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Ludovico Einaudi

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Ludovico Maria Enrico Einaudi OMRI (born 23 November 1955) is an Italian pianist and composer. Trained at the Conservatorio Verdi in Milan, Einaudi began his career as a classical composer, later incorporating other styles and genres such as pop, rock, folk, and world music. Einaudi has composed the scores for a number of films and television productions, including This Is England, The Intouchables, I'm Still Here, Nomadland, the TV miniseries Doctor Zhivago, and Acquario (1996), for which he won the Grolla d'oro. His music was used as the score for the Golden Globe and Academy Award-winning films Nomadland and The Father. He has also released a number of solo albums for piano and other instruments, notably I Giorni in 2001, Nightbook in 2009, and In a Time Lapse in 2013. On 1 March 2019, Einaudi announced a seven-part project named Seven Days Walking, which was released over the course of seven months in 2019. Einaudi was born in Turin, Piedmont. His father, Giulio Einaudi, was a publisher working with authors including Italo Calvino and Primo Levi, and founder of Giulio Einaudi Editore, while his paternal grandfather, Luigi Einaudi, was President of Italy between 1948 and 1955. His mother, Renata Aldrovandi, played the piano to him as a child. Her father, Waldo Aldrovandi, was a pianist, opera conductor, and composer who emigrated to Australia after World War II. Einaudi started composing his own music as a teenager, first writing by playing a folk guitar. He began his musical training at the Conservatorio Verdi in Milan, obtaining a diploma in composition in 1982. That same year he took an orchestration class taught by Luciano Berio and was awarded a scholarship to the Tanglewood Music Festival. According to Einaudi, "[Luciano Berio] did some interesting work with African vocal music and did some arrangements of Beatles songs, and he taught me that there is a sort of dignity inside music. I learnt orchestration from him and a very open way of thinking about music." He also learned by collaborating with musicians such as Ballaké Sissoko from Mali and Djivan Gasparyan from Armenia. His music is ambient, meditative, and often introspective, drawing on minimalism and contemporary pop. After studying at the conservatory in Milan and subsequently with Berio, Einaudi spent several years composing in traditional forms, including several chamber and orchestral compositions. He soon garnered international attention and his music was performed at venues such as the Teatro alla Scala, the Tanglewood Music Festival, Lincoln Center, and the UCLA Center for Performing Arts.] In the mid-1980s, he began to search for more personal expression in a series of works for dance and multimedia, and later for piano. Some of his collaborations in theater, video, and dance included compositions for the Sul filo d'Orfeo in 1984, Time Out in 1988, a dance-theater piece created with writer Andrea De Carlo, The Wild Man in 1990, and the Emperor in 1991. Later collaborations include Salgari (Per terra e per mare) (1995), an opera/ballet commissioned by the Arena di Verona with texts by Emilio Salgari, Rabindranath Tagore, and Charles Duke Jr, and E.A. Poe (1997), which was conceived as a soundtrack for silent films. ... Source: Article "Ludovico Einaudi" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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Jenna Mattison

Biography

Originally from India, Jenna Mattison moved to Chicago at 7 years old. She started her career in Chicago at 14 appearing in theatre productions, writing short stories and modeling. Upon her move to Los Angeles Mattison wrote her first screenplay titled Fish Without A Bicycle. The movie went into production in 2003 and was released at the Cannes Marketplace with a screening at the Palais theatre and a limited US theatrical release. And thus began Mattison's career as a writer, producer and actress. In 2007 her acting career was cut short, after signing on to play Brenda Starr Reporter in a TV series based on the iconic Lee Messick comic strip character with Warner Horizon & Tribune Entertainment producing alongside Constance Burge creator of Charmed, Mattison sustained an injury that would force her into 5 years of surgeries and rehabilitation. Her first project back, For The Love Of Money, a Jewish Gangster Bio Pic which she wrote & produced was released through Lionsgate limited theatrical for which she was honored by The Academy Of Motion Pictures to have her screenplay included in their Core Collection Library . Her subsequent films received theatrical or television releases and are available worldwide. Her most recent film The Sound was released by MGM's Orion and Samuel Goldwyn in select theaters to critical acclaim and through Sony on Home Video, the screenplay was also selected for induction into the Academy Of Motion Pictures Core Collection Library. Mattison is currently writing for television and releasing her 4th installment of her best selling mystery novel series.
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Toby Keith

Biography

​From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.   Toby Keith Covel (born July 8, 1961), best known as Toby Keith, was an American country music singer-songwriter, record producer and actor. Keith released his first four studio albums — 1993's Toby Keith, 1994's Boomtown, 1996's Blue Moon and 1997's Dream Walkin', plus a Greatest Hits package for various divisions of Mercury Records before exiting in 1998. These albums all earned gold or higher certification, and produced several chart singles, including his debut "Should've Been a Cowboy", which topped the country charts and was the most played country song of the 1990s. The song has received three million spins since then, according to Broadcast Music Incorporated. Signed to Nashville DreamWorks in 1998, Keith released his breakthrough single "How Do You Like Me Now?!" that year. This song, the title track to his 1999 album of the same name, was the Number One country song of 2000, and one of several chart-toppers during his tenure on DreamWorks Nashville. His next three albums, Pull My Chain, Unleashed, and Shock'n Y'all, produced three more Number Ones each, and all of the albums were certified multi-platinum. A second Greatest Hits package followed in 2004, and after that, he released Honkytonk University. When Dreamworks closed in 2005, Keith founded his own label, Show Dog Nashville, which became part of Show Dog-Universal Music in December 2009. He has released five studio albums on this label: 2006's White Trash with Money, 2007's Big Dog Daddy, 2008's That Don't Make Me a Bad Guy, 2009's American Ride and 2010's Bullets in the Gun as well as the compilation 35 Biggest Hits. He has also signed several other acts to the label, including Trailer Choir, Carter's Chord, Flynnville Train, Trace Adkins, Mac McAnally and Mica Roberts. Keith also made his acting debut in 2005, starring in the film Broken Bridges and co-starred with comedian Rodney Carrington in the 2008 film Beer for My Horses. Keith has released thirteen studio albums, two Christmas albums, and multiple compilation albums. He has also charted more than forty singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, including nineteen Number One hits and sixteen additional Top Ten hits. His longest-lasting Number One hits are "Beer for My Horses" (a 2003 duet with Willie Nelson) and "As Good as I Once Was" (2005), at six weeks each. Description above from the Wikipedia article Toby Keith, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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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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Corey Michael Eubanks

Biography

While training for a Golden Gloves boxing tournament in Southern California, Corey was discovered in his gym and cast to play the role of a young boxer in the feature film The Sting II (1983) for Universal Pictures. Intrigued by the entertainment industry, Corey spent the next four years perfecting his craft as a professional stuntman on the television show The Dukes of Hazzard (1979). Soon Corey's talents as a stuntman were in demand, and he began working on several other action shows such as The A-Team (1983), Hunter (1967), and The Fall Guy (1981). Throughout his twenty-year career, Corey has kept extremely busy working as one of Hollywood's top professional stuntmen.
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Paul Muni

Biography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Paul Muni (born Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, September 22, 1895 – August 25, 1967) was an Austrian-Hungarian-born American stage and film actor. During the 1930s, he was considered the most prestigious actor at Warner Brothers studios, and one of the rare actors who was given the privilege of choosing which parts he wanted. His acting quality, usually playing a powerful character, such as Scarface, was partly a result of his intense preparation for his parts, often immersing himself in study of the real character's traits and mannerisms. He was also highly skilled in using makeup techniques, a talent he learned from his parents, who were also actors, and from his early years on stage with the Yiddish Theater, in New York. At the age of 12, he played the stage role of an 80-year-old man; in one of his films, Seven Faces, he played seven different characters. He was nominated six times for an Oscar, winning once as Best Actor in The Story of Louis Pasteur. Description above from the Wikipedia article Paul Muni, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia
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Olivier Lafont

Biography

Olivier Sanjay Lafont (born 31 October 1979) is a French actor, author and screenwriter based in Paris. He is French, lived and worked in India for 30 years, and had an American international education, graduating from Colgate University, USA with BAs in Theatre and English Literature and academic distinction. Natively bilingual in English and French, speaking fluent Hindi and basic Spanish, he has acted in several Bollywood and Hollywood films, over 100 television commercials and advertising campaigns, and more than 100 voice overs and dubs. The first feature film he wrote premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and went on to win seven awards at international film festivals. He has sold several other feature film screenplays and written for comedy shows.
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Sheila E.

Biography

Sheila Escovedo (born December 12, 1957), known under the stage name Sheila E., is an American singer and drummer. She began her career in the mid-1970s as a percussionist for the George Duke Band. After separating from the group in 1983, Sheila began a solo career, starting with the release of her debut album in 1984, which included her biggest hit song, "The Glamorous Life". She also saw a hit with the single "A Love Bizarre". She is sometimes referred to as the "Queen of Percussion". Description above from the Wikipedia article Sheila E., licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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Holland Taylor

Biography

Holland Virginia Taylor (born January 14, 1943) is an American actress. She won the 1999 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her role as Judge Roberta Kittleson on ABC's The Practice (1998–2003). For her portrayal of Evelyn Harper on the CBS comedy Two and a Half Men (2003–15), she received a total of four Primetime Emmy Award nominations. Taylor's other notable television credits include starring roles on the sitcoms Bosom Buddies (1980–82), The Powers That Be (1992–93) and The Naked Truth (1995–98). She also appeared as Jill Ollinger on the soap opera All My Children (1981–83), as Peggy Peabody on The L Word (2004–08), and as Ida Silver on Mr. Mercedes (2017–19). In 2020, she received critical praise and her eighth Primetime Emmy Award nomination for portraying Ellen Kincaid in the Netflix miniseries Hollywood. Taylor's feature film credits include Romancing the Stone (1984) and its sequel (1985), Alice (1990), To Die For (1995), One Fine Day (1996), George of the Jungle (1997), The Truman Show (1998), Happy Accidents (2000), Keeping the Faith (2000), Legally Blonde (2001), The Wedding Date (2005), Baby Mama (2008), Gloria Bell (2018), Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020), and The Stand In (2020). Taylor wrote and starred in the one-woman play, Ann, based on the life and work of Ann Richards. For this, she received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actress. Description above from the Wikipedia article Holland Taylor, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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Vic Grimes

Biography

Victor Grimes (born January 3, 1963) is an American professional wrestler. He is best known for his appearances with Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW), Xtreme Pro Wrestling (XPW), and WWE. Grimes began his wrestling career in California's All Pro Wrestling, before working for the WWF. In the WWF, Grimes portrayed the character Key, a drug dealer. After a short tenure, Grimes debuted in ECW and joined the stable Da Baldies. He subsequently worked for XPW, where he continued his feud with New Jack that had begun in ECW. He also appeared in MTV's short-lived wrestling promotion Wrestling Society X.
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