Oscar-winner Ernest Borgnine is 94 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). Borgnine is however, perhaps best known as Lieutenant Commander Quinton McHale of the sitcom McHale’s Navy.
Ray Stevens is 72. (He was born Harold Ray Ragsdale.)
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.
“Ahab the Arab,” “Everything Is Beautiful” and “The Streak” are Stevens’s major contributions to American culture.
Neil Diamond is 70, as is Aaron Neville. Diamond is an inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year.
Mary Lou Retton is 43. Ed Helms is 37. Mischa Barton is 25.
Edith Wharton was born on January 24th in 1862.
[T]he writer who said, “Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.” That’s Edith Wharton, born in New York City (1862). She wrote about frustrated love in novels like The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Above from a long profile at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor
John Belushi should have been 62 today.