Today is the birthday of Billy Graham. He’s 89.
Opera star Joan Sutherland is 81.
Johnny Rivers is 65.
Roberta Joan Anderson is 64. We know her as Joni Mitchell.
A consummate artist, Joni Mitchell is an accomplished musician, songwriter, poet and painter. Hailing from Canada, where she performed as a folksinger as far back as 1962, she found her niche on the same Southern California singer/songwriter scene of the late Sixties and early Seventies that germinated such kindred spirits as Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon and Crosby, Stills & Nash. Mitchell’s artistry goes well beyond folksinging to incorporate elements of jazz and classical music. In her own words, “I looked like a folksinger, even though the moment I began to write, my music was not folk music. It was something else that had elements of romantic classicism to it.” Impossible to categorize, Mitchell has doggedly pursued avenues of self-expression, heedless of commercial outcomes. Nonetheless, she managed to connect with a mass audience in the mid-Seventies when a series of albums—Court and Spark (1974, #2), Miles of Aisles (1974, #2), The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975, #4) and Hejira (1976, #13)-established her as one of that decade’s pre-eminent artists.
Christopher Knight is 50. We know him as Peter Brady.
Herman Mankiewicz was born 110 years ago today. Mankiewicz shared the best writing Oscar for Citizen Kane with Orson Welles.
The screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz—who helped establish rapid-fire dialogue as a hallmark of Hollywood’s early talking pictures—is remembered first for co-authoring the script for Citizen Kane. Although he and director Orson Welles shared writing credit (and with it Kane’s only Academy Award), many film historians today not only give Mankiewicz more credit for the script than Welles did, they give him more credit than they give Welles himself.