Category: Birthdays

is 40 today. So are Moe Szyslak, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, Chief Wiggum, Professor Frink, Comic Book Guy and Dr. Nick Riviera. All are played by the multi-talented Hank Azaria, who was born on this date in 1964. Agador Spartacus is the Guatemalan houseboy in The Birdcage.

was born in Brooklyn on this date 62 years ago. Miss Streisand has been nominated for the best actress Oscar twice, winning for Funny Girl in 1969. She also shared the Oscar with Paul Williams for best original song in 1977 for A Star is Born.

five-time nominee for the Oscar for best actress — and one-time winner — is 70 today. Miss MacLaine won for Terms of Endearment in 1984.

Valerie Bertinelli is 44 today.

Sandra Dee is 62 today.

Shirley Temple is 76 today.

is 67 today.

Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award 12 times, eight times for best actor in a leading role and four times for best actor in a supporting role. He won for best actor for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1976) and As Good As It Gets (1998). He won for best supporting actor for Terms of Endearment (1984). Nicholson has been nominated for an Oscar for films made in the 60s (Easy Rider), 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s (About Schmidt).

The best actress Oscar went to a co-star each time Nicholson won — Louise Fletcher for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Shirley MacLaine for Terms of Endearment and Helen Hunt for As Good As It Gets.

According to IMDB, Nicholson “was raised believing his grandmother was his mother and his mother was his older sister. The truth was revealed to him years later when a Time magazine researcher uncovered the truth while preparing a story on the star.”

Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.

Her Majesty is 78 today. Her name is Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor. She signs Elizabeth R.

The Official web site of the British Monarchy is nicely done.

was born on this date in 1838. The Writer’s Almanac has a nice essay.

It’s the birthday of writer and naturalist John Muir, born in Dunbar, Scotland. When he was eleven years old, he immigrated with his family to Fountain Lake Farm in Wisconsin. He went to college, but left after three years to travel through the northern United States and Canada, working at odd jobs to earn a living. In 1867 he was working at a carriage parts shop in Indianapolis when he almost lost one of his eyes in a freak accident. He later said, “I felt neither pain nor faintness, the thought was so tremendous that my right eye was gone—that I should never look at a flower again.” He was so affected by the incident that he decided to quit his job and walk across the country, living as close to nature as possible.

He walked for a thousand miles, from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico, and then he sailed to Cuba, Panama, and finally California, which would become his home for the rest of his life. He fell in love with the Sierra Mountains in California, and spent much of his time hiking and camping there. He also visited Alaska, South America, Australia, Africa, China, Europe, and Japan, studying plants, animals, rocks, and glaciers. He came up with innovative theories of glacial formation that contradicted the theories of earlier scientists and that have proven to be mostly correct.

In 1889, he wrote a series of articles arguing for a national reserve to be created in the Sierra Mountains. The next year, Yosemite National Park was created, and Muir became known as the “Father of our National Parks.” In his final years, he wrote most of the nature books for which he is known—The Mountains of California (1894), Our National Parks (1901), The Yosemite (1912), and many others.

Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

Clint is 45 today. He has appeared in many of his brother’s films — Cocoon and Apollo 13 come to mind, but most will remember Clint Howard as the 8-year-old kid in the TV series Gentle Ben. (Dennis Weaver was the dad.) Howard was also the voice of Roo in the Disney Winnie the Pooh films.

was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on this date in 1897. As they so often do, Minnesota Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac has an interesting profile.

As a boy, [Wilder] lived near a university theater where they performed Greek dramas, and his mother let him participate as a member of the chorus. He never forgot the experience, and decided then that he would try to write for the theater someday. He produced his first play, The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926), while he was still an undergraduate at Yale.

After graduating from college, his father sent him to Rome, where he worked on an archaeological dig at the site of ancient Roman ruins. He later said, “Once you have swung a pickax that will reveal the curve of a street four thousand years covered over which was once an active, much-traveled highway, you are never quite the same again.” The experience inspired him to begin writing fiction about characters caught up in the forces of fate and history. His second novel was The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), about a group of unrelated characters who are all killed by the collapse of a bridge in Peru. That novel was a huge success, and it won the Pulitzer Prize.

Continue reading Thornton Wilder…

was born on this date in 1918. Holden was nominated three times for the Best Actor Oscar, winning for Stalag 17 in 1954. His other nominations were for Sunset Blvd. and Network. Holden is probably as well known for his portrayal of Hal Carter opposite Kim Novak in Picnic and as the leader of the demolition team intent on destroying Alec Guiness’ Bridge on the River Kwai.

was born in Oakland, California, very early on this date in 1972.

Imagine if you will the ideal teacher. What would they be like?

Intelligent. Sensitive. Caring. Prepared. Hard working. Above all, enthusiastic.

That’s her.

was born in London on this date in 1889.

The American Masters web site from PBS has a profile of Chaplin from which the following is excerpted:

Charlie Chaplin was one of the greatest and widely loved silent movie stars. From “Easy Street” (1917) to “Modern Times” (1936), he made many of the funniest and most popular films of his time. He was best known for his character, the naive and lovable — Little Tramp. The Little Tramp, a well meaning man in a raggedy suit with cane, always found himself wobbling into awkward situations and miraculously wobbling away. More than any other figure, it is this kind-hearted character that we associate with the time before the talkies. …

Chaplin’s slapstick acrobatics made him famous, but the subtleties of his acting made him great. While Harold Lloyd played the daredevil, hanging from clocks, and Buster Keaton maneuvered through surreal and complex situations, Chaplin concerned himself with improvisation. For Chaplin, the best way to locate the humor or pathos of a situation was to create an environment and walk around it until something natural happened. The concern of early theater and film was to simply keep the audience’s attention through overdramatic acting that exaggerated emotions, but Chaplin saw in film an opportunity to control the environment enough to allow subtlety to come through.

The TIME 100 essay on Chaplin includes this:

Never a formal innovator, Chaplin found his persona and plot early and never totally abandoned them. For 13 years, he resisted talking pictures, launched with The Jazz Singer in 1927. Even then, the talkies he made, among them the masterpieces The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952), were daringly far-flung variations on his greatest silent films, The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928) and City Lights (1931).

the older of the Wrights, was born on this date in 1867 (Orville in 1871). Wilbur Wright died from Typhus in 1912.

Three time Oscar-nominated actor Rod Steiger was born on this date in 1925. Steiger won for Best Actor for his portrayal of the sheriff in the movie In the Heat of the Night. He was nominated for best actor for The Pawnbroker and for best supporting actor for On the Waterfront. Steiger died in 2002.

The Pawnbroker (1964) was one of the first films to deal with the emotional aftermath of the Nazi concentration camps.

is 68 today.

is 63 today. The Writer’s Almanac also has an interesting essay on Theroux (rhymes with “true”).

It’s the birthday of novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). When he was growing up, his father read to him and his siblings from novels by Charles Dickens and Herman Melville. He and his brothers were encouraged to write, and at an early age they started a family newspaper to report on the daily events of their household.

Theroux joined the Peace Corps after college and went to live in East Africa. He was expelled from Malawi after he became friends with a group that planned to assassinate the president of the country. He continued traveling around Africa, teaching English, and started submitting journalism to magazines back in the United States. While living in Africa, he became friends with the writer V.S. Naipaul, who became his mentor and who encouraged him to keep traveling. He did keep traveling, and he believes that living outside the United States is the best thing that ever happened to him as a writer. He said, “Travel is a creative act—not simply loafing and inviting your soul, but feeding the imagination, accounting for each fresh wonder, memorizing and moving on. The discoveries the traveler makes in broad daylight—the curious problems of the eye he solves—resemble those that thrill and sustain a novelist in his solitude.”

He had published several novels when he decided to go on a four-month trip through Asia by train. He wrote every day on the journey, and filled four thick notebooks with material that eventually became his first bestseller, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975). He has since written many books of fiction, including The Mosquito Coast (1981), and many books of travel writing, including Fresh Air Fiend (2000). His most recent travel book is Dark Star Safari (2003), about traveling over land from Cairo, Egypt to Cape Town, South Africa.

Dwight Garner intereviewed Theroux for Salon a few years ago, as did Anthony Grant for Atlantic Unbound.

The fact that few people go there is one of the most persuasive reasons for traveling to a place.
Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania.

is 50 today. The Writer’s Almanac tells this about Ms. Lamott:

[N]ovelist and essayist Anne Lamott … was an overachieving child: she got perfect grades and became a junior tennis star. But after two years in college, she decided that the only thing she wanted to do was write, so she dropped out of school and supported herself giving tennis lessons and cleaning houses. In the late 1970s, her father was diagnosed with brain cancer, and she began to write short pieces about the effect of the disease on him and other members of her family, and these pieces became chapters of her first novel, Hard Laughter (1980).

She wrote three more novels over the next decade, but she didn’t have any big literary successes. Then, in her mid-thirties, she accidentally got pregnant and her boyfriend left her when she decided to keep the baby. For her first year as a single mother, she found herself on the edge of financial and emotional disaster. She was too busy to write fiction, so she just kept a daily journal of experiences as a parent. She read a series of books about parenting, but, she said, “They just offered solutions to calm the baby or help the baby get to sleep. No one talked about the exhaustion and the boredom and the frustration, how defeating it is [and] how funny.” She thought the world needed a book like that, so she decided to revise and publish her own journal as the memoir Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (1993). It became her first bestseller.

She’s since written two more books of non-fiction: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994) and Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (1999). Her most recent novel, The Blue Shoe, was published in 2002.

NewMexiKen feels certain you will want to read the official Playboy biography of Hugh Marston Hefner, who is 78 today.

was born on this date in 1896. One of the great lyricists, Harburg would be loved by us all if only for —

Somewhere over the rainbow way up high
There’s a land that I’ve heard of once in a lullaby
Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true

Some day I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops
That’s where you’ll find me

Somewhere over the rainbow blue birds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then, oh why can’t I?
If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow
Why oh why can’t I?

The Harburg Foundation provides this biographical sketch:

Edgar Y. (Yip) Harburg (1896-1981) was born of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents of modest means on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He attended the City University of New York. In high school (Townsand Harris) he met his lifelong friend, Ira Gershwin and discovered that they shared a mutual love for the works of Gilbert and Sullivan. Yip and Ira were frequent contributors of poetry and light verse to their high school and college papers.

The years after college found Yip slipping further away from writing and eventually into the world of business. After the electric appliance business Yip had helped develop over seven long years was decimated by the stock market crash of 1929, Yip turned his attention back full time to the art of writing lyrics. His old friend Ira Gershwin became a mentor, co-writer and promoter of Yip’s.

Mr. Harburg’s Broadway achievements included Bloomer Girl, Finnian’s Rainbow, Flahooley and Jamaica.

His most noted work in film musicals was in The Wizard of OZ for which he wrote lyrics, was the final editor and contributed much to the script (including the scene at the end where the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion are rewarded for their efforts by the Wizard). He also wrote lyrics for the Warner Brothers movie, Gay Purr-ee.

Yip was “blacklisted” during the 50’s by film, radio and television for his liberal views.

In all, Yip wrote lyrics to 537 songs including; “Brother Can You Spare a Dime”, “April In Paris”, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”, “Hurry Sundown”, “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”, “How Are Things In Glocca Mora” and of course his most famous… “Over the Rainbow”.