Oscar-winner Ernest Borgnine (McHale’s Navy) is 91 today. Borgnine won the best actor Oscar in 1956 for the lead in Marty. The film also won best picture, director and screenplay (Paddy Chayefsky).
Oral Roberts is 90. Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.
Ray Stevens is 69.
One of the most popular novelty artists of all time, Ray Stevens enjoyed a remarkably long career, with a stretch of charting singles — some of them major hits — that spanned four decades. Unlike parody king Weird Al Yankovic, Stevens made most of his impact with original material, often based on cultural trends of the day. Yet his knack for sheer silliness translated across generations, not to mention countless compilations and special TV offers. Stevens was a legitimately skilled singer and producer who also performed straight country and pop, scoring the occasional serious hit. But in general, comic novelty songs were his bread and butter, and his brand of humor somehow managed to endure seismic shifts in popular taste and style.
Neil Diamond is 67, as is Aaron Neville.
Mary Lou Retton is 40. Ed Helms is 34. Mischa Barton is 22.
Edith Wharton was born on January 24th in 1862. This is from her obituary in 1937.
John Belushi should have been 59 today.
Edith Wharton was the child as well as the author of the Age of Innocence. In her seventy-five years of life she published thirty-eight books, including that great love story, “Ethan Frome.” But her reputation rested mostly upon her achievement as the chronicler of Fifth Avenue, when the brownstone front hid wealth and dignity at its ease upon the antimacassar-covered plush chairs of the Brown Decade.