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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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Arnold Schwarzenegger
Biography
Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger (born July 30, 1947) is an Austrian-American actor, film producer, businessman, former bodybuilder and politician who served as the 38th governor of California (2003-2011). As of 2022, he is the most recent Republican governor of California. Time magazine named Schwarzenegger one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and 2007. He also served as Chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports (1990-1993).
He began weight training at 15. He was awarded the title of Mr. Universe at age 20 and went on to win the Mr. Olympia contest a total of seven times. He appeared in the bodybuilding documentary Pumping Iron (1977). The Arnold Sports Festival, considered the second-most important bodybuilding event after Mr. Olympia, is named after him. He has remained a prominent presence in the sport of bodybuilding and has written several books and numerous articles on the sport.
He wanted to move from bodybuilding into acting, finally achieving it when he played the title role in Hercules in New York (1970). Credited under the stage name "Arnold Strong", his accent in the film was so thick that his lines were dubbed after production. His second film role was as a mob hitman in The Long Goodbye (1973), followed by a more significant part in the film Stay Hungry (1976), for which he won the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actor.
In 1977, he appeared in an episode of the ABC sitcom The San Pedro Beach Bums and the ABC police procedural The Streets of San Francisco. He auditioned for the title role of The Incredible Hulk, but did not win the role because of his height. He appeared in the 1979 comedy The Villain. In 1980, he starred in a biographical film of the 1950s actress Jayne Mansfield as her husband, Mickey Hargitay.
He gained worldwide fame as a Hollywood action star with his breakthrough starring role in the epic Conan the Barbarian (1982) and its sequel in 1984. After playing the title role in the sci-fi action film The Terminator (1984), he starred in its' sequels Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machine's (2003), Terminator Genisys (2015), and Terminator: Dark Fate (2019). His other action films include Commando (1985), The Running Man (1987), Predator (1987), Red Heat (1988), Total Recall (1990), and True Lies (1994). His comedy films include Twins (1988), Kindergarten Cop (1990), Junior (1994), and Jingle All the Way (1996).
After leaving the governor's office, he resumed his acting career. He starred in The Expendables 2 (2012), The Last Stand (2013), his first leading role in 10 years, Escape Plan (2013), Sabotage (2014) and returned as Trench Mauser in The Expendables 3 (2014). He then starred in the Terminator sequels Terminator Genisys (2015) and Terminator: Dark Fate (2019). He was slated to reprise his role as Conan in The Legend of Conan, later renamed Conan the Conqueror; however, in April 2017, producer Chris Morgan stated that Universal had dropped the project, although there was a possibility of a TV show.
He was nicknamed the "Austrian Oak" and the "Styrian Oak" in his bodybuilding days, "Arnie" and "Schwarz" during his acting career and the "Governator" (a portmanteau of "Governor" and "Terminator"). He is the founder of the film production company Oak Productions.
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Marco Ferreri
Biography
Marco Ferreri (11 May 1928 – 9 May 1997) was an Italian film director, screenwriter and actor. He was born in Milan and died in Paris of a myocardial infarction. Upon his death, Gilles Jacob, artistic director of the Cannes International Film Festival, said: The Italian cinema has lost one of its most original artists, one of its most personal authors (...) No one was more demanding nor more allegorical than he in showing the state of crisis of contemporary man. His best known film is La Grande Bouffe, starring Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi.
His 1979 film Chiedo asilo won him the Silver Bear - Special Jury Prize at the 30th Berlin International Film Festival. In 1991, his film La casa del sorriso won the Golden Bear at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Marco Ferreri, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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J.P. McGowan
Biography
From Wikipedia
John Paterson McGowan (February 24, 1880 – March 26, 1952) was a pioneering Hollywood actor and director and occasionally a screenwriter and producer. J. P. McGowan, as he was usually known, remains the only Australian to have been made a life member of the Screen Directors Guild (now Directors Guild of America).
Born in the then-bustling railway centre of Terowie in South Australia, McGowan grew up in Adelaide (Islington) and Sydney. He was a capable horseman and served in the Second Boer War with Montmorency's Scouts as a special dispatch rider.
McGowan directed and often acted in the first 33 episodes of Kalem's 1914 adventure film series, The Hazards of Helen, which eventually ran to 54 episodes, some still with McGowan's participation. While filming he began a relationship with Helen Holmes, the film's star, and the two married. They left Kalem to set up their own production company, Signal Films, which successfully made a series of railroad melodramas but lost out when their distributor (Mutual) failed. The collaboration ended when they divorced in 1925. There was an adopted daughter, Kaye.
McGowan successfully made the transition from silent film to talkies. While never a major star, in a busy career that spanned four decades he is credited with acting in 232 films—mostly strong roles like sheriff or villain—writing 26 screenplays and directing 242 productions. In 1932 he directed a young John Wayne in the 12-episode rail vs airplane serial The Hurricane Express for the independent Mascot Pictures. From 1938 to 1951, as Executive Secretary of the Screen Directors Guild, he fought to secure recognition for the director within the studio systems of the film and emerging television industry.
J.P. McGowan died in 1952 in Hollywood and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
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Ludovico Einaudi
Biography
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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Eligio Meléndez
Biography
Eligio Meléndez is a Mexican film, theater and television director and actor, born on June 20, 1950, in Mexico City. He studied at the Andrés Soler Acting Institute, with the renowned Luis Gimeno, Carlos Ancira, Miguel Círcega and Soledad Ruíz as teachers. One of the most recognized personalities in theater, the actor has participated in more than 30 works, including The Flower of the Heart, Borges with Music, The Enchanted Mirror, The Old Men, Trufaldino Servant of Two Patrons, Mexican Entremeses, Mexico Pachuco, Soldado Razo, among others. In film, Eligio made his debut in the film Perseguida (1991), and then built an interesting and lucrative career with roles in films such as The Colonel Doesn't Have Anyone Write to Him (1999), In the Country of Nothing Happens (2000), for which that he would receive his first Ariel nomination; Perfume of violets (2001), Amar te duele (2002), Curandero (2005), The last one and we leave (2009), Hidalgo – The untold story (2010), Yerbamala (2014) and Dream in another language (2017) , for which he was nominated, for the second time, for an Ariel award.
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Elizabeth Plank
Biography
Elizabeth Plank is a senior producer and correspondent at Vox.com where she hosts a series about the presidential election called 2016ish. Prior to Vox, she was a Senior Correspondent at Mic and co-creator of Flip The Script, an award-winning weekly video series confronting social issues. In 2015, she was a correspondent for MSNBC's Shift Krystal Clear and was named one of Forbes' 30 Under 30 in Media. She has appeared on national and international television programs providing millennial perspective on politics, women's issues, and reproductive rights, including The Today Show, The Daily Show, MSNBC, Fox News, ABC News, Fusion, Al-Jazeera America and BBC World.
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Antonio Drove
Biography
Antonio Drove (Madrid, November 1, 1942 - Paris, September 24, 2005) was a Spanish film director and screenwriter.
He began his studies in Industrial Engineering, abandoning them to devote himself to cinema, enrolling in the Escuela Oficial de Cine (Official Film School). He was part of the Argüelles School, together with Luis Revenga, Antonio Franco, José María Carreño, Miguel Marías and Manolo Marinero, who met at the end of the 1960s in the cafeteria La Verdad, and in the cinemas of this neighborhood. The writer Antonio Martínez Sarrión defined him as follows: "The funambulist, the illusionist, the Fregoli of the group was Drove, personification and sign of the noble and ancient art of inventing entertainment". He also wrote in the magazine Nuestro cine and in El Mundo. He also made a documentary on Luis Buñuel. He has German ancestors.
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Jimmy Gideon
Biography
Jimmy Gideon was an Indonesian actor, comedian, and radio announcer. Jimmy is the younger brother of comedian Ogud Tomtam of the Tomtam Group. He became famous after starring in the comedy soap opera "Gara-Gara with Lydia Kandou" in the 1990s. Jimmy Gideon is part of the Gideon comedy group with Sion Gideon and Habil Gideon. The name Jimmy himself comes from his childhood nickname because when he was little his face resembled the 39th US President, Jimmy Carter. Meanwhile, the name Gideon itself comes from the abbreviation of the names of Gideon group's founders, namely Ginanjar, Derry, and Sion. The three of them were the original members and founders of this comedy group when it was first founded in the 1990s. Jimmy Gideon passed away on 26 December 2021 and was buried the next day at TPU Bojong Nangka, Tangerang Regency.
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Dan Ferro
Biography
Dan Ferro was an actor, known for Blow (2001), Creepshow (1982) and Sgt. Bilko (1996).
Ferro's acting career began with roles in the series Falcon Crest (CBS, 1981-1990) and Murder, She Wrote (CBS, 1984-1996). He also took on a few movie roles at the time, appearing in Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987).
In the eighties and the nineties, he shifted his entertainment career towards more comedic roles, appearing on Almost Grown (CBS, 1988-89). He also worked in film during these years, including a part on the comedic adaptation Sgt. Bilko (1996) with Steve Martin.
Then, he tackled guest roles on The Pretender (1996-2000) and Brother's Keeper (ABC, 1998-99). He also featured in the TV movie On the Line (ABC, 1997-98). Ferro also acted in the Johnny Depp crime drama film Blow (2001).
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