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Ben Bard

Biography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Ben Bard (January 26, 1893, Milwaukee – May 17, 1974, Los Angeles) was a movie actor, stage actor, and acting teacher. With comedian Jack Pearl, Bard worked in a comedy duo in vaudeville. In 1926, Bard, Pearl, and Sascha Beaumont appeared in a short film made in Lee DeForest's Phonofilm sound-on-film process. Bard had a small roll in Roland West's classic mystery The Bat Whispers (1930). Later in the decade, he ran a leading Hollywood acting school, Ben Bard Drama. He married the serial film star Ruth Roland in 1929, and was married to Roland until her death in 1937. Bard was recruited to be a leading man at Fox Film Corporation. However, he was typecast as a "Suave Heavy"—a smooth-talking, well-dressed fellow with a dark side. An example of this type is his portrayal of "Mr. Brun" in The Seventh Victim (1943). Also in 1943, Bard appeared in two other Val Lewton-produced horror films: The Leopard Man, as Robles, the Police Chief, and The Ghost Ship, as First Officer Bowns. In 1939, he married Roma Clarisse, an actress and last recipient of the Ruth Roland Scholarship to Ben Bard Drama. They had 3 children before she died in 1947. In 1948 Bard married Jackie Lynn Taylor, an actress in the Our Gang series. They divorced in 1954. During the 1950s, Bard was the head of the New Talent Department at Twentieth Century Fox. He re-opened his school, Ben Bard Drama, in 1960. Bard died in Los Angeles in 1974. His resting place is with Ruth Roland at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale. He is survived by his son Bryan Barak Bard, who is a video documentary artist living in Israel. He is also survived by his other son Bartley Bard, who is a professional director and screenwriter. Description above from the Wikipedia article Ben Bard, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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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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Paola Borboni

Biography

Italian film actress whose career spanned nine decades of cinema. She also made a substantial contribution to theatre. She entered film in 1916 in the silent picture Jacobo Ortis directed by Giuseppe Sterni, and made over 80 film appearances between then and 1990. Appearing in several silent films before 1921 she was absent from cinema for some 14 years during which time she made numerous stage appearances. She gained notoriety in 1925 when she appeared in a show as a mermaid exposing her breasts which she saw as natural in the role but caused considerable outrage at the time. She returned to the silver screen in 1936 in the Mario Mattoli film L' Uomo che sorride. She went on to appear in films such as the Carlo Lizzani-directed film Ai margini della metropoli in 1952 in which she appeared alongside the main cast of Massimo Girotti, Marina Berti and Giulietta Masina. Between 1936 and 1956 her career was at its peak and her roles gradually became less numerous in the decades that followed, making a final appearance in the Giorgio Mosa filmBlue dolphin - l'avventura continua in 1990. She died of a stroke aged 95 on 9 April 1995. (wikipedia)
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Macha Méril

Biography

Princess Maria-Magdalena Vladimirovna Gagarina (born 3 September 1940), known by her stage name Macha Méril, is a French actress and writer. Méril is descended by her father from the Russian princely house Gagarin and by her mother from a Ukrainian noble family. She appeared in 125 films between 1959 and 2012, including films directed by Jean-Luc Godard (A Married Woman / Une femme mariée), Luis Buñuel (Belle de jour), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Chinese Roulette). She also appeared in the Quebec television series Lance et Compte. She is perhaps best known for her roles as Helga Ulmann in Dario Argento's Deep Red and in Aldo Lado's Night Train Murders (1975). Description above from the Wikipedia article Macha Méril,licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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Paul Reubens

Biography

Paul Reubens (August 27, 1952 – July 30, 2023) was an American actor, writer, film producer, game show host, and comedian, best known for his character Pee-wee Herman. Reubens joined the Los Angeles troupe The Groundlings in the 1970s and started his career as an improvisational comedian and stage actor. In 1982 he began appearing in a show about a character he had been developing for years. The show, called The Pee-wee Herman Show, ran for five sold-out months, and HBO produced a successful special about it. Pee-wee became an instant cult figure and, for the next decade, Reubens was completely committed to his character, doing all of his public appearances and interviews as Pee-wee. His feature film Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), directed by the then-unknown Tim Burton, was a financial and critical success and soon developed into a cult film. Its sequel, Big Top Pee-wee (1988), was less successful. Between 1986 and 1990, Reubens starred as Pee-wee in the CBS Saturday-morning children's program Pee-wee's Playhouse.
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Claude Sarraute

Biography

Claude Sarraute (24 July 1927 – 20 June 2023) was a French writer and journalist and columnist for Le Monde. She was a recurring panelist on the humoristic radio show Les Grosses Têtes between 1984–1995 and from 2014 until her death. She was the daughter of lawyer and novelist Nathalie Sarraute, and lawyer Raymond Sarraute. Her first marriage, with American journalist Stanley Karnow (1925–2013), lasted from 1948 to 1955. She remarried in 1957 to doctor Christophe Tzara (1927–2018), son of Swedish artist Greta Knutson and Romanian Dada poet Tristan Tzara. They had two sons, Laurent and Martin, and divorced in 1966. In 1967, she was married to Jean-François Revel (1924–2006), philosopher, writer and member of the Académie Française from 1998 on. They had two children, a daughter Véronique (born 1968) and a son Nicolas Revel (born 1966), the former Chief of Staff of the Prime Minister Jean Castex. During the war, her mother and two sisters fled the capital because of the anti-Jewish laws of the Nazi-collaborating Vichy France, but Claude and her father stayed in her native Paris. After the war, she worked for four years as an actress, mainly playing minor roles in avant-garde pieces by contemporaries like Romain Weingarten, until she started working for Le Monde in the early 1950s. She died in the 4th arrondissement of Paris at the age of 95. Source: Article "Claude Sarraute" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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Felissa Rose

Biography

Felissa Rose Esposito (born May 23, 1969), better known as simply Felissa Rose, is an American actress. She has amassed over 200 film credits, and is best known for her work in the horror genre, for which she is recognized as a "scream queen." Rose made her film debut as Angela Baker in the cult horror film Sleepaway Camp (1983), which established her as a horror icon. She reprised the role in the 2008 sequel Return to Sleepaway Camp. Her other horror roles include Elsa Lansing in Silent Night, Zombie Night (2009), Mother in The Perfect House (2012), Rachel Steele in Camp Dread (2014), Angela Freeman in Death House (2018), Kathleen in Victor Crowley (2018), Ms. Crowell in Bloody Summer Camp (2021), and Ms. Principe in Terrifier 2 (2022). Rose continues to make regular appearances on The Joe Bob Briggs Show, The Last Drive-In on Shudder, and appeared in The Boulet Brothers's Halfway to Halloween special in 2023.
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John Paul Tremblay

Biography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. John Paul Tremblay (born May 17, 1968) is a Canadian actor who stars in the hit Canadian TV show Trailer Park Boys, playing Julian, a newly released ex-con returning to his home in a trailer park in Nova Scotia. The show is written by Tremblay along with co-stars Robb Wells and Mike Smith. The Trailer Park Boys released a film in 2006, most of it being filmed in the municipality of Halifax. Tremblay and Wells also appeared in the 2002 family film Virginia's Run, though not as Ricky and Julian. In 2010, Tremblay reunited with many of his former Trailer Park Boys castmates in the new series The Drunk and On Drugs Happy Fun Time Hour. Description above from the Wikipedia article John Paul Tremblay, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia .
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Andrée Pelletier

Biography

Andrée Pelletier (born August 24, 1951) is a Canadian actress, screenwriter and film director. As an actress, she is a five-time Canadian Film Award and Genie Award nominee, receiving nominations for Best Actress at the 29th Canadian Film Awards in 1978 for her performance as Marie-Anne Gaboury in the film Marie-Anne, at the 2nd Genie Awards in 1981 for The Handyman (L'Homme à tout faire), at the 4th Genie Awards in 1983 for Latitude 55° and at the 6th Genie Awards in 1985 for Walls, and a Best Supporting Actress nominee at the 8th Genie Awards in 1987 for Bach and Broccoli (Bach et Bottine). She later turned to screenwriting, including the films The Peanut Butter Solution, Nénette and Karmina, and directed the films Anchor Zone and Voodoo Dolls. Born in Montreal, Quebec, she is the daughter of Gérard Pelletier, a former journalist and diplomat.
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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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