The 6th of July

Today is the birthday

… of former President George W. Bush, 65 today.

… of Sylvester Enzio Stallone, also 65 today. Stallone is one of three people to be nominated for a writing Oscar and an acting Oscar for the same movie. The others are Chaplin and Welles.

… of the woman born Anne Frances Robbins. Nancy Reagan is 90.

… of William Schallert, Patty Duke’s TV father; he’s 89. Schallert was also the somewhat goofy sheriff’s deputy in Lonely Are the Brave, the fine 1962 Kirk Douglas film shot in Albuquerque.

… of Ned Beatty. Beatty, who is 74 today, was nominated for the supporting actor Oscar for Network.

… of the “Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl, Duke, Duke” Gene Chandler, 74 today.

… of Geoffrey Rush, 60 today. Rush has been nominated for four acting Oscars, winning for Shine. He’s one of about two dozen performers with an Oscar, a Tony and an Emmy.

… of Curtis James Jackson III. He’s 36 today. You may know him better as 50 Cent.

Janet Leigh and Pat Paulson were both born on July 6th in 1927.

Bill Haley (“Rock Around the Clock”) was born on this date in 1925; he died in 1981.

The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was born on this date in 1907 [she claimed 1910]. Ms. Kahlo died in 1954. The following is from the obituary in The New York Times when Ms. Kahlo died in 1954:

Frida Kahlo, wife of Diego Rivera, the noted painter, was found dead in her home today. Her age was 44. She had been suffering from cancer for several years.

She also was a painter and also had been active in leftist causes. She made her last public appearance in a wheel chair at a meeting here in support of the now ousted regime of Communist- backed President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala.

Frida Kahlo began painting in 1926 while obliged to lie in bed during convalescence from injuries suffered in a bus accident. Not long afterward she showed her work to Diego Rivera, who advised, “go on painting.” They were married in 1929, began living apart in 1939, were reunited in 1941.

Usually classed as a surrealist, the artist had no special explanation for her methods. She said only: “I put on the canvas whatever comes into my mind.” She gave one-woman shows in Mexico City, New York and elsewhere, and is said to have been the first woman artist to sell a picture to the Louvre.

Some of her pictures shocked beholders. One showed her with her hands cut off, a huge bleeding heart on the ground nearby, and on either side of her an empty dress. This was supposed to reveal how she felt when her husband went off alone on a trip. Another self-portrait presented the artist as a wounded deer, still carrying the shafts of nine arrows.