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Sydney Newman
Biography
Sydney Cecil Newman, OC (April 1, 1917 – October 30, 1997) was a Canadian film and television producer, who played a pioneering role in British television drama from the late 1950s to the late 1960s. After his return to Canada in 1970, Newman was appointed Acting Director of the Broadcast Programs Branch for the Canadian Radio and Television Commission (CRTC) and then head of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He also occupied senior positions at the Canadian Film Development Corporation and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and acted as an advisor to the Secretary of State.
During his time in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, he worked first with the Associated British Corporation (ABC, now Thames Television), before moving across to the BBC in 1962, holding the role of Head of Drama with both organisations. During this phase of his career, he was responsible for initiating two hugely popular television programmes, the spy-fi series The Avengers and the science-fiction series Doctor Who, as well as overseeing the production of groundbreaking social realist drama series such as Armchair Theatre and The Wednesday Play.
The Museum of Broadcast Communications describes Newman as "the most significant agent in the development of British television drama." His obituary in The Guardian declared that "For ten brief but glorious years, Sydney Newman ... was the most important impresario in Britain ... His death marks not just the end of an era but the laying to rest of a whole philosophy of popular art."
In Quebec, as commissioner of the NFB, he attracted controversy for his decision to suppress distribution of several politically sensitive films by French Canadian directors.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Sergio Leone
Biography
Sergio Leone (January 3, 1929 – April 30, 1989) was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter most associated with the "Spaghetti Western" genre. Leone's film-making style includes juxtaposing extreme close-up shots with lengthy long shots. His movies include The Colossus of Rhodes, the Dollars Trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars; For a Few Dollars More; and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), Once Upon a Time in the West; Duck, You Sucker!; and Once Upon a Time in America.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Sergio Leone, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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Ferris Webster
Biography
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ferris Webster (April 29, 1912 – February 4, 1989) was an American film editor with approximately seventy-two film credits. He was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Film Editing for his work on Blackboard Jungle (1955), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and The Great Escape (1963).
Webster was raised in the state of Washington, and was a student at the University of Southern California, where he was an outstanding track and field athlete. He was trained as an editor at the MGM Studios, and received his first feature-film credit in 1943 for Harrigan's Kid. At MGM, Webster edited six films with director Vincente Minnelli: Undercurrent (1946), Madame Bovary (1949), Father of the Bride (1950), Father's Little Dividend (1951), The Long, Long Trailer (1954), and Tea and Sympathy (1956). Film critic Bruce Eder has written of Madame Bovay that, "the cutting of the film in the gala ball sequence, in particular, was a marvel of the editor's art in the service of old Hollywood's restrained, elegant storytelling." In the mid-1950s, he edited three films with director Richard Brooks: Blackboard Jungle (1955), Something of Value (1957), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958); Webster received his first nomination for the Academy Award for Blackboard Jungle. His last film at MGM was Key Witness (1960).
Bruce Eder has written, "If ever a film editor deserved public recognition in the 1960s, it was Ferris Webster." Webster edited the three films of director John Frankenheimer's "paranoia trilogy": The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Seven Days in May (1964), and Seconds (1966). Eder writes that The Manchurian Candidate was "the editor's magnum opus. The shooting, cutting, and intercutting of one extended brainwashing sequence, seen from multiple points-of-view, is still striking decades later, and the movie earned Webster his second Academy Award nomination." Frankenheimer cast Webster in his only appearance as a film actor, as Air Force Gen. Bernard "Barney" Rutkowski in Seven Days in May.
Webster was nominated for an Academy Award for the editing of The Great Escape (1963), which was directed by John Sturges. Webster and Sturges' notable collaboration included fifteen films between 1950 and 1972, which is about half of Sturges' films in that period. It started with The Magnificent Yankee and Mystery Street (1950), and included The Law and Jake Wade (1958), The Magnificent Seven (1960), and Ice Station Zebra (1968). The final film of their collaboration was Joe Kidd (1972), which was near the end of Sturges' career.
Joe Kidd starred Clint Eastwood. In the last phase of his career, Webster edited and co-edited eight films that were directed by Eastwood, starting with High Plains Drifter (1973), which was Eastwood's second film as a director. Webster edited Breezy (1973), The Eiger Sanction (1975), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), The Gauntlet (1977), Bronco Billy (1980), Firefox (1982) and Honkytonk Man (both 1982). These latter two films with Eastwood concluded Webster's career as an editor, apparently after a falling-out between the two men.
Additional credits include The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Lili (1953), Forbidden Planet (1956), Les Girls (1957), Divorce American Style (1967).
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Dilys Powell
Biography
Elizabeth Dilys Powell, CBE - was an English film critic who wrote for The Sunday Times for over fifty years. Powell was noted for her receptiveness to cultural change in the cinema and coined many classic phrases about films and actors. She was one of the founder members of the Independent Television Authority (ITA), which launched commercial television in the UK, and also served as the second female President of the Classical Association. Powell was also the author of several books on films and her travels in Greece.
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Sean Connery
Biography
Sir Thomas Sean Connery (August 25, 1930 – October 31, 2020) was a Scottish actor and producer who won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards (one being a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award), and three Golden Globes, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award and a Henrietta Award.
Connery was the first actor to portray the character James Bond in film, starring in seven Bond films (every film from Dr. No to You Only Live Twice, plus Diamonds Are Forever and Never Say Never Again), between 1962 and 1983. In 1988, Connery won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Untouchables. His films also include Marnie (1964), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Highlander (1986), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Dragonheart (1996), The Rock (1996), and Finding Forrester (2000).
Connery was polled in a 2004 The Sunday Herald as "The Greatest Living Scot" and in a 2011 EuroMillions survey as "Scotland's Greatest Living National Treasure". He was voted by People magazine as both the “Sexiest Man Alive" in 1989 and the "Sexiest Man of the Century” in 1999. He received a lifetime achievement award in the United States with a Kennedy Center Honor in 1999. Connery was knighted in the 2000 New Year Honours for services to film drama.
On 31 October 2020, it was announced that Connery had died at the age of 90.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Sean Connery, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia
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Madeleine Gavin
Biography
Madeleine Gavin is an American documentary director, editor, and producer.
She is primarily an editor in narrative and documentary film. Madeleine’s work on Rebecca Cammisa’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Which Way Home earned her an Emmy nomination. She and Cammisa recently completed the HBO documentary Atomic Homefront. Madeleine directed the Netflix Original Documentary City of Joy, which follows the first class of students at a revolutionary leadership centre in a war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
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Anne McGuire
Biography
Anne McGuire was born in Minnesota and has lived in San Francisco since 1990. She began making videos in the late 1980s while she was a student. She has taught at various institutions in California including the San Francisco Art Institute, University of California Santa Cruz, and Stanford University, as well as KyungSung University in Busan, South Korea. Through her single-channel works, McGuire translates traditions of personal and poetic performances to camera, playing off of conventions of television. She has explored the personal through formal narrative, particularly in The Strain Andromeda, her 1993 end-to-beginning re-edit of Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain. Strain was her first foray into disaster deconstruction. In 2006 Anne completed The Adventure Poseiden (The Unsinking of My Ship), which celebrates the 20-year anniversary of her very own real-life shipwreck experience. She also writes poems and sings them as songs, and has performed as Freddy McGuire with San Francisco-based electronic musician Wobbly, live and on radio.
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Roy Acuff
Biography
From Wikipedia
Roy Claxton Acuff (September 15, 1903 – November 23, 1992) was an American country music singer, fiddler, and promoter. Known as the "King of Country Music," Acuff is often credited with moving the genre from its early string band and "hoedown" format to the star singer-based format that helped make it internationally successful. In 1952 Hank Williams told Ralph Gleason, "He's the biggest singer this music ever knew. You booked him and you didn't worry about crowds. For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God."
Acuff began his music career in the 1930s, and gained regional fame as the singer and fiddler for his group, the Smoky Mountain Boys. He joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1938, and although his popularity as a musician waned in the late 1940s, he remained one of the Opry's key figures and promoters for nearly four decades. In 1942, Acuff co-founded the first major Nashville-based country music publishing company—Acuff-Rose Music—which signed acts such as Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, and The Everly Brothers. In 1962, Acuff became the first living inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
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Peggy Ahwesh
Biography
Peggy Ahwesh (b. 1954 in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania) is an American experimental filmmaker and video artist. A bricoleur who has created both narrative works and documentaries, some projects are scripted and others incorporate improvised performance. She makes use of sync sound, found footage, digital animation, and Pixelvision video. Her work is primarily an investigation of cultural identity and the role of the subject in various genres. Her interests include genre; women, sexuality and feminism; reenactment; and artists' books. Her works have been shown worldwide, including in San Francisco, New York, Barcelona, London, Toronto, Rotterdam, and Créteil, France. Starting in 1990, she has taught at Bard College as a Professor of Film and Electronic Arts. Her teaching interests include: experimental media, history of the non-fiction film, and women in film.
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Ruth Bratt
Biography
Ruth Bratt is an English actress and comedian. Bratt has made appearances on several TV shows including FAQ U (2005) and Man Down (2017) on Channel 4, and Rob Brydon's Annually Retentive on BBC Three (2006). She was intended to have a larger role in the latter but most of the scenes where she had dialogue were cut.
In 2007 she appeared in Touch Me, I'm Karen Taylor as Dutch "climatologist" Yolanda van der Landavan. She played a number of different roles in several episodes of BBC Three's Mongrels and in 2013 appeared in Ricky Gervais' show Derek. She went on to play Roche, girlfriend of DJ Beats (aka Kev) in BBC3's People Just Do Nothing.
She co-wrote and co-starred with Lucy Trodd in the BBC radio comedy series Trodd en Bratt Say 'Well Done You' in 2014. Bratt has appeared in the BAFTA award winning BBC2 series People Just Do Nothing. In 2022, she was at the Edinburgh Festival in "Starship Improvise" with the Mischief Theatre.
She has also appeared in TV advertisements for products such as Kellogg's Nutrigrain bars.
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