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Tom Konkle

Biography

Thomas (Tom) Konkle, a distinguished figure in the entertainment industry, is renowned for his multifaceted expertise as an actor, director, writer, and producer. Known professionally as Tom in his acting endeavors and as Thomas in his writing and directing roles, Konkle has cultivated a career marked by creative and technical prowess, which began with his move to Los Angeles at the age of 22. Konkle's on-screen presence is notably recognized in the FX Network series "Baskets," where he starred alongside Zach Galifianakis and Louie Anderson. His diverse skill set extends to his role as a staff writer for Warner Brothers' "Be Cool Scooby Doo" television series, and his directorial acumen is exemplified in the WWII period film, "The Longest Knife." Additionally, he is a published author, having penned the novel "Red Skies." A product of The American University's Film and Drama program, Konkle's early films garnered accolades and set the stage for a trajectory filled with critical and creative triumphs. Throughout the 1990s, he refined his craft in live stage productions while simultaneously navigating the forefront of the digital revolution in filmmaking. This period was instrumental in shaping his comprehensive understanding of storytelling, the acting process, and the rapidly evolving technological landscape of production, post-production, and visual effects. Konkle's unique blend of artistic intuition and technical knowledge has resulted in over 80 IMDb credits and a plethora of award-winning projects in various capacities, including acting, writing, and directing. As an independent producer, his insights span the entire spectrum of film production, from initial concept to distribution and promotion, particularly through social media channels. Throughout his illustrious career, Konkle has had the privilege of learning from industry titans such as writer/director Christopher Guest, legendary TV director James Burrows, director Jim Sheridan, writer/director David Twohy, director Ruben Fleischer, and horror maestro Wes Craven. He also apprenticed under Graham Ford, the visionary producer behind "Time Bandits," "Brazil," and "Gandhi." Konkle's versatility and comedic talent were showcased when he collaborated with John Cleese on a comedy television special in Europe. Furthermore, the members of the legendary Monty Python ensemble enlisted his talents to direct, perform, and reinterpret their never-before-seen sketches for the show "Owl-Stretching Time." Konkle's contributions extend across major networks as a performer and writer. His body of work includes over a hundred internet productions, films, commercials, and live stage productions, highlighting his dynamic range and adaptability. As the owner and partner of Lumen Actus Productions, Inc, based in Burbank, CA, Konkle continues to be a pivotal force in the industry, seamlessly integrating production and post-production expertise to bring visionary projects to life. His career stands as a testament to his unwavering commitment to the art of storytelling and his remarkable ability to navigate the multifaceted world of entertainment.
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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 31 October 2020, it was announced that Connery had died at the age of 90. Description above from the Wikipedia article Sean Connery, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia
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Isuzu Yamada

Biography

Isuzu Yamada (山田 五十鈴, Yamada Isuzu, 5 February 1917 – 9 July 2012) was a Japanese stage and screen actress whose career spanned seven decades. Yamada was born in Osaka as Mitsu Yamada, the daughter of Kusudu Yamada, a shinpa actor specialising in onnagata roles, and Ritsu, a geisha. Yamada debuted as a film actress in 1930 at age twelve, appearing in the Nikkatsu film Tsurugi wo koete. She soon became one of Nikkatsu's top actresses, but it was her portrayals of strong-willed modern girls in Kenji Mizoguchi's Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion in 1936 at the new Daiichi Eiga studio that earned her popularity and critical acclaim. Moving to Shinkō Kinema and then to Toho, she became a star with Mikio Naruse's Tsuruhachi and Tsurujiro (1938). During the second half of the 1950s, Yamada's main attention shifted towards the stage, but she still appeared in a number of distinguished films like Naruse's Flowing (1956), Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Twilight (1957) and Akira Kurosawa's The Lower Depths (1957) and Throne of Blood (1957). Other directors she worked with during this decade include Keisuke Kinoshita, Kaneto Shindō and Shirō Toyoda. In addition to her theatre engagements, she appeared on television, including the long-running Hissatsu series. Her last TV appearance was in 2002. Yamada died from multiple organ failure in Tokyo on 9 July 2012 at the age of 95. She was married four times, to actor Ichirō Tsukita, to producer Kazuo Takimura, to actor Yoshi Katō, and to actor Tsutomu Shimomoto. Her daughter with Tsukita, Michiko, became known as the actress Michiko Saga (1935–1992). Description above from the Wikipedia article Isuzu Yamada, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia​
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Todd Haynes

Biography

Todd Haynes (/heɪnz/; born January 2, 1961; Los Angeles) is an American filmmaker. His films span four decades with themes examining the personalities of well-known musicians, dysfunctional and dystopian societies, and blurred gender roles. Haynes first gained public attention with his controversial short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), which chronicles singer Karen Carpenter's life and death, using Barbie dolls as actors. Superstar became a cult classic. Haynes's feature directorial debut, Poison (1991), a provocative exploration of AIDS-era queer perceptions and subversions, established him as a figure of a new transgressive cinema. Poison won the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize and is regarded as a seminal work of New Queer Cinema. Haynes received further acclaim for his second feature film, Safe (1995), a symbolic portrait of a housewife who develops multiple chemical sensitivity. Safe was later voted the best film of the 1990s by The Village Voice Film Poll. His next feature, Velvet Goldmine (1998), is a tribute to the 1970s glam rock era. The film received the Special Jury Prize for Best Artistic Contribution at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. Haynes gained acclaim and a measure of mainstream success with Far from Heaven (2002) earning his first Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. He continued to direct critically lauded films such as I'm Not There (2007), Carol (2015), Wonderstruck (2017) and Dark Waters (2019). He directed his first feature-length documentary, The Velvet Underground (2021). Haynes directed and co-wrote the HBO mini-series Mildred Pierce (2011) for which he was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards.
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Conrad Veidt

Biography

Hans Walter Conrad Veidt (22 January 1893 – 3 April 1943) was a German actor best remembered for his roles in films such as Different from the Others (1919), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and The Man Who Laughs (1928). After a successful career in German silent film, where he was one of the best-paid stars of Ufa, he was forced to leave Germany in 1933 with his new Jewish wife after the Nazis came to power. They settled in Britain, where he participated in a number of films, including The Thief of Bagdad (1940), before emigrating to the United States around 1941, which lead to him having a supporting role in Casablanca (1942). From 1916 until his death, Veidt appeared in more than 100 films. One of his earliest performances was as the murderous somnambulist Cesare in director Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), a classic of German Expressionist cinema, with Werner Krauss and Lil Dagover. His starring role in The Man Who Laughs (1928), as a disfigured circus performer whose face is cut into a permanent grin, provided the (visual) inspiration for the Batman villain the Joker, created in 1940 by Bill Finger. Veidt also starred in other silent horror films such as The Hands of Orlac (1924), another film directed by Robert Wiene, The Student of Prague (1926) and Waxworks (1924) where he played Ivan the Terrible. Veidt also appeared in Magnus Hirschfeld's film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others, 1919), one of the first films to sympathetically portray homosexuality, although the characters in it do not end up happily. He had a leading role in Germany's first talking picture, Das Land ohne Frauen (Land Without Women, 1929). He moved to Hollywood in the late 1920s and made a few films, but the advent of talking pictures and his difficulty with speaking English led him to return to Germany. During this period he lent his expertise to tutoring aspiring performers, one of whom was the later American character actress Lisa Golm.
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Lucas Prisor

Biography

Lucas Prisor (born 23 September 1983) is a German actor. Prisor was born in Hannover, Germany. During his school career he spent one year in New York City. After graduating he studied acting in Leipzig, before moving to Berlin to work at the Berliner Ensemble and at the Volksbühne. He also lived in Paris where he started to work with French director François Ozon, academy award winner Volker Schlöndorff and Paul Verhoeven. He lives in Berlin and Paris. Source: Article "Lucas Prisor" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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Kate Bryan

Biography

Kate Bryan is a British art historian, curator and arts broadcaster. In 2016, she became head of collections for Soho House globally. She presents the Sky Arts Series Inside Arts which began in 2019. She wrote and presented the art television series Galleries on Demand, which aired every week in 2016 on Sky Arts. She is a judge on the Sky Arts television series Artist of the Year, presented by Stephen Mangan and Joan Bakewell. She has been a contributor to the arts television programme The Culture Show on BBC2, Newsnight on BBC2 and in 2013 presented an hour-long special for The Culture Show on The Art of Chinese Painting. In 2016, she was a presenter of the Sky Arts documentary The Mystery of the Lost Caravaggio, which aired in Italy as Operazione Caravaggio. She also contributed to Dante's Inferno, Raphael and Beauty and Artemisia Gentileschi: Painting to Survive on Sky Arts. In 2018, she presented an hour-long live broadcast from Tate Modern on the Picasso 1932 exhibition, also on Sky Arts.In 2019 she presented a follow up as live programme from Tate Britain, Van Gogh and Britain for Sky Arts.
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W.C. Fields

Biography

William Claude Dukenfield was the eldest of five children born to Cockney immigrant James Dukenfield and Philadelphia native Kate Felton. He went to school for four years, then quit to work with his father selling vegetables from a horse cart. At eleven, after many fights with his alcoholic father (who hit him on the head with a shovel), he ran away from home. For a while he lived in a hole in the ground, depending on stolen food and clothing. He was often beaten and spent nights in jail. His first regular job was delivering ice. By age thirteen he was a skilled pool player and juggler. It was then, at an amusement park in Norristown PA, that he was first hired as an entertainer. There he developed the technique of pretending to lose the things he was juggling. In 1893 he was employed as a juggler at Fortescue's Pier, Atlantic City. When business was slow he pretended to drown in the ocean (management thought his fake rescue would draw customers). By nineteen he was billed as "The Distinguished Comedian" and began opening bank accounts in every city he played. At age twenty-three he opened at the Palace in London and played with Sarah Bernhardt at Buckingham Palace. He starred at the Folies-Bergere (young Charles Chaplin and Maurice Chevalier were on the program). He was in each of the Ziegfeld Follies from 1915 through 1921. He played for a year in the highly praised musical "Poppy" which opened in New York in 1923. In 1925 D.W. Griffith made a movie of the play, renamed Sally of the Sawdust (1925), starring Fields. Pool Sharks (1915), Fields' first movie, was made when he was thirty-five. He settled into a mansion near Burbank, California and made most of his thirty-seven movies for Paramount. He appeared in mostly spontaneous dialogs on Charlie McCarthy's radio shows. In 1939 he switched to Universal where he made films written mainly by and for himself. He died after several serious illnesses, including bouts of pneumonia.
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Mariah Carey

Biography

Mariah Carey (March 27, 1969) is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and record producer. Referred to as the "Songbird Supreme" and the "Queen of Christmas", she is noted for her five-octave vocal range, melismatic singing style, and signature use of the whistle register. Carey rose to fame in 1990 with her eponymous debut album. She was the first artist to have her first five singles reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100, from "Vision of Love" to "Emotions".
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Barbro Hörberg

Biography

Barbro Christel Hörberg was a Swedish singer, songwriter, poet and a stage and screen actress. One of Sweden´s most appreciated female poets and songwriters, sometimes described as a "Cult Figure" in her genre. She was in her early career noted for putting music to lyricist Beppe Wolgers´texts and for her own sly compositions, filled with everyday realism. In 1972 she released the album "Med Ögon Känsliga För Grönt" (With eyes sensitive to green), which was her most celebrated production."
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