Category: Birthdays

… of Annabella Sciorra. The actress is 43.

… of Peyton Manning. Number 18 is 31.

… of Keisha Castle-Hughes. The Oscar-nominated actress (Whale Rider) is 17.

“The easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place someone is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will result in sudden death.”

Harry Houdini, born on this date in 1874, quoted by The Writer’s Almanac at the end of their short biography.

Houdini Obituary

… of actor Karl Malden. The Oscar-winner (supporting actor in A Streetcar Named Desire) is 95. Malden was also nominated for supporting actor for On the Waterfront. He played Omar Bradley in Patton and was Detective Lt. Mike Stone in Streets of San Francisco (with Michael Douglas as his partner).

… of pantomimist Marcel Marceau. He’s 84.

… of Stephen Sondheim. The composer-lyricist (West Side Story) is 77.

… of actor William Shatner. Captain Kirk is 76.

… of musician George Benson. He’s 64.

… of broadcaster Wolf Blitzer. He’s 59.

… of Andrew Lloyd Webber. The composer (Cats, Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Phantom of the Opera) is 59.

… of sportscaster Bob Costas. He’s 55.

… of Oscar-winner Reese Witherspoon. She’s 31.

… of Matthew Broderick. Ferris is 45.

… of Rosie O’Donnell. She’s 45 also.

The oldest of the Huxtable children, Sondra, is 49 today. That’s Sabrina Le Beauf.

… of Carl Reiner. He’s 85. From the Encyclopedia of Television:

Carl Reiner is one of the few true Renaissance persons of 20th-century mass media. Known primarily for his work as creator, writer and producer of The Dick Van Dyke Show–one of a handful of classic sitcoms by which others are measured–Reiner has also made his mark as a comedian, actor, novelist, and film director.

… of Barney Miller, who’s 76. That’s Hal Linden.

… of Hockey hall-of-famer Bobby Orr, 59.

… of four-time Oscar nominee William Hurt, 57. He won best actor for Kiss of the Spider Woman.

The Fabulous Thunderbirds’ Jimmie Vaughan (Stevie Ray’s brother) is 56.

Two-time Oscar nominee Shelton Lee is 50. His mother called him Spike.

Holly Hunter is 49. Miss Hunter has been nominated for an Academy Award four times, twice for best actress and twice for supporting actress. She won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for The Piano in 1993. She has also won Emmys for Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom and Roe vs. Wade.

… of Kurt Russell, 56.

… of Gary Sinise, 52.

… of Rob Lowe 43.

… of Mia Hamm, 35 today.

It’s also the birth date of two greats who died young — Nat “King” Cole (1919-1965) and Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993).

And the great golfer Bobby Jones was born on this date in 1902. This from his obituary in 1971:

In the decade following World War I, America luxuriated in the Golden Era of Sports and its greatest collection of super-athletes: Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb in baseball, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney in boxing, Bill Tilden in tennis, Red Grange in football and Bobby Jones in golf.

Many of their records have been broken now, and others are destined to be broken. But one, sports experts agree, may outlast them–Bobby Jones’s grand slam of 1930.
. . .

At 28 he achieved the grand slam–victories in one year in the United States Open, British Open, United States Amateur and British Amateur championships. At that point, he retired from tournament golf.

A nation that idolized him for his success grew to respect him even more for his decision to treat golf as a game rather than a way of life. This respect grew with the years.

The New York Times

… of Jerry Lewis. He’s 81.

… of Erik Estrada of ”CHiPS.” Ponch is 58.

… of Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli’s son Wolfgang Van Halen. He’s 16.

The individual most responsible for the U.S. Constitution was born on this date in 1751. That’s James Madison.

… of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She’s 74.

… of Judd Hirsch. He’s 72.

… of Beach Boy Mike Love. He’s 66. Love is the cousin of brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson.

… of Sylvester Stewart. He’s 64.

Sly and the Family Stone took the Sixties ideal of a generation coming together and turned it into deeply groove-driven music. Rock’s first integrated, multi-gender band became funky Pied Pipers to the Woodstock Generation, synthesizing rock, soul, R&B, funk and psychedelia into danceable, message-laden, high-energy music. In promoting their gospel of tolerance and celebration of differences, Sly and the Family Stone brought disparate audiences together during the latter half of the Sixties. The group’s greatest triumph came at the Woodstock Festival in August 1969. During their unforgettable nighttime set, leader Sly Stone initiated a fevered call-and-response with the audience of 400,000 during an electrifying version of “I Want to Take You Higher.”

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Ry Cooder. He’s 60.

… of Eva Longoria, desperate at turning 32.

… of Quincey Jones. He’s 74.

In a musical career that has spanned six decades, Quincy Jones has earned his reputation as a renaissance man of American music. Jones has distinguished himself as a bandleader, a solo artist, a sideman, a songwriter, a producer, an arranger, a film composer, and a record label executive, and outside of music, he’s also written books, produced major motion pictures, and helped create television series. And a quick look at a few of the artists Jones has worked with suggests the remarkable diversity of his career — Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Lesley Gore, Michael Jackson, Peggy Lee, Ray Charles, Paul Simon, and Aretha Franklin.

All Music

… of Michael Caine. The two-time Oscar winner, six-time nominee, is 74. Caine won both times nominated in a supporting role. His leading role nominations were for Alfie, Sleuth, Educating Rita, and The Quiet American.

… of Billy Crystal is 60. Crystal once won an Emmy for hosting the Oscar telecast.

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, on this date in 1879.

He was home-schooled for the early part of his life, and when he finally went to school with the other children, his teachers thought he was developmentally disabled. He refused to study any subject he didn’t find interesting. The only subjects he did find interesting were math and philosophy. One teacher tried to have him expelled because all he did in class was sit in the back of the room smiling. He finally dropped out at the age of 16.

He went to a technical college in Zurich to study physics, but he often missed classes and only passed his final examination because his friend let him borrow all his lecture notes and was the only member of his class not to receive an assistant professorship. He was planning to get married, and suddenly he didn’t have any way to make a living. So he took a job at the Swiss patent office.

His job was to evaluate patent applications and determine whether the inventions described would actually work. He found that it was the perfect job for him. He didn’t have to bring any work home at night, when he was free to work on his own theories about physics. He was removed enough from the scientific community that he didn’t worry about whether his theories were fashionable or important. He just worked on the problems he found most interesting. Above all, he was interested in finding some law that could explain all the forces in the universe.

One night the spring of 1905, Einstein went to bed feeling extremely frustrated because he hadn’t been able to solve any of the problems he’d been working on for weeks. The following morning, he woke up and suddenly everything made sense. He said, “It was as if a storm broke loose in my mind.”

Einstein spent the next several weeks writing a paper on his theory, which came to be called the Special Theory of Relativity. That same year, 1905, Einstein published three more papers, each of which was just as revolutionary as the first, including the paper that included his most famous equation: E = mc².

The Writer’s Almanac

… of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Mike Stoller. He’s 74.

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller have written some of the most spirited and enduring rock and roll songs: “Hound Dog” (originally cut by Big Mama Thornton in 1953 and covered by Elvis Presley three years later), “Love Potion No. 9” (the Clovers), “Kansas City” (Wilbert Harrison), “On Broadway” (the Drifters), “Ruby Baby” (Dion) and “Stand By Me” (Ben E. King). Their vast catalog includes virtually every major hit by the Coasters (e.g., “Searchin’,” “Young Blood,” “Charlie Brown,” “Yakety Yak” and “Poison Ivy”). They also worked their magic on Elvis Presley, writing “Jailhouse Rock,” “Treat Me Nice” and “You’re So Square (Baby I Don’t Care)” specifically for him. All totaled, Presley recorded more than 20 Leiber and Stoller songs.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

Leiber wrote the lyrics. Stoller wrote the music.

… of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Neil Sedaka. He’s 68.

Singer, songwriter, and pianist Neil Sedaka enjoyed two distinct periods of commercial success in two slightly different styles of pop music: first, as a teen pop star in the late ’50s and early ’60s, then as a singer of more mature pop/rock in the 1970s. In both phases, Sedaka, a classically trained pianist, composed the music for his hits, which he sang in a boyish tenor. And throughout, even when his performing career was at a low ebb, he served as a songwriter for other artists, resulting in a string of hits year in and year out, whether recorded by him or someone else. For himself, he wrote eight U.S. Top Ten pop hits, including the chart-toppers “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” “Laughter in the Rain,” and “Bad Blood.” The most successful cover of one of his compositions was Captain & Tennille’s recording of “Love Will Keep Us Together,” another number one.

All Music

… of William H. Macy. He’s 57. Macy was nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar for his performance in Fargo.

… of Willard Scott, 73.

… of Steelers Franco Harris, 57, and Lynn Swann, 55.

… of Oscar-winner Rachel Weisz. She’s 37.

… of The Office’s Pam. Jenna Fischer is 33.

Oscar winner Anna Magnani was born on this date in 1908. She won best actress in 1956 for The Rose Tattoo and was nominated again in 1958 for Wild Is the Wind. Magnani died in 1973.

Maurice Ravel was born on this date in 1875. Bolero premiered in 1928. It was originally written as a ballet — and I guess still could be.

… of Ed McMahon. Johnny’s sidekick is 84.

… of Alan Greenspan. He’s 81.

… of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 79.

He was in law school in 1948, when a prominent Liberal Party politician was assassinated, and the event triggered a civil war that lasted for more than 10 years. García Márquez stayed in the city to write about the violence, but a riot in his neighborhood started a fire that burned down his house, and all his manuscripts were destroyed. So he moved into a tiny room in a four-story brothel called “the Skyscraper.” Márquez knew he wanted to write fiction, but he wasn’t sure what to write about. Then in 1950, his mother showed up and asked him to travel back to his hometown to help her sell the family home.

The trip filled him with nostalgia and flooded his mind with memories of his childhood and the stories told to him by his grandparents. A fictional town began to take shape in his mind, based on his memories, and he knew he had to write a novel about that town. That novel became One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which begins, “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

One Hundred Years of Solitude is now considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

The Writer’s Almanac

… of Mary Wilson. The Supreme who is neither Diana Ross nor the one Dream Girls is about is 63 today.

The members of the Supremes – Diana Ross, Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson – first came together in a quartet, the Primettes, that had been recruited by singer Paul Williams as a sister act to his locally popular Detroit group, the Primes (later known as the Temptations). After persistently showing up at Motown’s “Hitsville” headquarters after school, the Supremes were signed to the label in January 1961. The group was slow to find its footing, enduring several years of flop singles before finally clicking with “When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes” (#23) in early 1964. After that, it was off to the races for the Supremes, who amassed a dozen Number One hits between 1964-69. In addition to the aforementioned singles, the Supremes’ other chart-toppers were “I Hear a Symphony,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” “Love Is Here and Now You’re gone,” “The Happening,” “Love Child” and “Someday We’ll Be Together.”

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Rob Reiner. “Meathead” is 60.

… of Shaquille O’Neal. He’s getting up there — 35.

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on this date in 1475.

Detail from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on this date in 1806.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Bob Wills was born on this date in 1905.

You can see the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee,
It’s the home of country music, on that we all agree.
But when you cross that ole Red River, hoss,
that just don’t mean a thing,
‘Cause once you’re down in Texas,
Bob Wills is still the King.

(‘Bob Wills Is Still The King’ by Waylon Jennings)

Bob Wills was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1968 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.

It’s the birthday of novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, born in Albuquerque, New Mexico (1948). She grew up on a Pueblo reservation, where her community was made up of matrilineal families: Women owned the houses and the fields and were the authority figures, and men did much of the child rearing. Her first novel, Ceremony (1977), was one of the first novels ever published by a Native American woman, and many critics consider it a masterpiece.

The Writer’s Almanac

… of Penn Jillette. Penn of Penn & Teller is 52.

… of Adriana Barraza. The recent Academy Award nominee is 51 today.

Patsy Cline died in a plane crash on this date in 1963. She was 30. John Belushi was found dead from a drug overdose on this date in 1982. He was 33.

The Boston Massacre was on this date in 1770.

It’s the birthday of crime novelist James Ellroy, born in Los Angeles, California (1948). He is best known for his “LA Quartet,” a series of four novels that attempt to depict the criminal history of Los Angeles from the 1940s through the 1950s. The first book in the series was Black Dahlia (1987).

The Writer’s Almanac

Patricia Heaton of ”Everybody Loves Raymond” is 49 today.

Sonny and Cher’s daughter Chastity is 38.

Famed Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne was born on this date in 1888. He died in a plane crash at age 43 in 1931.

As a player and captain of the 1913 Notre Dame team, the first to ever beat the Army, Rockne began his shaping of football’s destinies by bringing the forward pass suddenly and dramatically into the front of the game. Army that season had scheduled Notre Dame as a “breather” game on its schedule. Only a small crowd turned out, and they stood amazed as Notre Dame defeated Army, 35 to 13. Gus Dorais, now coach at Detroit, threw seventeen passes in that game and thirteen were completed, and a great majority of these went to the short, chunky end, Knute Rockne.

The forward pass had been more or less of a haphazard thing until that time. The success of this Western team with it amazed the football world. Dorais and Rockne remained behind at West Point for a few days after that game to show the Army how it was done. One of the results of that was the famous Pritchard to Merrillat combination of Army teams.

The New York TImes

The U.S. Constitution went into effect on this date in 1789.

… of Roger Daltrey. “Who?” you say. “Of The Who,” I say. He’s 63.

… of Catherine Bach. “Who?” you say. “Daisy Duke of TV,” I say. She’s 53.

Well-known Americans of the 20th century born on this date include band-leader Glenn Miller (1904), author Ralph Ellison (1914), poet Robert Lowell (1917), Mad magazine publisher William M. Gaines (1922) and NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle (1926).

… of Gavin MacLeod. The captain of the Love Boat and Mary Tyler Moore’s wisecracking news writer is 76.

… of Dean Smith. The hall-of-fame basketball coach is 76.

… of Mario Andretti. He’s in the left lane with his blinker on at age 67.

… of Bubba Smith. The football star turned actor is 62.

… of Bernadette Lazzara, known to us as Bernadette Peters. The star of stage, screen and television (beginning at age 3) is 59 today. She’s won two a Tony twice as Best Leading Actress in a Musical — “Song and Dance” and “Annie Get Your Gun.”

… of Gilbert Gottfried, 52.

… of Betty Hutton. The actress is 86. She was Annie Oakley in the eponymous 1950 film, and the trapeze artist who saves the circus in The Greatest Show on Earth.

… of Antoine “Fats” Domino. The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer is 79 — and he still Wants to Walk You Home.

… of columnist Robert Novak. He’s 76 and ought to be shuffling off to Florida with David Broder.

… of Mitch Ryder. He’s 62. No report on the ages of the Detroit Wheels.

… of Michael Bolton. The singer is 54. The computer programmer’s age in Office Space isn’t known.

Johnny Cash was born on this date in 1932.

Jackie Gleason was born in Brooklyn on this date in 1916. One of the greats of early TV, known primarily now for his portrayal of bus driver Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners. He was in a number of films and received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor in The Hustler. Gleason also won a Tony Award.

“And away we go” was one of Gleason’s stock lines. It is also the inscription at his grave site.

John Harvey Kellogg was born on this date in 1852.

When he became a physician Dr. Kellogg determined to devote himself to the problems of health, and after taking over the sanitarium he put into effect his own ideas. Soon he had developed the sanitarium to an unprecedented degree, and he launched the business of manufacturing health foods. He gained recognition as the originator of health foods and coffee and tea substitutes, ideas which led to the establishment of huge cereal companies besides his own, in which his brother, W. K. Kellogg, produced the cornflakes he invented. His name became a household word. (The New York Times)

There might have been something to it. Kellogg lived to 91.