Trending

Popular people

Katsu Kanai

Biography

Katsu Kanai (金井 勝, Kanai Katsu, born 9 July 1936) is a Japanese experimental and avant-garde film director. The Harvard Film Archive has called him "one of the most vital and inventive filmmakers in the history of Japanese underground film". Born the son of a farmer in Kanagawa Prefecture, Kanai graduated from the College of Art of Nihon University before finding work at Daiei Film. He later became a freelance cinematographer and founded Kanai Productions in 1968. His first film, The Deserted Archipelago (1969, aka The Desert Island) won the grand prix at the Nyon International Documentary Film Festival. His second film, Good-Bye (1971), was the "first post-war, post-liberation Japanese feature to be filmed in Korea," and according to the film scholar Oliver Dew, illustrated "how a surreal, decided non-representational approach could block the determinations of cultural essentialism". His 2003 work, Super Documentary: The Avant-Garde Senjutsu, was awarded the FIPRESCI award at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Kanai has been the subject of retrospectives at Oberhausen, the Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival, and the Harvard Film Archive.
Read more

Umberto Eco

Biography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Umberto Eco OMRI (Italian: [umˈbɛrto ˈɛːko]; 5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician, and university professor. He is best known internationally for his 1980 novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory. He later wrote other novels, including Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault's Pendulum) and L'isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before). His novel Il cimitero di Praga (The Prague Cemetery), released in 2010, was a best-seller. Eco also wrote academic texts, children's books, and essays. He was the founder of the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Republic of San Marino, president of the Graduate School for the Study of the Humanities at the University of Bologna, member of the Accademia dei Lincei, and an honorary fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford.
Read more

Roy Allen III

Biography

Roy Allen is a Los Angeles-based actor, voice actor and former investment banker. He is a member of SAG-AFTRA and Actors Equity and received degrees in business administration and music from Colombia University in New York City, NY and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin, OH, respectively. In 2002, Allen moved to Los Angeles, CA to pursue a career in acting and attended notable schools including the Lee Strasberg Institute, the Theatricum Botanicum Academy, and the Groundlings Theatre & School. Among his many performances in theatre, television and film, Allen was cast in productions at Sacred Fools Theater Company, the Group Rep at the Lonny Chapman Theatre, and the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre (UCB). His work also includes short films, voice-over performances as well as national and international immersive art and print exhibitions.
Read more

Franco Cristaldi

Biography

Franco Cristaldi (Turin, 3 October 1924 – Montecarlo, 1 July 1992) was an Italian film producer, credited with producing (or co-producing) feature films from the 1950s to the 1990s. In 1946 Cristaldi founded Vides Cinematografica in Turin. This production company initially produced short and documentary films, and would later be renamed to Cristaldifilm in the 1980s. In the 1950s, Cristaldi changed his attention to feature films and moved to Rome. During his long career, he worked with directors and screenwriters such as Francesco Rosi, Pietro Germi, Mario Monicelli, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, and Giuseppe Tornatore. A noted film producer from some years in his native Italy, some of Cristaldi's most successful films internationally included The Name of the Rose and Nuovo cinema Paradiso. (The former winning a César and two BAFTAs, and the latter winning several BAFTAs, the Grand Prix at Cannes, and Best Foreign Language Film at the 62nd Academy Awards). In 1977 Cristaldi was elected president of the International Federation of Film Producers Associations, and was a member of the jury at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. Cristaldi was born in Turin, Italy in 1924, and studied at university for a time before focusing his interests on cinema. He was first married to Carla Simonetti with whom he had a son, Massimo. He applied to the Vatican to have this marriage annulled, and from 1966 lived with actress Claudia Cardinale. Cristaldi claimed to have married Cardinale, but she refuted this, saying he threw a marriage party, without ever officially marrying her. He mentored Cardinale through her own film career, producing many of her films, until their separation in 1975. In 1983, he married Eritrean actress Zeudi Araya, who starred in several Cristaldi-produced films. Franco Cristaldi died in Montecarlo in 1992, survived by his wife Zeudi, son Massimo, and adopted son Patrick, the son of Claudia Cardinale. Source: Article "Franco Cristaldi" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Read more

Daniel Wallace

Biography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Daniel Wallace (born 1959) is an American author, best known for his 1998 novel Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, the basis for the Tim Burton film Big Fish. His other books include Ray in Reverse and The Watermelon King. His stories have also been published in a number of anthologies and magazines, including The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.[ Description above from the Wikipedia article Daniel Wallace (author), licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia
Read more

Tony Orlando

Biography

Michael Anthony Orlando Cassavitis (born April 3, 1944), better known as Tony Orlando, is an Americanshow business professional, best known as the lead singer of the group Tony Orlando and Dawn in the early 1970s. Discovered by producer Don Kirshner, Orlando had songs on the charts in 1961 when he was 16, "Halfway to Paradise" and "Bless You". Orlando then became a producer himself, and at an early age was promoted to a vice-president position at CBS Records, where he was in charge of the April-Blackwood Music division. He sang under the name "Dawn" in the 1970s, and when the songs became hits, he went on tour and the group became "Tony Orlando and Dawn". They had several songs which were major hits including "Candida", "Knock Three Times", and "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree". The group hosted a variety program, "The Tony Orlando and Dawn Show" on CBS from 1974–76, and then broke up in 1978. Orlando then continued as a solo singer, performing in Las Vegas and Branson, Missouri.[1] Orlando has hosted the New York City portions of the MDA Labor Day Telethon on WWOR-TV since the 1980s but quit in 2011 in response to Jerry Lewis' firing from the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
Read more

Roseanne Barr

Biography

Roseanne Cherie Barr (born November 3, 1952) is an American actress, comedian, writer, television producer and director. Barr began her career in stand-up comedy at clubs in Colorado in the 1980s. Her big break came in 1987 when she was cast in her own sitcom, Roseanne. The show was a hit and lasted nine seasons, from 1988 to 1997. Barr won both an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her work on the show. In addition, she has won six People's Choice Awards, three American Comedy Awards, a Kids Choice Award, a GLAAD Media Award, and the TV Land Innovator Award. Barr starred in the film She-Devil (1989) and had a voice role in Look Who's Talking Too (1991). In 2004, she voiced one of the main characters in the animated film Home on the Range. After her sitcom ended, Barr launched her own talk show, The Roseanne Show, which aired from 1998 to 2000. She later returned to stand-up in the mid-2000s. She had guest spots on shows, 3rd Rock from the Sun, The Nanny, and My Name Is Earl. Barr released her autobiography in 1989, a second book in 1994, and a third book in 2011. She will star in her own reality TV show on Lifetime, revolving around her family and life on her farm. She hosts a radio show on KCAA on Sundays. In 1990, controversy arose when she sang the "The Star-Spangled Banner" during a nationally aired baseball game, by singing the song off-key, then spitting and grabbing her crotch. The next year she appeared in People magazine announcing that she was an "incest survivor", something her parents and sister publicly denied. Twenty years later Barr and her sister appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to explain how they felt at the time. She was married to Bill Pentland for 15 years and had three children before divorcing and marrying comedian Tom Arnold four days later. Their marriage lasted for four years, before going through a highly publicized divorce. Barr married her bodyguard in 1995 and had one child before divorcing in 2002. She began dating Johnny Argent in 2003, and now lives in Hawaii. Description above from the Wikipedia article Roseanne Barr, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Read more

J.R. Ramirez

Biography

J. R. Ramirez is a Cuban-American actor. He is best known for his series regular role of Detective Jared Vasquez on the NBC/Netflix series Manifest. Prior, he was a series regular as Julio on the Starz series Power and as Oscar Arocho on the Netflix / Marvel Television series Jessica Jones. Ramirez also played Ted Grant / Wildcat in a recurring role in the third season of Arrow. Description above from the Wikipedia article J. R. Ramirez, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Read more

Elle Fanning

Biography

Mary Elle Fanning (born April 9, 1998) is an American actress. As a child, she made her film debut as the younger version of her sister Dakota Fanning's character in the drama film I Am Sam (2001). She appeared in several other films as a child actress, including Daddy Day Care (2003), Babel (2006), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Phoebe in Wonderland (both 2008), and the miniseries The Lost Room (2006). She then had leading roles in Sofia Coppola's drama Somewhere (2010) and J. J. Abrams' science fiction film Super 8 (2011). Fanning played Princess Aurora in the fantasy films Maleficent (2014) and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019) while working in independent films such as Sally Potter's Ginger & Rosa (2012), Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon (2016), Mike Mills' 20th Century Women (2016), and Coppola's The Beguiled (2017). From 2020 to 2023, she starred as Catherine the Great in the Hulu period satire series The Great, for which she received nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award and two Golden Globe Awards. She has since portrayed Michelle Carter in the Hulu limited series The Girl from Plainville (2022), made her Broadway debut in the play Appropriate (2023), and played a character based on Suze Rotolo in the biographical drama A Complete Unknown (2024). Description above from the Wikipedia article Elle Fanning, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Read more

Margaret Sullavan

Biography

Margaret Brooke Sullavan (May 16, 1909 – January 1, 1960) was an American actress. Sullavan started her career on the stage in 1929. In 1933 she caught the attention of movie director John M. Stahl and had her debut on the screen that same year in Only Yesterday. Margaret Sullavan preferred working on the stage and did only 16 movies. She retired from the screen in the early forties, but returned in 1950 to make her last movie, No Sad Songs For Me (1950), in which she plays a woman who is dying of cancer. For the rest of her career she would only appear on the stage. Sullavan was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Three Comrades (1938). She died of an overdose of barbiturates on January 1, New Year's Day, 1960, at the age of 50. Description above from the Wikipedia article Margaret Sullavan, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Read more