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Sammy Cahn

Biography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Sammy Cahn (June 18, 1913 – January 15, 1993) was an American lyricist, songwriter and musician. He is best known for his romantic lyrics to films and Broadway songs, as well as stand-alone songs premiered by recording companies in the Greater Los Angeles Area. He and his collaborators had a series of hit recordings with Frank Sinatra during the singer's tenure at Capitol Records, but also enjoyed hits with Dean Martin, Doris Day and many others. He played the piano and violin. He won the Academy Award four times for his songs, including the popular song "Three Coins in the Fountain". Among his most enduring songs is "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!", cowritten with Jule Styne in 1945. Cahn was born Samuel Cohen in the Lower East Side of New York City, the only son (he had four sisters) of Abraham and Elka Reiss Cohen, who were Jewish immigrants from Galicia, then ruled by Austria-Hungary. His sisters, Sadye, Pearl, Florence, and Evelyn, all studied the piano. His mother did not approve of Sammy studying it though, feeling that the piano was a woman's instrument, so he took violin lessons. After three lessons, he joined a small dixieland band called Pals of Harmony, which toured the Catskill Mountains in the summer and also played at private parties. This new dream of Cahn's destroyed any hopes his parents had for him to be a professional man. Some of the side jobs he had were playing violin in a theater-pit orchestra, working at a meat-packing plant, serving as a movie-house usher, tinsmith, freight-elevator operator, restaurant cashier, and porter at a bindery. At age 16, he was watching vaudeville, of which he had been a fan since the age of 10, and he witnessed Jack Osterman singing a ballad Osterman had written. Cahn was inspired and, on his way home from the theater, wrote his first lyric, which was titled "Like Niagara Falls, I'm Falling for You – Baby." Years later he would say "I think a sense of vaudeville is very strong in anything I do, anything I write. They even call it 'a vaudeville finish,' and it comes through in many of my songs. Just sing the end of 'All the Way' or 'Three Coins in the Fountain'—'Make it mine, make it mine, MAKE IT MINE!' If you let people know they should applaud, they will applaud." Cahn became a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. He later became president. Cahn died on January 15, 1993, at the age of 79 in Los Angeles, California from heart failure. His remains were interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery. He was married twice: first to vocalist and former Goldwyn girl Gloria Delson in 1945, with whom he had two children, and later, in 1970, to Virginia Curtis. Over the course of his career, he was nominated for 31 Academy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, and an Emmy Award. He also received a Grammy Award nomination, with Van Heusen. He won the Christopher Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the Theatre World Award. In 1988, the Sammy Film Music Awards (the "Sammy"), an annual award for movie songs and scores, was started in his honor.
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Sean Connery

Biography

Sir Thomas Sean Connery (August 25, 1930 – October 31, 2020) was a Scottish actor and producer. He 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 October 31, 2020, Connery died at the age of 90.
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Ceferina Banquéz

Biography

She was born in 1945 in Guamanga, in the Montes de María (Bolívar) region of the Caribbean. She is a composer and interpreter of all the airs of the bullerengue, belonging to a family of old singers. The bullerengue is one of the oldest canta’os dances performed by people descended from the maroon; It is a happy song that talks about life and how it goes by in everyday life, tells the daily chores and tells the little stories of the towns and their people. It begins with the intervention of the intonating voice, with the response of the choir and the drums. Ceferina narrates in her songs the ancestral practices, her daily life and the process of violence experienced in her town, since like many others she was forcibly displaced from her territory by paramilitary groups in the late 1990s. Currently Ceferina has returned to her land, resisting by means of their creations and their cultivation of bread to catch amidst palm monocultures. She has a record work titled "Cantos ancestrales de Guamanga" (2010) with which she received the Award for Dedication to the Enrichment of Ancestral Culture of the Black, Raizales, Palenqueras and Afro-Colombian Communities, from the Ministry of Culture.
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Jeff Chang

Biography

Jeff Chang (Chinese: 張信哲; born 26 March 1967) is a Taiwanese singer and actor, who is known for his numerous chart-topping sentimental Mandarin pop ballads. Chang was born in Xiluo Township, Yunlin County, Taiwan. He started his philanthropic works as a voluntary teacher in impoverished areas of Taiwan since he was in high school. He started off his showbiz career by winning a singing competition while in college, in which Hsiao-Wen Ting was a judge.[1] Since 1989 he has released a string of highly successful albums and is known as the "Prince of Love Ballads" in the Chinese pop world. His name is well known across Taiwan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and mainland China. Besides singing, Chang's interests include arts, antiques, traveling and water sports, and stage production. He became Taipei's leader in a stage theatre team in 2011.
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Gabriel Figueroa

Biography

Gabriel Figueroa Mateos (April 24, 1907 – April 27, 1997) was a Mexican cinematographer who worked both in Mexican cinema and Hollywood. His mother died after giving birth to him. His father, unable to cope with the loss of his wife, left Gabriel and his brother Roberto to be cared for by their aunts. He studied painting at the Academia de San Carlos, and at the age of 16 he became interested in photography thanks to José Guadalupe Velasco. He later befriended other photographers, such as Gilberto Martínez Solares and Raúl Martínez Solares, and these three would then move on to cinematography. Figueroa made his entry in the movie industry in 1932 as a photographer of stills for the film Revolución of Miguel Contreras Torres. He was later one of the 20 cinematographers hired for the Howard Hawks film Viva Villa!. After a few jobs he obtained a scholarship to study in the United States where the established director of photography Gregg Toland taught Figueroa. Back in Mexico, his first film was Fernando de Fuentes's Allá en el Rancho Grande (1936) which would become one of the most popular films in Mexico and Latin America, and gave him his first award at the Venice Film Festival. He filmed 235 movies over 50 years, including Los Olvidados by Luis Buñuel, The Night of the Iguana by John Huston, The Fugitive by John Ford, and Río Escondido by Emilio Fernández. One of his main collaborators was Fernández, with whom he shot twenty films, some of which won prizes at the Venice Film Festival, the Cannes Film Festival, and the Berlin Film Festival. After collaborating with Fernández and Buñuel on their films with such actors as Dolores del Río, Pedro Armendáriz, María Félix, Jorge Negrete, Columba Domínguez, and Silvia Pinal, Figueroa has come to be regarded one of the most influential cinematographers active in México.
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Vincent Belorgey

Biography

Vincent Belorgey (born 31 July 1975), known professionally as Kavinsky, is a French musician, producer, DJ, and actor. His production style is reminiscent of the electropop film soundtracks of the 1980s. Kavinsky claims that his music is inspired by thousands of movies he watched as a young boy and that he has cherry-picked the best parts from them, consolidating them into one concept. Kavinsky has been compared to many similar French house artists, including Danger and French duo Daft Punk. He achieved greater mainstream recognition after his song "Nightcall" was featured in the 2011 film Drive. His debut studio album, OutRun, was released in 2013. After many years as an actor, Kavinsky's musical career started in 2005 after being inspired by his close friends Jackson Fourgeaud and Quentin Dupieux, the latter director also included Kavinsky's music in his film Steak. During this period Kavinsky produced his first single "Testarossa Autodrive" which was inspired by the Testarossa model of Ferrari (one of which Vincent drives in real life). Kavinsky presented the single to Quentin, who in turn presented it to a record label he had access to because of his filming career, and Kavinsky signed with Record Makers. Kavinsky went on to release three EPs on the Record Makers label: Teddy Boy in 2006, 1986 a year later, and Nightcall with Lovefoxxx of CSS in 2010. Kavinsky toured alongside Daft Punk, The Rapture, Justice, and SebastiAn in 2007. The SebastiAn remix of "Testarossa Autodrive" off the 1986 EP is featured in the video games Grand Theft Auto IV and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Kavinsky's single "Nightcall" was featured in the opening credits of the film Drive, and became a major hit soon after. In December 2012 he released "ProtoVision" and on 25 February 2013 released his debut studio album OutRun. In November 2021, he returned from his seven year hiatus with the lead single "Renegade" from his second studio album Reborn. The song is produced by Gaspard Augé and Victor Le Masne. Kavinsky is a character made by Vincent Belorgey that has a striking resemblance to Vincent himself but the backstory does not follow anything in Belorgey's history. Kavinsky's story is that after crashing his Testarossa in 1986, he reappeared as a zombie in 2006 to make his own electronic music. Kavinsky's songs help tell his story; Vincent claims in an interview, "'Night Call' is just about the zombie guy [who] goes to his girlfriend's house and says okay I'm not the same, we need to talk", referring to Kavinsky going back to find his girlfriend after the crash who has already moved on with her life. In interview, Kavinsky stated that the entirety of Teddy Boy was written and recorded on a Yamaha DX7, which was famous and notable for the synth-pop sound of the 1980s. Kavinsky originally started making music on an old Apple computer given to him by his friend Mr. Oizo. Source: Article "Kavinsky" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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Pamela Anderson

Biography

Pamela Denise Anderson (born July 1, 1967) is a Canadian-American actress, model and media personality. She rose to prominence after being selected as the February 1990 Playboy Playmate of the Month. She went on to make regular appearances on the magazine's cover and held the record for the most Playboy covers by any individual. Anderson began her acting career on the ABC sitcom Home Improvement(1991–1997) before receiving international recognition for starring as "C.J." Parker on the action drama series Baywatch (1992–1997), which further cemented her status as a sex symbol. In 1995, personal home videos of Anderson with her then-husband, Tommy Lee, were stolen and sold as a sex tape, which resulted in a legal fight and made her the subject of controversy. Anderson played Vallery Irons on the syndicated series V.I.P. (1998–2002) and starred as Skyler Dayton on the Fox sitcom Stacked (2005–2006). Her film credits include Barb Wire (1996), Scary Movie 3 (2003), Borat (2006), Baywatch (2017), and City Hunter (2018). She has appeared in her reality series Pam: Girl on the Loose (2008) and the Dancing with the Stars franchise (2010–2012, 2018). Anderson saw a career resurgence in the 2020s after her 2022 Broadway debut portraying Roxie Hart in the long-running musical Chicago, the 2023 Netflix documentary Pamela, a Love Story(which coincided with the release of her autobiography, Love, Pamela), and the 2024 indie-drama film The Last Showgirl, the latter of which earned her nominations for the Golden Globe Award and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress. Anderson has publicly supported various charitable causes, particularly animal rights, and has endorsed PETA activities. She endorses plant-based cooking and serves as the host for Flavour Network's plant-based cooking show, Pamela's Cooking with Love (2025–present). She also released the plant-based cookbook I Love You: Recipes from the Heart in 2024. Description above from the Wikipedia article Pamela Anderson, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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Queen Esther Marrow

Biography

Queen Esther Marrow (born February 12, 1941) is an American soul and gospel singer. Queen Esther Marrow was born in Newport News, Virginia. She began her career at the age of 22, when her vocal gifts were discovered by Duke Ellington and made her debut as a featured artist in his "Sacred Concert" world tour. Marrow and Ellington formed a long-life friendship during the next four years while touring together. Queen has since performed with such musicians as Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, B.B. King, Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea and Bob Dylan. In 1965, Marrow became active in the civil rights movement when she performed in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s World Crusade. There she met her lifetime idol Mahalia Jackson, with whom she would later share the stage. Other political activists on the crusade were Jesse Jackson, Sidney Poitier and Dr. Ralph Abernathy. Marrow was also involved in musical theater, jazz, television and film. She played Auntie ‘Em on Broadway in The Wiz, and was featured in several other Broadway shows including Comin’ Uptown, Nice To Be Civilized, and she starred as her idol Mahalia Jackson in the national tour of Sing Mahalia Sing, directed by George Faison. Marrow was featured in Motown’s film The Last Dragon, produced by Berry Gordy. Her many television appearances have ranged from the serious to the comic. They include Duke Ellington: The Music Lives On, as Oscar the Grouch’s mother in Sesame Street on PBS and New York to Paris with The Harlem Gospel Singers, also on PBS. In 1990, a dream of Marrow’s came true when Truly Blessed, a musical about Mahalia Jackson written by and starring Queen Esther, was performed in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and in New York City on Broadway. The musical received three Helen Hayes nominations including Best New Play. Marrow has performed for Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton and done a command performance for the British Royal Family. She sang at the Vatican for Pope John Paul II several times. Most recently she founded The Harlem Gospel Singers, an international touring gospel group. The group with their popularity at an all-time high made history on July 7, 1998, as the only gospel group ever to perform the Grand Evenement du Maurier (grand event) at the Montreal Jazz Festival, drawing over 100,000 audience members. In 2015, Marrow was the only performer from the original 1965 performance of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concert to also perform at the 50th anniversary performance at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. Source: Article "Queen Esther Marrow" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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Paul Fix

Biography

Paul Fix (March 13, 1901, Dobbs Ferry, New York – October 14, 1983, Los Angeles, California) was an American film and television character actor, best known for his work in westerns. Fix appeared in more than a hundred movies and dozens of television shows over a 56-year career spanning from 1925 to 1981. In the 1950s, Fix was best known for portraying Marshal Micah Torrance alongside Chuck Connors in The Rifleman. Paul Fix died October 14, 1983, Los Angeles, California, of kidney failure. He was survived by his daughter Marilyn Carey and son-in-law Harry "Dobe" Carey, three grandchildren and several great-grandchildren. Supposedly Fix taught John Wayne -- a lifelong friend -- his famous and distinctive "rolling walk" when Wayne was starting out in the business. He wanted something to set him apart, so Fix suggested the rolling gait that became his trademark.
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Laura Esquivel

Biography

Mexican writer and politician. She is internationally known for her work "Como agua para chocolate" published in 1989, translated into more than 30 languages. From 2008 to 2011 she held the position of General Director of Culture in Coyoacán, Mexico City. From 2015 to 2018, she was a federal Representative for the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena), the party created by former presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a party she represented in the commissions of Science and Technology, Culture and Cinematography, and Environment and Natural Resources. She studied Theater and Dramatic Creation at the Centro de Arte Dramático A.C. (CADAC), specializing in Theater and Dramatic Creation. (CADAC) specializing in Children's Theater. She is a graduate in Preschool Education (1966-1968), instructor of the Children's Theater and Literature Workshop (1977), instructor of the Tlaxcala and Oaxaca Script Consultant Workshop (1998 - 2002) and Instructor of the Writing Laboratory Workshop in Oaxaca, Michoacán and Spain (1999). Between 1970 and 1980 she wrote children's programs for Mexican television, and in 1983, she founded the Centro de Invención Permanente, made up of artistic workshops for children, and assumed its technical direction. Her television work gave her the stimulus to devote herself to writing screenplays for film. It was then that she decided to write her first novel. "Como agua para chocolate" (Like water for chocolate) was a great commercial success. The film version would be directed by Alfonso Arau Quirós, to whom she was married from 1975 to 1995. In this novel, she uses magical realism, proclaims the importance of the kitchen as the most important part of the home, and promotes personal and family changes as a form of inner revolution. In 1994 she was awarded the ABBY Award (American Booksellers Book of the Year), the first time this award was given to a foreign writer. In 2004 she received the Giussepe Acerbi Award from the University of Verona, Italy, for her novel Tan veloz como el deseo (As Fast as Desire). In 2008 she won the prize for the best audiobook in Spanish awarded by the Audio Publishers Association (APA), for Malinche, published in 2006, which includes a codex (illustrated by Jordi Castells). In September 2011, in an interview on the occasion of his participation in the National Festival of the Arts in Argentina, he revealed that he set out to write the story of Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum. In 2014 she published A Lupita le gustaba planchar, which marks her first foray into crime novels and whose protagonist is an alcoholic policewoman, survivor of the death of her son and the abandonment of her husband who, throughout the story, becomes an anti-heroine, as she unravels the murder of her boss, the delegado (political boss) of Iztapalapa. In May 2016 she published El diario de Tita, the sequel to Como agua para chocolate. Her latest work is the novel Mi negro pasado, published in November 2017, with which she completed the trilogy Como agua para chocolate.
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