Eight-time Oscar nominee for best actor, Peter O’Toole is 79 today.
Director-writer-producer Wes Craven is 72. He will be celebrating on Elm Street.
Kathy Lennon of the Lennon Sisters is 68.
Eddie Munster, aka actor Butch Patrick, is 58.
Emmy-winner, for Angels in America, Tony-winner for Proof, and Weeds star Mary Louise Parker is 47 today. Parker also played Amy Gardner on West Wing.
Andrew Gold would have been 60 today.
Carroll O’Connor was born on this date in 1924. He won a Golden Globe and four Emmys for his portrayal of Archie Bunker on All in the Family and a Golden Globe as the sheriff in the TV series In the Heat of the Night. O’Connor was also the truck driver who hits Kirk Douglas on his horse in the wonderful 1962 film Lonely Are the Brave. He died in 2001.
Author James Baldwin was born on this date in 1924.
After writing a number of pieces that were published in various magazines, Baldwin went to Switzerland to finish his first novel. Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1953, was an autobiographical work about growing up in Harlem. The passion and depth with which he described the struggles of black Americans was unlike anything that had been written. Though not instantly recognized as such, Go Tell It on the Mountain has long been considered an American classic. Throughout the rest of the decade, Baldwin moved from Paris to New York to Istanbul, writing Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Giovanni’ Room (1956). Dealing with taboo themes in both books (homosexuality and interracial relationships, respectively), Baldwin was creating socially relevant and psychologically penetrating literature.
Actress Myrna Loy was born on this date in 1905. IMDB has her listed for an incredible 138 roles, beginning with silent films when she was the femme fatale, but more famously as the witty, urbane Nora Charles in The Thin Man movies. NewMexiKen liked her in The Best Years of Our Lives, a film everyone should see. It won seven Academy Awards in 1946.
Inventor, engineer, co-founder of Western Electric, Elisha Gray was born on August 2nd in 1835. Gray and Alexander Graham Bell engaged in a long legal battle over patents for the telephone. Who won? Well, we don’t call AT&T Ma Gray (though Gray’s work may have been instrumental to Bell).
James Butler Hickok was killed while playing poker in Deadwood 135 years ago today.