Angela Lansbury is 84 today. Lansbury was 36 when she played 34-year-old Laurence Harvey’s mother in The Manchurian Candidate. For that alone she deserved the Academy Award nomination she received; it was her third supporting actress nomination.
Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass is 82. “Whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history” (from the Nobel press release, 1999).
Suzanne Somers turns 63 today.
Tim Robbins is 51 today. Robbins won a supporting actor Oscar for Mystic River and received a best director nomination for Dead Man Walking. Hard to beat his portrayal of Andy Dufresne, though.
John Mayer is 32 today.
Nobel and Pulitizer Prize winner Eugene O’Neill was born on October 16th in 1888.
Eugene O’Neill was one of the greatest playwrights in American history. Through his experimental and emotionally probing dramas, he addressed the difficulties of human society with a deep psychological complexity. O’Neill’s disdain for the commercial realities of the theater world he was born into led him to produce works of importance and integrity.
John Brown began his famous raid on this date in 1859:
Late on the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown and twenty-one armed followers stole into the town of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) as most of its residents slept. The men–among them three free blacks, one freed slave, and one fugitive slave–hoped to spark a rebellion of freed slaves and to lead an “army of emancipation” to overturn the institution of slavery by force. To these ends the insurgents took some sixty prominent locals including Col. Lewis Washington (great-grand nephew of George Washington) as hostages and seized the town’s United States arsenal and its rifle works.
The upper hand which nighttime surprise had afforded the raiders quickly eroded, and by the evening of October 17, the conspirators who were still alive were holed-up in an engine house. In order to be able to distinguish between insurgents and hostages, marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee waited for daylight on October 18 to storm the building.
Marie Antoinette’s head became estranged from the rest of her body on this date in 1793.