Trending
Popular people
Seymour Cassel
Biography
Seymour Joseph Cassel (January 22, 1935 – April 7, 2019) was an American actor who appeared in over 200 films and television shows, with a career spanning over 50 years. He first came to prominence in the 1960s in the pioneering independent films of writer/director John Cassavetes. The first of these was Too Late Blues (1961), followed by Faces (1968), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award and won a National Society of Film Critics Award. Cassel went on to appear in Cassavetes's Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Opening Night (1977), and Love Streams (1984). He also appeared in other notable films, including: Coogan's Bluff (1968), The Last Tycoon (1976), Valentino (1977), Convoy (1978), Johnny Be Good (1988), Mobsters (1991), In the Soup (1992), Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993), The Sleepy Time Gal (2001), Imaginary Crimes (1994), Beer League (2006), and Fort McCoy (2011). Like Cassavetes, Wes Anderson frequently cast Cassel – first in Rushmore (1998), then in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), and finally in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004).
Read more
Owen Sheers
Biography
Owen Sheers (born 20 September 1974) is a Welsh poet, author, playwright and TV presenter. He was the first writer in residence to be appointed by any national rugby union team.
Owen Sheers was born in Suva, Fiji in 1974, and brought up in Abergavenny, south Wales. He was educated at King Henry VIII School in Abergavenny, before going on to study at New College, Oxford and the University of East Anglia, where he completed an MA in Creative Writing. During his time at New College, Sheers captained the Oxford University Modern Pentathlon team.
In 1999, Sheers received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. His first collection of poetry, The Blue Book, was published by Seren in 2000. A collection of poems about family, first love and farming life, it was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year and the Forward Prize for 'Best First Collection'. Following this first publication, Sheers worked on the light entertainment television show The Big Breakfast as a researcher.[3] His debut prose work, The Dust Diaries, was published by Faber in 2004. A non-fiction narrative set in Zimbabwe, it won the Wales Book of the Year in 2005, and was also shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize.
In 2004 Sheers was Writer in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust and was selected as one of the Poetry Book Society’s 20 Next Generation Poets. Sheers' 2nd collection of poetry, Skirrid Hill (Seren, 2005) won a 2006 Somerset Maugham Award. Unicorns, almost his one man play based on the life and poetry of the WWII poet Keith Douglas was developed by Old Vic, New Voices, and performed by Joseph Fiennes.
Owen is currently Professor of Creativity at Swansea University.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Read more
William L. Johnson
Biography
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
William L. Johnson is an accomplished American actor and musician.
William L. Johnson has held starring and prominent roles in many theatrically released projects. His performance as a lead in director Craig Ross' Blue Hill Avenue helped the movie garner top honors at the Acapulco and Black Hollywood Film Festival's. Some of his latest film projects include Motives 2, Mannsfield 12, Crossover, Doing Hard Time, Tears of a Clown, and Motives 1.
Johnson's acting diversity has been displayed in several independent short films and features such as Move, Wanted: Soulful Energy Xchange with Gary Dourdan and Mari Morrow, director Tony Spires' Two Degrees starring Don "DC' Curry, and Nikita Blues from Foremost Entertainment. He also performed a scene-stealing role in Showtime's A Spider's Web with Stephen Baldwin and Carrie Weir.
Equally important to Johnson is his passion to deliver conscious messages through his music via his stage persona "Brotha Bill". Brotha Bill's essence is a lyrical flow that sets him apart from other neo-soul artists. Those who have experienced his fusion of poetic verse and energetic R&B funk are sure to cherish the kinetic vibe in their own home. His CD contains uptempo songs as wells as succulent cuts that feed the desire for real, soulful music. His latest album entitled BrothaBill- Underground Funky Street Soul Brotha is currently available online through Napster, Itunes, CDBaby, as well as his website Brothabill.com .
Upon relocating to Los Angeles in 1998 Johnson quickly gained a name for himself as a very talented and versatile actor starring in films that have won accolades at top film festivals. Claiming Gary, Indiana and Chicago, Illinois as hometowns, Johnson has steadily improved his craft in the Los Angeles entertainment scene for the past six years. His music career was spawned at an early age upon matriculation to Emerson Visual and Performing Arts High School. Soon after graduation he formed a group, Black to Black, which was nurtured by notable manager Jimmy Newton. In 1999, Johnson and prominent producer/engineer Booker T. Jones conceived BaldHeadDread, which garnered significant exposure when they scored the movie soundtrack for Ragdoll. Both projects were stepping stones to help him launch his solo venture.
Description above from the Wikipedia article William L. Johnson, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Read more
June Clyde
Biography
June Clyde (December 2, 1909, St. Joseph, Missouri – October 1, 1987, Fort Lauderdale, Florida) was an American actress, singer and dancer. She was a niece of actress Leona Hutton. Clyde's career began at age seven on the vaudeville stage, billed as "Baby Tetrazini" (her mother's maiden name) at the age of nine. She made her first screen appearance at age ten with Noah Beery, Sr. in The Sea Wolf. Later her voice changed and she joined a stock company. She was a WAMPAS Baby Star of 1932 and she progressed to a modest career in Hollywood films before marrying film director Thornton Freeland. Clyde moved to England with her husband and appeared in several British films and stage productions starting in 1934, as well as returning to the United States periodically for both stage and film work. A Mormon, she became friends with actress Dennie Moore, who nicknamed Clyde "The Loveliest Latter Day who ever lived".
Read more
Pedro Almeida
Biography
Pedro Almeida (born 6th January 2004) is a Portuguese film and theatre score composer. His work focuses on creating music using electronic elements and traditional instruments in conjunction with specially designed soundscapes. His theatre works includes shows such as "As Orelhas de Van Gogh"; "ERMA"; "As Troianas"; "Final Girl"; "INGÉNUAS!" and "Sete Crianças Judias". In film, his only project was composing the original score for "Where Fireflies Are Born", official selection in the “La Cinef” category at the Cannes Film Festival.
Almeida began his studies in Porto, at ACE-Escola de Artes, and is currently completing his degree at the Escola Superior de Música e Artes do Espetáculo. He has also been part of the sound team at the Teatro Nacional São João (one of Portugal's most prestigious theatres) in 2024 .
He has collaborated on numerous projects with directors such as Rui Paixão, Raquel S., Joana Providência, Rina Marques, Pedro Vilela, Tommy Luther, Inês Vicente and many others.
Read more
Sylvie Vartan
Biography
Sylvie Vartan (born Sylvie Georges Vartanian on 15 August 1944) is a Bulgarian-Armenian-French singer and actress. She is known as one of the most productive and tough-sounding yé-yé artists. Her performances often featured elaborate show-dance choreography,[and she made many appearances on French and Italian TV.
Yearly shows with then-husband Johnny Hallyday attracted full houses at the Olympia and the Palais des congrès de Paris throughout the 1960s and mid-1970s. In 2004, after a break in performances, she began recording and giving concerts of jazz ballads in francophone countries.
Sylvie Vartan was born in Iskrets, Sofia Province, in the then Kingdom of Bulgaria. Her father, Georges Vartanian (1912–1970), was born in France to a Bulgarian mother named Slavka and an Armenian father. He worked as an attaché at the French embassy in Sofia. The family shortened the name Vartanian to Vartan. Her mother, Ilona (née Mayer 1914–2007), daughter of prominent architect Rudolf Mayer, was of Hungarian-Jewish descent.
When the Soviet Army invaded Bulgaria in September 1944, the Vartanian family house was nationalised and they moved to Sofia. In 1952, a friend of Sylvie's father, film director Dako Dakovski, offered her the role of a schoolgirl in the movie Pod igoto, a film about Bulgarian rebels against the Ottoman occupation. Participating in the film made her dream of becoming an entertainer come true.
The hardships of postwar Bulgaria made the family emigrate to Paris in December 1952. At first they stayed in the Lion d'Argent hotel near Les Halles, where Georges found a job, then for the next four years they stayed in a single room at the Angleterre Hotel. Young Sylvie had to work hard to keep up at school and blend in with her schoolmates. She spent two years learning French.
In 1960, her family moved to an apartment in Michel Bizot Avenue. Thanks to the influence of her music producer brother Eddie, music became teenage Sylvie's main interest. Her most influential genres were jazz and, out of spite toward her strict high school, rock 'n' roll. Her favourite artists included Brenda Lee, Bill Haley, and Elvis Presley.
In 1961, Eddie offered Sylvie the chance to record the song "Panne d'essence" with French rocker Frankie Jordan. The Decca Records EP was a surprise hit. Although she was not credited on the sleeve, "Panne d'essence" provided Vartan her first appearance on French television. The journalists gave her the nickname la collégienne du twist. After the "twisting schoolgirl" had finished the Victor Hugo High School, she was free to sign a contract with Decca Records to start recording her own EP; carrying the title song "Quand le film est triste", a cover of Sue Thompson's "Sad Movies (Make Me Cry)", the EP was on sale by the beginning of December 1961. ...
Source: Article "Sylvie Vartan" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
Read more
Pixie Lott
Biography
Victoria Louise "Pixie" Lott (born 12 January 1991) is an English singer-songwriter, dancer and actress. Her debut single "Mama Do" was released in June 2009 and went straight to number one in the UK Singles Chart. Her second single "Boys and Girls", also topped the UK charts in September 2009. Her debut album Turn It Up was released in September 2009. It has so far reached number six on the UK Albums Chart, spawned five consecutive Top 20 singles, and has been certified double platinum after spending almost an entire year on the charts. Lott is often credited for her live performances and style. In July 2010, Lott appeared as a guest judge for the auditions for the sixth series of The X Factor in Cardiff, covering for Dannii Minogue, who was on maternity leave. Lott has released "Boys and Girls" as her debut US single on 24 August 2010. The release is set to coincide with the TV premiere of her first film, Fred: The Movie. In January 2010, Lott was named one of 2010's "Faces to Watch" by US magazine, Billboard. Lott's album, Turn It Up, will be released in the US early 2011. So far Lott has produced seven Top 20 Singles on the UK Singles Chart.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Pixie Lott, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia
Read more
Cathy Cavadini
Biography
Catherine Janet Cavadini (born April 21, 1961) is an American voice actress. She is most well known as the original voice of Blossom on Cartoon Network's animated television series The Powerpuff Girls and Tanya Mousekewitz in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West and in the subsequent TV series, Fievel's American Tails. In 2003, Catherine was honored with a White House Project Epic Award (which gives recognition to projects that promote women leadership) for her work in The Powerpuff Girls Movie as Blossom.
In 1998, Cavadini was nominated for an Annie Award for "Outstanding Individual Achievement for Voice Acting by a Female Performer in an Animated Feature Production" for performing the voice and singing for the role of Mary in the animated movie Babes in Toyland. She also sang Dreams to Dream as the character Tanya Mousekewitz in the animated movie An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, which was nominated for Best Song at the 49th Golden Globe Awards. In addition, she has received 2 Emmy Award Certificates for contributing to Outstanding Sound on the TV series, The X-Files.
Read more
Jeong Ga-young
Biography
Jeong Ga-young (born 1990~) is an independent film director. When she was a teenager, she wanted to be the producer of a popular TV show about movies. That’s why she started a degree in mass communication before realizing that this job wasn’t for her. She then enrolled at the Film, TV & Multi media School of the Korea National University of Arts, but dropped out less than two years after to try writing novels. She would not persevere on that path, though, as she eventually concluded that she didn’t have enough talent for that. Instead, she started making films, all by herself. After a dozen or so of short movies, usually shot over of a day due to her impatience, she invested her own money to realize her first feature project, Bitch on the Beach. Her sophomore film, Hit the Night won the Vision-Director’s Award (given every year to two promising independent directors) at the Busan International Film Festival and was later invited to the main competition of the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Read more
Alexandre Alagôa
Biography
Alexandre Alagôa (1994) is an experimental filmmaker, multimedia artist and electronic music producer working between Lisbon and Luxembourg.
Alagôa’s film and video work explores the mechanical, material and durational qualities of the audiovisual medium, and its immediate physical and kinetic impact on the viewer’s nervous system, often shattering the senses of vision and hearing into new sensible and obscure realms. Following a continuous research on conceptual art, the fluxus movement, and the structrural filmmaking approach, along with a constant curiosity on scientific issues on perception and psychology, Alagôa’s audiovisual pieces unfold into layered experiences often evoking optical illusions (such as the waterfall effect), studies on the physiology of the eye (such as phosphenes, after-images, purkinje trees and other entoptic phenomena) and synaesthetic sensations in order to destabilize, breakdown and (re)organize perceptual experience to its core elements, often inducing bodily and mental dispositions, at the same time leading the viewer to an awareness of their act of seeing and hearing.
Read more
