "Bright Eyes" also appeared in the movie (based on the famous novel) Watership Down. Garfunkel briefly reunited with Paul Simon in the 1975 hit "My Little Town".


During this time, he also starred in major motion pictures Catch-22 and Carnal Knowledge (1971).

Following disappointing sales of his 1981 album Scissors Cut, Garfunkel reunited with Paul Simon for The Concert in Central Park and a world tour. They had disagreements during the tour, and Simon excluded Garfunkel's voice from a new album, initially slated to be a Simon and Garfunkel album, but released as a Paul Simon solo album (Hearts and Bones). Garfunkel then left the music scene until his 1988 album, Lefty and later 1993's Up 'til Now, neither of which received significant critical or commercial success. His live 1996 concert Across America, recorded at the registry hall on Ellis Island features musical guests James Taylor, Garfunkel's wife, Kim, and his son James [2].

Garfunkel also performed the theme song for the 1991 television series, "Brooklyn Bridge", and "The Ballad of Buster Baxter" for a 1998 episode of the PBS Kids cartoon Arthur.


Recent events

In 2003, Garfunkel made his debut as a songwriter on his well-received Everything Waits to Be Noticed album. Teaming up with singer-songwriters Maia Sharp and Buddy Mondlock, the album contained several songs whose origins were poems penned by Garfunkel. The album is recognized as his first effort at songwriting since his teenage years with Tom and Jerry.

In 2003, Simon and Garfunkel reunited again for a successful world tour that extended into 2004. Also in early 2004, he was arrested for possession of cannabis, and again in August 2005.[3] In 2005, his song "Sometimes When I'm Dreaming" from The Art Garfunkel Album (1984) (written by Mike Batt) was re-recorded by ex-ABBA singer Agnetha Fältskog on her album My Colouring Book.

In 2006, Garfunkel signed with Rhino Records (revived Atco Records), and his first Rhino/Atco album Some Enchanted Evening was released in America on January 30, 2007.[4] In late February 2007 during a German television interview to promote the new album, he expressed interest in reuniting with Paul Simon on a new Simon and Garfunkel album.


Trivia


Art Garfunkel's website contains a year-by-year listing of every book he has read since 1968.
From 1983 to 1997, Garfunkel walked across America, taking 40 excursions to complete the route from New York City to the Pacific coast of Washington.

Sam Shepard
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born November 5, 1943 (1943-11-05) (age 64)
Fort Sheridan, Illinois

Sam Shepard (born November 5, 1943) is an American artist who has worked as an award-winning playwright, writer and actor. His many written works are known for[citation needed] being frank and often absurd, as well as for having an authentic sense of the style and sensibility of the gritty modern American west. He is an actor of the stage and motion pictures; a director of stage and film; author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs; and a musician.




Biography

Early life

Shepard was born Samuel Shepard Rogers VII in Fort Sheridan, Illinois and worked on a ranch as a teenager. His father, Samuel Shepard Rogers VI, was a teacher, farmer and served in the Air Force as a bomber pilot during World War II;[1] his mother, Jane Elaine (née Schook) was a teacher and a native of Chicago.[2] After high school Shepard briefly attended college, but dropped out to join a traveling theater group. He avoided the draft during the Vietnam-era by claiming to be a heroin addict. The year 1963 found him working as a busboy in Greenwich Village. During this time Shepard was using illicit drugs. He was also a drummer for the eccentric late 1960s rock band Holy Modal Rounders.


Career

Shepard became very much involved in New York's off-off-Broadway theater scene, beginning at the age of nineteen. Although his plays were staged at several off-off-Broadway venues, he was most closely connected with Theatre Genesis, housed at St. Mark's Church in the East Village. He acted occasionally in those days, but his interests were almost strictly confined to writing, up until the late 1970s. Most of his writing was for the stage, but he had early screen-writing credits for Me and My Brother (1968) and Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970). His early science-fiction play, The Unseen Hand, influenced Richard O'Brien's Rocky Horror Show. After three years of living in England, in 1976 Shepard relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area and was named playwright in residence at the Magic Theatre where many of his works received their premier productions. Notable work includes Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class in 1978, True West in 1980 and A Lie of the Mind in 1985. He also continued with his collaboration with Bob Dylan that started with the surrealist film Renaldo and Clara on an epic, 11 minute song entitled "Brownsville Girl", included on the 1986 Knocked Out Loaded album and later compilations.

Shepard began his acting career in earnest when he was cast as the handsome but doomed land baron in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), opposite Richard Gere and Brooke Adams. This led to other important films and roles, most notably his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, earning him an Oscar nomination in 1984. By 1986, one of his plays, Fool for Love, was being made into a film directed by Robert Altman; his play A Lie of the Mind was on Broadway with an all-star cast including Harvey Keitel and Geraldine Page; he was living with Jessica Lange; and he was working steadily as a film actor -- all of which put him on the cover of Newsweek magazine. Earlier in his life, during the rebellion of the 1960s, Shepard had vowed famously, "I never want to be on the cover of Newsweek." Things had changed.

Throughout the years, Shepard has done a considerable amount of teaching on playwriting and other aspects of theatre. His classes and seminars have occurred at various theatre workshops, festivals, and universities. During the 1970s he served a stint as a Regents Professor at the University of California, Davis.

In 1986, Shepard was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 2000, Shepard decided to repay a debt of gratitude to the Magic Theatre by staging his play The Late Henry Moss as a benefit in San Francisco. The cast included Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, and Cheech Marin. The limited, three-month run was sold out.

In 2007, Shepard was featured playing banjo on Patti Smith's cover of Nirvana's song, Smells Like Teen Spirit, on her album Twelve.

Although many artists have had an influence on Shepard's work, one of the most significant has been actor-director Joseph Chaikin, a veteran of the Living Theatre and founder of a group called the Open Theatre. The two have often worked together on various projects, and Shepard acknowledges that Chaikin has been a valuable mentor.


Shepard as a director

At the beginning of his playwriting career, Shepard did not direct his own plays. His earliest plays were directed by a number of different directors but most frequently by Ralph Cook, the founder of Theatre Genesis. Later, in San Francisco, Shepard formed a successful playwright-director relationship with Robert Woodruff, who directed the premiere of Buried Child (1978), among other plays. During the 1970s, though, Shepard decided that his vision of his plays required that he should direct them himself. He has since directed many of his own plays, but with a few rare exceptions, he has not directed plays by other playwrights. He has also directed two films but apparently does not see film direction as a major interest.


Personal life

When Shepard first arrived in New York, he roomed with Charlie Mingus, Jr., a friend of his from high school and son of the famous jazz musician. Then he lived with actress Joyce Aaron. He later married actress O-Lan Jones (born O-Lan Johnson, alias O-Lan Johnson Dark, alias O-Lan Barna) from 1969 to 1984, with whom he has one son, Jesse Mojo Shepard (born 1970). After the end of his relationship with the singer and musician Patti Smith, Shepard met Oscar-winning actress Jessica Lange on the set of a movie they both starred in, Frances. He moved in with her in 1983, and they have been together ever since. They have two children, Hannah Jane (born 1985) and Samuel Walker Shepard (born 1987). In 2005 Jesse Shepard wrote a book of short stories which was published in San Francisco, and his father appeared together with him at a reading to introduce the book.

Although he played a famous pilot in The Right Stuff and went through an airliner crash in the film Voyager (1992), Shepard is known for his aversion to flying. According to one account, he vowed never to fly again after a very rocky trip on an airliner coming back from Mexico in the '60's. However, he allowed the real Chuck Yeager to take him up in a jet plane in 1984, when he was preparing for his role as Yeager in The Right Stuff.

Awards and honors

His play Buried Child received a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979.

For his portrayal of test pilot Chuck Yeager in the film The Right Stuff, Shepard was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1983.

In 1986, Shepard was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy in 1992.

In 1994 he was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. Of his more than forty-five plays, eleven of them have won Obie Awards. He was nominated for two Tony Awards for Buried Child in 1996, and for True West in 2000.

Tatum O'Neal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Birth name Tatum Beatrice O'Neal
Born November 5, 1963 (1963-11-05) (age 44)
Los Angeles, California, United States
Years active 1973 - present
Spouse(s) John McEnroe (1 August 1986 - 1992) (divorced) 3 children
[show]Awards
Academy Awards
Best Supporting Actress
1973 Paper Moon

Tatum Beatrice O'Neal (born November 5, 1963 in Los Angeles, California) is an Academy Award-winning American actress best known for her film work as a child actress in the 1970s. To this day, she remains the youngest actor ever (at the age of 10) to win an Oscar.



Biography

O'Neal was born into the motion picture family of actor Ryan O'Neal and actress Joanna Cook Moore. Her brother, Griffin, was born in 1964. In 1967 her parents divorced. Her father married actress Leigh Taylor-Young, the mother of her half-brother, Patrick (who was married to actress Rebecca DeMornay). She also has another half-brother, Redmond, from Ryan O'Neal's relationship with actress Farrah Fawcett. Tatum's mother died in 1997 of lung cancer at age 63 after a career in which she had appeared in such movies as Touch of Evil.


A Paper Life

In her autobiography called A Paper Life, Tatum O'Neal alleged that she had been molested by a male friend of her father. Tatum also alleges physical and emotional abuse from her father, much of which she attributes to drug use. She later said she was dragged to an opium-fueled orgy by Melanie Griffith when she was 12 years old. In the book, Tatum also details her own heroin addiction and its effects on her relationship with her children.


Academy Award as a child

In 1974, Tatum O'Neal became the youngest person ever to win an Oscar, a record that she still holds to this day. She won the Best Supporting Actress award for her performance in Paper Moon. O'Neal played the role of Addie Loggins, a child con artist being tutored by a Depression-era grifter played by her father, Ryan. She was 9 years old at the time she won the award.


Other roles

Other movies starring O'Neal include The Bad News Bears, Nickelodeon, International Velvet, and Little Darlings. Controversy arose as well around her underage nude scene opposite screen icon Richard Burton in the Canadian-made Circle of Two. She also starred as the title character in the Faerie Tale Theatre episode Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Her acting career took a backseat to her marriage to John McEnroe, the professional tennis player, for many years, but in 2005 she began a recurring role as Maggie Gavin on the firehouse drama series Rescue Me, portraying the unbalanced and lively sister of Tommy Gavin played by Denis Leary. O'Neal's character is married to a firefighter in her brother's firehouse.

In January 2006, she participated in the second season of ABC's reality series Dancing with the Stars but was the second contestant to be eliminated in the second round. She went on to do commentary for the series on Entertainment Tonight.

From 2006 to early 2007, Tatum starred as the vindictive and psychotic Blythe Hunter in the My Network TV prime-time drama Wicked Wicked Games. She appears opposite Nashawn Kearse and Vanessa L. Williams in the Liberty Artists feature film My Brother (2007).


Personal Life

O'Neal describes her upbringing as chaotic, with her mother battling drug and alcohol problems and neglecting the care of her and her brother Griffin, while her father was absentee and prone to abusive outburts of temper. After her parents divorced, Ryan O'Neal obtained custody and Tatum was exposed to his celebrity, bachelor lifestyle, as well as his temper.[1]

In 1986, O'Neal wed tennis superstar John McEnroe. No one from her family attended the ceremony. The couple had three children: Kevin, Sean, and Emily. The couple divorced in 1992. After the divorce, Tatum's drug problems re-emerged and she developed an addiction to heroin. As a result of her drug problems, McEnroe obtained custody of the children in 1998. [2]

Sue over the property
Did you know that heaven and hell are actually right next to each other? They are seperated by a big chain-link fence. Well, one day hell was having a big party and it got a little out of hand. God heard the ruckus and arrived to find his fence completely smashed by the wild partiers. He called the devil over and said "Look, Satan, you have to rebuild this fence." Satan agreed. The next day God noticed that the devil had completely rebuilt the fence...but it was 2 feet further into heaven than before.

"Satan!" beckoned God. "You have to take that fence down and put it back where it belongs!"

"Yeah? What if I don't?" replied the devil.

"I'll sue you if I have to," answered God.

"Sure," laughed Satan. "Where are you going to find a lawyer?"

UhOh, BioBob. Another lawyer joke, but I do love it, buddy. Thanks again for all the great background on famous folks.

So, Sam and Jessica are still together? Fond memories of Mountain Lake resort and having met them.

Until our Raggedy arrives, I was looking through our cache of Holly Cole songs. (miss BoGoWo)

Love this song, folks, and it's all done in a minor key.


If it takes forever I will wait for you
For a thousand summers I will wait for you
Till you're back beside me, till I'm holding you
Till I hear you sigh here in my arms

Anywhere you wander, anywhere you go
Every day remember how I love you so
In your heart believe what in my heart I know
That forevermore I'll wait for you

The clock will tick away the hours one by one
Then the time will come when all the waiting's done
The time when you return and find me here and run
Straight to my waiting arms

If it takes forever I will wait for you
For a thousand summers I will wait for you
Till you're here beside me, till I'm touching you
And forevermore sharing your love

Hi there, Letty!
Checkin' in now and then, nice seein' some charmin people on the air this fine autumn day!
Rock on Girl!

Welcome back, bigdice. Miss you and Urs as well. There's a picture in my head of sitting in a chair and watching some band "rock on". You paid the leader to kiss my hand, right? Still have all those pictures from the gathering. I look at them once in a while.

Me too, Letty, me too...

Good morning.

If I'd have been here last evening, Letty, I'd have added this one.

Miss Fitzsimmon went in swimmin'
Early one Sunday morn
Took a dip, heard a rip
And knew her suit was torn

Waited until the change of tide
Took all the water out
And when she could no longer hide
She began to shout


Hey, Show me the way to go home......................


Will Durant; Joel McCrea; Roy Rogers; Vivien Leigh, Ike Turner, Elke Sommer; Art Garfunkel, Sam Shepard; Tatum O'Neil

Well, Raggedy, your song makes me remember this one although the lyrics are a bit different from the parody that I recall.

Once I went in swimming where-ere

There were no women, down by the deep, blue se-e-ea,

Seeing no one there I hung my underwear upon a willow tree,

Dove into the water just-ust

Like pharao's daughter dove into ni-i-ile,

Someone saw me there and hooked my underwear

And left me with a smile.

Well, bigdice's observation made me a mite sad, but I recovered with that one.

Great collage again, PA, and Will Durant's book was the first one that I ever read on philosophy.

Wow! Nine great photo's today, gal. Thanks. Back in a bit, folks, with a song by the Son's of the Pioneers. Ah, that reminds me of Mr. Lee. "beedle" here on A2K.

Frankly, folks, I didn't know that Roy was a member of those son's.

Here's one from him and we'll dedicate this one to dys and Di.and also for my mom who loved them.

Ridin' Down The Canyon

When evening chores are over at the ranch house on the plains
And all I have to do is lay around,
I saddle up my pony and go ridin' down the trail
To watch the desert sun go down.

Ridin' down the canyon to watch the sun go down
A picture that no artist ere can paint.
White faced cattle lowing on the mountain side,
I hear a coyote calling for its mate.

Cactus plants are blooming, sage brush everywhere,
granite spires are standing all around,
I tell you folks it's heaven to go riding down the trail
When the desert sun goes down.

Artist: Sons Of The Pioneers
Song: Tumbling Tumbleweeds
Album: Rca Country Legends Buy Sons Of The Pioneers Sheet Music


I'm a roaming cowboy riding all day long,
Tumbleweeds around me sing their lonely song.
Nights underneath the prairie moon,
I ride along and sing this tune.

See them tumbling down
Pledging their love to the ground
Lonely but free I'll be found
Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.

Cares of the past are behind
Nowhere to go but I'll find
Just where the trail will wind
Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.

I know when night has gone
That a new world's born at dawn.

I'll keep rolling along
Deep in my heart is a song
Here on the range I belong
Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.

Artist: Sons Of The Pioneers
Song: Cool Water



All day I face the barren waste without the taste of water,
Cool water.
Old Dan and I with throats burned dry and souls that cry for water,
Cool water.

The night are cool and I'm a fool each stars a pool of water,
Cool water.
But with the dawn I'll wake and yawn and carry on to water,
Cool water.

(Chorus)
Keep a movin' Dan, don't you listen to him Dan, he's a devil not a man
and he spreads the burnin' sand with water.
Dan can't you see that big green tree where the waters runnin' free
and it's waiting there for me and you.
Water, cool water.

The shadows sway and seem to say tonight we pray for water,
Cool water.
And way up there He'll hear our prayer and show us where there's water,
Cool Water.

Dan's feet are sore he's yearning for just one thing more than water,
Cool water.
Like me, I guess, he'd like to rest where there's no quest for water,
Cool water.

Some damn good songs by those sons, Bob. We know that "Cool Water" is a reference to fata morgana. Thanks, Boston.

and another, folks.

Ole Faithful

Ole Faithful, we rode the range together
Ole Faithful, in ev'ry kind of weather
When your round up days are over
There'll be pastures white with clover
For you, Ole Faithful, pal o' mine.

Hurry up ole fellow
'Cause the moon is yellow to-night
Hurry up ole fellow
'Cause the moon is mellow and bright
There's a coyote howling to the moon above
So carry me back to the one I love
Hurry up ole fellow
'Cause we gotta get home to-night.