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Sean Connery
Biography
Sir Thomas Sean Connery (August 25, 1930 - October 31, 2020) was a Scottish actor and producer who 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, it was announced that Connery had died at the age of 90.
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Tizuka Yamasaki
Biography
Tizuka Yamasaki (born May 12, 1949) is a Brazilian film director. Daughter of Japanese immigrants, Yamasaki was one of the first women filmmakers in Brazil to achieve a successful and longstanding career. She and her peers learned filmmaking by working on the sets of well-established Cinema Novo directors such as Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos.
Yamasaki challenged the norms of Cinema Novo by increasing both the representation of women and the awareness of issues affecting women in Brazilian society. Her film style focuses on historical subjects and she uses the genre of melodrama to reconstruct Brazilian politics, history and culture.
She established herself as one of the most important film directors of the 1980s. Her films discussed sexuality and traditional gender roles more openly within Brazilian cultural identity. Yamasaki initiated a “cinema of emotion” to comment on Brazil’s past and rework female figures’ experiences in Brazil’s history.
During her career, especially during the final years of the Brazilian military dictatorship, Yamasaki has suffered censorship and funding issues with her films. In response to these challenges, she established her own production company in 1976, Centro de Produção e Comunicação (Production and Communication Center).
Tizuka gained some critical acclaim with her 1980 film "Gaijin, Os Caminhos da Liberdade" (aka "Gaijin, a Brazilian Odyssey"), a story about Japanese immigration to Brazil. She has also achieved the audience's praise by directing movies starring children TV show hostess Xuxa, which have become extremely popular and a cornerstone in Brazilian pop culture. In 2003, she completed Gaijin 2 as a sequel to her debut film.
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Xu Qing
Biography
Xu Qing (born 22 January 1969) is a Chinese actress. She was accepted into the acting class of Beijing Film Academy in 1988. She made her debut in the 1990 film Life on a String, directed by Chen Kaige. She graduated from Beijing Film Academy in 1992, and in that year, she was nominated for the Hundred Flowers Award for Best Actress. On 30 November 2009, Xu became a contracted artiste under the talent agency Huayi Brothers. She portrayed Soong Ching-ling in the 2009 Chinese historical film The Founding of a Republic. Xu played the wife of Bruce Willis's character in the 2012 film Looper.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Qing Xu, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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Mantan Moreland
Biography
Although his brand of humor has been reviled for decades, Negro character actor Mantan Moreland parlayed his cocky but jittery character into a recognizable presence in the late 1930s and early 1940s, appearing in a long string of comedy thrillers . . . and was considered quite funny at the time!
Born just after the turn of the century in Louisiana, Mantan began running away from home at age 12 to join circuses and medicine shows, only to be brought back time and again. During these times he sharpened his comic skills and developed routines and acts that eventually became popular on the vaudeville stage, or what was then called the "chitlin' circuit." A solo performer by nature, he often teamed up with other famous comics (such as Ben Carter) to keep working, and became a deft performer of "indefinite talk" routines, where two quicksilver comics continually topped each other in mid-sentence, as if reading each other's mind (i.e., "Say, did you see...?" "Saw him just yesterday...didn't look so good"). Mantan's focus gradually shifted his trade toward film, where he initially appeared in servile bits (shoeshine men, porters, waiters). However, his talent for making people laugh couldn't be overlooked and he soon earned featured status in Harlem-styled western parodies and grade "A" comedy films playing the superstitious, ever-terrified manservant running from any kind of impending doom.
Moreland's peak in movies came with his recurring role as Birmingham, the skittish chauffeur, in the "Charlie Chan" series, where he was forever forewarning his boss to stay away from an obviously dangerous case or situation. Though haunted mansions were an ideal place for setting off his stereotyped character, Mantan would be haunted in a different way by this Hollywood success in years to follow. By the 1950s, racial attitudes began to change and, with the rise of the civil rights movement, what was once considered hilarious was now interpreted as demeaning and offensive to both blacks and whites. Mantan and others, such as Stepin Fetchit, were ostracized and ridiculed by Hollywood for their past negative portrayals. It took decades for audiences to forgive and newer generations to forget the Depression-era comedy of Mantan Moreland in order for the actor to come back.
In the late 1960s he managed a modest resurgence on TV and in commercials and occasional films, allowing him to work again with such comic heavyweights as Bill Cosby, Godfrey Cambridge and director Carl Reiner. It was all too brief, however, for Mantan, long suffering from ill health, died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1973, just as he was settling in to his renewed popularity. Today, audiences tend to be kinder and more understanding of Moreland, remembering him as a highly talented comic who, in the only way he knew, broke major barriers and opened the doors for others black actors to follow.
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Gawin Caskey
Biography
Fluke Gawin Caskey is a Thai-American actor signed with GMMTV. He studied at McDowell High School in the US before graduating from Assumption University's Martin de Tours School of Management and Economics in Bangkok.
Having entered the entertainment industry through his contract with GMMTV, Fluke made his acting debut in their 2018 series "Kiss Me Again." Later, Fluke began singing OSTs for GMMTV projects, soon becoming a favourite. After earning favour playing supporting roles, he booked his first lead role in a full-length series as a late replacement for Mike Chinnarat in the 2023 series "Be My Favourite."
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Isaiah Asher Hanley
Biography
Isaiah Asher Hanley is an American actor best known for his roles as Bradley Burton in the film Tyson's Run, Andrew Derenzy in the TV Series American Detective with Lt. Joe Kenda and Xavier in the film Here Today. He grew up in Longview Washington where he first began acting in commercials. He then moved to Georgia with his family where he landed his first major role in the film Here Today. He has since taken to behind the scenes of the production world and is a video editor for a production studio.
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Luis Uriel Baca
Biography
Luis Uriel Baca originally from Morelia, Mexico, at just 20 years old, he has become an emerging filmmaker with a short career but with potential. Among his merits, we can highlight his participation in the Unidos en Corto Film Festival in the city of Morelia with his first official short film "Apolo & Dafne", consecutively participating in the official selection of the 2022 edition of the SmartFilms Mexico Film Festival with "A Story of Vengeance", nominated for Best Advertising Campaign and Pre-Nominated for Best Short Film in the Amateur category, under the guidance of his producer house, Necronomic.
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Rita Bennett
Biography
Lovely, shapely, and captivating brunette Rita Bennett was born on January 26, 1941 in Glen Cove, New York. An only child, Rita grew up in a dysfunctional household in Long Island. Unhappy with her turbulent home life, Bennett focused primarily on her burgeoning comely looks as a teenager. Rita left home at age sixteen and moved into a room in a Manhattan apartment with five girls who she barely knew. Bennett soon started modeling and was featured in ads in both newspapers and magazines as well as on billboards (she even was the face of an ad campaign for a Manhattan department store). Rita appeared in her first soft-core film in 1961. Among the notable East Coast soft-core cinema directors that Bennett appeared in films for are Joseph W. Sarno, Barry Mahon, William Rose, and John Amero and Lem Amero. Outside of acting, Rita also worked as a stripper in the tri-state area on the East Coast and managed to land the occasional small role in a major mainstream movie in which she was cast to type as a stripper. Bennett quit acting and stripping in the mid-1980's and went on to focus on fashion and animal welfare instead. Alas, Rita had serious problems with alcoholism throughout her life. Bennett died in 2017. Her body was unclaimed and ultimately wound up buried in a potter's field.
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Eva Mottley
Biography
Eva Mottley was a Barbadian-born British and Nigerian raised actress, who began her acting career following a 15 month prison sentence for possession of LSD. Her most famous role was Bella O'Reilly in the television drama Widows. She was due to star in the sequel but left the production claiming that she had been racially and sexually abused by the production team. By the time the sequel aired on TV (with Debby Bishop taking up the role of Bella) Mottley had committed suicide from an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol after running up a £25,000 from cocaine addiction. Mottley's other credits include the films Scrubbers and Superman III and Corinne, Denzil's wife, in Only Fools and Horses. She was romantically involved with David Bowie for two years and was part of a well-known political family in Barbados; Her grandfather, Ernest Motley, was the first mayor of Bridgetown, whilst her uncle, Elliott Motley, and cousin Mia Mottley are both politicians.
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Jules Roy
Biography
Jules Roy (22 October 1907 – 15 June 2000) was a French writer. "Prolific and polemical" Roy, born an Algerian pied noir and sent to a Roman Catholic seminary, used his experiences in the French colony and during his service in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War as inspiration for a number of his works. He began writing in 1946, while still serving in the military, and continued to publish fiction and historical works after his resignation in 1953 in protest of the First Indochina War. He was an outspoken critic of French colonialism and the Algerian War of Independence and later civil war, as well as a strongly religious man.
Like his friend Albert Camus and his first editor Edmond Charlot, Roy was a descendant of white settlers in French Algeria. He was born in Rovigo, Algeria, and spent his childhood on the farm of his maternal grandparents, the Pâris, small landholders who lived near the village of Sidi Moussa, about eight kilometres north of the town. Roy was the fruit of an adulterous liaison between Mathilde Roy, the wife of a policeman, and Henri Dematons, a school-teacher.
During World War II, Roy commanded a Royal Air Force squadron which was engaged in bombing the Ruhr Basin; he described the missions in La Vallée heureuse (Charlot, 1946). In his memoirs the journalist Walter Lewino states that when Roy first joined the Free French Forces after the Allied invasion of North Africa, he was sent for flight training to Dumfries, where upon skills testing the British ignored his captain's rank and designated him a second navigator, making Roy junior under British rules to his pilot let alone squadron leadership. In June 1953 Roy resigned from the army, at the rank of colonel, in protest at the government's policies in the First Indochina War.
His Le Voyage en Chine (Julliard, 1965) recounts the story of a visit to Mao Zedong's China during which he planned to make a film portraying what he had imagined to be the successful transformation of the society, only to be disappointed at the lack of access to real conditions. In 1995, Roy, who had been living in France for many years, returned to Algeria and visited his mother's grave in the small pied noir cemetery at Sidi Moussa. Roy spent the last years of his life in Vézelay, following his interest in the life of Mary Magdalene. He was first married to Mirande Grimal with whom he had two children, Jean-Louis and Genevieve. Following a divorce he married Tatiana Soukoroukoff in 1965 (she died in 2012). Both children survived him.
Source: Article "Jules Roy" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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