List of people and presidents that can actually in my opinion pretend to be Herb Vigran while I pretend to be Harrison Ford in my own Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Monday day scale part one.
This is a list of all presidents and people that were either born on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, or Mondays to be honest with you all.
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- Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He was previously the second vice president of the United States under John Adams and the first United States secretary of state under George Washington. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was a proponent of democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, motivating American colonists to break from the Kingdom of Great Britain and form a new nation. He produced formative documents and decisions at state, national, and international levels.He was born on a Saturday according to the Gregorian calendar!
- He enjoyed a humanistic school education. Madison completed his studies in 1771 with a Bachelor of Arts. He showed particular interest in the new ideas of the time, the Enlightenment, with which he dealt intensively. He became politically active at an early age. In 1776 he was elected to the Virginia Convention, which advocated independence and a constitution. During the American Revolution he campaigned for the colonial resistance movement against Great Britain in Virginia. Here he met the governor and later President Thomas Jefferson, with whom he became lifelong friends. In 1780, James Madison was elected to the Continental Congress, where he advocated for a strong central government that would help complete American liberation. The planter was instrumental in the preparations for the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, where he drafted the so-called "Virginia Plan" in May 1787.
In it, Madison advocated for a strong national central government that would guarantee personal freedoms, party diversity, and federal freedoms. With this model of a balanced party system that should lead to a mutual sharing of power, Madison founded the basic principle of the republican system of government in the USA. From 1789 to 1797, Madison represented Virginia in Congress. In 1794 he married Dolley Payne Todd. After supporting the presidential campaign of his friend Thomas Jefferson, Madison was appointed Secretary of State when he took office in 1801. In the election campaign of 1808, Madison himself was elected fourth president of the United States. Although he became embroiled in war with Great Britain on June 18, 1812, Madison was re-elected to a second term that same year.
The war with Great Britain was initially very disadvantageous for the USA. In 1814, Madison watched as the Capitol and White House were set ablaze by British troops. Nevertheless, the President was able to end the war with an advantageous peace agreement within the end of the year. A hugely popular leader, Madison left the office of president in March 1817. In the coming years he assisted Jefferson in planning the University of Virginia. He acted as an advisor to the next President James Monroe. In 1829, Madison officially returned to political life to attend the Virginia Constitutional Convention. He then withdrew into private life as a quiet observer of politics.
James Madison died on June 28, 1836 in Montpelier, Virginia.He was born on a Tuesday according to the Gregorian calendar! - His father, John Adams, served as the second president of the United States from 1797 to 1801. In 1779, at the age of 12, the young Adams accompanied his father to Europe. There the linguistically gifted boy supported the US embassy as a translator and secretary. When Adams enrolled at Harvard in 1785, he already had knowledge of Greek, Latin, French, Dutch and German. After studying law, he began working as a lawyer in Boston in 1790. At the same time, he gained a certain level of notoriety by writing political essays for the press in support of George Washington's administration. In 1793 the young Adams was sent to the Netherlands as a diplomat. On a diplomatic mission to London he met the American consulate's daughter Louisa Catherine Johnson, whom he married in 1797. In the same year Adams was sent as an envoy to Prussia.
Returning to the United States, he was elected to the Massachusetts Senate in 1801. In 1803 he was appointed to the US Senate, where he served until 1808. In 1809, Adams went on a diplomatic mission to Russia, where he was able to win over Tsar Alexander as a mediator in the American conflict with Great Britain. In 1812 he helped negotiate the peace treaty with Great Britain. From 1815 Adams worked as an ambassador in London. Two years later, he was appointed Secretary of State by President James Monroe. In complete agreement with the president, in this role until 1825 he contributed to raising the USA to an equal size with the European powers, giving them independent diplomacy and helping them make territorial gains. In this context, Adams was instrumental in the negotiations that led to the acquisition of Florida and the securing of Louisiana's western border. In 1823 he contributed to the development of the "Monroe Doctrine".
In 1824, Adams won the American presidential election to become the sixth president of the United States for one term from the following year. However, his policy of internal reform and national consolidation was largely unsuccessful due to opposition resistance. In the election campaign of 1828, John Quincy Adams was overwhelmingly defeated by Andrew Jackson, who succeeded him as president a year later. After a temporary withdrawal from political life, Adams was elected to the House of Representatives in 1831, where he served until his death in 1848. As an independent, he took up the demand for the abolition of slavery without joining the ranks of the abolitionists. Soon after, he suffered a stroke in the House of Representatives.
John Quincy Adams died on February 23, 1848 in Washington.He was actually born on Saturday, July 11, 1767! - Served as eighth President of the United States (1837-1841). He was one of the founders of the Democratic Party. He was the eighth Vice President of the United States (1833-1837) He was also the tenth Secretary of State. Martin Van Buren was the first President of the United States of the United States to actually be born in the United States. He was a major factor in the abolitionist movement.He was born on a Thursday!
- Harrison, who was born on a plantation, also came from a distinguished family of planters and politicians. His father, Benjamin Harrison, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He was governor of Virginia between 1781 and 1784. William Harrison initially studied at college and at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1792 he joined the army. In 1794 he was used against the Indians in Ohio. A year later, Harrison married Anna Tuthill Symmes, an Ohio girl. In 1798, Harrison left the army as a captain. Harrison was then elected as a representative in the US Congress. In 1801, President John Adams made him governor of Indiana. During his 12 years in office, Harrison proved himself in the fight against the Indians, who had come together to form a federation under the leadership of Tecumseh.
During the war with Great Britain from 1812 to 1814, he secured American rule over Indiana and the Northwest. Returning to Ohio, William Harrison was elected to the House of Representatives in 1816, where he was represented until 1819. In 1825 he was elected to the US Senate, where William Harrison was active until 1828. In 1828, President John Quincy Adams sent Harrison as an envoy to Colombia, but he was recalled the following year. After a temporary withdrawal from politics, Harrison was considered a candidate in the presidential election in 1836, which was won by Martin van Buren. In the following election campaign in 1840, Harrison was able to garner the majority of votes. In March 1841 he took office as the ninth President of the USA.
William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia in Washington just one month later, on April 4, 1841. He was succeeded by John Tyler.He was also born on a Tuesday! - His father was governor of Virginia and a judge. After graduating from college in 1807, Tyler studied law. At 19 he was admitted to the bar. From 1811 to 1815, Tyler sat in the Virginia House of Delegates. He then served as a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives from 1817 to 1821. Tyler was appointed governor of Virginia in 1825. In 1827 he resigned from this position because he was now elected to the US Senate, where he was represented until 1836. In these positions, Tyler distinguished himself as a staunch advocate of the "states' rights" theory and a faithful interpretation of the Constitution. The doctrine advocated the primary sovereignty and independence of the US states over the federal government. After turning away from the Democratic Party, Tyler was elected vice president in 1840 as the Whig candidate.
However, the new President William Harrison died in 1841 after only a month in office. Therefore, Tyler succeeded him as the tenth President of the USA on April 4, 1841. Differences with his new Whig party blocked the new president's key domestic policy initiatives. As a southern aristocrat, the former Virginia governor and senator was only put forward to win southern voters for Harrison. However, his political views were opposed to those of the Whig Party, which represented the interests of the northeastern states with their emerging industry and business community - so he vetoed the establishment of a national bank, which was a fundamental concern of the Whigs and their most prominent senator, Henry Clay. In the fall of 1841, he was expelled from the Whig Party. In 1842, when he vetoed the tariff bill, Congress tried, but failed, to impeach him.
In the area of foreign policy, Tyler prepared the incorporation of Texas into the Union after his presidency. In 1842, his Secretary of State Daniel Webster was able to reach a border treaty with Great Britain that established the border between Maine and Canada. In the run-up to the Civil War, he campaigned for secession and was elected to the Congress of the Confederacy, but died of a stroke before he could take office. In the presidential election of 1844, Tyler was no longer a candidate. Tyler was replaced in 1845 by James Knox Polk. After his presidency, however, Tyler remained involved in political life. Shortly before his death, he was elected to the Congress of the Confederate States of America in 1861. The politician died before its meetings opened.
John Tyler died on January 18, 1862 in Richmond, Virginia.He was born on a Monday! - After graduating from college in 1809, Buchanan became a lawyer. In 1814 he entered the Pennsylvania Assembly as a Federalist representative. In 1820 Buchanan was elected to the US House of Representatives, where he served until 1831. At the same time he served as envoy to Russia from 1823 to 1833. He became a leading figure in the newly emerging Democratic Party in Pennsylvania. From 1834 to 1845 he served in the US Senate, where he supported the southern states' position on the slave issue. Under the presidency of James Knox Polk (1845-1849), Buchanan played a key role in his expansionist policies as Secretary of State.
Meanwhile, he was chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1836 to 1841. He reached an agreement with Great Britain on the Oregon issue. In the war against Mexico (1846-1848) he advocated the annexation of large parts of the neighboring country. President Franklin Pierce sent Buchanan as an envoy to Great Britain from 1853 to 1856. In 1856 he won the US presidential election as the Democratic candidate. The following year he began his term in the White House. Buchanan was the only unmarried President of the United States. His niece, Harriet Lane, served as "First Lady" during his term.
As with his predecessor Franklin Pierce, Buchanan's efforts at reconciliation and compromise were doomed to failure in view of the increasingly irreconcilable conflict over the slave issue. During his presidency, the Democratic Party was increasingly divided into northern and southern factions. An economic depression and conflict with the Mormons in Utah continued to complicate the domestic political environment of Buchanan's administration. Having already lost the 1860 presidential election to Abraham Lincoln, Buchanan faced his final crisis in office with the secession of South Carolina.
The US President lacked the ability to take decisive action to counteract the southern state's secession from the Union. Amid allegations of having been responsible for the dissolution of the Union and the outbreak of the American Civil War, Buchanan bitterly withdrew from the presidency and politics in 1861.
James Buchanan died on June 1, 1868 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.He was born on a Saturday! - Ulysses S. Grant was an American military officer and politician who served as the 18th president of the United States from 1869 to 1877. As Commanding General, he led the Union Army to victory in the American Civil War in 1865 and thereafter briefly served as Secretary of War. Later, as president, Grant was an effective civil rights executive who created the Justice Department and worked with Radical Republicans to protect African Americans during Reconstruction.He was born on a Saturday!
- James Abram Garfield was the 20th president of the United States, serving from March 4, 1881, until his death six months later, two months after he was shot by an assassin. A lawyer and Civil War general, he served nine terms in the House of Representatives and was the only sitting member of the House to be elected president. Before his candidacy for the White House, he had been elected to the Senate by the Ohio General Assembly, a position he declined when he became president-elect.Saturday's child always!
- Stephen Grover Cleveland was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 22nd and 24th president of the United States from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897. Cleveland is the only president in American history to serve two non-consecutive terms in office. He won the popular vote for three presidential elections-in 1884, 1888, and 1892-and was one of two Democrats (followed by Woodrow Wilson in 1912) to be elected president during the era of Republican presidential domination dating from 1861 to 1933.Saturday's child always!
- Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd President of the US. He was born in North Bend, Ohio, on August 20, 1833. He came from a family which had a long history in politics--his grandfather William Henry Harrison was a former US President, his father was a Congressman and he had cousins who were congressmen, governors and mayors.
He was educated at Farmers College and Miami University in Ohio, graduating from the university in 1862. He was admitted to the bar in 1864 and began a law practice in Indianapolis, Indiana, but soon became involved in Republican politics. He held some minor party and appointed offices, During the Civil War he organized an army unit, the 70th Indiana Infantry, which he commanded as a colonel. The unit was posted to mostly garrison duty in Kentucky and Tennessee, and in 1864 it was attached to the forces of Gen. William T. Sherman in Georgia.
After the war he returned to Indiana and got even more involved in state politics, becoming a driving force in what became known as the Radical Republican movement. He ran in the Republican primary for the gubernatorial nomination in 1872, but was unsuccessful. In 1876 he finally got the nomination, but lost the election. In 1880 he headed the Indiana delegation to the Republican convention and was a major factor in securing the presidential nomination for James A. Garfield, who won the election. He was offered a cabinet post but turned it down in favor of being the party's nominee for Senator, and won the election. As a senator he was a strong advocate for civil-service reform and helped in the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. He lost his bid for re-election that year, but in 1888 secured the Republican nomination for President. He ran against Democrat Grover Cleveland, and although Cleveland won the popular vote, Harrison received more votes in the electoral college, therefore winning the presidency.
As President, Harrison's most notable accomplishments occurred in foreign affairs, and he sponsored the first Pan-American Conference in 1889 between the US and Latin America. On the domestic front, his administration secured passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which was popular with the public, but it also passed the highly unpopular McKinley Tariff Act and the even more unpopular Sherman Silver Purchase Act. A major scandal occurred in the Veterans Bureau--later to become the Veterans Administration--during Harrison's presidency; it had been very strictly run during Cleveland's term, but Harrison loosened oversight of it and soon the extravagant expenditures lavished by the bureau's top management on themselves and their cronies shocked the public and forced the resignation of the bureau's pension commissioner. In the 1890 elections the Democratic party took control of Congress. Public dissatisfaction with Harrison's administration led to his defeat by former president Cleveland in the 1892 elections, after which Harrison returned to Indianapolis and resumed his law practice. He wrote several articles for local newspapers and eventually published two books, "This Country of Ours" (1897), a collection of his writings; and a memoir, "Views of an ex-President" (1901).
He died in Indianapolis on March 13, 1901.Tuesday's child always! - William Howard Taft was the 27th president of the United States (1909-1913) and the tenth chief justice of the United States (1921-1930), the only person to have held both offices. Taft was elected president in 1908, the chosen successor of Theodore Roosevelt, but was defeated for reelection in 1912 by Woodrow Wilson after Roosevelt split the Republican vote by running as a third-party candidate. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft to be chief justice, a position he held until a month before his death.Tuesday's child always!
- Thomas Woodrow Wilson was an American politician and academic who served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the president of Princeton University and as the governor of New Jersey before winning the 1912 presidential election. As president, Wilson changed the nation's economic policies and led the United States into World War I in 1917. He was the leading architect of the League of Nations, and his progressive stance on foreign policy came to be known as Wilsonianism.He was actually born on December 29, 1856 which was equal to Monday!
- Warren Gamaliel Harding was the 29th president of the United States, serving from 1921 until his death in 1923. A member of the Republican Party, he was one of the most popular sitting U.S. presidents. After his death, a number of scandals were exposed, including Teapot Dome, as well as an extramarital affair with Nan Britton, which diminished his reputation.Thursday's child always!
- Though three U.S. Presidents have died on the Fourth of July, John Calvin Coolidge was the first and only one to have been born on that date, in 1874. He is also the only President to have had the oath of office administered by his father, a justice of the peace, who swore him in when the Coolidges received word of President Warren G. Harding's death. Coolidge's reputation is that of an unfeeling and lazy man, unaware of what was going on in the country and who dawdled while the United States drifted toward the Great Depression. Yet history doesn't really support this caricature of a man who actually was a highly intelligent and complex individual.
Though self-contained and terse, Coolidge was an extremely intelligent man and a fine scholar (his wedding gift to his wife, Grace Goodhue, was his own translation of Dante Alighieri's "Inferno". A week after the wedding, Coolidge, ever the practical New Englander, also presented his wife with 52 pairs of his socks that needed mending). Some have argued that Coolidge was the best-prepared candidate ever to become President, having worked his way through a succession of elective political offices until he wound up as the Vice President under Harding, attaining the presidency when Harding died in office in August of 1923. Coolidge was a laissez-faire proponent, believing, like Jefferson, that the government governs best which governs least. In July of 1924 his son, Calvin Jr., died of blood poisoning. The younger Coolidge, like his mother, was an outgoing and gregarious boy, and his death affected his father deeply. Although some historians have characterized Coolidge's behavior in office as marked by laziness or indolence, it seems now that it was almost certainly a deep depression brought about by the death of his son. Coolidge chose not to run in 1928. Privately, his wife remarked to a friend that "Daddy thinks there is going to be a Depression." On January 5, 1933, he died of heart failure at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Though Coolidge was dismissed for years as a presidential lightweight, his reputation has grown in recent years. President Ronald Reagan retrieved Coolidge's portrait from storage and displayed it in the White House during his tenure in office, and a recent biography has provided a much more favorable view of Coolidge and his presidency than had previously been available.Thursday's child always! - Additional Crew
Herbert Hoover was born on August 10, 1874 in West Branch, Iowa. His family were devout Quakers. At age eight, Hoover was orphaned and was sent to live with relatives. They showed him little affection, but taught him the importance of hard work and industry. In 1891, Hoover entered Stanford University's School of Engineering, graduating in 1895. Four years later, he married his wife, Lou Henry and they had two sons, Herbert Jr. and Allan. From an early age, Hoover showed a prodigious talent for engineering and was hired by the engineering firm Bewick and Moering, working in Australia and then in China. He was in China when the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 broke out and he coordinated the barricades of Americans trapped in China. At age forty, his engineering career was so successful that he was a millionaire. 1914 saw the outbreak of World War I in Europe. That was when he left his engineering career and entered public service. He organized a relief effort to feed starving Belgians, known as the Commission for the Relief of Belgium. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked Hoover to organize the Food Administration, which encouraged Americans to cut down on food consumption to help the war effort. After the end of World War I in 1918, Hoover organized a massive relief effort to feed starving peoples in Europe, whose countries had been devastated by the war. From 1921 to 1929, Herbert Hoover served as Secretary of Commerce, under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, expanding the department and making it more active in working with business and labor. In 1928, he was the Republican candidate for President and easily defeated his opponent, the Democratic Candidate, Alfred E. Smith. Herbert Hoover was sworn in as President on March 4, 1929. Seven months after he entered office, the Stock Market crashed, ending the "Roaring Twenties" and the economic boom of that decade and ushered in the Great Depression. At first, Hoover was proactive in handling this economic crisis, having meetings with business leaders on how to weather the economic downturn, cutting taxes and increasing money for corporations and state governments. But none of this was effective in the teeth of the worst economic crisis in American history. He tried to calm the situation with statements like "Prosperity is just around the corner," but they were not effective. His dour demeanor and seemingly callous attitudes towards the millions of unemployed were what people saw in him, particularly when he refused to provide direct relief to the unemployed. Things came to a head in the summer of 1932 when the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF), an army of World War I veterans, marched to Washington demanding immediate payment of a bonus promised to them in 1945. But the veterans wanted their money now. They camped out along the Anacostia River and lobbied for their bonus. The House of Representatives approved immediate payment, but the Senate voted no. Hoover obtained $100,000 from Congress to buy the veterans train tickets home. Many veterans accepted the offer, but many stayed in Washington. At that point, the US army led by Gen. Douglas McArthur forcibly evicted the veterans from Washington, setting their camps on fire and forcing them out at gunpoint. In so doing, McArthur disobeyed Presidential orders, but Hoover took full responsibility for the eviction of the Bonus Marchers. In the 1932 election, Herbert Hoover was defeated in a landslide by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. After he left office in 1933, Hoover returned to California and was an unstinting critic of FDR. After the death of his wife in 1944, Hoover moved to New York City where he lived his last twenty years at the Waldorf Towers, remaining active in Republican Party politics. In 1946, President Harry Truman asked him to undertake yet another relief effort for the people of Europe; he and Truman became surprisingly good friends. In 1953, Hoover chaired a commission to increase efficiency in the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. He died on October 20, 1964 at age ninety.Monday!- Writer
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882, in Hyde Park, New York, to James and Sara Roosevelt. His father was 54 at the time of FDR's birth and already had a grown son, nicknamed "Rosy". Sarah was only 27 when FDR was born. Growing up, FDR had a happy but sheltered childhood. His family was very wealthy and FDR had a very privileged upbringing, with trips to Europe and private tutors. Sara Roosevelt was a loving but domineering and overprotective mother. FDR was a devoted son, but found clever and subtle ways to get around his mother's domination. At 14 he was sent to Groton, an exclusive prep school led by the Rev. Endicott Peabody. FDR did not enjoy his time at Groton, often being teased by the other kids for having a formal and stuffy manner. Since he had a nephew who was older than him, kids at Groton called him "Uncle Frank". He graduated from Groton in 1900 and went to Harvard, where he edited the "Crimson" but failed to be accepted into the Porcellian Social Club. He graduated Harvard in 1903. Soon after that he fell madly in love with his sixth cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt. They married in 1905, with President Theodore Roosevelt giving the bride away. However, from the start Franklin and Eleanor's marriage was not a happy one. She was quiet and shy, whereas he was boisterous and outgoing. The fact that his mother moved into the house next door to theirs, and ran things, did not help. Franklin and Eleanor had six children (one child died in infancy). In 1910 Franklin was elected to the New York State Legislature from Duchess County. There he made a name for himself as a crusading reformer who favored the "average guy" over big business and championed for honest government. In 1913 he was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy and served under Josephus Daniels and President Woodrow Wilson. In 1918 he began a love affair with his wife's social secretary, Lucy Mercer. When Eleanor discovered the affair, she was understandably devastated and told Franklin she wanted a divorce. At the urging of his mother, Frankilin chose to save the marriage and promised Eleanor that he would never have anything more to do with Lucy. The damage was done, however, and Franklin and Eleanor never again shared the intimacies of marriage, becoming more like political partners. In 1921 FDR was stricken with polio and paralyzed. He permanently lost the use of his legs, but refused to let that thwart his political ambitions. He spoke at the 1924 Democratic Convention for the candidacy of Alfred E. Smith, then the Governor of New York, calling him the "Happy Warrior". In 1928 FDR was elected Governor of New York and was well placed when the stock market crashed in 1929. As governor he took the lead in providing relief and public works projects for the millions of unemployed in the state. His success as New York's governor made him a strong candidate for the Presidency in 1932. He easily beat incumbent President Herbert Hoover.
When Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in as President on March 4, 1933, more than 15 million Americans were unemployed. Millions more had been hard hit by the Depression and the banking system had collapsed. FDR wasted no time in launching a radical economic recovery program, known as the New Deal. He created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which made the federal government the guarantor of people's bank deposits - not the banks themselves - and allowed drought-stricken farmers to refinance their mortgages, He created public works programs including the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)--thus making the government the employer of last resort--as well as setting up the Social Security system, instituting a minimum wage, outlawing child labor--a widespread practice at the time, especially in mines, factories and textile mills--and mandating a 40-hour work week with overtime pay. In responding to the Depression, FDR forever changed the role of the federal government in American life. He was easily reelected in 1936, defeating Republican Alf Landon in a landslide. His second term as president was less successful than his first, however. The Supreme Court had ruled a number of New Deal measures unconstitutional. With an electoral mandate in the bank, FDR proposed "packing" the Supreme Court with justices of his political persuasion for every judge over the age of 70 that did not retire. However, Congress refused to pass the Supreme Court packing plan, and from that point on FDR was unable to get Congress to pass much of his legislation. Also, fascism was rising rapidly throughout Europe and Asia. Germany's Adolf Hitler and Italy's Benito Mussolini had both seized power and began to conquer other countries, such as Ethiopia, Austria and Czechoslavakia. FDR was unable to respond to the threats from Europe and Asia, however, because sentiment in the US was strongly isolationist and Congress had passed a series of neutrality laws that gave the President very little power to respond to international aggression. World War II began in September 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland. Nine months later all of Western Europe had fallen to Hitler. The UK and its Commonwealth and Empire was standing alone. FDR wanted to help Britain, but had to move carefully and skillfully. He negotiated a deal in which the US gave Britain 50 old destroyers in exchange for bases in the Western Hemisphere. With World War II underway, FDR took the unprecedented move of seeking a third term as president. He won that term in November 1940, defeating Republican Wendell Willkie. Safely re-elected, he proposed a radical new program for helping Britain, known as Lend-Lease, in which Britain could buy armaments and other supplies from the US but not have to pay for them until after the war. FDR used the analogy of borrowing a neighbor's hose to put out a house fire to sell Lend-Lease. It passed and America became the "arsenal of democracy" as it began to build armaments for Britain and then the Soviet Union, when Hitler invaded it in mid-1941. Roosevelt met Britain's Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, for the first time in August 1941 where they drew up the Atlantic Charter. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, destroying much of America's Pacific fleet. The next day,FDR declared war on Japan, calling December 7 "a date that will live in infamy." America was in the war, and not only against Japan, but also against Germany and Italy. Under FDR's leadership, America quickly transformed itself from a decaying nation of idle factories, impoverished families, abandoned farms and masses of hobos roaming the streets to a nation turning out planes, tanks, guns, military vehicles and other armaments on a scale that quickly dwarfed the capability of Nazi Germany to do the same. World War II also changed American life as blacks got better jobs in the war plants and women began working outside the home in unprecedented numbers. Helped by Eleanor, FDR used the war as a vehicle for social progress, securing better treatment for minorities and women, higher wages and better benefits for workers and a GI bill, which guaranteed a free college education for all American soldiers who fought in the war. In so doing, he created the American middle class of today.
After a series of military defeats, the US and its allies began to win the war. Invasions of North Africa and Italy were launched and the US started retaking islands in the South Pacific it had lost to Japan at the beginning of the war, starting with the Battle of Midway in 1942. FDR met with Churchill several times throughout the war and with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Tehran in 1943 and at Yalta in 1945. The Allied invasion of France, known as D-Day, was launched on June 6, 1944. As the war ended, FDR pushed for his dream of a United Nations and for reforms that would ensure that another World War would never happen. The United Nations did come to pass, as well as new global institutions such as the World Bank and IMF. Also, FDR advocated for decolonization of Africa and Asia, leading to the collapse of the old European empires.
Because of the war, FDR felt he had no right to leave the presidency while Americans under his command were still fighting. So he sought a fourth term in 1944. His opponent was the new governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey, who ran a campaign of innuendo, hinting that FDR was too ill to lead and that his government had gone stale. FDR retaliated with a speech accusing the Republicans of attacking his dog, Fala. FDR won his fourth term in November 1944. In January 1945 he journeyed to Yalta to confer with Churchill and Stalin for the last time, to settle the postwar world and push for Russian participation in the United Nations. By this time FDR was gravely ill. After the Yalta Conference, he traveled to his resort at Warm Springs, Georgia, where he died suddenly of a massive stroke on April 12, 1945. It was revealed that Lucy Mercer, his one-time lover, was with him when he died and that she had secretly visited him in the White House a number of times during his last year.
There was an elaborate funeral for him, with a train procession from Warm Springs to Washington DC, then to Hyde Park, where he was buried.Monday also!- Harry S. Truman was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. A lifetime member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as a U.S. senator from the state of Missouri from 1935 to 1945. He was chosen as incumbent president Franklin D. Roosevelt's running mate for the 1944 presidential election. Truman was inaugurated as the 34th vice president in 1945 and served for less than three months until President Roosevelt died. Now serving as president, Truman implemented the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy of Western Europe and established both the Truman Doctrine and NATO to contain the expansion of communism. He proposed numerous liberal domestic reforms, but few were enacted by the Conservative Coalition that dominated the Congress.Thursday also!
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Dwight D. Eisenhower was born on Tuesday, October 14, 1890, as Dwight David Eisenhower, in Denison, Texas. He was the third of seven sons born to David Jacob Eisenhower and Ida Elizabeth Stover. Both of his parents were of German descent. Eisenhower studied at the West Point Military Academy from 1911-1915. He served with the infantry, became the #3 leader of the tank corps, and rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel by the end of the First World War. From 1922-1924 he served in the Panama Canal Zone as executive officer to General, Fox Conner. From 1925-1926 he studied at the Command and General Staff College in Kansas, and from 1928-1933 he served as executive officer to Gen. George V. Moseley: Assistant Secretary of War, in Washington, DC.
Eisenhower was chief military aide to Gen. Douglas MacArthur from 1933-1935. He accompanied MacArthur to the Philippines in 1935, and served there as assistant military adviser to the Philippine government until 1939. Back in Washington, he held various staff positions and was promoted to Brigadier General in September 1941. Shortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, on Sunday, December 7th, 1941. Eisenhower was assigned to the General Staff. There he gradually rose to Assistant Chief of Staff under the Chief of Staff, Gen. George C. Marshall. Although Eisenhower had no experience in active military command, Marshall recognized his organizational and administrative strength. It was his association with Marshall that brought Eisenhower to London in June 1942 as Commanding General of the European Theater of Operations. He was also appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces of the North African Theater of Operations, which was renamed the Mediterranean Theater of Operations after the capitulation of the German army in Africa. In September of 1943 Eisenhower oversaw the Allied invasion of Sicily and then of Italy, which led to the immediate surrender of Italian forces in southern Italy. However, the German Winter Line fortifications in Italy, kept fighting even after the fall of Berlin.
Eisenhower was in charge of planning and carrying out the Allied landings in Normandy, France, and the invasion of Germany. The first part of his plan, named Operation Overlord, was the largest seaborne operation in history. Under this plan, 2.8 million Allied troops from 12 nations crossed the English Channel. Starting on Tuesday, June 6th, 1944, known as "D-Day", they landed on the beaches of Normandy, France. After extremely fierce heavy fighting, the Allies breached the fortifications and pushed back the defending German forces. Two months later they reached Paris. Adolf Hitler had ordered the German commander of Paris to destroy the city rather than let it fall into Allied hands, but that officer refused to carry out those orders and eventually surrendered the city to the Allies. After fighting that was not as fierce as was expected, the city of Paris was liberated on Friday, August 25th, 1944. Eisenhower was with French Gen. Charles de Gaulle at the Hotel de Ville, where they greeted the Allied forces and took part in the French victory parade. After liberating Belgium and the Netherlands, the Allied troops crossed into Germany. In 1945 US and Soviet armies linked up on the Elbe River, west of Berlin. Soon Eisenhower met with Russian Gen. Georgi Zhukov and the two made a trip to the Soviet Union; the first (and only) time Eisenhower did so. After the German surrender on Tuesday, May 8th, 1945, Eisenhower was made the Military Governor of the US Occupied Zone in Germany, based in Frankfurt. He ordered the detailed search, documentation, photographing and widespread dissemination of what went on in the Nazi death camps. By actions such as these, Eisenhower began the process of documenting the horrors of the Holocaust.
Although he had never been in action himself, Eisenhower was respected as a brilliant military strategist and skilled political leader during the Second World War. He successfully dealt with conflicting demands from many sides, and managed to mollify such tough and determined personalities as Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Gen. Bernard L. Montgomery and Gen. George S. Patton. From 1945 to 1948 Eisenhower was Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, and from 1950-1952 was Supreme Commander of all NATO forces.
Eisenhower won the 1952 US presidential elections, with Richard Nixon as his Vice President, and brought the Republicans back to national power after 20 years. He was President from 1953-1960, becoming the first and only army general to serve as President in the 20th Century, formally becoming a civilian during his term in office. He ended the Korean War and offered peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin in 1953. He authorized the 1953 Iranian coup d'etat and the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'etat. He invited Nikita Khrushchev to his first visit to the US in 1959, and hosted him at his farm at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where his children and grandchildren met the family of the Soviet leader. Shortly after that, however, the Soviets shot down an American U2 spy plane, captured the pilot and canceled Eisenhower's reciprocal visit to the Soviet Union. Relations between the two superpowers deteriorated very quickly, leading to an increasingly rapid nuclear arms race and a dangerous standoff in the Cold War.
Domestically, Eisenhower began the modernization and integration of American roads into the interstate highway system, modeled after the autobahn, which he saw in Germany. In spite of some serious setbacks with US-Soviet relations, overall his presidency was a successful example of a non-partisan approach to politics.
After his presidential term expired (US Presidents can only serve two terms), Eisenhower was again commissioned a five-star general in the army. He lived in retirement on his farm in Gettysburg, where he wrote his memoirs. He died on Friday, March 28th, 1969, at the Army Hospital in Washington, DC, and was laid to rest in Abilene, Kansas, at the Eisenhower Presidential Library.
The complete lifetime of Dwight D. Eisenhower, was from Tuesday, October 14th, 1890, to Friday, March 28th, 1969. He lived 28,654 days, equaling 4,093 weeks & 3 days.Tuesday's child!- John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Rose Kennedy (née Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald) and Joseph P. Kennedy. John was named after his maternal grandfather, John "HoneyFitz" Fitzgerald, the mayor of Boston. John was very ill as a child and was given the last rites five times, the first one being when he was a new-born. He was the second of four boys born to an Irish Catholic family with nine children: Joseph Jr., John, Robert F. Kennedy (called Bobby), and Ted Kennedy (born Edward). Because Rose made Joe and Jack (the name his family called him) wear matching clothes, they fought a lot for attention. When John was young, the family moved from Boston to New York. John went to Choate, a private school. Most of the time, though, he was too sick to attend. In the late 1930s, father Joe became the ambassador to England. He took sons John and Robert with him, as well as his wife and daughters Kathleen and Rosemary Kennedy. John went to Princeton, then Harvard, and for his senior thesis, he wrote a piece about why England refused to get into the war until late. It was published in 1940 and called "Why England Slept". His older brother Joe was a pilot during the war, and was killed when the bombs his plane was carrying exploded. Not long after that, John's sister Kathleen and her husband died in a plane crash. In the early 1950s, John ran for Congress in Massachusetts and won. He married Jacqueline Kennedy (née Jacqueline Lee Bouvier) on September 12, 1953. Their daughter, Caroline Kennedy, was born on November 27, 1957 and their son, John Kennedy Jr., was born on November 25, 1960. They also had a stillborn daughter named Arabella and a son named Patrick Bouvier, who died a few days after birth. In 1954, J.F.K. had to have back surgery and in the hospital wrote his second book, "Profiles in Courage". His father always said that his son Joe was going to be President of the U.S.; when he died in World War II, though, that task was passed on to John. He ran for president in 1960 against Richard Nixon and narrowly won. His administration had many conflicts, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis being key examples. In November 1963, he and Jackie (his wife's nickname) went on a trip to Texas. Everywhere they went there were signs saying "Jack and Jackie." On November 22, 1963, John was to give a speech in Dallas, but on his way an assassin hidden on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository opened fire at Kennedy, who was riding in an open car. Hit twice and severely wounded, Kennedy died in a local hospital at 1:00 P.M. The alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was captured a short time later after shooting and killing a Dallas policeman, and was himself assassinated before he could be thoroughly interrogated, let alone tried. In just a little bit of irony, considering the death of Abraham Lincoln a century earlier, Kennedy was shot in a Ford Lincoln (Lincoln was in Ford's Theater when he was shot). He was laid to rest on his son's third birthday.Tuesday's child!
- Lyndon Baines Johnson often referred to by his initials LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. He had previously served as the 37th vice president from 1961 to 1963 under President John F. Kennedy. A Democrat from Texas, Johnson also served as a U.S. representative, U.S. senator and the Senate's majority leader. He holds the distinction of being one of the few presidents who served in all elected offices at the federal level.Thursday's child!
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Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. He was a member of the Republican Party who previously served as a representative and senator from California and was the 36th vice president from 1953 to 1961. His five years in the White House saw reduction of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, detente with the Soviet Union and China, the first manned Moon landings, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Nixon's second term ended early, when he became the only president to resign from office, following the Watergate scandal.Thursday!- Gerald Rudolph Ford was the 38th President of the United States from August 1974 until January 1977.
Ford was born on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska as Leslie Lynch King, Jr., being the son of Leslie Lynch King and Dorothy Ayer Gardner King. His parents separated two weeks after his birth and his mother took him to Grand Rapids, Michigan to live with her parents. On February 1, 1916, his mother Dorothy married Gerald R. Ford, a paint salesman. The Fords began calling their son Gerald R. Ford, Jr. but the name became legal only on December 3, 1935. Aged 13, Ford knew that Gerald Sr., was not his biological father, but it wasn't until 1930 he met his biological father Leslie King, who had made an unexpected stop in Grand Rapids.
Ford grew up in a family with three younger half-brothers, Thomas, Richard, and James. He attended South High School in Grand Rapids, where he already showed his athletics skills, being named to the honor society and the "All-City" and "All-State" football teams. As a scout he was ranked Eagle Scout in November 1927. He earned money by working in the family paint business and at a local restaurant.
Ford attended The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor from 1931 to 1935. He majored in economics and political science and graduated with a B.A. degree in June 1935. He played on the University's national championship football teams in 1932 and 1933 and was voted MVP of Wolverine in 1934. He also played in All-Star and benefit football games. He denied offers from two professional football teams, (Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers), but chose to become boxing coach and assistant varsity football coach at Yale hoping to attend law school there. Ford earned his law degree in 1941.
After returning to Michigan and passing his bar exam, Ford set up a law partnership in Grand Rapids with Philip Buchen, a University of Michigan fraternity brother (who later served on Ford's White House staff as Counsel to the President).
In April 1942 Ford joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and became a physical fitness instructor at a flight school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In the spring of 1943 he began service in the light aircraft carrier USS Monterey. Ford spent the remainder of the war ashore and was discharged as a lieutenant commander in February 1946. He returned to Grand Rapids to become a partner in the locally prestigious law firm of Butterfield, Keeney, and Amberg.
His first political experience was in the summer of 1940 when he was working in the presidential campaign of Wendell Willkie. Six years later he decided to challenge Bartel Jonkman for the Republican nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1948 election. Ford won the nomination and after that was elected to Congress on November 2, 1948, receiving 61% of the vote.
On October 15 1948, the height of the campaign, Ford married Elizabeth ('Betty') Anne Bloomer Warren, a department store fashion consultant. Betty was born on April 8, 1918 in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up in Grand Rapids. They subsequently had four children: Michael Gerald (March 14, 1950), John Gardner (March 16, 1952), Steven Meigs (May 19, 1956) and Susan Elizabeth (July 6, 1957).
Ford served in the House of Representatives from January 3, 1949 to December 6, 1973. He was re-elected twelve times, winning each time with more than 60% of the vote. As his ambition was to become Speaker of the House already in the early 1950s, he denied offers to run for both the Senate and the Michigan governorship in these years. In 1961 he became chairman of the House Republican Conference. In 1963 President Johnson appointed Ford to the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He was the last living member of the Warren Commission.
In 1965 Ford was chosen as the House minority leader, a post he held until 1973. As minority leader Ford made more than 200 speeches a year all across the country, which made him nationally known. He was not only a close friend of Richard Nixon for many years, but also a loyal supporter in both the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections. As in 1960, Ford was again considered as a vice presidential candidate in 1968. Because the Republicans did not attain a majority in the House, Ford was unable to reach his ultimate political goal, Speaker of the House. Instead, he became President of the Senate.
Late in 1973 Spiro Agnew pleaded no contest to a charge of income tax evasion and resigned as Vice President. President Nixon was empowered by the 25th Amendment to appoint a new vice president and chose Ford. He was sworn in on December 6, 1973.
On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign from the office under the threat of impeachment in the Watergate scandal. The same day Gerald R. Ford took the oath of office as 38th President of the United States on August 9, 1974. Also in August 1974, Ford nominated Nelson Rockefeller for vice president, which nomination was confirmed by Congress on December 19, 1974.
One month after taking office President Ford faced one of the toughest decisions in his career. He decided to grant Nixon a full, free and absolute pardon for all offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in. The public opinion was mostly negative about the pardon and there was even suspicion Ford and Nixon had made a deal to grant a pardon if Nixon would resign. Although this happened on September 8, 1974, it might have cost the re-election of Ford two years later.
On November 24, 1974, in the conference hall of the Okeansky Sanitarium, Vladivostok, USSR, President Ford and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT-treaty, following talks on the limitation of strategic offensive arms.
In March 1975, during the final days of the Vietnam War, Ford ordered the airlift of about 237,000 Vietnamese refugees to the United States. Two months later, on May 14, 1975, Ford ordered U.S. forces to retake the S.S. Mayaguez after its seizure by Cambodia, an action Ford characterized as an "act of piracy." The operation saved the ship's 39-member crew, but sadly 41 Americans were killed and 50 more wounded during the preparation and execution of the rescue.
President Ford was twice the target of assassination attempts. Both took place in on two separate trips to California in September 1975 and both were 'performed' by women. On September 5, 1975 he survived an assassination attempt in Sacramento, California, by Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a member of a cult once led by convicted mass murderer Charles Manson. On September 22, 1975, in San Francisco, California, Sara Jane Moore fired a shot at the president, but a bystander diverted the shot.
Despite his former athletics skills, Gerald Ford tumbled several times during his presidency. No cause was ever communicated. At the Republican National Convention in August 1976, Ford fought off a serious challenge from Californian Governor Ronald Reagan to be nominated as his party's presidential candidate. He chose Senator Robert Dole of Kansas as his running mate.
Although he succeeded in closing in on Democrat Jimmy Carter's large lead in the polls, President Ford finally lost one of the closest elections in history in November 1976. After leaving office, Gerald and Betty Ford returned to private life and moved to California where they built a new house in Rancho Mirage, which became his last residence.
President Ford continued to actively participate in the political process and to speak out on important political issues. He lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities. In 1981, the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, were dedicated.
President Ford was the recipient of numerous awards and honors by many civic organizations, like the recipient of many honorary Doctor of Law degrees from various public and private colleges and universities.
In August 1999, President Bill Clinton presented Ford with the nation's highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom. Two months later, in October 1999, Senate and House leaders presented Ford and his wife, Betty, with the Congressional Gold Medal. Together with former President Carter, he served as honorary Co-Chair of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform in 2001. In May 2001 he was presented with the Profiles in Courage award for his controversial decision to pardon former President Nixon.
In August 2000 Ford suffered a mild stroke while attending the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On May 16, 2003 following fluctuations in blood pressure and hot weather, Ford suffered dizzy spells on the golf course and taken to hospital. He was released the next day.
Although President Ford cut back on his travel and public appearances in recent years, he attended funeral services for President Ronald Reagan at Washington's National Cathedral, sitting with former Presidents Clinton, Bush and Carter, and their wives in June 2004.
In August 2006, he was discharged from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, after doctors tried to reduce or eliminate blockages in his coronary arteries. They also implanted a pacemaker to improve his heart performance. In the fall of 2006 Ford spent several days at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage for medical tests. He was released on October 16.
On November 12, 2006, Ford officially became the longest-lived president, surpassing Ronald Reagan. Ford would extend the record by 45 days.
On December 26, 2006 at 6:45 p.m., President Ford died in his house in Rancho Mirage, California. He was aged 93 years and 165 days old, making him the longest-lived United States President. No cause of death was communicated. A state funeral and memorial services were held at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. on January 2, 2007. President Ford was buried at his presidential museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
President Gerald Ford was survived by his wife Betty, after more than 58 years of marriage, and by their four children, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. He was also survived by his brother, Richard, of Grand Rapids, Michigan.Monday! - Actor
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Ronald Reagan had quite a prolific career, having catapulted from a Warner Bros. contract player and television star, into serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild, the governorship of California (1967-1975), and lastly, two terms as President of the United States (1981-1989).
Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, to Nelle Clyde (Wilson) and John Edward "Jack" Reagan, who was a salesman and storyteller. His father was of Irish descent, and his mother was of half Scottish and half English ancestry.
A successful actor beginning in the 1930s, the young Reagan was a staunch admirer of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (even after he evolved into a Republican), and was a Democrat in the 1940s, a self-described 'hemophiliac' liberal. He was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947 and served five years during the most tumultuous times to ever hit Hollywood. A committed anti-communist, Reagan not only fought more-militantly activist movie industry unions that he and others felt had been infiltrated by communists, but had to deal with the investigation into Hollywood's politics launched by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, an inquisition that lasted through the 1950s. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigations of Hollywood (which led to the jailing of the "Hollywood Ten" in the late '40s) sowed the seeds of the McCarthyism that racked Hollywood and America in the 1950s.
In 1950, U.S. Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas (D-CA), the wife of "Dutch" Reagan's friend Melvyn Douglas, ran as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate and was opposed by the Republican nominee, the Red-bating Congressman from Whittier, Richard Nixon. While Nixon did not go so far as to accuse Gahagan Douglas of being a communist herself, he did charge her with being soft on communism due to her opposition to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Nixon tarred her as a "fellow traveler" of communists, a "pinko" who was "pink right down to her underwear." Gahagan Douglas was defeated by the man she was the first to call "Tricky Dicky" because of his unethical behavior and dirty campaign tactics. Reagan was on the Douglases' side during that campaign.
The Douglases, like Reagan and such other prominent actors as Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson, were liberal Democrats, supporters of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, a legacy that increasingly was under attack by the right after World War II. They were NOT fellow-travelers; Melvyn Douglas had actually been an active anti-communist and was someone the communists despised. Melvyn Douglas, Robinson and Henry Fonda - a registered Republican! - wound up "gray-listed." (They weren't explicitly black-listed, they just weren't offered any work.) Reagan, who it was later revealed had been an F.B.I. informant while a union leader (turning in suspected communists), was never hurt that way, as he made S.A.G. an accomplice of the black-listing.
Reagan's career sagged after the late 1940s, and he started appearing in B-movies after he left Warner Bros. to go free-lance. However, he had a eminence grise par excellence in Lew Wasserman, his agent and the head of the Music Corp. of America. Wasserman, later called "The Pope of Hollywood," was the genius who figured out that an actor could make a killing via a tax windfall by turning himself into a corporation. The corporation, which would employ the actor, would own part of a motion picture the actor appeared in, and all monies would accrue to the corporation, which was taxed at a much lower rate than was personal income. Wasserman pioneered this tax avoidance scheme with his client James Stewart, beginning with the Anthony Mann western Winchester '73 (1950) (1950). It made Stewart enormously rich as he became a top box office draw in the 1950s after the success of "Winchester 73" and several more Mann-directed westerns, all of which he had an ownership stake in.
Ironically, Reagan became a poor-man's James Stewart in the early 1950s, appearing in westerns, but they were mostly B-pictures. He did not have the acting chops of the great Stewart, but he did have his agent. Wasserman at M.C.A. was one of the pioneers of television syndication, and this was to benefit Reagan enormously. M.C.A. was the only talent agency that was also allowed to be a producer through an exemption to union rules granted by S.A.G. when Reagan was the union president, and it used the exemption to acquire Universal International Pictures. Talent agents were not permitted to be producers as there was an inherent conflict of interest between the two professions, one of which was committed to acquiring talent at the lowest possible cost and the other whose focus was to get the best possible price for their client. When a talent agent was also a producer, like M.C.A. was, it had a habit of steering its clients to its own productions, where they were employed but at a lower price than their potential free market value. It was a system that made M.C.A. and Lew Wasserman, enormously wealthy.
The ownership of Universal and its entry into the production of television shows that were syndicated to network made M.C.A. the most successful organization in Hollywood of its time, a real cash cow as television overtook the movies as the #1 business of the entertainment industry. Wasserman repaid Ronald Reagan's largess by structuring a deal by which he hosted and owned part of General Electric Theater (1953), a western omnibus showcase that ran from 1954 to 1961. It made Reagan very comfortable financially, though it did not make him rich. That came later.
In 1960, with the election of the Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the black and gray lists went into eclipse. J.F.K. appointed Helen Gahagan Douglas Treasurer of the United States. About this time, as the civil rights movement became stronger and found more support among Democrats and the Kennedy administration, Reagan - fresh from a second stint as S.A.G. president in 1959 - was in the process of undergoing a personal and political metamorphosis into a right-wing Republican, a process that culminated with his endorsing Barry Goldwater for the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. (He narrated a Goldwater campaign film played at the G.O.P. Convention in San Francisco.) Reagan's evolution into a right-wing Republican sundered his friendship with the Douglases. (After Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980, Melvyn Douglas said of his former friend that Reagan turned to the right after he had begun to believe the pro-business speeches he delivered for General Electric when he was the host of the "G.E. Theater.")
In 1959, while Reagan was back as a second go-round as S.A.G. president, M.C.A.'s exemption from S.A.G. regulations that forbade a talent agency from being a producer was renewed. However, in 1962, the U.S. Justice Department under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy successfully forced M.C.A. - known as "The Octopus" in Hollywood for its monopolistic tendencies - to divest itself of its talent agency.
When Reagan was tipped by the California Republican Party to be its standard-bearer in the 1965 gubernatorial election against Democratic Governor Pat Brown, Lew Wasserman went back in action. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and though Wasserman was a liberal Democrat, having an old friend like Reagan who had shown his loyalty as S.A.G. president in the state house was good for business. Wasserman and his partner, M.C.A. Chairman Jules Styne (a Republican), helped ensure that Reagan would be financially secure for the rest of his life so that he could enter politics. (At the time, he was the host of "Death Valley Days" on TV.)
According to the Wall Street Journal, Universal sold Reagan a nice piece of land of many acres north of Santa Barbara that had been used for location shooting. The Reagans sold most of the ranch, then converted the rest of it, about 200 acres, into a magnificent estate overlooking the valley and the Pacific Ocean. The Rancho del Cielo became President Reagan's much needed counterpoint to the buzz of Washington, D.C. There, in a setting both rugged and serene, the Reagans could spend time alone or receive political leaders such as the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, and others.
Reagan was known to the world for his one-liners, the most famous of them was addressed to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. "Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall" said Reagan standing in front of the Berlin Wall. That call made an impact on the course of human history.
Ronald Reagan played many roles in his life's seven acts: radio announcer, movie star, union boss, television actor-cum-host, governor, right-wing critic of big government and President of the United States.Monday!- The 41st President of the United States of America, George Herbert Walker Bush (known colloquially as "Bush 41" to distinguish him from his son, George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the U.S., who is known as "Bush 43"), was born on June 12, 1924 in Milton, Massachusetts, a suburb south of Boston. His parents were Dorothy (Walker) and Prescott Bush, who was then the president of sales for the Stedman Products Co. of South Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1925, Prescott joined the United States Rubber Co. (New York, NY) as their foreign division manager, necessitating a move to Greenwich, Connecticut.
Prescott Bush (Yale 1917) made his fortune and name as an investment banker on Wall St., eventually becoming a partner of the white shoe brokerage Brown Bros. Harriman. He was a member of the Yale Corp., the principal governing body of Yale University, from 1944 to 1956 and was on the board of directors of the Columbia Broadcasting System (C.B.S.), after having been introduced to C.B.S. Chairman William Paley in 1932 by his friend and business partner Averell Harriman, a major Democratic party power-broker.
George Bush was educated at the exclusive Greenwich Country Day School in Greenwich, Connecticut before moving on to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he matriculated from 1936 to 1942. At Phillips Andover, he captained the baseball and soccer teams and was a member of an exclusive fraternity called the A.U.V, or "Auctoritas, Unitas, Veritas", Latin for "Authority, Unity, Truth". Like his father before him, Bush was on schedule to attend Yale College and would have in the fall of 1942, but for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy on December 7, 1941 that necessitated the entry of the United States into World War II.
Upon his graduation from Phillips Andover, George Bush enlisted in the U.S. Navy on June 12, 1942, his 18th birthday, with the intent on becoming an aviator. After completing the 10-month naval aviation course, he was commissioned as an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve three days before his nineteenth birthday, which made him the youngest naval aviator ever at the time.
George Bush married the former Barbara Pierce on January 6, 1945, and after he was demobilized, they moved to New Haven, Connecticut so that he could attend Yale, where he proved a fine student and captained the baseball team, which made it to the first College World Series. They had their first of six children, future President George Walker Bush, two days after the Fourth of July, 1946. In his senior year, George Bush was tapped for the exclusive secret society Skull & Bones, as had been his father (and as his son would be).
Using his father's connections and $2 million in seed money from his relatives (approximately $17 million in 2006 terms), George Bush prospered in the oil industry after graduating from Yale in 1949. Through his father's business and social relationship with a fellow Skull & Bones member, George Bush secured a position with Dresser Industries, on whose board of directors Prescott had served for 22 years.
As the son of a moderate Republican senator, it was natural that George Bush would stand for office. At the time, the "Solid South" was solidly Democratic, with the Republican Party of Civil War winner (and Civil Rights champion) Abraham Lincoln anathema below the Mason-Dixon line.Good Republican candidates were hard to come by (though John Tower later proved that a Republican could win in the Deep South when he took a Senate seat in 1966). One year after his father left the Seante, his son George stood won the Republican nomination to oppose Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough, an ally of President 'Lyndon Johnson (I)' (QB), who was on his way to defeating Republican Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater in an electoral landslide in 1964. Riding the coat-tails of favorite son Johnson, Yarborough handily won reelection, keeping George Bush in the private sector for two more years.
Bush stood for a House seat in 1966 and won, then won reelection in 1968. In Congress, he established a reputation as a liberal Republican and was known as a supporter of contraception services (his father, Prescott, had been a mainstay of Planned Parenthood). At the request of President Richard Nixon, Bush gave up his seat voluntarily in 1970 to seek the Senate seat of Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough, who was a fierce Nixon critic. It was felt that Yaborough's liberalism made him vulnerable to a challenge from the right, and it did; however, it was the right-wing of the Democratic Party. Lloyd Bentsen won the Democratic nomination and, endorsed by Yarborough, beat Bush handily in the November general election. (Ironically, Bentsen would one day be the running mate of Bush's 1988 rival for the presidency, Michael Dukakis.) One of the reason for Bush's defeat was that with Yarborough out of the race, Nixon's support for Bush's campaign was only half-hearted.
As a payback to Bush, Nixon appointed him Ambassador to the United Nations, and he later served Nixon as the Chairman of the Republican National Committee during the Watergate crisis. Nixon's successor in the Oval Office, Gerald Ford, briefly considered appointing Bush as his replacement as vice president before going with liberal Republican stalwart Nelson Rockefeller, the four-term governor of the State of New York, but Ford eventually appointed Bush as the first American plenipotentiary to Communist China, then later director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
After losing the 1980 Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan, Bush was chosen as Reagan's running mate and elected Vice President of the United States in Reagan's victory over incumbent President Jimmy Carter in November. In 1988, Bush as vice president was Reagan's heir apparent, and he won the Republican nomination handily, though personally he was not very popular. Bush was perceived as "weak" due to his social liberalism, which included support for abortion rights and contraception. As a "Rockefeller Republican" (that is, an Eastern Establishment pro-business Republican who is moderate or liberal on social issues), Bush, unlike Reagan, was out-of-step in an increasingly conservative party dominated by voters from the South and West. The well-educated, thoughtful Bush, according to Reagan biographer Edmund Morris, was a genuinely nice and gracious person, and more importantly: sincere. However, he was perceived as not standing for anything, at least not in the stark black & white terms that had inspired the conservative if not reactionary Republican Party faithful during the two terms of the "Great Communicator".
As president, Bush saw the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he soared to unprecedented levels of public approval after his firm handling of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait pushed the Iraqi army out of the invaded kingdom with a minimum amount of U.S. casualties. However, his popularity plummeted by the time the campaign rolled around in 1992 due to his seeming inability to cope with a recession caused by economic dislocations linked to the end of the Cold War.
After the presidency, George Bush prospered financially as a corporate speaker, reportedly making as much as $10 million from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Bush's business ventures through the Carlyle Group, a private equity fund with close ties to the government of Saudi Arabia, have proved very remunerative. Most importantly, he achieved a sort of personal vindication when his son, George Walker Bush, defeated Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, and was elected the 43rd President of the United States.
In the twilight of his years, comfortably retired from the political wars, Bush teamed with fellow ex-President Bill Clinton for a uniquely close relationship in which the two jointly led campaigns to help the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2005 devastation of the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina via private sector fund-raising.
George Herbert Walker Bush died on November 30, 2018, in Houston, Texas. He joined his wife Barbara, who had passed in April of that year.Thursday's child! - Actor
- Writer
- Producer
His father, a sales representative, died in a car accident a few months before his birth. His mother then moved to New Orleans. Bill Clinton initially grew up with his grandparents. In 1950 his mother returned to Hope. That same year she married car dealer Roger Clinton. As a member of a student delegation from the patriotic American Legion, Clinton met in Washington D.C. with President John F. Kennedy. Clinton was interested in politics from a young age. After graduating from high school, he studied international relations at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. until 1968. He then studied law at Yale and Oxford Universities on a scholarship until 1973. During his studies, Clinton was already involved in various student organizations. He played saxophone in a jazz band and supported himself as a staffer in the office of Senator J. William Fulbright. In 1968, Clinton received a "Rhodes Scholarship" that allowed him to travel to the University of Oxford, England.
From 1970 he studied law at Yale University. After receiving his doctorate in 1973, he briefly worked for the House Judiciary Committee. From 1973 to 1976 he was appointed to the University of Arkansas School of Law. In 1974 he ran for a seat in the House of Representatives, but was narrowly defeated by the Republican incumbent John-Paul Hammerschmidt. In 1975, Bill Clinton married Hillary Rodham, Hillary Clinton. In 1976, Clinton was elected to the office of Attorney General of Arkansas. Two years later, in 1978, at just 32 years old, he was appointed governor of Arkansas, the youngest head of government of an American state at the time. After two years he resigned from the senatorial office. His daughter Chelsea was born in 1980. From 1980 to 1983, Bill Clinton worked at the law firm of Wright, Lindsey and Jennings in Little Rock. At the end of 1983 he was re-elected as governor of Arkansas. In 1985 he became a co-founder of the "Democratic Leadership Council" and from 1990 its chairman.
From 1986 to 1987, Clinton served as chairman of the National Governors Association. In 1991, Clinton decided to run for president. In July 1991 he was nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate. Senator Al Gore, who was running for vice-presidency, went into the election campaign with him. Throughout the entire election campaign, Bill Clinton was in the lead by a clear margin, not least because of his successful connection to the historical myth of former President John F Kennedy. In the presidential election on November 3, 1992, Clinton won over the incumbent George H. W. Bush. He then moved into the White House on January 20, 1993 as the 42nd President of the United States of America. At 46, he was the third youngest president in the history of the United States, after Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Clinton's top priorities during his term in office were the introduction of health insurance, reconciliation with Vietnam, and combating drug abuse, gun violence, and poverty in the United States and the world.
On foreign policy matters, Clinton visited Germany on July 10, 1994. In Berlin he gave a speech in which Clinton, like John F. Kennedy in 1963, said in German "America is at your side - now and forever." In 1994 he received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. In terms of foreign policy, he supported the Israeli-Jordanian peace process, which led to the peace treaty between the two countries. At the CSCE summit in Budapest in 1995, Clinton, Boris Yeltsin and the presidents of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan exchanged views on the instruments of ratification of the START I Agreement. The Treaty on the Reduction of Nuclear Weapons with a Range of More Than 5,500 km, signed in 1991, thus came into force. In the following presidential election in November 1996, Clinton was able to clearly assert himself in office against Bob Dole. The summit meeting between Boris Yeltsin and Clinton in Helsinki ended in March 1997 without an agreement on the dispute over NATO's eastern expansion. In May 1997, Clinton traveled to Mexico on an official visit. It was the first visit by a US president to the neighboring country since 1979.
In May 1997, the "Basic Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between the North Atlantic Organization and the Russian Federation" was signed in Paris. After a long budget dispute between the administration and Congress, an agreement on tax cuts was reached. The US budget was brought out of the red for the first time since 1969. President Clinton's second term was overshadowed by allegations of sexually assaulting government employee Paula Jones in a hotel room in 1991. Clinton denied the accusation.
For the first time in the history of the United States, a sitting president testified under oath on his own behalf on January 17, 1998. On January 26, 1998, Clinton reaffirmed his sworn statement that he had not had an extramarital affair with his intern, Monica Lewinsky. Clinton also rejected the accusation that he had incited Lewinsky to make false statements with an affidavit. For the first time in 130 years, i.e. H. Since the presidency of Andrew Johnson, impeachment proceedings have again been opened against an American president in office.
Clinton later revised his statement. However, at the end of the investigation in 1999, the allegations were not sufficient for either impeachment or indictment. In March 1998, Clinton became the first US president to undertake an extensive tour of southern Africa. As part of this trip, he announced debt relief for African reform states. Paula Jones' lawsuit against Clinton was dismissed by the Arkansas federal court in April 1998. After bombings at the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the US fired cruise missiles at six suspected terrorist camps in Afghanistan in retaliation on August 20, 1998. In October 1998, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat signed a peace agreement in Washington at Clinton's initiative. This got the peace process in the Middle East, which had been stalled for almost two years, back on track. Despite protests from the Chinese government, Clinton received the Dalai Lama at the White House in November 1998. As a result of the 2000 hacker attacks on the World Wide Web, a conference on Internet security issues began in Washington. Clinton advocated for a national security center.
On June 2, 2000, during his visit to Germany, Bill Clinton became the first US president to receive the International Charlemagne Prize from the city of Aachen. In his laudatory speech, Gerhard Schröder praised Clinton's commitment to growing together in Europe. That same month, he became the first U.S. president to deliver a speech to the Russian parliament. He offered Russia comprehensive cooperation. During his three-day visit to Moscow, he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and privately visited former President Boris Yeltsin. At the turn of the millennium, Bill Clinton completed his term as one of the most successful presidents of the United States. Above all, his commitment to new companies and technologies gave the USA the longest economic rise in its history. His successor as US President was George W. Bush, who was sworn in as the 43rd President of the United States on February 20, 2001. On June 22, 2004, Bill Clinton published his biography entitled "My Life" in New York. The almost 1,000-page work was pre-ordered two million times before publication.
Bill Clinton underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery in New York on September 6, 2004, but he survived without incident. The former US President is committed to fighting poverty, corruption and climate change worldwide with his "Clinton Global Initiative", which held its first conference in New York in mid-September 2005. For his tireless efforts to help the poorest, Bill Clinton was awarded the German media prize "Bambi" by Hubert Burda Medien in the "Charity" category in Germany in December 2005. In 2007 he was honored with the TED Prize and in 2013 Clinton was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America's highest civilian honor, by Barack Obama.Monday's child!- Camera and Electrical Department
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
The 43rd President of the United States of America, George Walker Bush (known colloquially as "W" to distinguish himself from his father, George Bush, the 41st president of the U.S.), was born two days after the national holiday of the Fourth of July, 1946 in New Haven, Connecticut. There, his father was attending Yale College in the Class of 1949. His mother was Barbara Bush (the former Barbara Pierce), whom his father had married on January 6, 1945. "W" was their first child. Bush disliked being called "Junior" or Bush II, or even having the term "Jr." abbreviated next to his name.
Initially, W's prospects of living up to his illustrious pedigree were dim. Possibly hobbled by dyslexia (a condition little understood and seldom treated during his childhood), Bush proved an uninspired student in high school. He did maintain a gentlemanly "C+" average at Yale and acquired a Masters of Business Administration degree from Harvard Business School, but until he turned 40, he seemed to be floundering. He admittedly had a drinking problem in his youth, but a late marriage to Laura Welch helped stabilize him. His rebirth as a believing Christian (he is a Methodist whereas his parents were Episcopalian) in 1986 helped put him on the straight and narrow path that led him to the Presidency.
Bush has been discounted many times in his life and career for being wooden and unintelligent due to his fractured speaking style, but in fact, his academic performance was on par if not slightly better than that of his better-spoken, fellow Yalie John Kerry. As Bush's test scores and subsequent achievements suggest an above average intelligence, it is appropriate to believe that he likely has benefited from other's underestimation of his gifts. This was apparent in the first televised debate with Al Gore in 2000, when Bush held his own against the condescending vice president, and in doing so, triumphed in the eyes of the political handicappers.
After W. turned his life around in the late 1980s, he began achieving success on his own, though that success inevitably was indebted to his social position and his father's business and political connections, particularly after he himself ascended to the Presidency after the expiration of Ronald Reagan's second term. The first President Bush (Bush 41, as he is colloquially known) had great connections in the Middle East, particularly with the Saudi royal family and the powerful Bin Laden clan. Using his father's Saudi connections, Bush Jr. became a millionaire twice over through Middle Eastern oil projects. His most notable achievement in private life was in becoming president and chief operating partner of the Texas Rangers professional baseball team, which was financially invigorated by the building of a new stadium with taxpayers' funds. For a man whose greatest ambition was not the presidency but to be baseball commissioner, the "job" of Rangers owner suited him just fine, and his stint as the amiable owner of the team helped generate good publicity that wiped out his past image as a playboy. When he cashed out his ownership stake, Bush had a $14 million profit. More importantly, ownership of the Rangers positioned him financially and in the public eye for a successful run for the governorship of Texas, which proved to be his springboard to the presidency.
Under the quirky Texas constitution, the governor of Texas is primarily a ceremonial position, somewhat akin to that of the president in a Parliamentary system. The true political power in Texas lies with the lieutenant governor, who acts as a prime minister (or provincial premier in Canada) in that that he/she runs the legislature. In a life characterized by luck, the capricious Bush was luckier still in that he was told by the lieutenant governor, a Democrat, that he would make Bush a great governor if he would let him. Bush did and established an enviable reputation, one that crossed both party lines in Texas, where it would have been futile for the governor to act in a partisan fashion.
With his father's Eastern Establishment credentials that linked him to the "Rockefeller Republicans" (conservative on financial matters, liberal on social issues) and his mother's own noted social liberalism, Bush was seen as being a moderate with a difference. That difference was his connections to the powerful evangelical Christian wing of the Republican Party, due to his own rebirth as a believing Christian and his immersion in day-to-day Texas politics. In the Sun Belt, fundamentalists and evangelicals were considered ordinary, run-of-the-day folk, not the exotics that Washington and the Eastern Establishment looked at them as.
With a foot in both wings of the party, Bush was seen as a natural candidate for president after Bob Dole's dolorous 1996 candidacy. That he was a "straight shooter" with no scandal attached to him since his misbegotten youth (which he had confessed to and had put behind him) made him attractive to the Republicans, who had tried to terminate William Jefferson Clinton's presidency through impeachment due to his lies linked to his "bimbo eruptions." Bush seemed like a "Man for All Seasons" that would be the GOP's best shot of unseating the Clintonistas as represented by Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election.
With the Republican Establishment firmly behind him as a kind of "Great White Hope" of the Grand Old Party, Bush managed to wrap up the nomination easily, after stumbling initially when confronted with the candidacy of the renegade Republican senator from Arizona, John McCain. Although viewed by most Republicans as a RINO (Republican in name only), McCain dominated the early primaries in states that allowed cross over voting by attracting middle-of-the-road independents and conservative Democrats, but stumbled himself when the primary season headed South. He was badly defeated by Bush in South Carolina, a deeply conservative state that had voted for favorite son (and segregationist) Strom Thurmond in 1948, uber-conservative Barry Goldwater in 1964, and segregationist George Wallace in 1968. McCain also was victimized by smear tactics, such as the whispering campaign started by Mississippi Senator Trent Lott that claimed the renegade McCain had been mentally discombobulated by his seven years as a POW in Vietnam. The dirty tricks used against McCain by Bush campaign manager/major domo Karl Rove would prove to be harbingers of the paranoid style of politics that would come to fruition during Bush's first term.
McCain, a maverick senator with the support of many moderate Republicans and Independents as well as a following among conservative Democrats, was not only smeared, but his attempts to get on the ballot in such states as New York were stymied until the federal courts stepped in. (In 2004, even though he endorsed Bush against Kerry, McCain found himself smeared again by elements connected with Karl Rove when he defended Kerry's war record and patriotism.) The Republican Establishment were determined to give the nomination to a true blue Republican who could win (the color red was not associated with the GOP until Election Night 2000, when it was used as the map color for the Party after a century wherein the Republicans were blue and the Democrats red). After his defeat of McCain in South Carolina, Bush had as easy a time wrapping up the nomination as if he had been an incumbent.
At the beginning of the fall campaign, what with the U.S. still enjoying the tail end of almost eight years of prosperity under President Bill Clinton, his vice president, Al Gore, started out as a prohibitive favorite to win the presidency. Gore, whoever, turned out to be unable to shed his past reputation as an uninspiring campaigner, and failed to fire up the uncommitted. Bush, on the other hand, a relative unknown commodity who had enjoyed good press for the past decade as a baseball owner and governor, did not make many errors after appearing at Bob Jones University several weeks after it had banned interracial dating during the early Republican primaries (for which he apologized). He capitalized on the low expectations others had for him, and won respect - and votes - for going the distance without stumbling or embarrassing himself, while Gore had to live down the bimbo eruptions of his past running mate and his own faux pas, such as his claim to have invented the "Information Superhighway" (Internet). His stiff, "Wooden Indian" style came off as pompous on the campaign trail, giving Bush's persona a boost as it could have been portrayed as bumbling if he had been up against a natural born campaigner such as Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan.
In the game of politics as played in the US, Gore had everything to lose and Bush had everything to gain. Gore had to rise and exceed expectations while Bush merely had to live up to lowered expectations to rise above them and gain credence, and he did, beginning with the first debate. Going into the first debate, pundits expected the better-spoken Gore to eviscerate the syntactically challenged Bush (whose intelligence they disparaged), but it did not happen. Gore was haughty, and since Bush held his own, the governor of Texas was adjudged the winner. From there to the end of the campaign, Gore could never consolidate his early lead, which slipped away.
On election day, Bush and Gore were locked in a dead heat. In the closest election in a century, it all came down to a matter of 537 votes in Florida. Out of the nearly six million votes cast in the Sunshine State (5,861,785 total, with 36,742 won by third party candidates), Bush was certified as the winner, with a margin representing 0.0087%, less than nine one-thousandths of a percentage point.
After a long drawn-out process involving recounts and court challenges, Bush took the oath of office on January 20, 2001 and won re-election in November 2004 to become the first son of a president to win two terms in office.Saturday's child!- David Knight was born on 16 January 1928 in Niagara Falls, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for On Such a Night (1956), A Story of David: The Hunted (1960) and Missiles from Hell (1958). He was married to Wendy McClure. He died on 20 December 2020.Monday's child!
- Actor
- Soundtrack
James Robertson Justice was always a noticeable presence in a film with his large stature, bushy beard and booming voice. A Ph.D., a journalist, a naturalist, an expert falconer, a racing car driver, JRJ was certainly a man of many talents.
He entered the film industry quite late in life (37) after he was spotted serving as MC for a local music hall. He became a familiar figure on-screen after a succession of "larger than life" roles during the 40s and 50s, and particularly as Sir Lancelot Spratt in the "Doctor" film series.Saturday's child!- Robert Beatty graduated with a B.A. from the University of Toronto and started in amateur dramatics with the Hamilton Player's Guild. For a while, he made a living as a cashier for a gas and fuel company. In order to further hone his acting skills, he made his way to London in 1936 (on the advice of Leslie Howard) to train for acting at RADA. He made his theatrical debut in "Idiot's Delight" at the Apollo, and from there obtained regular work on both stage and screen in bit parts and walk-ons, eventually making his breakthrough on radio as a broadcaster for the BBC. He was famously on hand, reporting eyewitness accounts of the London Blitz for the Overseas News Service during the war years.
On the strength of this, Beatty was promoted to more substantial film roles, beginning with San Demetrio London (1943), in which he played a brash, alcoholic American sailor mellowed by his good-natured British crewmates in the best 'stiff-upper-lip' tradition. This seemed to set the tone for his future screen personae, for he was henceforth typecast as tough, down-to-earth Canadians or Americans, many of them cops or gumshoes in low budget potboilers. That notwithstanding, he had his share of quality assignments as well, notably as loyal friend to IRA fugitive James Mason in Odd Man Out (1947); as a plausible Lord Beaverbrook in The Magic Box (1951); as Lieutenant William Bush, best friend and second-in-command to Gregory Peck's Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951); and as a washed-out heavyweight prizefighter in The Square Ring (1953). Throughout his career, Beatty's stock-in-trade was masculinity, dependability and forthrightness.
Immensely popular on radio, Beatty provided the voice for private eye Philip Odell in a long-running series for the BBC "Light Programme" between 1947 and 1961. From the late 1950's, he also became increasingly prolific on television and as a narrator of documentaries. If his face was not yet recognisable enough, he appeared in commercials for a hair care product. For two years, Beatty starred in his own half-hour series, Dial 999 (1958), as a Canadian mountie seconded to Scotland Yard. On the big screen he was cast as Dr. Ralph Halvorsen in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Towards the end of his lengthy career, he gave one of his finest performances, a thoroughly convincing impersonation of President Ronald Reagan in the documentary-drama Breakthrough at Reykjavik (1987).Tuesday's child! - Eunice Gayson was an English actress best known for playing Sylvia Trench, James Bond's girlfriend in the first two Bond films (Dr. No and From Russia with Love). Originally, Gayson was to be cast as Miss Moneypenny, but that part went to Lois Maxwell instead.
Gayson was originally to have been a regular in the Bond film series, but her character was dropped. Gayson's voice in Dr. No and From Russia with Love was overdubbed by voice actress Nikki van der Zyl, as were the voices of nearly all the actresses appearing in the first two Bond films, though Gayson's real voice can still be heard in original trailers for Dr. No.
As the first female to be seen in Dr. No together with James Bond (Sean Connery), she is officially the very first actress to play a Bond girl.
Decades later, Gayson's daughter appeared in a casino scene in the 1995 Bond film GoldenEye.
She also starred in the Hammer horror film The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958).
Gayson died on 8 June 2018, aged 90.Saturday's child! - Marie Lohr was born on 28 July 1890 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. She was an actress, known for Pygmalion (1938), Notorious Gentleman (1945) and South Riding (1938). She was married to Anthony Leyland Val Prinsep. She died on 21 January 1975 in London, England, UK.Monday's child!
- Harold Kasket was born on 26 July 1926 in London, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Moulin Rouge (1952), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Reluctant Bandit (1965). He was married to Esther Laredo. He died on 20 January 2002 in London, England, UK.Monday's child!
- Jill Melford came from a rich theatrical background. She was evacuated to America during World War Two and was educated at Gardner School and the Ballet Arts School, both of which are in New York. Her New York theatre debut came in 1949 when she appeared as a dancer in a production of 'Oklahoma!' and her first London appearance came in 1953 when she performed in 'The Seven Year Itch'. She went on to appear in other stage plays including 'Auntie Mame', 'Ulysses in Night-time', 'The Life of the Party', 'The Right Honourable Gentleman', 'There's a Girl in My Soup', 'Not Now, Darling', 'Best of Friends' and 'The Chairman'. In addition to her acting work, Melford was also an experienced interior decorator. She was divorced from the actor John Standing with whom she had a son, Alexander.Monday's child!
- An engineer's daughter, she had first planned on becoming a ballerina, using her original Christian name Muguette, but abandoned those plans by the age of 17 when she realized that her physique was more in keeping with her other first name, Megs. She trained in Liverpool at the School of Dancing and Dramatic Art and then joined the Liverpool Repertory Company in 1933 before moving to London to appear at the Player's Theatre four years later.
During the 1950's, Megs was busy acting on stage and had considerable critical success in two plays by Emlyn Williams, 'Light of Heart' (1940) and 'The Wind of Heaven' (1945). Against character, she also played the vicious, unstable Alma Winemiller in 'Summer and Smoke' (1951) by Tennessee Williams. In 1956, she was awarded the Clarence Derwent Award as Best Supporting Actress for her role as the stoic wife of a longshoreman harbouring incestuous feelings for his niece in 'A View from the Bridge' by Arthur Miller. The previous year, she had made her Broadway debut in Chekhov's 'A Day by the Sea' as a supportive governess to an alcoholic physician.
Among her screen roles, best remembered are those of Nurse Woods in the excellent murder mystery Green for Danger (1946); her plump, homely innkeeper providing final happiness to the title character at the end of The History of Mr. Polly (1949)); and three of her many housekeepers : the proper one of Indiscreet (1958), the nervously anxious one, sensing danger in The Innocents (1961) and the warm, dependable one in the musical Oliver! (1968). From the 1960's, Megs did a lot of television work, starred in her own series, Weavers Green (1966), as a country veterinarian, and even made tea bag commercials. Her versatility and popularity as an actress ensured that she was never out of work.Saturday's child! - Actor
- Soundtrack
Born as Arthur John Stainer, he was the younger son of Ferdinand (Frank) Steiner and Lilian Blumberg. His brother was the film actor Leslie Howard and his sister the casting director Irene Howard. His uncle was the film director Wilfrid Noy. He married the actress Jean Compton Mackenzie (a daughter of the actor Frank Compton) in 1936 and they had a son together, the stage actor Alan Howard.
Arthur appeared in several television programmes such as Whack-O, a school comedy in which he played the hapless assistant headmaster Pettigrew to Jimmy Edwards's headmaster, and he was in the 1959 film version Bottoms Up. He appeared in many films, including American Friends, The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins, and had the small role of Cavendish in the James Bond film Moonraker.
Balding, worried-looking London-born comic actor, who first rose to prominence as Jimmy Edwards's long-suffering headmaster in 'Whack-O!' on BBC radio. The show was later transferred to the screen by BBC TV and ran from 1956 to 1960 in its original format.Tuesday's child!- Cyril Luckham was born on 25 July 1907 in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, UK. He was an actor, known for A Man for All Seasons (1966), The Guardians (1971) and The Barchester Chronicles (1982). He was married to Violet Lamb. He died on 8 February 1989 in London, England, UK.Thursday's child!
- Michael Howard was born on 4 March 1916 in Holywell Green, Yorkshire, England, UK. He was an actor, known for A Sister to Assist 'Er (1948), Golden Rendezvous (1977) and Front Page Story (1954). He was married to Peggy Evans and Betty Kelly. He died on 18 February 1988 in London, England, UK.Saturday's child!
- Actor
- Writer
Debonair British actor at home on stage (since the age of 15), screen and TV. Initially, his roles tended to be dramatic but, by his 40s, he was increasingly playing tongue-in-cheek comedy parts. His smooth lounge-lizard voice has frequently been used for voice-overs on television advertisements (most famously a long-running campaign for Schweppes drinks) and TV trailers.Tuesday's child!- Russell Napier was born on 28 November 1910 in Perth, Western Australia, Australia. He was an actor, known for A Night to Remember (1958), The Case of the Red Monkey (1955) and The Time Machine (1949). He was married to Lois Mary Caird Miller. He died on 19 August 1974 in Surbiton, Surrey, England, UK.Monday's child!
- Actor
- Soundtrack
The star of the Carry On series of films, Sid James originally came to prominence as sidekick to the ground breaking British comedy actor Tony Hancock, on both radio and then television. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa and named Solomon Joel Cohen, James arrived in England in 1946, second wife in tow, having served with the South African Army during World War 2. By now an aspiring actor, James claimed to have boxed in his youth, perhaps to explain his craggy features, but was certainly a well respected hairdresser in his native country. Known in the trade as "one take James", he became a very talented and professional actor, constantly in demand for small parts in British post-war cinema. In 1960 James debuted in the fourth of the Carry On films, taking the lead role in Carry on Constable (1960) and went on to appear in a further 18 Carry On films as well as various stage and television spin-offs. Reputed not to have got on with Carry On co-star Kenneth Williams, the two often played adversaries on-screen, notably in the historical parodies Carry on Up the Khyber (1968) and Carry on Don't Lose Your Head (1967). James however was respected and revered by almost everyone he worked with and contrary to popular myth, a true gentleman. An addiction to gambling played a large part in James' workaholic schedule and subsequent heart attack in 1967. He was soon back in action however, playing a hospital patient in Carry on Doctor (1967), able to spend most of the film in bed. He suffered a second and fatal heart attack on stage in Sunderland, England on April 26 1976, leaving behind 3 children and his third wife Valerie who had stuck by him despite his affair with Carry On co-star Barbara Windsor, saying, "He always came home to me".Thursday's child!- Barbara Leake was born on 14 May 1903 in Hunstanton, Norfolk, England, UK. She was an actress, known for Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Dead of Night (1945) and A Study in Terror (1965). She was married to Stafford Byrne. She died on 18 August 1991 in Chichester, Sussex, England, UK.Thursday's child!
- Douglas Ives was born on 16 August 1898 in Sheffield, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Brandy for the Parson (1952), The History of Mr. Polly (1959) and ITV Television Playhouse (1955). He died on 6 March 1969 in London, England, UK.Tuesday's child!
- Actor
- Soundtrack
Popular Hollywood leading man of late silents and early talkies. He is best remembered for his teaming with Janet Gaynor in 12 screen romances between 1927 and 1934. He retired from films in the early 1940s, but TV audiences of the 1950s would see him as Gale Storm's widower dad in the popular television series My Little Margie (1952).Thursday's child!- Charles Farrell was born on 6 August 1900 in Dublin, Ireland. He was an actor, known for Night and the City (1950), The Crimson Pirate (1952) and Wall of Death (1951). He was married to Babbie McManus. He died on 27 August 1988 in London, England, UK.Monday's child!
- Born on October 1, 1896, in Rangoon, Burma, to Burmese-Jewish parents, and the son of a well-to-do merchant, distinguished veteran character actor Abraham Isaac Sofaer was a one-time schoolteacher in both Rangoon and London. He switched gears to acting after a short time and made his stage debut in 1921 as a walk-on in William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice."
Sofaer scored his first prominent London appearance with "The Green Goddess" in 1925 and, from the 1930s on, alternated between the London and Broadway repertory stages playing an assortment of Shakespearean roles (Othello, Lear, Cassius, etc.) among other classical plays. He scored a personal triumph in New York as Benjamin Disraeli opposite Helen Hayes in "Victoria Regina" in 1936. The following year, he directed Ms. Hayes in "The Merchant of Venice", in which he played the title role of "Shylock". A theatre repertory player of note, he soon focused on the big screen and made his British film debut with The Dreyfus Case (1930). Subsequent noteworthy British film roles included his judge in A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and as Disraeli in The Ghosts of Berkeley Square (1947). Recognized for his bulgy, wide-eyed stare, resonant tones and imposing stance, he built up a solid reputation over the years playing odd and interesting Eastern ethnics -- sultans, swamis, high priests, witch doctors, foreign dictators and dignitaries, he was even convincing playing Indian chiefs on occasion. His characters ranged from wise and warm-hearted to cunning and wickedly evil.
In the mid-1950s, Sofaer settled in Hollywood wherein he became a main staple in exotic dramas and costumed adventure, appearing almost exclusively in movies and TV. Some of his better known U.S. films include Quo Vadis (1951), His Majesty O'Keefe (1954), Elephant Walk (1954), Taras Bulba (1962) and Chisum (1970). Throughout the 1960s, he could be counted on for guest appearances on all the popular shows of the day including Perry Mason (1957), Wagon Train (1957), Gunsmoke (1955), Daniel Boone (1964) and Star Trek (1966). On TV, he may be best remembered for his recurring role of Haji, the master of all genies, on I Dream of Jeannie (1965).
Married to wife Angela for nearly seven decades and affectionately called "Abe" to closer friends, Sofaer was the father of six children. Retiring from acting in 1974, Sofaer died of congestive heart failure at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California at the age of 91 in 1988.Thursday's child! - Kenneth Kove was born on 30 April 1892 in Wandsworth, London, England, UK. He was an actor, known for The Organizer (1963), The Great Game (1930) and Thark (1948). He died in December 1984 in Brighton, East Sussex, England, UK.Saturday's child!
- Clifford Buckton was born on 5 January 1897 in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Detective Lloyd (1932), Battle for Music (1943) and Someone at the Door (1939). He died on 9 July 1960 in Kensington, London, England, UK.Tuesday's child!
- Actress
- Soundtrack
Jill Adams (nee Siggins), was discovered while working as a model, having been asked to step in at the department store where she was an artist, when a model failed to show up. She was the daughter of Irish-American silent film actress Molly Adair, and New-Zealand writer, Arthur James Siggins (published under the name A.J. Siggins),. He had first sailed from the Antipodes to Africa as a young man to fight in the Boer war, where he served with the Matabele Mounted Police and later represented The ANZACs at Cecil Rhodes funeral in1902. His first wife was from Mozambique. The couple first met in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), where he was working with the High Commission. She was there on location to star in the silent film version of 'The Blue Lagoon' The young ingénue became A.J. Siggins' 2nd wife. After several years in Africa, during which time two sons were born, they relocated to England, where Jillian M.M.J. Siggins was born in London. During WWII, the family moved to North Wales, where they had 2 working farms. Upon returning to London following the war, and after Jill had become a successful model, she married a young US Navy officer stationed in the British capital, by the name of James Adams, in 1951. They had a daughter (Tina) in 1952. Jill's career began to flourish, but sadly the marriage did not, and now alone she began securing a few minor TV and film roles, before eventually being signed by J. Arthur Rank as one of the corporation's 'starlets'. The bubbly blonde actress, Jill Adams, soon made a string of popular films for the studios - many of which were light-hearted comedies such as 'Doctor at Sea' and 'Brothers in Law' - and she was often referred to as Britain's answer to Marilyn Monroe. She also made a few films in the US and Australia. In 1957, she married the well-known BBC radio and TV personality, Peter Haigh, and they were very much the 'It' couple. They had a daughter, Peta Louise, in 1962. Jill also starred in the popular TV series 'The Flying Doctor' which lasted for 39 episodes. Over the next few years, although no longer getting the bigger roles, Adams continued to work both in radio and on stage. But, by the end of the 60s, with fewer opportunities available, she essentially retired from show business. In 1971, she and her husband Peter moved the family to the Algarve in Portugal, where they ran a hotel and restaurant in Albufeira. When that marriage ended, Adams spent several years with Michael Johnson, a former British radio host and musician, with whom she ran two businesses. She then eventually went solo until meeting Alan 'Buster' Jones, and moved first to the Lisbon area to be with him, and then they relocated to Spain. Following Jones's death in 1996, in the Costa del Sol, she returned to Portugal to be nearer to family. Always a prolific, popular and talented artist, she continued to paint even after being diagnosed with cancer in 2005 and right up until her death in Clareanes, in the Algarve., on May 13, 2008, at the age of 77.Tuesday's child!- Edward Jewesbury was born on 6 August 1917 in Marylebone, London, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Richard III (1995), Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Henry V (1989). He was married to Christine Roberts. He died on 31 March 2001 in Esher, Surrey, England, UK.Monday's child!
- Jim Tyson was born on 2 September 1912 in England, UK. He was an actor, known for St. Ives (1967), Pegasus (1969) and The Benny Hill Show (1955). He died on 9 September 1974 in England, UK.Monday's child!
- Martin Lyder was born on 30 September 1922 in Germany. He was an actor, known for Sweet Beat (1959), Rock You Sinners (1958) and The Rat Catchers (1966). He was married to Marion Shaw. He died on 12 January 2003 in Westminster, London, England, UK.Saturday's child!
- Actor
Professional boxer and background player Ernie Rice was born John Tomasso on November 17, 1896 in Hull, Yorkshire, England. Rice was a professional boxer from 1911 to 1930: Throughout the course of his boxing career Rice participated in 83 fights altogether, with 50 wins, 28 losses, three no contests, and two fights resulting in a draw. In the wake of retiring from boxing Ernie went on to become a boxing referee. Moreover, Rice first began popping up in films in uncredited minor roles in the mid-1930's. A large muscular man with a rough face and a hulking build, Ernie was often cast as vendors, villagers, or pub patrons. His brothers Dick Rice and Toni Rice were also boxers. Rice died in 1979.Tuesday's child!- Louis Matto was born on 16 August 1910 in London, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Glad Tidings! (1953) and Softly Softly: Task Force (1969). He was married to Norah Mary Cox. He died on 16 April 1989 in Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England, UK.Tuesday's child!
- Music Artist
- Composer
- Actor
Sir Paul McCartney is a key figure in contemporary culture as a singer, composer, poet, writer, artist, humanitarian, entrepreneur, and holder of more than 3 thousand copyrights. He is in the "Guinness Book of World Records" for most records sold, most #1s (shared), most covered song, "Yesterday," largest paid audience for a solo concert (350,000+ people, in 1989, in Brazil). He is considered one of the most successful entertainers of all time.
He was born James Paul McCartney on June 18, 1942, in Liverpool General Hospital, where his mother, Mary Patricia (Mohin), was a medical nurse and midwife. His father, James "Jim" McCartney, was a cotton salesman and a pianist leading the Jim Mac's Jazz Band in Liverpool. He has Irish and English ancestry. Young McCartney was raised non-denominational. He studied music and art, and had a happy childhood with one younger brother, Michael. At age 11, he was one of only four students who passed the 11+ exam, known as "the scholarship" in Liverpool, and gained a place at Liverpool Institute for Boys. There he studied from 1953 to 1960, earning A level in English and Art.
At the age of 14, Paul McCartney was traumatized by his mother's sudden death from breast cancer. Shortly afterward, he wrote his first song. In July 1957 he met John Lennon during their performances at a local church fête (festival). McCartney impressed Lennon with his mastery of guitar and singing in a variety of styles. He soon joined Lennon's band, The Quarrymen, and eventually became founding member of The Beatles, with the addition of George Harrison and Pete Best. After a few gigs in Hamburg, Germany, the band returned to Liverpool and played regular gigs at the Cavern during 1961.
In November 1961, they invited Brian Epstein to be their manager, making a written agreement in January 1962. At that time McCartney and Harrison were under 21, so the paper wasn't technically legal, albeit it did not matter to them. What mattered was their genuine trust in Epstein. He improved their image, secured them a record deal with EMI, and replaced drummer Best with Ringo Starr. With a little help from Brian Epstein and George Martin, The Beatles consolidated their talents and mutual stimulation into beautiful teamwork, launching the most successful career in the history of entertainment.
The Beatles contributed to music, film, literature, art, and fashion, made a continuous impact on entertainment, popular culture and the lifestyle of several generations. Music became their ticket to ride around the world. Beatlemania never really ended since its initiation; it became a movable feast in many hearts and minds, a sweet memory of youth, when all you need is love and a little help from a friend to be happy. Their songs and images carrying powerful ideas of love, peace, help, and imagination evoked creativity and liberation that outperformed the rusty Soviet propaganda and contributed to breaking walls in the minds of millions, thus making impact on human history.
All four members of The Beatles were charismatic and individually talented artists, they sparked each other from the beginning. Paul McCartney had the privilege of a better musical education, having studied classical piano and guitar in his childhood. He progressed as a lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a singer-songwriter. In addition to singing and songwriting, Paul McCartney played bass guitar, acoustic and electric guitars, piano and keyboards, as well as over 40 other musical instruments.
McCartney wrote more popular hits for the Beatles than other members of the band. His songs Yesterday, Let It Be, Hey Jude, Blackbird, All My Loving, Eleanor Rigby, Birthday, I Saw Her Standing There, I Will, Get Back, Carry That Weight, P.S. I Love You, Things We Said Today, "Hello, Goodbye," Two of Us, Why Don't We Do It in the Road?, Helter Skelter, Honey Pie, When I'm 64, Lady Madonna, She's a Woman, Maxwell's Silver Hammer, "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," Mother Nature's Son, Long And Winding Road, Rocky Raccoon, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Fool on the Hill, You Never Give Me Your Money, Your Mother Should Know, The End, Yellow Submarine, and many others are among the Beatles' best hits. Yesterday is considered the most covered song in history with over three thousand versions of it recorded by various artists across the universe.
Since he was a teenager, McCartney honored the agreement that was offered by John Lennon in 1957, about the 50/50 authorship of every song written by either one of them. However, both were teenagers, and technically, being under 21, their oral agreement had no legal power. Still, almost 200 songs by The Beatles are formally credited to both names, regardless of the fact that most of the songs were written individually. The songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney was really working until the mid-60s, when they collaborated in many of their early songs. Their jamming on a piano together led to creation of their first best-selling hit 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' in 1963.
In total, The Beatles created over 240 songs, they recorded many singles and albums, made several films and TV shows. Thousands of memorable pictures popularized their image. In their evolution from beginners to the leaders of entertainment, they learned from many world cultures, absorbed from various styles, and created their own. McCartney's own range of interests spanned from classical music and English folk ballads to Indian raga and other Oriental cultures, and later expanded into psychedelic experiments and classical-sounding compositions. His creative search has been covering a range of styles from jazz and rock to symphonies and choral music, and to cosmopolitan cross-cultural and cross-genre compositions.
Epstein's 1967 death hurt all four members of The Beatles, as they lost their creative manager. Evolution of each member's creativity and musicianship also led to individual career ambitions, however, their legacy as The Beatles remained the main driving force in their individual careers ever since. McCartney and The Beatles made impact on human history, because their influence has been liberating for generations of nowhere men living in misery beyond the Iron Curtain.
Something in their songs and images appealed to everybody who wanted to become free as a bird. Their songs carrying powerful ideas of real love, peace, help, imagination and freedom evoked creativity and contributed to breaking chains and walls in the minds of millions. The Beatles expressed themselves in beautiful and liberating words of love, happiness, freedom, and revolution, and carried those messages to people across the universe. Their songs and images helped many freedom-loving people to come together for revolutions in Prague and Warsaw, Beijing and Bucharest, Berlin and Moscow. The Beatles has been an inspiration for those who take the long and winding road to freedom.
McCartney was 28 when he started his solo career, and formed his new band, Wings. His first solo album, "McCartney," was a #1 hit and spawned the evergreen ballad "Maybe I'm Amazed", yet critical reaction was mixed. He continued to release music with Wings, that eventually became one of the most commercially successful groups of the 70s. "Band on the Run" won two Grammy Awards and remained the Wings' most lauded work. The 1977 release "Mull of Kintyre" stayed at #1 in the UK for nine weeks, and was highest selling single in the UK for seven years. In 1978 McCartney's theme "Rockestra" won him another Grammy Award. In 1979, together with Elvis Costello, he organized Concerts for the People of Kampuchea. In 1979, McCartney released his solo album "Wonderful Christmastime" which remained popular ever since.
In 1980 McCartney was arrested in Tokyo, Japan, for marijuana possession, and after a ten-day stint in jail, he was released to a media firestorm. He retreated into seclusion after the arrest, and was comforted by his wife Linda. Yet he had another traumatic experience when his ex-band-mate, John Lennon, was shot dead by a crazed fan near his home in New York City on December 8, 1980. McCartney did not play any live concerts for some time because he was nervous that he would be "the next" to be murdered.
After almost a year of absence from the music scene, McCartney returned in 1982 with the album "Tug of War," which was well received by public and enjoyed great critical acclaim. He continued a successful career as a solo artist, collaborated with wife Linda McCartney, and writers such as Elvis Costello. During the 80s, McCartney released such hits as 'No More Lonely Nights' and his first compilation, "All the Best." In 1989, he started his first concert tour since the John Lennon's murder.
In 1994, the three surviving members of The Beatles, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr, reunited and produced Lennon's previously unknown song "Free as a Bird." It was preserved by Yoko Ono on a tape recording made by Lennon in 1977. The song was re-arranged and re-mixed by George Martin at the Abbey Road Studios with the voices of three surviving members. The Beatles Anthology TV documentary series was watched by 420 million people in 1995.
During the 1990s McCartney concentrated on composing classical works for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society, such as "The Liverpool Oratorio" involving a choir and symphony, and "A Leaf" solo-piano project, both released in 1995. That same year he was working on a new pop album, "Flaming Pie," when his wife Linda was diagnosed with breast cancer, and caring for his wife during her illness meant only sporadic public appearances during that time. The album was released in 1997 to both critical and commercial success, debuting at #2 on both the UK and US pop charts. That same year he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II as Sir Paul McCartney for his services to music.
In April 1998, Linda McCartney, his beloved wife of almost 30 years, mother of their four children, and his steady partner in music, died of breast cancer. McCartney suffered from a severe depression and undergone medical treatment. He spent much of the next year away from the public eye, emerging only to campaign on behalf of his late wife for animal rights and vegetarian causes.
He eventually returned to the studio, releasing an album of rock n'roll covers in 1999. "Run Devil Run" made both Entertainment Weekly and USA Today's year-end top ten lists. McCartney also slowly returned to the public spotlight with the release of his another classical album, "Working Classical" in November 1999, in recording by the London Symphony Orchestra. His 2000 release "A Garland for Linda" was a choral tribute album, which raised funds to aid cancer survivors.
In 2000 he was invited by Heather Mills, a disabled ex-model, to her 32nd birthday. McCartney wrote songs dedicated to her, he and Mills developed a romantic relationship and became engaged in 2001. However, the year brought him a cascade of traumatic experiences. On September 11, 2001, Paul McCartney was sitting on a plane in New York when the World Trade Center tragedy occurred in front of his eyes, and he was able to witness the events from his seat. Yet there was another sadness, as his former band-mate George Harrison died of cancer in November, 2001.
Recuperating from the stressful year, McCartney received the 2002 Academy Award nomination for the title song to the movie Vanilla Sky (2001), and also went on his first concert tour in several years. In June, 2002, Sir Paul McCartney and Heather Mills married in a castle in Monaghan, Ireland. Their daughter, Beatrice Milly McCartney, was born in October 2003. Four years later, the high profile marriage ended in divorce, after a widely publicized litigation. "Whenever you're going through difficult times, I'm at the moment, it's really cool to be able to escape into music" says Paul McCartney.
In 2003 Paul McCartney rocked the Red Square in Moscow with his show "Back in USSR" which was attended by his former opponents from the former Soviet KGB, including the Russian president Vladimir Putin himself, who invited McCartney to be the guest of honor in the Kremlin. In 2004 Paul McCartney received a birthday present from the Russian president. In June 2004, he and Heather Mills-McCartney stayed as special guests at suburban Royal Palaces of Russian Tsars in St. Petersburg, Russia. There he staged a spectacular show near the Tsar's Winter Palace in St. Petersburg where the Communist Revolution took place, just imagine.
In 2005 the Entertainment magazine poll named The Beatles the most iconic entertainers of the 20th Century. In 2006, the guitar on which Paul McCartney played his first chords and impressed John Lennon, was sold at an auction for over $600,000.
On June 18, 2006, Paul McCartney celebrated his 64th birthday, as in his song "when I'm Sixty-Four." McCartney's celebrity status, made it a cultural milestone for a generation of those born in the baby-boom era who grew up with the music of The Beatles during the 1960s. The prophetic message in the song has been intertwined with McCartney's personal life and his career.
In 2007 McCartney left his longtime label, EMI, and signed with Los Angeles based Hear Music. He learned to play mandolin to create a refreshing feeling for his latest album "Memory Almost Full," then appeared in Apple Computer's commercial for iPod+iTunes to promote the album. In June 2007 McCartney appeared together with Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, Olivia Harrison and Guy Laliberté in a live broadcast from the "Revolution" Lounge at the Mirage Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
His 3-DVD set "The McCartney Years" with over 40 music videos and hours of Historic Live Performances was released in November 2007. His classical album "Ecco Cor Meum" (aka.. Behold My Heart), recorded with the Academy of St. Martin of the Fields and the boys of King's college Choir, was voted Classical Album of the Year in 2007. That same year, Paul McCartney began dating Nancy Shevell. The couple married in 2011, in London. Sir Paul's "On the Run Tour" once again took him flying across world from July through December 2011 giving sold out concerts in the USA, Canada, UK, United Arab Emirates, Italy, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland and Russia.
In July 2012, Paul McCartney rocked the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. He delivered a live performance of The Beatles's timeless hit "Hey Jude" and engaged the crowd of people from all over the world to join his band in a sing along finale. The show was seen by a live audience of close to 80000 people at the Olympic Park Stadium in addition to an estimated TV audience of two billion people worldwide.
On the long and winding road of his life and career, Sir Paul McCartney has been a highly respected entertainer and internationally regarded public figure.Thursday's child!!- Music Artist
- Actor
- Producer
A master musician, a film producer and actor, best known as the lead guitarist and occasionally lead vocalist of The Beatles, George Harrison was born February 25, 1943, in Liverpool, Merseyside, England. He was also the youngest of four children, born to Harold Harrison and Louise Harrison.
Like his future band mates, Harrison was not born into wealth. Louise was largely a stay-at-home mom while her husband Harold drove a school bus for the Liverpool Institute, an acclaimed grammar school that George attended and where he first met a young classmate, Paul McCartney. By his own admission, Harrison was not much of a student and what little interest he did have for his studies washed away with his discovery of the electric guitar and American rock-'n'-roll.
There were a lot of harmonies in the Harrison household. He had a knack of sorts for it by age 12 or 13, while riding a bike around his neighborhood and hearing Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel", playing from a nearby house. By the age of 14 George--who was a fan of such legends as , Harrison, who grew up in the likes of listening to such rock legends Carl Perkins, Little Richard and Buddy Holly--had purchased his first guitar and taught himself a few chords.
McCartney', who had recently joined up with another Liverpool teenager, John Lennon, in a skiffle group known as The Quarrymen, invited Harrison to see the band perform. Harrison and Lennon had a few things in common, such as the fact that they both attended Dovedale Primary School but didn't know each other. Their paths finally crossed in early 1958. McCartney had been egging the 17-year-old Lennon to allow the 14-year-old Harrison to join the band, but Lennon was reluctant; as legend has it, after seeing McCartney and Lennon perform, George was granted an audition on the upper deck of a bus, where he wowed Lennon with his rendition of popular American rock riffs.
The 17-year-old Harrison's music career was in full swing by 1960. Lennon had renamed the band The Beatles and the young group began cutting its rock teeth in the small clubs and bars around Liverpool and Hamburg, Germany. Within two years, the group had a new drummer, Ringo Starr, and a manager, Brian Epstein, a young record store owner who eventually landed the group a record contract with EMI's Parlophone label.
Before the end of 1962, Harrison and The Beatles recorded a song, "Love Me Do", that landed in the UK Top 20 charts. Early that following year, another hit, "Please Please Me," was released, followed by an album by the same name. "Beatlemania" was in full swing across England, and by early 1964, with the release of their album in the US and an American tour, it had swept across the States as well.
Largely referred to as the "Quiet Beatle" Harrison took a back seat to McCartney, Lennon and, to a certain extent, Starr. Still, he could be quick-witted, even edgy. During the middle of one American tour, the group members were asked how they slept at night with long hair.
From the get-go, Lennon-McCartney were primary lead vocalists. While the two spent most of the time writing their own songs, Harrison had shown an early interest in creating his own work. In the summer of 1963 he spearheaded his first song, "Don't Bother Me," which made its way on to the group's second album. From there on out, Harrison's songs were a staple of all Beatle records. In fact, some of the group's more memorable songs--e.g., "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Something," which was the only Beatle song ever recorded by Frank Sinatra--were penned by Harrison.
However, his influence on the group and pop music in general extended beyond just singles. In 1965, while on the set of The Beatles' second film, Help! (1965), Harrison took an interest in some of the Eastern instruments and their musical arrangements that were being used in the film. He soon developed a deep interest in Indian music. He taught himself the sitar, introducing the instrument to many western ears on Lennon's song, "Norwegian Wood"" He soon cultivated a close relationship with renowned sitar player Ravi Shankar. Other groups, including The Rolling Stones, began incorporating the sitar into some of their work. It could be argued that Harrison's experimentation with different kinds of instrumentation helped pave the way for such ground-breaking Beatle albums as "Revolver" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".
Harrison's interest in Indian music soon extended into a yearning to learn more about eastern spiritual practices. In 1968 he led The Beatles on a journey to northern India to study transcendental meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Having grown spiritually and musically since the group first started, Harrison, who wanted to include more of his material on Beatle records, was clearly uneasy with the McCartney-Lennon dominance of the group. During the "Let It Be" recording sessions in 1969, Harrison walked out, staying away for several weeks before he was coaxed to come back with the promise that the band would use more of his songs on its records.
However, tensions in the group were clearly high. Lennon and McCartney had ceased writing together years before, and they, too, were feeling the need to go in a different direction. In January of 1970 the group recorded Harrison's "I Me Mine." It was the last song the four would ever record together. Three months later, McCartney announced he was leaving the band and The Beatles were officially over.
After the breakup of The Beatles, Harrison pursued a solo career. He immediately assembled a studio band consisting of ex-Beatle Starr, guitar legend Eric Clapton, keyboardist Billy Preston and others to record all the songs that had never made it on to The Beatles catalog. The result was a three-disc album, "All Things Must Pass". While one of its signature songs, "My Sweet Lord," was later deemed too similar in style to The Chiffons' 1963 hit "He's So Fine," forcing the guitarist to cough up nearly $600,000, the album as a whole remains Harrison's most acclaimed record.
Not long after the album's release, Harrison combined his charitable work and his continued passion for the east when he put together a series of ground-breaking benefit concerts at New York City's Madison Square Garden to raise money for refugees in Bangladesh. Known as the "Concert for Bangladesh", the shows, which featured Bob Dylan, Leon Russell, and Ravi Shankar, would go on to raise some $15 million for UNICEF, produced a Grammy-winning album, a successful documentary film (The Concert for Bangladesh (1972)) and laid the groundwork for future benefit shows like "Live Aid" and "Farm Aid".
Not everything about post-Beatle life went smoothly for Harrison, though. In 1974, his marriage to Pattie Boyd, whom he'd married eight years before, ended when she left him for Eric Clapton. His studio work struggled, too, from 1973-77, starting with, "Living in the Material World", "Extra Texture," and "33 1/3," all of which failed to meet sales expectations.
Following the release of that last album, Harrison took a short break from music, winding down his own label, Dark Horse Records--which he had started in 1974, and which had released albums by a number of other bands--and started his own film production company, Handmade Films. The company produced the successful Monty Python film Life of Brian (1979) and would go on to make 26 other films before Harrison sold his interest in the company in 1994.
In 1979, he returned to the studio to release his self-titled album. It was followed two years later by, "Somewhere in England," which was still being worked on at the time of John Lennon's assassination in December of 1980. The record eventually included the Lennon tribute track, "All Those Years Ago," a song that reunited ex-Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with ex-Wings members Denny Laine and Linda McCartney. While the song was a hit, the album, its predecessor and its successor, "Gone Troppo," weren't. For Harrison the lack of commercial appeal and the constant battles with music executives proved draining and prompted another studio hiatus.
A comeback of sorts came in November 1987, however, with the release of the album "Cloud Nine," produced by Jeff Lynne (of Electric Light Orchestra). The album turned out several top-charting hits, including "Got My Mind Set On You"-- remake of the 1962 song by Rudy Clark--and "When We Was Fab," a song that reflected on the life of Beatlemania, with Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, who was dressed up as a walrus, but was a camera shy, in February 1988. Later that year Harrison formed The Traveling Wilburys. The group consisted of Harrison, Lynne, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan, and spawned two successful albums. Buoyed by the group's commercial success, Harrison took to the road with his new bandmates in 1992, embarking on his first international tour in 18 years.
Not long afterwards he was reunited with McCartney and Starr for the creation of an exhaustive three-part release of a Beatles anthology--which featured alternative takes, rare tracks and a John Lennon demo called "Free as a Bird," that the three surviving Beatles completed in the studio. The song went on to become the group's 34th Top 10 single. After that, however, Harrison largely became a homebody, keeping himself busy with gardening and his cars at his expansive and restored home in Henley-on-Thames in south Oxfordshire, England.
Still, the ensuing years were not completely stress-free. In 1997, Harrison, a longtime smoker, was successfully treated for throat cancer. Eighteen months later, his life was again put on the line when a deranged 33-year-old Beatles fan somehow managed to circumvent Harrison's intricate security system and broke into his home, attacking the musician and his wife Olivia with a knife. Harrison was treated for a collapsed lung and minor stab wounds. Olivia suffered several cuts and bruises.
In May 2001, Harrison's cancer returned. There was lung surgery, but doctors soon discovered the cancer had spread to his brain. That autumn, he traveled to the US for treatment and was eventually hospitalized at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA. He died November 29, 2001, at ex-bandmate McCartney's house in Los Angeles, at aged 58, with his wife and son at his side.
Just one year after his death, Harrison's final studio album, "Brainwashed," was released. It was produced by Lynne, Harrison's son Dhani Harrison and Harrison himself, and featured a collection of songs he'd been working at the time of his death. Dhani finished putting the album together and it was released in November of 2002.Thursday's child too!!!- Anthony Faramus is known for The Colditz Story (1955) and King Rat (1965).Tuesday's child in 1920!
- Actor
- Director
Rex Garner was born on 31 January 1921 in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, England, UK. He was an actor and director, known for Shadow Squad (1957), Survivor (1987) and ITV Play of the Week (1955). He was married to Tammy Bonell. He died on 17 May 2015 in Havant, Hampshire, England, UK.Monday's child!- Actor
- Writer
Lane Meddick was born on 18 March 1924 in Barry, Glamorgan, Wales, UK. He was an actor and writer, known for Flower of Evil (1961), The Death Wheelers (1973) and Journey's End (1954). He died on 1 January 2017 in Binfield Heath, Berkshire, England, UK.Tuesday's child!- British character actress, on stage from 1894. Her many notable theatrical appearances include "Little Lord Fauntleroy" at the Prince's Theatre in Bristol, and, as Lady McClean, in "Escape Me Never" at the Apollo in London (1933) - a part she subsequently took to Broadway two years later. Until well into her seventies, Katie's screen career consisted almost exclusively of smallish parts, until she was cast as sweet, frail Mrs. Wilberforce in the classic Ealing comedy The Ladykillers (1955). A most quintessentially British role, it finds her in a crumbling boarding house with dodgy plumbing, surrounded by Victorian memorabilia, a parrot named General Gordon, and an assortment of genteel, but pixillated, old friends. Her innocence and moral fortitude ultimately precipitate the downfall of a gang of bank robbers, posing as a string quartet.
This was the defining role of Katie's career and it won her the 1955 BAFTA Award as Best Actress. She had another juicy role, as eavesdropping would-be sleuth Aunt Alice, in How to Murder a Rich Uncle (1957). Sadly, there was to be no more from this delightful scene stealer, as she passed away shortly after, at the age of 78.Monday's child! - Actor
- Music Department
- Script and Continuity Department
Jack Warner started acting with the Sutton Amateur Dramatics Club after the end of World War I. From 1935, performed in cabaret at the London West End as half of the double act of Warner & Darnell. In addition to starring as Dixon of Dock Green (1955), which ran for over 20 years, he achieved lasting popularity on screen in the role of Joe Huggett, patriarch of a Cockney family, in Holiday Camp (1947), and its three sequels (plus a radio serial). Towards the end of his working life, 1976-80, Warner made a brief return to cabaret, before a stroke brought about his retirement.Thursday's child!- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Sir Dirk Bogarde, distinguished film actor and writer, was born Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde on March 28, 1921, to Ulric van den Bogaerde, the art editor of "The Times" (London) newspaper, and actress Margaret Niven in the London suburb of Hampstead. He was one of three children, with sister Elizabeth and younger brother Gareth. His father was Flemish and his mother was of Scottish descent.
Ulric Bogaerde started the Times' arts department and served as its first art editor. Derek's mother, Margaret - the daughter of actor and painter Forrest Niven - appeared in the play "Bunty Pulls The Strings", but she quit the boards in accordance with her husband's wishes. The young Derek Bogaerde was raised at the family home in Sussex by his sister, Elizabeth, and his nanny, Lally Holt.
Educated at the Allen Glen's School in Glasgow, he also attended London's University College School before majoring in commercial art at Chelsea Polytechnic, where his teachers included Henry Moore. Though his father wanted his eldest son to follow him into the "Times" as an art critic and had groomed him for that role, Derek dropped out of his commercial art course and became a drama student, though his acting talent at that time was unpromising. In the 1930s he went to work as a commercial artist and a scene designer.
He apprenticed as an actor with the Amersham Repertory Company, and made his acting debut in 1939 on a small London stage, the Q Theatre, in a role in which he delivered only one line. His debut in London's West End came a few months later in J.B. Priestley's play "Cornelius," in which he was billed as "Derek Bogaerde". He made his uncredited debut as an extra in the pre-war George Formby comedy Come on George! (1939).
The September 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union triggered World War II, and in 1940 Bogarde joined the Queen's Royal Regiment as an officer. He served in the Air Photographic Intelligence Unit and eventually attained the rank of major. Nicknamed "Pippin" and "Pip" during the war, he was awarded seven medals in his five years of active duty. He wrote poems and painted during the war, and in 1943, a small magazine published one of his poems, "Steel Cathedrals," which subsequently was anthologized. His paintings of the war are part of the Imperial War Museum's collection.
Similar to his character, Captain Hargreaves, in King & Country (1964), he was called upon to put a wounded soldier out of his misery, a tale recounted in one of his seven volumes of autobiography. While serving with the Air Photographic Intelligence Unit, he took part in the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which he said was akin to "looking into Dante's Inferno".
In one of his autobiographies, he wrote, "At 24, the age I was then, deep shock stays registered forever. An internal tattooing which is removable only by surgery, it cannot be conveniently sponged away by time."
After being demobilized, he returned to acting. His agent re-christened him "Dirk Bogarde," a name that he would make famous within a decade. In 1947 he appeared in "Power Without Glory" at the New Lindsay Theatre, a performance that was praised by Noël Coward, who urged him to continue his acting career. The Rank Organization had signed him to a contract after a talent scout saw him in the play, and he made his credited movie debut in Dancing with Crime (1947) with a one-line bit as a policeman.
His first lead in a movie came that year when Wessex Films, distributed by Rank, gave him a part in the proposed Stewart Granger film Sin of Esther Waters (1948). When Granger dropped out, Bogarde took over the lead. Rank subsequently signed him to a long-term contract and he appeared in a variety of parts during the 14 years he was under contract to the studio.
For three years he toiled in Rank movies as an apprentice actor without making much of a ripple; then in 1950, he was given the role of young hood Tom Riley in the crime thriller The Blue Lamp (1950) (the title comes from the blue-colored light on police call-boxes in London), the most successful British film of 1950, which established Bogarde as an actor of note. Playing a cop killer, an unspeakable crime in the England of the time, it was the first of the intense neurotics and attractive villains that Bogarde would often play.
He continued to act on-stage, appearing in the West End in Jean Anouilh's "Point of Departure". While he was praised for his performance, stage acting made him nervous, and as he became more famous, he began to be mobbed by fans. The pressure of the public adulation proved overwhelming, particularly as he suffered from stage fright. He was accosted by crowds of fans at the stage door during the 1955 touring production of "Summertime," and his more enthusiastic admirers even shouted at him during the play. He was to appear in only one more play, the Oxford Playhouse production of "Jezebel," in 1958. He never again took to the boards, despite receiving attractive offers.
He first acted for American expatriate director Joseph Losey in The Sleeping Tiger (1954). Losey, a Communist and self-described Stalinist at the time, had emigrated to England after being blacklisted in Hollywood after he refused to direct The Woman on Pier 13 (1949) at RKO Pictures, which was owned by right-wing multi-millionaire Howard Hughes at the time, and he was accused in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee of being a Communist. The director, like Bogarde, would not find his stride until the early 1960s, and Losey and Bogarde would build their reputations together.
First, however, Losey had to overcome Bogarde's reluctance to star in a low-budget film (shot for $300,000) with a blacklisted American director. Losey, who had never heard of Bogarde until he was proposed for the film, met with him and asked Bogarde to view one of his pictures. After seeing the film, Bogarde was enthusiastic, and Losey talked him into taking the role, which he accepted at a reduced fee (Losey originally was not credited with directing the film due to his being blacklisted in the States). A decade later they would make more memorable films that would be watersheds in their careers.
It was not drama but comedy that made Dirk Bogarde a star. He achieved the first rank of English movie stardom playing Dr. Simon Sparrow in the comedy Doctor in the House (1954). The film was a smash hit, becoming one of the most popular British films in history, with 17 million admissions in its first year of release. As Sparrow, Bogarde became a heartthrob and the most popular British movie star of the mid-50s. He reprised the character in Doctor at Sea (1955), Doctor at Large (1957).
The title of the latter film may have described his mood as a serious actor having to do another turn as Dr. Sparrow between his career-making performances in Losey's The Servant (1963), with a script by Harold Pinter, and Losey's adaptation of the stage play King & Country (1964), in which Bogarde memorably played the attorney for a young deserter (played by Tom Courtenay).
Bogarde, hailed as "the idol of the Odeons" in honor of his box-office clout, was offered the role of Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger (1959) by producer Harry Saltzman and director Tony Richardson, based on the play that touched off the "Angry Young Man" and "Kitchen Sink School" of contemporary English drama in the 1950s. Though Bogarde wanted to take the part, Rank refused to let him make the film on the grounds that there was "altogether too much dialog." The part went to Richard Burton instead, who went over-the-top in portraying his very angry, not-so-young man.
After this disappointment, Bogarde went to Hollywood to play Franz Liszt in Song Without End (1960) and to appear in Nunnally Johnson's Spanish Civil War drama The Angel Wore Red (1960) with Ava Gardner. Both were big-budgeted films, but hampered by poor scripts, and after both films failed, Bogarde avoided Hollywood from then on.
He was reportedly quite smitten with his French "Song Without End" co-star Capucine, and wanted to marry her. Capucine, who suffered from bi-polar disorder, was bisexual with an admitted preference for women. The relationship did not lead to marriage, but did result in a long-term friendship. It apparently was his only serious relationship with a woman, though he had many women friends, including his I Could Go on Singing (1963) co-star Judy Garland.
In the early 1960s, with the expiration of his Rank contract, Bogarde made the decision to abandon his hugely successful career in commercial movies and concentrate on more complex, art house films (at the same time, Burt Lancaster made a similar decision, though Lancaster continued to alternate his artistic ventures with more crassly commercial endeavors). Bogarde appeared in Basil Dearden's seminal film Victim (1961), the first British movie to sympathetically address the persecution of homosexuals. His career choice alienated many of his old fans, but he was no longer interested in being a commercial movie star; he, like Lancaster, was interested in developing as an actor and artist (however, that sense of finding himself as an actor did not extend to the stage. His reputation was such in 1963 that he was invited by National Theatre director Laurence Olivier to appear as Hamlet to open the newly built Chichester Festival Theatre. That production of the eponymous play also was intended to open the National Theatre's first season in London. Bogarde declined, and the honor went instead to Peter O'Toole, who floundered in the part.)
Jack Grimston, in Bogarde's "Sunday Times" obituary of May 9, 1999, entitled "Bogarde, a solitary star at the edge of the spotlight," said of the late actor that he "belonged to a group that was rare in the British cinema. He was a fine screen player who owed little to the stage. Dilys Powell, the Sunday Times film critic, wrote of him before her own death: 'Most of our gifted film players really belonged to the theater. Bogarde belonged to the screen.'" Bogarde had won the London Critics Circle's Dilys Powell award for outstanding contribution to cinema in 1992.
Appearing in "Victim" was a huge career gamble. In the film, Bogarde played a married barrister who is being blackmailed over his closeted homosexuality. Rather than let the blackmail continue, and allow the perpetrators to victimize other gay men, Bogarde's character effectively sacrifices himself, specifically his marriage and his career, by bravely confessing to be gay (homosexuality was an offence in the United Kingdom until 1967, and there reportedly had been a police crackdown against homosexuals after World War II which made gay men particularly vulnerable to blackmail).
The film was not released in mainstream theaters in the US, as the Production Code Administration (PCA) refused to classify the film and most theaters would not show films that did not carry the PCA seal of approval. "Victim" was the antithesis of the light comedy of Bogarde's "Doctor" movies, and many fans of his character Simon Sparrow were forever alienated by his portrayal of a homosexual. For himself, Bogarde was proud of the film and his participation in it, which many think stimulated public debate over homosexuality. The film undoubtedly raised the public consciousness over the egregious and unjust individual costs of anti-gay bigotry. The public attitude towards the "love that dared not speak its name" changed enough so that within six years, the 1967 Sexual Offences Act decriminalizing homosexual acts between adults passed Parliament. Bogarde reported that he received many letters praising him for playing the role. His courage in taking on such a role is even more significant in that he most likely was gay himself, and thus exposed himself to a backlash.
Bogarde always publicly denied he was a homosexual, though later in life he did confess that he and his manager, Anthony Forwood, had a long-term relationship. When Bogarde met him in 1939, Forwood was a theatrical manager, who eventually married and divorced Glynis Johns. Forwood became Bogarde's friend and subsequently his life partner, and the two moved to France together in 1968. They bought a 15th-century farmhouse near Grasse in Provence in the early 1970s, which they restored. Bogarde and Forwood lived in the house until 1983, when they returned to London so that Forwood could be treated for cancer, from which he eventually died in 1988. Bogarde nursed him in the last few months of his life. After Forwood died, Bogarde was left rudderless and he became more reclusive, eventually retiring from films after Daddy Nostalgia (1990).
Mark Rowe and Jeremy Kay, in their obituary of Bogarde, "Two brilliant lives - on film and in print," published in "The Independent" on May, 9, 1999, wrote, "Although he documented with frankness his early sexual encounters with girls and later his adoring love for Kay Kendall and Judy Garland, he never wrote about his longest and closest relationship - with his friend and manager for more than 50 years, Tony Forwood. Sir Dirk said the clues to his private life were in his books. "If you've got your wits about you, you will know who I am." The British documentary The Private Dirk Bogarde: Part One (2001) made with the permission of his family, stressed the fact that he and Forwood were committed lifelong partners.
In the same issue, the National Film Theatre's David Thompson, in the article "The public understood he was essentially gay," wrote about Bogarde at his high-water mark in the 1950s, that "Audiences of that time loved him . . . Very few people picked up on the fact that there was a distinct gay undertone. It says something about British audiences of the time. He had the good fortune to break out of that prison, and it came through the film Victim (1961), where he played a gay character, and through meeting with Joseph Losey, who directed him in The Servant (1963). For the first time, Bogarde's ambivalence was exploited and used by film."
Bogarde's sexuality is not the issue; what was striking was that it was an act of personal courage for one of Britian's leading box-office attractions to appear in such a provocative and controversial film. Even in the 21st century, many mainstream actors are afraid to play a gay character lest they engender a public backlash against themselves, which is much less likely than it was more than 40 years ago when Bogarde made "Victim."
Apart from sociology, "Victim" marks the milestone in which critics and audiences could discern the metamorphosis of Bogarde into the mature actor who went on to become one of the cinema's finest performers. Most of Bogarde's best and most serious roles come after "Victim," the film in which he first stretched himself and broke out of the mold of "movie star." He received the first of his six nominations as Best Actor from the British Academy of Film & Television Arts (BAFTA) for the film.
Bogarde co-starred with John Mills in The Singer Not the Song (1961), and with Alec Guinness in Damn the Defiant! (1962) (a.k.a. "Damn the Defiant!"). In 1963 he reunited with Losey to film the first of two Losey films with screenplays by Pinter. Bogarde's participation in the two Losey/Pinter collaborations, The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967), in addition to 1964's "King & Country", solidified his reputation. Critics and savvy moviegoers appreciated the fact that Bogarde had developed into a first-rate actor. For his role as the eponymous servant, Bogarde won BAFTA's Best Actor Award. He had now "officially" arrived in the inner circle of the best British film actors.
These three films also elevated Losey into the ranks of major directors (Bogarde also starred in Losey's 1966 spy spoof Modesty Blaise (1966), but that film did little to enhance either man's reputation. He turned down the opportunity to appear in Losey's The Assassination of Trotsky (1972) due to the poor quality of the script).
Philip French, in his obituary "Dark, exotic and yet essentially English", published in "The Observer" on May 9, 1999, said of Bogarde, "Losey discovered something more complex and sinister in his English persona and his performance as Barrett, the malevolent valet in 'The Servant,' scripted by Harold Pinter, is possibly the most subtle, revealing thing he ever did - by confronting his homosexuality in a non-gay context."
Losey told interviewer Michel Ciment that his work with Bogarde represented a turning point in the actor's career, when he developed into an actor of depth and power. He also frankly admitted to Ciment that without Bogarde, his career would have stagnated and never reached the heights of success and critical acclaim that it did in the 1960s.
Interestingly during the filming of "The Servant." Losey was hospitalized with pneumonia. He asked Bogarde to direct the film in order to keep shooting so that the producers would not cancel the film. A reluctant Bogarde complied with Losey's wishes and directed for ten days. He later said that he would never direct again.
Bogarde co-starred with up-and-coming actress Julie Christie in John Schlesinger's Darling (1965), for which Christie won a Best Actress Oscar and was vaulted into 1960s cinema superstardom. During the filming of the movie, both Bogarde and Christie were waiting to hear whether they would be cast as Yuri Zhivago and his lover Lara in David Lean's upcoming blockbuster Doctor Zhivago (1965). Christie got the call, Bogarde didn't, but he was well along in the process of establishing himself as one of the screen's best and most important actors. He won his second BAFTA Best Actor Award for his performance in "Darling."
Bogarde went on to major starring roles in such important pictures as The Fixer (1968), for which Alan Bates won a Best Actor Academy Award nomination. While Bogarde never was nominated for an Oscar, he had the honor of starring in two films for Luchino Visconti, The Damned (1969) ("The Damned") and Death in Venice (1971), based on Thomas Mann's novella "Death in Venice." Bogarde felt that his performance as Gustav von Aschenbach, the dying composer in love with a young boy and with the concept of beauty, in "Death in Venice" was the "the peak and end of my career . . . I can never hope to give a better performance in a better film."
Visconti told Bogarde that when the lights went up in a Los Angeles screening room after a showing of "Death in Venice" for American studio executives, no one said anything. The silence encouraged Visconti, who believed it meant that the executives were undergoing a catharsis after watching his masterpiece. However, he soon realized that, in Bogarde's own words, "Apparently they were stunned into horrified silence . . . A group of slumped nylon-suited men stared dully at the blank screen." One nervous executive, feeling something should be said, got up and asked, "Signore Visconti, who was responsible for the score of the film?"
"Gustav Mahler," Visconti replied.
"Just great!", said the nervous man. "I think we should sign him."
After "Venice", Bogarde made only seven films over the next two decades and was scathing about the quality of the scripts he was offered. To express himself artistically, he began to write. In his third volumes of autobiography, he wrote, "No longer do the great Jewish dynasties hold power: the people who were, when all is said and done, the Picture People. Now the cinema is controlled by vast firms like Xerox, Gulf & Western, and many others who deal in anything from sanitary-ware to property development. These huge conglomerates, faceless, soulless, are concerned only with making a profit; never a work of art . . . "
He rued the fact that "it is pointless to be 'superb' in a commercial failure; and most of the films which I had deliberately chosen to make in the last few years were, by and large, just that. Or so I am always informed by the businessmen. The critics may have liked them extravagantly, but the distributors shy away from what they term 'A Critic's Film', for it often means that the public will stay away. Which, in the mass, they do: and if you don't make money at the box-office you are not asked back to play again."
However, the courageous artist was not to be daunted: "But I'd had very good innings. Better than most. So what the hell?" His well-written works were enthusiastically received by critics and the book-buying public.
Bogarde appeared in another film that flirted with the theme of German fascism, Liliana Cavani's highly controversial The Night Porter (1974) ("The Night Porter"). He played an ex-SS officer who encounters a woman with whom he had been engaged in a sado-masochistic affair at a World War II Nazi extermination camp. Many critics found the film, which featured extensive nudity courtesy of Charlotte Rampling, crassly offensive, but no one faulted Bogarde's performance.
He played Lt. Gen. Frederick "Boy" Browning in the all-star blockbuster A Bridge Too Far (1977). Although some of his fellow actors were World War II veterans, only Bogarde had been involved in the actual battle. His performance arguably is the best in the film. Appearing in Alain Resnais' art house hit Providence (1977) gave Bogarde the opportunity to co-star with John Gielgud. He also starred in German wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder's adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Despair (1978), with a script by Tom Stoppard. Though the film was not much of a critical success, Bogarde's acting as 1930s German businessman Hermann Hermann, a man who chooses to go mad when faced with the paradoxes of his life in his proto-fascist fatherland, was highly praised.
Bogarde enjoyed working with Fassbinder. He wrote that "Rainer's work was extraordinarily similar to that of Visconti's; despite their age difference, they both behaved, on set, in much the same manner. Both had an incredible knowledge of the camera: the first essential. Both knew how it could be made to function; they had the same feeling for movement on the screen, of the all-important (and often-neglected) 'pacing' of a film, from start to finish, of composition, of texture, and probably most of all they shared that strange ability to explore and probe into the very depths of the character which one had offered them."
After his experience with Fassbinder, he acted only four more times, twice in feature films and twice on television. Bogarde was nominated for a Golden Globe for playing Roald Dahl in The Patricia Neal Story (1981). He got rave reviews playing Jane Birkin's father in Bertrand Tavernier's Daddy Nostalgia (1990), his last film.
In 1984 Bogarde was asked to serve as president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, a huge honor for the actor, as he was the first Briton ever to serve in that capacity. Two years earlier he had been made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des lettres 1982. A decade later, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on February 13, 1992.
Bogarde won two Best Actor Awards out of six nominations from the British Academy of Film & Television Arts, for "The Servant" and "Darling" in 1964 and 1966, respectively. He was also nominated in 1962 for "Victim," in 1968 for "Accident" and Our Mother's House (1967) and in 1972 for "Morte a Venezia."
Bogarde suffered a stroke in 1996, and though it rendered him partially paralyzed, he was able to recover and live in his own flat in Chelsea. However, by May of 1998 he required around-the-clock nursing care, and he had his lawyers draw up a "living will," also known as a no-resuscitation order. Bogarde publicly came out in favor of voluntary euthanasia, becoming Vice President of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society. He publicly addressed the subject of his own "living will," which ordered that no extraordinary measures be taken to keep him alive should he become terminally ill.
The living will proved unnecessary. Dirk Bogarde died of a heart attack on May 8, 1999, in his home in Chelsea, London, England. According to his nephew Brock Van den Bogaerde, the family planned to hold a private funeral but no memorial service in accordance with his uncle's wish "just to forget me." Bogarde wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered in France, and accordingly, his remains were returned to Provence.
Margaret Hinxman, in her May 10, 1999, obituary in "The Guardian", said of him, "At his peak and with directors he trusted - Joseph Losey, Luchino Visconti and Alain Resnais - Dirk Bogarde . . . was probably the finest, most complete, actor on the screen."
Clive Fisher's obituary in "The Independent" on May 10, 1999, praised Bogarde as "a major figure because, wherever they were made, his finest films are all somehow about him. He was a great self-portraitist and the screen persona he fashioned, a stylization of his private being, not only dominated its surroundings but spoke subliminally and powerfully to British audiences about the tensions of the time, about connivances and cruel respectabilities of England in the Fifties and Sixties."
The secret of Dirk Bogarde's success as a great cinema actor was his intimate relationship with the camera. Bogarde believed that the key to acting on film was the eyes, specifically, the "look" of the actor. Like Alan Ladd, it didn't matter if an actor was good with line readings if they had mastery over the "look." For many critics and movie-goers at the end of the 20th century, Dirk Bogarde's face epitomized the "look" of Britain in the tumultuous decades after the Second World War.
David Tindle's portrait of Bogarde is part of the collection of London's National Portrait Gallery, London. In 1999, the portrait, on temporary loan, was displayed at 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister's official residence, with other modern works of art. Officially, Dirk Bogarde had become the look of Britain.Monday's child!- Peggy Evans was born on 10 January 1921 in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, UK. She was an actress, known for The Blue Lamp (1950), Penny and the Pownall Case (1948) and Murder at 3am (1953). She was married to Peter Stevens and Michael Howard. She died on 26 July 2015.Monday's child!
- Gladys Henson was born on 27 September 1897 in Dublin, Ireland. She was an actress, known for Derby Day (1952), The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950) and Frieda (1947). She was married to Harry Wright and Leslie Henson. She died on 21 December 1982 in London, England, UK.Monday's child!
- Patric Doonan was born on 19 April 1926 in Alvaston, Derby, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Project M7 (1953), The Cockleshell Heroes (1955) and Crest of the Wave (1954). He was married to Aud Johansen. He died on 10 March 1958 in Chelsea, London, England, UK.Saturday's child actually from 1925!
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Good-natured British actor Jimmy Hanley was groomed by the Rank Studio system during his teen years and earned stardom as the "boy next door" type in exuberant musicals and likeable comedies. He married actress Dinah Sheridan in 1942 and they appeared together in a number of featherweight war-era films, including Salute John Citizen (1942) and For You Alone (1945). When Jimmy grew up he tried everything from Henry V (1944) with Laurence Olivier to The Huggetts film series. But radio and TV were his forte and it was those two mediums which revived his star in the late 50s, becoming a familiar face on a number of TV series, notably "Jim's Inn" co-starring second wife Maggie Hanley, which ran from 1957-1963. Jimmy died of cancer in 1970.Tuesday's child!- Actor
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Campbell Singer was born on 16 March 1909 in London, England, UK. He was an actor and writer, known for The Saint (1962), Murder on Monday (1952) and Take a Pair of Private Eyes (1966). He was married to Gillian Maude. He died on 16 February 1976 in London, England, UK.Tuesday's child!- Norman Shelley was born on 16 February 1903 in Chelsea, London, England, UK. He was an actor, known for The Railway Children (1957), Wuthering Heights (1967) and Madame Bovary (1964). He was married to Monica Brett. He died on 22 August 1980 in London, England, UK.Monday's child!
- Arthur Rigby was born on 27 September 1900 in London, England, UK. He was an actor and writer, known for Wolves of the Underworld (1933), Dixon of Dock Green (1955) and Love Lies (1931). He was married to Sheila MacEvoy. He died on 25 April 1971 in Worthing, Sussex, England, UK.Thursday's child!