June 21st

Jane Russell

Jane Russell is 87 today. She was 36D when she made The Outlaw for Howard Hughes. He discovered her at his dentist, where she was a receptionist.

Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross, the wife and husband on the TV sitcom Family Ties, are both 61 today. Alex, their son on the show, was played by Michael J. Fox, who was 46 on June 9th.

Novelist Ian McEwan is 60.

Kathy Mattea is 48.

Juliette Lewis is 35 today. She was 18 when she played the daughter in Cape Fear, and received a best supporting actress Oscar nomination.

Prince William is 26.

It doesn’t really matter but existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre was born on this date in 1905.

Sartre became a teacher. At a time when the European teaching style was lecturing from a distance, he drank with his students at local bars, played cards and ping-pong with them, and joined them for picnics on the beach. In his spare time he began to write a novel called Nausea (1938). The book was his first major success, and it made him famous. People called him the French Kafka. He went on to write Being and Nothingness (1943), about the meaning of freedom. He wrote, “Hell is other people.” And, “If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.”

The Writer’s Almanac