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Josephine Siao Fong-Fong
Biography
Josephine Siao Fong-Fong MBE is a Hong Kong film star who became popular as a child actress and continued her success as a mature actress, winning numerous awards including Best Actress at the 45th Berlin International Film Festival (for Summer Snow).[1] Since retiring from show business (partly due to her increasing deafness), she has become a writer and a psychologist, known for her work against child abuse.
Was a member of Madame Fan Fok-Fa's The Spring And Autumn Drama School's Peking Opera.
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Phil Cornwell
Biography
Philip Cornwell (born 5 October 1957) is an English comedian, actor, impressionist and writer. He is well known in the UK as being part of the Dead Ringers television and radio series, and achieved international recognition as the voice of Murdoc Niccals in the virtual band Gorillaz. Cornwell has co-written and performed principal roles in The Glam Metal Detectives and Stella Street. He is also well known as DJ Dave Clifton from I'm Alan Partridge and Alpha Papa.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Kad Merad
Biography
Kad Merad is a French-Algerian filmmaker and actor who has acted both on stage and on screen.
Kad Merad was born in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria, on March 27, 1964 to an Algerian father and a French mother.
During his teens, he played drums and sang with various rock bands. Soon afterwards, he started playing as an animator in Club Med alongside the Gigolo Brothers troop.
In 1990, he was hired by Ouï FM, the Paris Rock genre station where he met Olivier Baroux. The duet most known as Kad & Olivier began working together and started their own show, the Rock'n Roll Circus, introducing some of their most famous sketches (Pamela Rose, Teddy Porc Fidèle...). The early success of the show allowed them to meet Jean-Luc Delarue who brought their act to TV.
In 1999, they began appearing on the French Satellite TV channel Comédie+ on their own show, La Grosse Emission. At the same time, Merad started his Cinema career with a lot of secondary roles.
In 2003, he scored his First box-office success with Mais Qui a tué Pamela Rose?, co-written with Baroux.
In 2007, Kad received the César Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Je vais Bien, ne t'en fais pas! and appears in AaRON's film soundtrack video clip. His best challenger was Dany Boon. During the shooting of Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, this friendly struggle was a running joke between the two of them.
That same year, he made his first appearance with Les Enfoirés music troop and is still one of its members. He was also inducted as the Godfather of the Telethon.
The next year, he starred as Phillipe Abrams in the French movie Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis. The film was a surprise - and phenomenal - success in France and Europe, becoming the best-attended movie ever made in France, with 21 million moviegoers.
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Morgan Conway
Biography
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Morgan Conway (March 16, 1903 in Newark, New Jersey – November 16, 1981 in Livingston, New Jersey) was an American actor, best known for his portrayals of Dick Tracy.
Born Sydney Conway, he was educated at Columbia University in New York City. He arrived in Hollywood just in time to get on the ground floor of the industry's burgeoning labor movement. Conway was one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild. His first film appearance was in the 1934 film Looking for Trouble.
For many years he freelanced, working for various studios in bits or supporting roles. His most familiar appearance from this period is probably in Charlie Chan in Reno (1939).
By the mid-1940s he was a contract player for RKO Radio Pictures, and he was chosen to portray Chester Gould's comic-strip detective Dick Tracy in a pair of feature films: Dick Tracy and Dick Tracy vs. Cueball. RKO's earliest publicity photos posed Conway in profile, hoping to emulate Gould's square-jawed caricatures. Although this screen Tracy didn't resemble the print Tracy physically, Conway's dramatic interpretation was faithful; he gave the role an understated, businesslike quality totally in keeping with a police procedural. Morgan Conway is considered by many (including Dick Tracy writer Max Allan Collins) to be the best screen Dick Tracy.
Morgan/Sydney Conway left the motion picture industry and returned to New Jersey, where he died of lung cancer at the age of 78.
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Enrico Macias
Biography
Gaston Ghrenassia (born 11 December 1938), known by his stage name Enrico Macias, is a French singer, songwriter and musician.
Gaston Ghrenassia was born to a Sephardic Jewish family. His father, Sylvain Ghrenassia (1914–2004), was a violinist in an orchestra that played primarily malouf, Andalusian classical music. Gaston played the guitar from childhood, and started playing with the Cheikh Raymond Leyris Orchestra at age 15.
He pursued a school teacher career, but continued playing the guitar. In 1961, the Algerian War of Independence was raging, and the situation became untenable for the European colonizers of Constantine. The assassination in 1961 of his father-in-law and musician Cheikh Raymond Leyris by the National Liberation Front (FLN) was of immense effect on Gaston Ghrenassia, and appears to have been due to his opposition to the independence of Algeria from France and pro-Israel stance. Gaston left Algeria with his wife, Suzy, on 29 July 1961, eleven months before the end of the Algerian War of Independence, and went into exile in mainland France. He has not been permitted to return to Algeria ever since.
First living in Argenteuil, he eventually moved to Paris, where he decided to pursue a career in music. At first he tried translating into French the malouf numbers which he already knew. Later on, he developed a new French repertoire that he performed in cafés and cabarets. He remained, though, a popular interpreter of Arab-Andalusian music and Judeo-Arab songs in France.
He adopted the stage name Enrico Macias and made his first recording in 1962 after a meeting with Raymond Bernard of Pathé. The result was the recording of "Adieu mon pays" which he had composed for his beloved Algeria on the ship on his way to France. He appeared on French television and became an overnight sensation. This led to a first tour in 1963 as a second act with Paola and Billy Bridge. His daughter, Jocya, was also born that year.
In spring 1964, he opened for Les Compagnons de la chanson at the Paris Olympia and then undertook a successful tour of the Middle East, performing with great success in Israel, Greece and Turkey, especially in the latter where he still has a huge following. In Turkey, many of his songs were translated and interpreted by Turkish artists. In 1965, he was awarded the Prix Vincent Scotto, and the following year he sang before 120,000 people at the Dinamo Stadium in Moscow, performing concerts in more than 40 other Soviet cities. He also toured Japan and recorded titles in Spanish and Italian and was popular in both countries.
His American debut, at a sold-out Carnegie Hall concert, took place on 17 February 1968. He continued to tour the United States, singing in Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles. In Quebec, Canada, he was warmly welcomed as a Francophone artist. ...
Source: Article "Enrico Macias" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
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Kaori Ravi
Biography
Born on the island of Martinique, Kaori Ravi's early years were spent moving as his mother's health and his father's shifting career required. The young graphic artist got permission to draw art on the shop window in 2015 and kept doing it for several months. A few years later, he started training under the guidance of actress and stage performer Rita Ravier (known for Battledream Chronicle). The growing acting skills were only noticed by those fortunate enough to have seen them perform multiple parts in the school performance of the play "La Terre qui ne voulait plus tourner" by Françoise du Chaxel. When the casting call came for Opal,with the stipulation that all candidates would need to be able to read for the parts in English, a rare occurrence on the French-speaking territory, Kaori auditioned. He was barely 14 when recording for the film. Child actors are an unusual thing in the history of Martinican film. Child actors taking on a foreign language part, in Martinique? Definitely unusual!
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Mylène Demongeot
Biography
Mylène Demongeot (born Marie-Hélène Demongeot; 29 September 1935 – 1 December 2022) was a French film, television and theatre actress and author with a career spanning seven decades and more than 100 credits in French, Italian, English and Japanese speaking productions. Demongeot became a star at age 21 with her portrayal of Abigail Williams in The Crucible (1957) which garnered her a BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles nomination and the best actress prize at the socialist Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Some other notable film roles include Elsa in Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse (1958), alongside Deborah Kerr and David Niven, and as Milady de Winter in Les Trois Mousquetaires (1961).
A "veteran of cinema" who started as one of the blond sex symbols of the 1950s and 1960s, she managed to avoid typecasting by exploring many film genres including thrillers, westerns, comedies, swashbucklers, period films and even pepla, such as Romulus and the Sabines (1961) opposite Roger Moore or Gold for the Caesars (1963).
Demongeot also has a cult following based on the Fantomas trilogy, as Hélène Gurn opposite Louis de Funès and Jean Marais: Fantômas (1964), Fantômas Unleashed (1965) and Fantômas Against Scotland Yard (1967). Thirty years later, she starred again in another one of France's most successful comedy trilogies as Madame Pic in Fabien Onteniente's Camping (2006), Camping 2 (2010) and Camping 3 (2016).
She was twice nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the César Awards for 36 Quai des Orfèvres (2004) and French California (2006). In 2007, she was made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et de Lettres of the French Republic. In 2017, she was inducted into the Légion d'Honneur by ethologist and neurologist Boris Cyrulnik, with the rank of Chevalier.
She remained popular until her passing from peritoneal cancer. At the time of her death, she was starring in Thomas Gilou's film Maison de retraite (2022) alongside Gérard Depardieu, one of the biggest box office hits of 2022 in France. Through an Élysée Palace official tribune, President Emmanuel Macron paid a long tribute to her which included : "we salute the career of a great figure in the French Seventh Art, who knew how to shine in all its genres to move all French people".
Demongeot was born in September 1935 in Nice, Alpes-Maritimes, the daughter and only child of Alfred Jean Demongeot, born Nice, 30 January 1897 (himself the son of Marie Joseph Marcel Demongeot, career soldier, and Clotilde Faussonne di Clavesana, an Italian contessa) and Claudia Troubnikova, born 17 May 1904 in Kharkiv (Ukraine, Russian Empire). Her parents, both actors themselves, had met in Shanghai, China, where her half-brother, Léonid Ivantov, from the first marriage of her mother, was born, in Harbin on 17 December 1923.
Like hundreds of other major European figures of stage and screen, she trained at the 'Cours Simon' in Paris where her classmates included Jean-Pierre Cassel, Claude Berri and Guy Bedos. She was a classically trained pianist and her first ambition was of becoming a professional. ...
Source: Article "Mylène Demongeot" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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Tim DeKay
Biography
Timothy Robert DeKay (born June 12, 1963) is an American actor best known for starring as FBI Special Agent Peter Burke in the USA Network series White Collar (2009–2014). He was also a cast member of the series Party of Five (1997–1999), Carnivàle (2003–2005), and Tell Me You Love Me (2007). He has guest–starred on a number of top-rated television series, including Seinfeld, Friends, CSI, My Name Is Earl, NCIS, The New Adventures of Old Christine and Scrubs. McKay has appeared in notable films such as Swordfish (2001), Get Smart (2008), and Oppenheimer (2023).
He has been married to actress Elisa Taylor since 1991; they have two children.
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Noomi Rapace
Biography
Noomi Rapace (Swedish: [ˈnǒːmɪ raˈpasː]; née Norén; born 28 December 1979) is a Swedish actress. She achieved international fame with her portrayal of Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish film adaptations of the Millennium series (2009): The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. For her performance in the Millennium series, Rapace won, amongst others, two Nymphe d'Or, a Guldbagge Award, and a Satellite Award as Best Actress, and was nominated for a BAFTA Award, an International Emmy Award and a European Film Award. Following the success of the Millennium series, Rapace has gone on to star in American movies.
She has also starred as Anna in Daisy Diamond (2007), Leena in Beyond (2010), Anna in The Monitor (2011), Madame Simza Heron in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), Elizabeth Shaw in Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), Beatrice in Dead Man Down (2013), Nadia in The Drop (2014), Raisa Demidova in Child 44 (2015), the seven lead roles in What Happened to Monday (2017), Leila in Bright (2017), Rupture (2016), Bianca Lind in Stockholm (2018), Sam Carlson in Close (2019), Lizzie in Angel of Mine (2019), Harriet Bauman in Jack Ryan (TV series, 2019), Maja in The Secrets We Keep (2020), Maria in Lamb (2021), Lisa in The Trip (2021), Bosilka in You Won't Be Alone (2022) and Caroline Edh in Black Crab (2022).
Description above from the Wikipedia article Noomi Rapace, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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Lil Wayne
Biography
Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. (born September 27, 1982), better known by his stage name Lil Wayne, is an American rapper. At the age of nine, Lil Wayne joined Cash Money Records as the youngest member of the label, and half of the duo, The B.G.'z, with B.G.. In 1997, Lil Wayne joined the group Hot Boys, which also included rappers Juvenile, B.G., and Turk. Hot Boys debuted with Get It How U Live! that year. Lil Wayne gained most of his success with the group's major selling album Guerrilla Warfare, released in 1999. Also in 1999, Lil Wayne released his Platinum debut album Tha Block Is Hot, selling over one million copies in the U.S. Although his next two albums Lights Out (2000) and 500 Degreez (2002) were not as successful (only reaching Gold status), Lil Wayne reached higher popularity in 2004 with Tha Carter, which included the single "Go D.J." Wayne also appeared on the Destiny's Child top ten single "Soldier" that year. In 2005, the sequel to Tha Carter, Tha Carter II, was released. In 2006 and 2007, Lil Wayne released several mixtapes and appeared on several popular rap and R&B singles. His most successful album, Tha Carter III, was released in 2008 which went on to sell over 1 million copies in the U.S. its first week of release. It included the number-one single "Lollipop" and won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. Lil Wayne released his debut rock album, Rebirth, in 2010 to primarily negative reception from critics. The album eventually went gold. In March 2010, Lil Wayne began serving an 8 month prison sentence in New York after being convicted of criminal possession of a weapon stemming from an incident in July 2007. While in jail he released another album entitled I Am Not a Human Being in September 2010, featuring Young Money artists such as Drake, Nicki Minaj and Lil Twist.
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