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Jay Crawford
Biography
Jason "Jay" Crawford (born July 4, 1965) is an American TV news and sports anchor, who is best known nationally for his time at ESPN. Crawford anchored the live 11 p.m. edition of SportsCenter with Chris McKendry until April 2017. Prior to that, Crawford spent nine years hosting ESPN's morning show Cold Pizza, its successor ESPN First Take, and First Take spinoff 1st and 10. He is currently a news anchor for NBC affiliate WKYC-TV 3 in Cleveland, seen on the station's 5 p.m. newscast since January 2020.
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Kristen Johnston
Biography
Kristen Johnston studied acting at the Atlantic Theater Company Acting School in New York City.
She won two Emmys for her role on 3rd Rock from the Sun (1996). She has appeared on many other television shows, including Ugly Betty (2006), ER (1994), Bored to Death (2009) and, perhaps most memorably, as the party girl whose famous final words were "I'm so bored I could die" on Sex and the City (1998). She's currently, on television, on TV Land's hit series, The Exes (2011), which is now in its fourth season. Just a few of Johnston's many stage credits are "So Help Me God!" (Drama desk nomination), "The Women", "Aunt Dan & Lemon", "Love Song" on the West End, as well as starring in three "Shakespeare in Central Park" productions, "Much Ado About Nothing", "12th Night", and "The Skin of our Teeth". She is a long-time member of The Atlantic Theater Company, and her roles over the years have included "The Lights" (Drama Desk Nomination) and "Scarcity". Kristen's film credits include Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), the 2nd Austin Powers film (as "Ivana Humpalot"), Finding Bliss (2009), Bad Parents (2012), Bride Wars (2009), L!fe Happens (2011), Vamps (2012), Strangers with Candy (2005), and the upcoming independent film, Lovesick (2014), with Matt LeBlanc. Johnston teaches acting at The Atlantic Theater Company's Acting School at NYU. She founded an organization called SLAM, whose goal is the creation of a desperately needed sober high school in New York City. Johnston's first book was a New York Times Bestselling memoir, entitled "GUTS: the endless follies and tiny triumphs of a giant disaster".
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Gemini Ganesan
Biography
Ramaswamy Ganesan, better known by his stage name Gemini Ganesan, was an Indian film actor who worked mainly in Tamil cinema. He was nicknamed "Kadhal Mannan" (King of Romance) for the romantic roles he played in films.Ganesan was one among the "three biggest names of Tamil cinema", the other two being M. G. Ramachandran and Sivaji Ganesan. While Sivaji Ganesan excelled in films with drama, and MGR dominated films with fight sequences, Gemini Ganesan held his own with sensitive portrayals of the yearning lover. A recipient of the Padmashree in 1971, he had also won several other prestigious awards such as the "Kalaimamani", "MGR Gold Medal" and "Screen Lifetime Achievement Award". He came from an orthodox Brahmin family, and was one of the few graduates to enter the film industry at that time.
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Isaiah Mustafa
Biography
Isaiah Mustafa (born February 11, 1974 height 6' 3½" (1,92 m)) is an American actor and former NFLpractice squadwide receiver. Mustafa is widely known as the main character for a series of Old Spice TV commercials, The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, for portraying Luke Garroway on Freeform's fantasy series Shadowhunters, and as adult Mike Hanlon in It Chapter Two (2019). Mustafa was born in Portland, Oregon, the youngest of seven children of Shahidah Mustafa-Davis and John Wali Mustafa, who owned and ran a limousine service in Laguna Hills, California in the early 1980s. Mustafa studied history at Arizona State and he played during the 1997 Rose Bowl between the then-undefeated Sun Devils and the Ohio State Buckeyes. Although Mustafa expected to become a high school teacher after graduation, a sports agent suggested that he try out for NFL teams. The Tennessee Oilers signed him to the practice squad, then sent him to NFL Europe's Barcelona Dragons in 1998. After a season on the Oakland Raiders and Cleveland Browns' practice squads in 1999, Mustafa attended the Seattle Seahawks' training camp in 2000. Next he owned a restaurant called Jo Jo's Barbecue on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles that has since closed. Mustafa is a comic book fan; his knowledge of Doctor Doom's first name helped him win $47,000 on The Weakest Link, for a question on the first name of Doctor Frankenstein. The money helped him pursue his post-restaurateur goal of becoming an actor.
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Francis Blanche
Biography
François Jean Blanche, known as "Francis Blanche" (20 July 1921 – 6 July 1974) was a French actor, singer, humorist and author. He was a very popular figure on stage, radio and in films, during the 1950s and 1960s. His two daughters, Barbara & Dominique, are artists with their studios in Eze.
Blanche was born in an artistic family, mainly of stage actors—including his father Louis Blanche and his uncle, Emmanuel Blanche, who was a painter—. He completed his secondary schooling at fourteen, the youngest in France to do so at the time.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Blanche was part of Robert Dhéry's theatrical company Les Branquignols, with whom he played in the film Ah! Les belles bacchantes, starring Robert Dhéry, Colette Brosset (Dhéry's then-wife), and Louis de Funès; directed by Jean Loubignac in 1954.
Blanche teamed up with Pierre Dac to form a comic duo best remembered for Le Sâr Rabindranath Duval, a sketch about a phony and nonsensical Indian clairvoyant and guru (1957). They also created a popular and equally nonsensical radiophonic series, loosely based on a highly improbable espionage and conspiration plot, Malheur aux barbus, which was broadcast on Paris Inter in 213 episodes from 1951 to 1952. The same plot and characters were revived on Europe 1 in a series called Signé Furax, enjoying no less than 1,034 daily episodes between 1956 and 1960. Both broadcasts were phenomenal audience successes in the pre-television era. Blanche was also renowned for broadcasting phone pranks, in which he entertained listeners by making the most improbable situations sound plausible.
He wrote poems, and the lyrics of 673 songs. On stage, he acted in Tartuffe and Néron and, in 1955, Chevalier du Ciel, an operetta by Luis Mariano at the Gaîté-Lyrique theatre.
Blanche also enjoyed a successful cinematographic career, both as an actor and scriptwriter. He appeared as a hard-headed German colonel ("Obersturmführer Schulz") opposite Brigitte Bardot in Babette s'en va-t-en guerre (1959). He was one of the favourite actors of French filmmaker Georges Lautner, and played Maître Folace (a shady solicitor counselling a colourful gangster mob) in Les Tontons flingueurs (1963). Blanche also appeared in Boris Vassilief's Les Barbouzes (1964).
He delighted in parodying classical music, adapting famous works such as Schubert's "Die Forelle" (The Trout) into a crazy and slightly risqué piece about a 16-year-old romantic girl obsessed with Schubert's song to the point of giving birth to a live trout while performing it on her piano. Similarly, he turned Beethoven's 5th Symphony into a lengthy and quite repetitive musical glorification of the clothes peg and its fictitious inventor, Jérémie-Victor Opdebec.
Blanche died at the age of 52, from a heart attack with a background of untreated Type 1 diabetes. He is buried in Èze cemetery.
Source: Article "Francis Blanche" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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Shane Stanley
Biography
At sixteen years old, Shane had already received his first Emmy Award for his work on Desperate Passage (1987) which starred Michael Landon. Over the next few years he learned filmmaking under his father Lee Stanley on what became known as The Desperate Passage Series (1988 to 1995) starring Sharon Gless, Edward James Olmos, Marlo Thomas and Louis Gossett Jr.. The self-produced series earned a total of thirty-three Emmy nominations, (winning thirteen) as well as numerous Christopher Awards and CINE Golden Eagles. In 1994, the Stanleys feature film, Street Pirates (1994) was a two-time winner of the CINE Golden Eagle Award for best feature documentary and film editing.
In 2001, Shane launched Visual Arts Entertainment, his own production company, most notably credited with Gridiron Gang (2006) starring Dwayne Johnson & Xzibit as well as the critically acclaimed independent film, A Sight for Sore Eyes (2004) with Academy Award nominee, Gary Busey. The film, (produced for under $10,000) marked Shane's directorial debut and went on to win the Gold Special Jury Award at Worldfest Houston, Best Dramatic Short Film at the International Family Film Festival, a Telly Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film and Television as well as two Aurora Awards for writing & directing. The film was also invited to Cannes to compete in the annual international film festival.
Other directing credits to his name include Mistrust, starring two-time Golden Globe® and Emmy® Award winner Jane Seymour, Break Even with Tasya Teles, Steve Guttenberg, and Golden Globe® nominee, Joanna Pacula which he also produced with Adam Kane (Prodigal Son, 24: Live Another Day, Heroes).
Shane produced and directed the action-comedy, Double Threat starring Matthew Lawrence and Dawn Olivieri (Yellowstone, 1883), which The New York Times listed on their Top 5-Action Movies to Stream Now and was the sole indie feature among Hollywood blockbusters on Amazon Prime's "Top 10 in the US" list remaining there for several weeks and peaking at #4. The film enjoyed similar success on Netflix's world-wide charts, ranking #1 in 16/17 countries the week of its debut and remained on the platform's Top-10 most watched films in the summer of 2024.
Shane's action-thriller, Night Train, starring Danielle C. Ryan and Diora Baird premiered on HULU where it reached #1 on the platform and remained in the top spot for an astonishing five weeks in 2023. Night Train is the story of a single mom struggling to make ends meet as a Hollywood teamster who evades capture by a ruthless FBI Agent while running black market medical supplies in her legendary souped-up pickup truck. It also stars Joe Lando, Ivan Sergei, and Joseph D. Reitman.
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Phil Seuling
Biography
Philip Nicholas Seuling (January 20, 1934–August 21, 1984) was a comic book fan convention organizer and comics distributor primarily active in the 1970s. Seuling was the organizer of the annual New York Comic Art Conventions, originally held in New York City every July 4 weekend throughout the 1970s. Later, with his East Coast Seagate Distribution company, Seuling developed the concept of the direct market distribution system for getting comics directly into comic book specialty shops, bypassing the then established newspaper/magazine distributor method, where no choices of title, quantity, or delivery directions were permitted.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Andrei Konchalovsky
Biography
Andrei Sergeyevich Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky (Russian: Андре́й Серге́евич Михалко́в-Кончало́вский; born 20 August 1937, Moscow) is a Russian filmmaker, screenwriter, actor, producer and theater, TV director, who works in Russia and USA. His father was the writer Sergey Mikhalkov (1913) and the brother of Nikita Mikhalkov (1945), who is also a well known Russian filmmaker. Andrei Konchalovsky was a frequent collaborator of Andrei Tarkovsky (1932) earlier in his career. His work has won numerous accolades, including the "Cannes Grand Prix Spécial du Jury", a "FIPRESCI Award", two "Silver Lions", three "Golden Eagle Awards", and a "Primetime Emmy Award".
He studied for ten years at the Moscow Conservatory, preparing for a pianist's career. In 1960, however, he met Andrei Tarkovsky and co-scripted his movie Andrei Rublev (1966). His first full-length feature, The First Teacher (1964), was favourably received in the Soviet Union and screened by numerous film festivals abroad. His second film, Asya Klyachina's Story (1967), was suppressed by Soviet authorities. When issued twenty years later, it was acclaimed as his masterpiece. Thereupon, Konchalovsky filmed adaptations of Ivan Turgenev's A Nest of Gentle Folk (1969) and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (1970), with Innokenty Smoktunovsky in the title role. His epic Siberiade upon its 1979 release was favourably received at Cannes and made possible his move to the United States in 1980.
His most popular Hollywood releases are Maria's Lovers (1984), Runaway Train (1985), based on a script by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, and Tango & Cash (1989), starring Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell. In the 1990s, Konchalovsky returned to Russia, although he occasionally produced historical films for U.S. television, such as his adaption of The Odyssey (1997) and the award-winning remake, The Lion in Winter (2003).
Konchalovsky's full-length feature, House of Fools (2003), with a cameo role by Bryan Adams as himself, set in a Chechen psychiatric asylum during the war, won him a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. In 2010, Konchalovsky released a longtime passion project of his, The Nutcracker in 3D, a musical adaptation of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet. A musical film, it mixed live action and 3D animation, and starred Elle Fanning, John Turturro, Nathan Lane, and Richard E. Grant. The film was scored with music from the ballet, with additional lyrics by Tim Rice. In 2012, Konchalovsky wrote, directed and produced "The Battle for Ukraine", which provided an in depth analysis of how Ukraine to this day struggles to escape from the close embrace of its former big brother. His film "The Postman's White Nights" won the Silver Lion at the 71st Venice International Film Festival. The script is centred around the true story of Aleksey Tryaptisyn, a real life postman based in a remote Russian village surrounding the Kenozero lake. In 2016 "Paradise" directed by him won the Silver Lion at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival. It was selected as the Russian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 89th Academy Awards. In 2020 at the 77th Venice film festival, his film "Dear Comrades" won a special jury prize.
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Tom Guiry
Biography
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Thomas John Guiry (born October 12, 1981) is an American actor. Guiry was born in Trenton, New Jersey and attended St. Gregory the Great school in Hamilton Township, Mercer County, New Jersey from kindergarten through eighth grade, and then high school at Notre Dame High School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. His most notable appearances were in The Sandlot, Mystic River, The Mudge Boy, and The Four Diamonds. Guiry played Jimmy Donnelly on the NBC drama The Black Donnellys.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Tom Guiry, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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Rita Johnson
Biography
Rita Ann Johnson (August 13, 1913 – October 31, 1965) was an American actress.
Early in her career, Johnson was busy in radio.
Johnson began acting on Broadway in 1935 and started her film career two years later. She played a murderer in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and a doomed wife in the RKO film noir They Won't Believe Me (1947).
In an incident that was never fully explained, Johnson suffered a head trauma on September 6, 1948 that required brain surgery. Unsubstantiated rumors promulgated by gossip columnists such as Walter Winchell suggested she might have been abused by a boyfriend, but the only explanation she offered was that a large, industrial-grade hair dryer at her apartment had fallen on her. She was in a coma for two weeks and it was reported it took her a year to recover. Her left side was paralyzed temporarily and for a while she couldn't walk. The injury put a virtual halt to her film career. Her screen time in movies after that was limited due to her reduced mobility and powers of concentration. Johnson suffered from alcoholism from the time of her injuries until her death of a brain hemorrhage at age 52.
From Wikipedia.
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