Don Everly and Garret Morris (of “Saturday Night Live”) are 70 today. Sherman Hemsley (of “The Jeffersons”) is 69.
Lisa Marie Presley is 39.
Four-time Oscar winner for best director John Ford was born on this date.
It’s the birthday of American movie director John Ford, born Sean Aloysius O’Fearna, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine (1895), the youngest of 13 children. He made more than 120 films, most of them Westerns. On the sets of his movies he wore old khaki pants, tennis shoes with holes in the toes, a worn-out fedora, and a dirty scarf around his neck. He always had poor eyesight. He started wearing an eye patch like a pirate after he went blind in one eye. He usually worked with a glass of brandy in his hand and was always smoking a cigar. (The Writer’s Almanac)
Clark Gable was born on this date in 1901. He won the Best Actor award in 1935 for It Happened One Night. He was nominated for Best Actor for Mutiny of the Bounty and Gone With the Wind.
Langston Hughes was born on this date in 1902. This from his obituary in 1967.
Mr. Hughes was sometimes characterized as the “O. Henry of Harlem.” He was an extremely versatile and productive author who was particularly well known for his folksy humor.
In a description of himself written for “Twentieth Century Authors, a biographical dictionary, Mr. Hughes wrote:
“My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson and Henry Armstrong.”
“I live in Harlem, New York City,” his autobiographical sketch continued. “I am unmarried. I like ‘Tristan,’ goat’s milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike ‘Aida,’ parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.”