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Benny Carter
Biography
Bennett Lester Carter (August 8, 1907 – July 12, 2003) was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, trumpeter, composer, arranger, and bandleader. With Johnny Hodges, he was a pioneer on the alto saxophone. From the beginning of his career in the 1920s, he worked as an arranger including written charts for Fletcher Henderson's big band that shaped the swing style. He had an unusually long career that lasted into the 1990s. During the 1980s and 1990s, he was nominated for eight Grammy Awards, which included receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Carter was born in New York City in 1907. He was given piano lessons by his mother and others in the neighborhood. He played trumpet and experimented briefly with C-melody saxophone before settling on alto saxophone. In the 1920s, he performed with June Clark, Billy Paige, and Earl Hines, then toured as a member of the Wilberforce Collegians led by Horace Henderson. He appeared on record for the first time in 1927 as a member of the Paradise Ten led by Charlie Johnson. He returned to the Collegians and became their bandleader through 1929, including a performance at the Savoy Ballroom in New York City.
In his early 1920s, Carter worked as arranger for Fletcher Henderson after that position was vacated by Don Redman. He had no formal education in arranging, learning by trial and error, getting on his knees and looking at the existing charts, "writing the lead trumpet first and the lead saxophone first—which, of course, is the hard way. It was quite some time that I did that before I knew what a score was."
He left Henderson to take Redman's former job as leader of McKinney's Cotton Pickers in Detroit. In 1932, he formed a band in New York City that included Chu Berry, Sid Catlett, Cozy Cole, Bill Coleman, Ben Webster, Dicky Wells, and Teddy Wilson. Carter's arrangements were complex. Among the most significant were "Keep a Song in Your Soul", written for Henderson in 1930, and "Lonesome Nights" and "Symphony in Riffs" from 1933, both of which show Carter's writing for saxophones.
By the early 1930s, Carter and Johnny Hodges were considered the leading alto saxophonists. Carter also became a leading trumpet soloist, having rediscovered the instrument. He recorded extensively on trumpet in the 1930s. Carter's short-lived Orchestra played the Harlem Club in New York but only recorded a handful of records for Columbia, OKeh and Vocalion. The OKeh sides were issued under the name The Chocolate Dandies.
In 1933, Carter participated in sessions with British composer/musician Spike Hughes, who visited New York City to organize recordings with prominent African American musicians. These 14 sides plus four by Carter's big band, titled at the time Spike Hughes and His Negro Orchestra, were initially only issued in England. The musicians were from Carter's band and included Red Allen, Dicky Wells, Wayman Carver, Coleman Hawkins, J. C. Higginbotham, and Chu Berry. ...
Source: Article "Benny Carter" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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S. S. Rajamouli
Biography
Koduri Srisaila Sri Rajamouli is an Indian filmmaker who works in Telugu cinema industry. Known for his epic, action and fantasy genre films, he is the highest grossing Indian director of all time, as well as the highest-paid director in Indian cinema. His acclaimed filmography includes Eega (2012), the Bāhubali duology (2015 - 2017), and RRR (2022). He is a recipient of various national and international honours including a New York Film Critics Circle award, a Critics' Choice Movie Award, two Saturn Awards, and three National Film Awards. In 2016, the Government of India honoured him with the Padma Shri, for his contributions in the field of Art.
Rajamouli's films are often characterized by their epic grandeur, larger-than-life characters, stylized action sequences, and unbridled heroism with historical and mythological references. His films are noted for their integration of CGI with practical effects. With his Baahubali films, he has pioneered the pan-Indian film movement, wherein a film is simultaneously released in multiple Indian languages across the country, and made in a way that appeals to the audience cutting across the linguistic and cultural barriers. He is also credited for expanding the market of Telugu cinema and South Indian cinema into North India and international markets.
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Daniel Haller
Biography
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Daniel Haller (born September 14, 1926 in Glendale, California) is an American film and television director, production designer, and art director. Haller studied at the renowned Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles.
In 1953, Haller started as an art director in television, then quickly graduated to low budget feature films. Among many other credits, Haller designed the deceptively opulent sets for nearly all of Roger Corman's critically acclaimed Edgar Allan Poe film series, including House of Usher (1960) and The Pit and the Pendulum (1961).
Haller directed his first film, Die, Monster, Die!, in 1965 for American International Pictures. Based on H. P. Lovecraft's short story The Colour Out of Space, it was very similar in plot and atmosphere to Corman's Poe films. After directing two motorcycle pictures (The Devil's Angels (1967) and The Wild Racers (1968)), Haller filmed another Lovecraft adaptation, The Dunwich Horror (1970).
From 1972, all of Haller's subsequent work has been in television, including directing episodes of Night Gallery, Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Today he lives with his family in a horse ranch in the San Fernando Valley.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Daniel Haller, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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Yuki Okada
Biography
Yuki Okada (岡田 雄樹, Okada Yūki, born October 8, 1987) is a Japanese actor and voice actor from Tokyo. He is affiliated with Atomic Monkey. He has blood group O.
He has been an actor since the 2000s when he was in high school. In addition to appearing in TV dramas, variety shows, and movies, he is also active as a stage actor as a member of the theater company Hero Hero Q Company (Gekidan Hero Hero Q Company). Since the latter half of the 2010s, he has also been working as a voice actor for anime and dubbing.
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Cathy Moriarty
Biography
Cathy Moriarty-Gentile (born November 29, 1960) is an American actress.
Her first film credit was Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), as Vikki LaMotta, the wife of Robert De Niro's lead character. Her performance earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She also appeared opposite Andrew Dice Clay in the short-lived CBS sitcom Bless This House (1995). Later, she appeared as the villain Carrigan Crittenden in the 1995 film Casper and as Rose Donlan, wife of Harvey Keitel's corrupt cop in 1997's Cop Land. She reunited with De Niro for 2002's Analyze That, in which she played female Mafia boss Patti LoPresti.
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Jacob Elordi
Biography
Jacob Elordi (born 26 June 1997) is an Australian actor. His accolades include a Critics' Choice Award and three AACTA Awards, in addition to nominations for an Academy Award, three British Academy Film Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.
He became known for his role as Noah Flynn in Netflix's The Kissing Booth franchise (2018–2021) and as Nate Jacobs in the HBO drama series Euphoria (2019–2026). Elordi gained further recognition for his performance in Emerald Fennell's Saltburn (2023) and for his portrayal of the Creature in Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein (2025), which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. His other credits include the films Priscilla (2023) and Wuthering Heights (2026), and the miniseries The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2025).
Description above from the Wikipedia article Jacob Elordi, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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Wayne Duvall
Biography
Wayne Duvall (born May 29, 1958) is an American actor, known for playing Homer Stokes in O Brother Where Art Thou?, Coach Ferguson in "Leatherheads" and Ned Guston in "Duplicity". On television he is best known for playing Sgt. Phil Brander on The District (2000–2004). In 2002, he married Denise Guillet. In November 2009, he acted in a musical play at the La Jolla Playhouse in California—as the Sheriff in Frank Wildhorn's musical Bonnie & Clyde slated for Broadway in 2011. Duvall is the cousin of actor Robert Duvall. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park.
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Vonetta McGee
Biography
Vonetta Lawrence McGee (January 14, 1945 – July 9, 2010) was an American actress. She debuted in the Spaghetti Western The Great Silence and went on to appear in blaxploitation films such as Hammer, Melinda, Blacula, Shaft in Africa, Detroit 9000, and 1974's Thomasine & Bushrod alongside her then-boyfriend Max Julien. In 1975, she was Clint Eastwood's co-star in The Eiger Sanction. She was a regular on the 1987 Universal Television situation comedy Bustin' Loose, starring as Mimi Shaw for its only season (1987–88).
Description above from the Wikipedia article Vonetta McGee, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia
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Jean Douchet
Biography
Jean Douchet (January 19, 1929 – November 22, 2019) was a French film director, historian, film critic and teacher who began his career in the early 1950s at Gazette du Cinéma and Cahiers du cinema with members of the future French New Wave.
As a journalist Douchet wrote extensively about New Wave filmmakers, as well as such directors as Alfred Hitchcock, F. W. Murnau, Kenji Mizoguchi, Vincente Minnelli, Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Daniel Pollet. He enabled Serge Daney to begin working for Cahiers. He also acted in small roles for such directors as Godard, Rohmer, François Truffaut, Jean Eustache, Jacques Rivette, Jean Pierre Lefebvre and François Ozon. He taught at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques and his students included Ozon, Émilie Deleuze and Xavier Beauvois. He was also involved with the Cinémathèque Française and regularly hosts screenings and events. For the Cinémathèque's 2010 tribute to the then recently deceased Éric Rohmer he made the documentary Claude et Éric, an interview with Claude Chabrol about Rohmer's early days at Cahiers du cinema.
On November 22, 2019, the Cinémathèque Française announced that Jean Douchet had died at age 90.
Source: Article "Jean Douchet" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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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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