Ed Ames, the singer and actor, is 82. Ames, whose parents were Ukrainian Jews, played the Indian Mingo on “Daniel Boone.” He was responsible for the classic incident with Johnny Carson throwing a tomahawk. Ames threw at a two-dimensional silhouette and managed to add some three-dimensional anatomy. Ed, with his brothers Joe, Gene and Vic — the Ames Brothers — had several top hits in the early 1950s. Their actual surname was Urick.
Donald Rumsfeld is 77.
Doctor and author Oliver Sacks is 76 today.
He has devoted his career to studying people with unusual neurological disorders, and writing about them so that they seem like real people and not just case studies. His first book was Migraine (1970), about migraine headaches, and it got good reviews. In the 1960s, he started working with survivors of the sleeping sickness epidemic that occurred between 1916 and 1927. These people had been in institutions ever since, still alive but in unresponsive bodies. Sacks noticed that many people had similar reactions as people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, so he decided to treat them with the drug levodopa. Many of them woke up and were cognizant for the first time in 40 years. But it was extremely stressful for many of them to have lost so much time like that, and most of them went back to sleep. Sacks wrote a book about it, Awakenings (1973). In 1990, it was made into a movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
He went on to write several more books in the same vein, including Seeing Voices (1989), The Island of the Colorblind (1997), and the best-selling book of essays The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), about people living with a variety of neurological disorders. His most recent book is Musicophilia (2007), about the sometimes bizarre connections between music and the brain, and the ways in which music operates on everyone from people with severe neurological disorders to ordinary people who can’t get a tune out of their heads.
Brian Dennehy is 71 — guess he’ll be playing one of the old folks in any re-make of Cocoon. Dennehy won a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award for his portrayal of Willy Loman in the 2000 made-for-TV presentation of Death of a Salesman.
Chris Cooper is 58. Cooper has appeared in over 50 films and television productions, winning a best supporting actor Oscar for Adaptation.
Jimmy Smits is 54. Smits was nominated six times for an Emmy for supporting actor for L.A. Law. He won once. He was nominated five times for best actor for NYPD Blue. No nominations for his work as Senator Bail Organa in Star Wars. But then, he was elected President on West Wing.
Tom Hanks is 53 today. Hanks has been nominated for the Academy Award for best actor five times, winning for Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994). His other nominations were for Big, Saving Private Ryan and Cast Away.
Kelly McGillis is 52, Courtney Love is 45, and Fred Savage is 33.
And Orenthal James Simpson is 62 today.
I couldn’t remember the tomahawk incident you mentioned, so I googled it and got a clip off YouTube. The narration says it was one of the longest laughs in the history of the show. I love Johnny’s quip at the end.
I never thought it was all THAT funny.
This is pretty good though.