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Dorothy Jeakins
Biography
Dorothy Jeakins (January 11, 1914 – November 21, 1995) was an American costume designer.
Born in San Diego, California, she attended public school in Los Angeles from first grade through high school. As a senior at Fairfax High School, she was offered a scholarship to study at the Otis Art Institute (now known as Otis College of Art and Design). She also attended the Art Students League of Los Angeles, under Stanton Macdonald-Wright. She was later awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Otis College in 1987.
Jeakins worked on WPA projects and as a Disney artist in the 1930s. Her fashion career began as a designer at I. Magnin's, where she was spotted by director Victor Fleming. Hired as a sketch artist for Joan of Arc (1948), Jeakins worked on the costumes with Barbara Karinska and shared an Oscar with her in the color category. This was the first Oscar ever awarded for costumes outside the black and white category.
Jeakins was unusual in that she freelanced, never signing a long-term contract with any one studio. She worked steadily for the next thirty-nine years, winning another two Oscars, for Samson and Delilah (1949, shared with Edith Head and others), The Night of the Iguana (1964), and another 12 nominations. She designed period costumes for The Ten Commandments (1956), The Music Man (1962), The Sound of Music (1965), Little Big Man (1970), The Way We Were (1973), Young Frankenstein (1974) and The Dead (1987). Her modern dress excursions included Niagara (1953), Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), South Pacific (1958), and On Golden Pond (1981).
Jeakins also worked on stage productions, including South Pacific (in which Motley was the principal costume designer), King Lear, Winesburg, Ohio, and The World of Suzie Wong (for which she received her third Tony nomination), and such television productions as the 1957 production of Annie Get Your Gun, and Mayerling. For ten years beginning in 1953, she served as designer for the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera. In 1961 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Japan. She spent a year there, studying theater costume. From 1967 to 1970, Ms. Jeakins was Curator of Costumes and Textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1987, she was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who, through their endurance and excellence of their work, have helped to expand women's roles within the entertainment industry. Jeakins, who retired in 1990, once summed up her designing: "I can put my world down to two words: Make beauty. It's my cue and my private passion."
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Annalisa Ericson
Biography
Annalisa Ericson was a Swedish stage and screen actress, dancer, and revue artist. She was trained at the Royal Swedish Ballet School. In 1931 she was offered the role of Anna in SF's feature production of "Värmlänningarna". Annalisa Ericson was a great success in various revues from the early 30's and on for several decades. She appeared in more than 60 feature films and television productions. Her two auto biographies are titled "Min sju liv/My Seven Lifes" (1982) and "Lätta bubblor/ Light Bubbles" (1998).
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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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Paul Pavlowitch
Biography
Paul Pavlowitch (born February 5, 1942) is a French writer, editor and journalist. He trained as a lawyer and has worked in various jobs, including as a teacher, librarian, and translator. A relative of the well-known French author, Romain Gary, Pavlowitch was presented in public through the 1970s in the guise of writer "Emile Ajar", actually a pseudonym of Gary's. Assuming this role for his famous cousin—concealing the true authorship of certain novels of Gary's—embroiled Pavlowitch in controversy when the deception came to light. Pavlowitch's first published work was his 1981 account of the affair, L'homme que l'on croyait ('The man we believed'). Pavlowitch went on to write novels, having his first published in 1986. Since 2000, he has had four further novels published.
Pavlowitch was born in Nice, to a mother from a Lithuanian–Jewish background.
A scholarship enabled Pavlowitch to study law in Toulouse and Paris; he graduated in 1964. After obtaining his license in legal practice, a stay in an American university was financed by Gary, who considered him something like a son to him. After having been a librarian at the Lycée Arago in Paris, Pavlowitch became a "copyist", then an English translator for various publishing houses, and an editor at the Mercure de France, a publishing house run by Simone Gallimard.
Although the writer Romain Gary presented Paul Pavlowitch as his "nephew", Pavlowitch is the son of Gary's first cousin, Dinah Owczyńska. This means to each other they were cousins also, just "at one remove". That is, the precise relationship between them is that Paul is Romain Gary's first cousin, once removed, in French: cousin germain au 1er degré éloigné.
Pavlowitch is famous for having assumed, in the early 1970s, the pseudonymic identity of "Émile Ajar", at the request of Romain Gary, who wanted an alternative identity to write under; Pavlowitch thus played for eight years the author of the novels Gros-Câlin, La Vie devant soi, Pseudo and L'Angoisse du roi Salomon, actually written by his "uncle". Émile Ajar won the Prix Goncourt in 1975, a prize not awarded to a single author more than once. Gary ultimately was not refused the award and remains the only writer to receive this prize on two occasions. Gradually, journalists established the relationship between Romain Gary and "Ajar"–Pavlowitch. Gary then invents, mischievously, a fictional confession to the Ajar ruse. The result is Pseudo (1976), a novel featuring a mysterious, tyrannical, egocentric uncle named Tonton Macoute, in which everyone can recognize Gary. Violent and comical, this novel analyzes the intricacies of literary creation.
The links between Paul Pavlowitch, who got caught up in the writer's game, and Romain Gary (who signed a contract with Mercure de France for five books by Ajar) were deteriorating. The latter calls on his lawyer to formalize an arrangement: forty percent of his royalties go to Pavlowitch who, in exchange, guarantees the secrecy of the agreement, and signs several letters to Romain attesting that he is only "a puppet". ...
Source: Article "Paul Pavlowitch" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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Dragomir Mrsic
Biography
Dragomir Mrsic (born 2 October 1969), nicknamed Gago is a Serbian-Swedish actor, sports consultant and sports leader.
Mrsic was born in the Rasavci village near Prijedor, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslavia, to father Momir and mother Radojka. His father got a job in Sweden in the late 1960s. Dragomir moved with his mother and two older siblings to Sweden aged a month and a half, and was brought up in Fittja, a suburb of southern Stockholm. His father worked as a chef at Grand Hôtel in the city, his mother as a cleaner at the local school. His father was a functioning alcoholic. At 14 years of age he witnessed his brother's friend's suicide by jumping. His two siblings, sister Ranka and brother Radomir "Rajko", died due to drug usage.
He has been trained in Taekwondo since his youth, and has a black belt. His childhood idol was Bruce Lee. At 18 years of age, in 1987, he became the Nordic Champion in taekwondo. In 1990, he and his friend Liam Norberg were involved in the robbery of bank Götabanken; he stood guard some hundred meters away. He was arrested and sentenced to three years and six months in prison for the robbery, and served his sentence at Hall Prison. He studied Buddhism in prison. After serving his sentence, he entered into a sports college. He then started a gym, and became a sports consultant. He was a top program trainer in the Swedish Olympics Committee from 2000 to 2004.
After a few minor acting roles, such as in the Wallander film Kuriren (2009), he got his big break out in 2010 as Mrado, in the critically acclaimed film Easy Money (2010).
In 2014, he co-starred in the Tom Cruise film, Edge of Tomorrow.
In January 2015, he gave his voice and likeness to Dragan in the video game Payday 2. Mrsic is the only cast member in the game who has previously been involved in illegal activities.
In his gym, "Extreme Training", he has trained sportspeople such as Martina Navratilova, Helen Alfredsson and Douglas Murray and actors such as Rooney Mara.
He also starred in Stjärnorna på slottet in seasons 2019/2020.
Mrsic is cohabitation with the PT coach Isabel Alonso. They met in 1992 and have a daughter and a son together.
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Fabienne Égal
Biography
Fabienne Égal (born 21 July 1954 in Rabat, Morocco) is a French announcer and television host.
She became an announcer on TF1 in the 1970s, then hosted Les pieds au mur with Nicolas Hulot in 1980 and La Une chez vous (1985-1987). She became famous presenting TV show Tournez manège from 1985 to 1993, alongside Evelyne Leclercq and Simone Garnier. When the show was no longer broadcast, she hosted Double mixte and Doublé gagnant on RTL 9, then Jeux sans frontières with Nelson Monfort on France 2. She also participated as a guest star in the TV series Pas de pitié pour les croissants! She started working as a television announcer on TF1 in 1976, after answering a classified ad in Télé 7 Jours and being selected from among 2,600 candidates.
Source: Article "Fabienne Égal" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
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Dirty Martini
Biography
Dirty Martini (born Linda Marraccini) is an American burlesque dancer, pin-up model and dance teacher. She is best known for her over-the-top performance acts, which mostly incorporate various classic burlesque styles such as the fan dance, balloon striptease, and shadow stripping.
Martini lives and performs in New York City, but tours extensively throughout North America and Europe. She has performed on stages that range from weekly burlesque venues, gay leather bars, the London Palladium and Carnegie Hall. In 2004, Dirty Martini was crowned Miss Exotic World.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Dirty Martini, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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GACKT
Biography
Gakuto Oshiro (born July 4, 1973) best known by his mononymous stage name Gackt is a Japanese singer-songwriter, musician, record producer and actor.
Gackt’s father was a music teacher, and his mother also a teacher. He is the second of three children, with an older sister and younger brother. His musical education began early, and he started learning classical music theory and piano from the age of three. After exposure to rock music during his teenage years he practiced electric guitar and drums intensely. In the early 1990s he was working as a sound technician and studio drummer, but by the mid-'90s he had begun his career as a singer. He spent a short time in the independent band Cains:Feel before moving on to the visual kei rock band Malice Mizer. With Gackt as vocalist, lyricist, and composer, they rose to fame within the visual kei genre. In 1999 he parted ways with the band and launched his solo career, debuting with the EP Mizérable. He has since released nine studio albums, eight compilation albums, and forty-four singles. He has toured extensively within Japan and also throughout Asia and Europe.
With an illustrious career spanning over 15 years, and forty-three consecutive singles ranked in the top ten of the Oricon music charts, he holds the title of the most successful male soloist in Japanese music history. A hallmark of his productions has been the use of all-encompassing, conceptual, and sometimes abstract themes, "Moon" and "Requiem et Reminiscence", to develop a series of related songs, concerts, movies, books or theatre play. To describe this idea he combined the words visual, live (concert), and alive to form the term "Visualive". It references the evocative and immersive experience he strives to create for his audiences.
In addition to his music career, Gackt has undertaken various film and television acting roles. He wrote and starred in his first cinematic production Moon Child (2003), which screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003, and the Philadelphia Film Festival in 2004. In 2007 he received a TV Navi award for best supporting actor in a drama, for his portrayal of the powerful feudal leader Kenshin Uesugi in NHK's The Trusted Confidant (2007).
One of Gackt's most notable performances was as the samurai protagonist Yoshi in the Guy Moshe film Bunraku (2010), where he costarred alongside Josh Hartnett, Woody Harrelson, Ron Perlman and Demi Moore. His depiction of the unnerving eunuch Jo Teigai in NHK's TV drama Tempest (2011) was brought to movie screens the following year in Gekijouban Tenpesuto 3D (2012).
Gackt's numerous voice acting credits include animated films, such as Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker (2012), and video games, with two from the popular Final Fantasy VII series; Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII (2006)and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (2007) among others.
In his stage play debut Nemuri Kyoshiro Burahikae (2010), Gackt was cast as the leading character. He later expanded his theater credentials by resuming his "Moon" concept and writing, producing, composing and starring in Moon Saga - Yoshitsune Hiden (2012). He has since announced a sequel scheduled to begin in August 2014 entitled Moon Saga - Yoshitsune Hiden - Chapter 2 (2014).
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Matias Varela
Biography
Matias Varela, born 23 June 1980 in Katarina parish in Stockholm, is a Swedish-Spanish actor of Galician descent.
Varela played Miguel "Mischa" Zantos in TV4's Nya tider in 2000–2001. He made a big comeback after 10 years away from acting in the role of Jorge Salinas Barrio in Snabba Cash and returned in the acclaimed role in the sequels Snabba Cash II and Snabba Cash – Livet deluxe . He was nominated for the Guldbaggen for his contributions in the last two films in the Snabba Cash trilogy. In the Arne Dahl films he plays Jorge Chavez. In 2013 he was in the third season of the TV series The Borgias, where he played the role of Ferdinand II of Naples. After this, his international career took off with roles in Point Break and Assassin's Creed.
Matias Varela plays one of the main characters, Jorge Salcedo, in season three of the Netflix series Narcos.
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Ethan Wacker
Biography
Ethan Wacker played series regular Bernie on the popular Disney show Bizaardvark (2016). He has also appeared as a guest star on KC Undercover (2015) and Hawaii 5-0. Born in Connecticut, Ethan lived in Seoul, South Korea for four years before moving with his family to Hawaii where has lived since 2007. A diehard sports enthusiast, Ethan has worked with ESPN/Disney 365 to create NBA shorts with the Golden State Warriors (including Stephan Curry) (2017), the Boston Celtics (2017), and most recently with the Laker's Josh Hart (2018). He also created content at the ProBowl, interviewing and acting with the NFL players (2018). Ethan enjoys skiing, hiking, swimming, riding ATVs, going to see every movie twice, and, hanging with family and shooting hoops with friends. He loves his two dogs Buster and Chewie.
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