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Ray Harryhausen

Biography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Raymond "Ray" Harryhausen (June 29, 1920 – May 7, 2013) was an American visual effects creator, writer, and producer who lived in London, England, from 1960 until his death in 2013. He created a brand of stop-motion model animation known as "Dynamation." His most important works include the animation on Mighty Joe Young, with pioneer Willis O'Brien, which won the Academy Award for special effects (1949); The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, his first color film; and Jason and the Argonauts, featuring a famous sword fight against seven skeleton warriors.
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Charlie Hall

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Charlie Hall (19 August 1899 – 7 December 1959) was an English film actor. He is best known as the "Little Nemesis" of Laurel and Hardy and appeared in nearly 50 films with them, so that Hall was the most frequent supporting actor of their films. Hall was born in Ward End, Birmingham, Warwickshire, and learned carpentry as a trade, but as a teenager, he became a member of the Fred Karno troupe of stage comedians. In his late teens, he visited his sister in New York and stayed there, finding employment as a stagehand. While working behind the scenes, he met the comic actor Bobby Dunn and they became friends; Dunn convinced Hall to take a stab again at acting, which he did. By the mid-1920s, Hall was working for Hal Roach. Stan Laurel, one of Roach's comedy stars, was also a graduate of the Karno troupe. As an actor, Hall worked with such comedians as Buster Keaton and Charley Chase, but is best remembered as a comic foil for Laurel and Hardy. He appeared in nearly 50 of their films, sometimes in bit parts, but often as a mean landlord or opponent in many of their memorable tit-for-tat sequences. Unlike the usual villains in Laurel and Hardy films, who were big and burly, Charlie Hall (billed as "Charley" Hall in the Roach comedies) was of short stature, standing 5 ft 5 in tall. His height and slight English accent allowed him to be convincingly cast as a college student, despite being 40 years old, in Laurel and Hardy's A Chump at Oxford. Hall almost never played starring roles; the exception was in 1941, when he was teamed with character comedian Frank Faylen by Monogram Pictures. Hall continued to play bits and supporting roles in short subjects and features through the 1940s and 1950s, occasionally on TV, appearing very briefly in Charlie Chaplin's final American film, Limelight (1952). In 1956 he played a small but important part in the TV show Cheyenne, season 1, episode 11, "Quicksand", starring Clint Walker, with Dennis Hopper, John Alderson, Wright King and Peggy Webber. His last role was in a Joe McDoakes short film starring George O'Hanlon, So You Want to Play the Piano, in 1956. Hall died in North Hollywood, California, on 7 December 1959. A J D Wetherspoon's public house in Erdington, is named The Charlie Hall as a tribute to him.
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Sean Connery

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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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Nadia Lotfi

Biography

Nadia Lutfi or Nadia Loutfi was an Egyptian actress. During the apex of her career, she was one of the most popular actresses of Egyptian cinema's golden age. She was born in 1937 in Cairo to an Egyptian father and a Polish mother. Her father was an accountant. Acting started as a hobby, when she was 10 years old she participated in a play at her school and did very well. Her first roles in Egyptian cinema were in Soultan (1958) and Cairo Station (1958), both in the same year. The latter brought filmmaker Youssef Chahine to international attention and acclaim when it was a competitor at the Berlin Film Festival. Her career progressed and she appeared in El saman wel karif (1967) (based on the book by Nobel-winning author Najeeb Mahfouz). She closed out the 1960s in Abi foq al-Shagara (1969) opposite Abdel Halim Hafez as a nightclub dancer who loves a much younger man.
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Romain Goupil

Biography

Politically committed to the left, Romain Goupil, born in 1951, is the most eloquent representative of the spirit of the revolution of May 1968. From his first feature in 1982, Mourir à 30 ans (1982) to his latest to date Les mains en l' air (2010), he has managed to remain faithful to his ideals, quite a feat if you think of all of his fellow revolutionaries who have changed sides, lured by money and/or power. His films, whether documentaries or fiction, have failed -with one or two exceptions - to draw large audience but they will remain a mirror of a whole generation.
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Wim Wenders

Biography

Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders (German: [ˈvɪm ˈvɛndɐs]; born 14 August 1945; Düsseldorf) is a German filmmaker, producer, playwright, author, and photographer. He is a major figure in New German Cinema. Among many honors, he has received three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature: for Buena Vista Social Club (1999), about Cuban music culture; Pina (2011), about the contemporary dance choreographer Pina Bausch; and The Salt of the Earth (2014), about Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. One of Wenders's earliest honors was a win for the BAFTA Award for Best Direction for his narrative drama Paris, Texas (1984), which also won the Palme d'Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. Many of his subsequent films have also been recognized at Cannes, including Wings of Desire (1987), for which he won the Best Director Award at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival. Wenders has been the president of the European Film Academy in Berlin since 1996. Alongside filmmaking, he is an active photographer, emphasizing images of desolate landscapes. He is considered an auteur director. Wenders has received many awards, including the Golden Lion for The State of Things at the Venice Film Festival (1982); the Palme d'Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival for his movie Paris, Texas; and Best Direction for Wings of Desire in the 1987 Bavarian Film Awards and the 1987 Cannes Film Festival. He won the Bavarian Film Awards for Best Director for Faraway, So Close! in 1993. In 2004, he received the Master of Cinema Award of the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg. He was awarded the Leopard of Honour at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2005. In 2012, his dance film Pina was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature of the 84th Academy Awards. Wenders also received a nomination for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Documentary Screenplay for the film. Wenders was awarded the Honorary Golden Bear at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2015.
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Ellen McLain

Biography

Ellen McLain is an American opera singer, voice actress, and voice instructor who is best known as the voice of the maniacal artificial intelligence GLaDOS in the Portal series, a character who has been consistently lauded by many publications as one of the greatest video game villains of all time. Her performance as GLaDOS led to the similar roles of the A.I. of Gipsy Danger in Pacific Rim, and the A.I. of Gipsy Avenger in Pacific Rim: Uprising. Since 1986, McLain has been married to fellow voice actor John Patrick Lowrie, who she often performs alongside in video games.
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Maria Howell

Biography

Wanda Maria Howell is an American actress and also a singer. Maria was born in Gastonia, North Carolina and graduated from Winston-Salem State University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Howell worked as a jazz singer and made her film debut in The Color Purple. She lived in Okinawa, Japan, from 1995-2001. She made guest appearances on the television series Drop Dead Diva, Army Wives, The Game, Necessary Roughness, and The Vampire Diaries, and as well as co-starred in films that include Daddy's Little Girls, Mississippi Damned, The Blind Side, and What to Expect When You're Expecting. In 2013, Howell played Seeder in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Also in 2012, she was cast in the recurring NBC television series Revolution as Grace Beaumont, and in 2013 she plays Ida Hayes in the m comedy-drama Devious Maids.
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Agnez Mo

Biography

Agnes Monica Muljoto (born 1 July 1986), known by her stage name Agnes Monica (now AGNEZ MO), is an Indonesian singer and actress. She started her career in the entertainment industry at the age of six as a child singer. She has recorded three children's albums. She also became a presenter of several children's television programs. She signed a recording deal with the US label The Cherry Party, which is owned by Sony Music Entertainment. Her debut international single, "Coke Bottle", was released indie in September 2013 and re-released in early 2014 by Sony Music, featuring American rappers Timbaland and T.I.
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Craig Hensley

Biography

An American actor known for his large body of stage work and more recently for his portrayals in Western films of characters ranging from an upright family man to a cold-blooded hired gun. With comedic and dramatic film, television and theater credits ranging from New York to Los Angeles and numerous locales in between, Mr. Hensley has several films in post-production (2018 release) while he performs his one-man traveling stage play "Wyatt: Last Words", an exploration of the meaning behind Wyatt Earp's deathbed utterance "Suppose...suppose." Craig also collaborates on writing projects with Ric Maddox, co-creator of Deadmen The Series, one of his recent and most favorite projects.
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