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Stanley Kubrick
Biography
Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career. Kubrick was noted for the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his slow method of working, the variety of genres he worked in, his technical perfectionism, and his reclusiveness about his films and personal life. He maintained almost complete artistic control, making movies according to his own whims and time constraints, but with the rare advantage of big-studio financial support for all his endeavors. Kubrick's films are characterized by a formal visual style and meticulous attention to detail—his later films often have elements of surrealism and expressionism that eschews structured linear narrative. His films are repeatedly described as slow and methodical, and are often perceived as a reflection of his obsessive and perfectionist nature. A recurring theme in his films is man's inhumanity to man. While often viewed as expressing an ironic pessimism, a few critics feel his films contain a cautious optimism when viewed more carefully.
The film that first brought him attention to many critics was Paths of Glory (1957), the first of three films of his about the dehumanizing effects of war. Many of his films at first got a lukewarm reception, only to be years later acclaimed as masterpieces that had a seminal influence on many later generations of film-makers. Considered especially groundbreaking was 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) noted for being both one of the most scientifically realistic and visually innovative science-fiction films ever made while maintaining an enigmatic non-linear storyline. He voluntarily withdrew his film A Clockwork Orange (1971) from England, after it was accused of inspiring copycat crimes which in turn resulted in threats against Kubrick's family. His films were largely successful at the box-office, although Barry Lyndon (1975) performed poorly in the United States. Living authors Anthony Burgess and Stephen King were both unhappy with Kubrick's adaptations of their novels A Clockwork Orange and The Shining (1980) respectively, and both authors were engaged with subsequent adaptations. All of Kubrick's films from the mid-1950s to his death except for The Shining were nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes, or BAFTAs. Although he was nominated for an Academy Award as a screenwriter and director on several occasions, his only personal win was for the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Even though all of his films, apart from the first two, were adapted from novels or short stories, his works have been described by Jason Ankeny and others as "original and visionary". Although some critics, notably Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, frequently disparaged Kubrick's work, Ankeny describes Kubrick as one of the most "universally acclaimed and influential directors of the postwar era" with a "standing unique among the filmmakers of his day."
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Patricia Vonne
Biography
Patricia Vonne is an American singer and actress. A native of San Antonio, Texas, Vonne, born Patricia Rodriguez, moved to New York City in 1990-2001 to pursue her artistic ambitions. She worked extensively in Europe and America and was featured in national/international commercials, and film work. She formed her own musical band, which performed on the New York circuit from 1998-2001. She then relocated to her native Texas where she currently tours extensively in the U.S., Mexico and Europe. She toured as a member of Tito & Tarantula, the band featured in the film From Dusk Till Dawn in 2002. Her song, "Traeme Paz", was featured in the film Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Her song "Mudpies and Gasoline" is featured in the Quentin Tarantino presented film Hell Ride. She is the sister of Angela Lanza, Marcel Rodriguez and Robert Rodriguez.
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Sammi Davis
Biography
Sammi Davis (born Samantha Davis; 21 June 1964) is a British actress.
She gained considerable praise for her performance in Ken Russell's The Rainbow (1989). She also had significant roles in Mike Hodges' A Prayer For The Dying and John Boorman's Hope and Glory (both 1987) as well as a leading role in the Emmy Award-winning American television series, Homefront (1991–1993).
Davis was married to the director Kurt Voss, whom she later divorced. After taking a few years out of the film industry to raise her family, she returned to the screen in a cameo role on Lost, playing the mother of Dominic Monaghan's character.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Sammi Davis, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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Madonna
Biography
Madonna (born Madonna Louise Ciccone; August 16, 1958) is an American recording artist, actress and entrepreneur. Born in Bay City, Michigan, she moved to New York City in 1977 to pursue a career in modern dance. After performing in the music groups Breakfast Club and Emmy, she released her debut album in 1983. She followed it with a series of albums in which she found immense popularity by pushing the boundaries of lyrical content in mainstream popular music and imagery in her music videos, which became a fixture on MTV. Throughout her career, many of her songs have hit number one on the record charts, including "Like a Virgin", "Papa Don't Preach", "Like a Prayer", "Vogue", "Frozen", "Music", "Hung Up", and "4 Minutes". Critics have praised Madonna for her diverse musical productions while at the same time serving as a lightning rod for religious controversy.
Her career was further enhanced by film appearances that began in 1979, despite mixed commentary. She won critical acclaim and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for her role in Evita (1996), but has received harsh feedback for other film roles. Madonna's other ventures include being a fashion designer, children's book author, film director and producer. She has been acclaimed as a businesswoman, and in 2007, she signed an unprecedented US $120 million contract with Live Nation.
Madonna has sold more than 300 million records worldwide and is recognized as the world's top-selling female recording artist of all time by the Guinness World Records. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), she is the best-selling female rock artist of the 20th century and the second top-selling female artist in the United States, behind Barbra Streisand, with 64 million certified albums. In 2008, Billboard magazine ranked Madonna at number two, behind only The Beatles, on the Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists, making her the most successful solo artist in the history of the Billboard chart. She was also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the same year. Considered to be one of the "25 Most Powerful Women of the Past Century" by Time for being an influential figure in contemporary music, Madonna is known for continuously reinventing both her music and image, and for retaining a standard of autonomy within the recording industry.
On May 4, 2024, with a free concert which was live streamed at the Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in front of 1.6 million people, Madonna broke the record for the most attended stand-alone concert by any artist, and the all-time highest attended concert by a female artist.
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Josephine Byrnes
Biography
Josephine Byrnes (born 28 December 1966) is an Australian actress best known for her work in television, including a lead role in Brides of Christ for which she won a Logie Award.
Bryne was born in United States, and moved to Hong Kong with her family before coming to Australia in 1971. Prior to taking up acting, she worked as a graphic artist and graduated from NIDA in 1989.
Bryne appears to have retired from acting on screen and stage after marrying Peter Gilbert in 2005, and becomes an interior stylist, designer and artist and has two children living in Singapore.
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Sean Connery
Biography
Sir Thomas Sean Connery (August 25, 1930 – October 31, 2020) was a Scottish actor and producer. He won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards (one being a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award), and three Golden Globes, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award and a Henrietta Award. Connery was the first actor to portray the character James Bond in film, starring in seven Bond films (every film from Dr. No to You Only Live Twice, plus Diamonds Are Forever and Never Say Never Again), between 1962 and 1983. In 1988, Connery won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Untouchables. His films also include Marnie (1964), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Highlander (1986), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Dragonheart (1996), The Rock (1996), and Finding Forrester (2000).
Connery was polled in a 2004 The Sunday Herald as "The Greatest Living Scot" and in a 2011 EuroMillions survey as "Scotland's Greatest Living National Treasure". He was voted by People magazine as both the “Sexiest Man Alive" in 1989 and the "Sexiest Man of the Century” in 1999. He received a lifetime achievement award in the United States with a Kennedy Center Honor in 1999. Connery was knighted in the 2000 New Year Honours for services to film drama.
On October 31, 2020, Connery died at the age of 90.
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Gustavo Graef-Marino
Biography
Gustavo took the independent film scene by storm in the 90's with his very original and highly acclaimed take on post-Pinochet Chile with "Johnny 100 Pesos". The film became Chile's highest grossing movie and was selected as its official candidate for both the "Best Foreign Language Film" category in the 1993 Academy Awards, as well as the Spanish Goya Awards that same year. In the US, the film premiered at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival where it became an instant success and was commercially released in the US to rave reviews from the indie press. Crowning its success, the film was invited to participate in A-list festivals such as Tokyo International Film Festival, New Directors New Films at the MOMA in New York, Toronto, and other prestigious festivals like Montreal, Los Angeles, San Sebastian, Munich, London, Stockholm, V'iennale, Sydney, Rio; and winning numerous awards including the Chilean film critics' Best Movie of the Year and 1st place at the "Mystery Film Festival" in Italy. "Johnny" went on to obtain worldwide distribution.
His prestige as an international filmmaker has also led Gustavo to become President of the Jury of the Latin American Cinema Award at the Sundance Film Festival 1999.
Gustavo's desire to become a filmmaker started at an early age. After attending law school at the prestigious Universidad Catolica in Chile, he left to pursue his film career as a student at the highly selective and celebrated HFF -Munich Film and Television University- in Germany, where he spent five years. He remained in Germany where he developed a career as a screenwriter and director, beginning with films such as "Filming with Douglas Sirk" -a documentary about the master of melodrama in Hollywood, featuring the late great post-war German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Gustavo directed in Germany his first English language feature, "The voice", with British actors Jon Finch and Suzanna Hamilton, and late rock star Ian Dury.
Gustavo returned to Chile after 15 years in Europe to write, produce and direct "Johnny 100 Pesos". With this success under his belt he was invited to work in the United States and offered his first American feature "Diplomatic Siege" starring Darryl Hannah, Peter Weller and Tom Berenger. His second American film "Instinct to kill" features martial arts star Mark Dacascos.
Gustavo has most recently been directing, writing and producing greatly admired big budget movies for Chilean TV like "Balmaceda," for which he won the Altazor Television award in the best drama category. His next TV movie "Prat" reached a record audience in that country. In 2017 he directs and produces "Johnny 100 Pesos - Chapter Two".
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John Garet Stoker
Biography
MTV personality on the television series Eye Candy in the role of Connor. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and raised in Hopewell, New Jersey. His middle name is Stabile.
Growing up, he was an avid baseball player and also took horseback riding for several years. He spent his junior year of high school in Zaragoza, Spain in the School Year Abroad program where he performed in Spanish theater productions.
He attended Carnegie Mellon University, receiving a Bachelor's of Fine Arts degree in acting, and graduating in 2014.
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Sandra Vidal
Biography
Sandra Vidal, ( born September 17, 1966) is an Argentine model and actress, gained prominence for her role as Sofia Alonso in "The Bold and the Beautiful" (1987). Prior to her acting career, she achieved success as an international model after winning Miss Punta del Este at 17, working in major fashion capitals. Her acting talent earned her an ALMA Award in 2002 and nominations for her soap opera performance. She has also appeared in films like "White Rush 2003" and most recently starred in the reality series "Rica, Famosa, Latina."
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Leslie Cheung
Biography
Cheung Kwok-Wing (Chinese: 張國榮, English name: Leslie, September 12, 1956 – April 1, 2003) was a Hong Kong Canadian singer and actor. Born in Hong Kong, Leslie Cheung moved to the United Kingdom in 1971, settling in Leeds, where he enrolled at university to study fashion design. After completing his studies, he returned to Hong Kong and, in 1977, took part in an amateur singing competition—the ATV Asian Music Contest—where he won second prize. The following year, he released his first album, I Like Dreaming. He soon began appearing on television and quickly landed his first film role in Erotic Dreams of the Red Chamber (1978), an erotic production that Cheung himself later described as a “shameful disaster.”
Throughout a 26-year career from 1977 until his death, Cheung released over 40 music albums and acted in 56 films. He was one of the most prominent pioneers that shaped the identity of Cantopop during the 1980s. His studio albums Summer Romance (1987) and Most Beloved (1995) each sold over 300,000 copies and are among the best-selling albums of all time in the territory. In addition to music, Cheung achieved pan-Asian fame with such films as A Better Tomorrow (1986) and A Chinese Ghost Story (1987). He won the Best Actor at the 1991 Hong Kong Film Awards for his role in Days of Being Wild (1990). His venture into acting in the 1990s was recognized for his portrayal of queer characters in the then-conservative film industry, he was one of the few Hong Kong actors willing to take on gay roles—such as in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together—or to play a cross-dressing opera performer in Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1993. Leslie Cheung died by suicide on April 1, 2003, at the age of 46, by jumping from the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong. In the note he left behind, he stated that he had been suffering from depression.
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