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Kath Soucie
Biography
Kath Soucie was born on February 20, 1967 in New York City, New York, USA. She is an American voice, film, stage and television actress known for playing Linka in Captain Planet and the Planeteers, Lola Bunny in the Looney Tunes franchise, Fifi La Fume and Li'l Sneezer in Tiny Toon Adventures, Minx in Jem, Bea in Mighty Max, Dexter's Mom in Dexter's Laboratory, Maddie Fenton in Danny Phantom, Phil, Lil and their mother Betty DeVille in Rugrats, Princess Sally Acorn in Sonic the Hedgehog, Cadpig and Rolly in 101 Dalmatians: The Series, Kat Harvey in The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper, Morgana Macawber in Darkwing Duck, and Kanga in the Winnie the Pooh franchise. She voiced Tuffy Mouse from The Tom and Jerry Show, Perdita from 101 Dalmatians, since 101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure (2003), and Ray Ray Lee in The Life and Times of Juniper Lee.
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Stéphane Marti
Biography
Stéphane Marti (born January 7, 1951 in Algiers) is a filmmaker, visual artist and teacher as well as a user of Super 8, which he has practiced for 70 years and does everything for it survive the digital age. He studied under Dominique Neguez, an advocate and theoretician of experimental film, Michel Journiac, a major protagonist of the Body art and Andrew Almuro, a composer of electroacoustic music.
From 1985 to 2007, he worked at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Art from the University of Paris 1 Sorbonne and shared his experience to new generations of filmmakers in workshops. Moreover, he organizes several screenings of films from his workshops, "the Smarti Brigades".
In his films, Marti works around issues of the body, the sacred, of gender identity disorder and strategies of desire.
Attached immediately by critics at the "School of the body" cinema revolves primarily around issues of the body and the sacred, of gender identity disorder and strategies of desire. Always chiseling his films by the super 8 that combines visual splendor with artistic and against-cultural independence, he designed a operatic esthetics of the intimacy, whose mannerist decadence, the telluric forces, the splendor rituals, golds and purples forge baroque and flamboyant coordinated its "small theaters of the body".
Meanwhile, he engages in other practices such as painting, photography, installation, projection environments and shapes Totems facts assemblies, photomontages and objects from his own films and create, their combination, endless narratives, torn, fragmented as we know them in his films.
Since, in particular, The City of nine gates (Grand different cinema award and award of criticism in Hyères festival in 1977), his film work has been shown in a large number of festivals and national and international events (in Montreal , New York, London, Tokyo, etc.) and generated numerous articles and interviews.
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Robert Merle
Biography
Robert Merle (28 August 1908 – 27 March 2004) was a French novelist.
Merle was born in 1908 in Tébessa, French Algeria. His father Félix, who was an interpreter "with a perfect knowledge of literary and spoken Arabic", was killed in 1916 in the Dardanelles. Young Merle and his mother moved to Paris, where he attended three lycées and the Sorbonne.
Merle was professor of English Literature at several universities until the outbreak of the second world war in 1939. During World War II Merle was conscripted in the French army and assigned as an interpreter to the British Expeditionary Force. In 1940 he was in the Dunkirk evacuation on the beach of Zuydcoote — which he called a "blind and abominable lottery" — and was captured by the Germans. Merle was taken prisoner to Stalag VID at Dortmund, and escaped, but was recaptured at Belgian customs. He was repatriated in July 1943, and after the war was awarded the Croix du Combattant.
Merle used his experiences at Dunkirk in his 1949 novel Week-end at Zuydcoote, which became a "sensational success" and won the Prix Goncourt. A 1964 feature film adaptation, Weekend at Dunkirk, was directed by Henri Verneuil and starred Jean-Paul Belmondo. It was a box office hit and made both men famous.
Merle's 1967 novel Un animal doué de raison (lit. A Sentient Animal), a stark Cold War satire inspired by John Lilly's studies of dolphins and the Caribbean Crisis, was translated into English and filmed as The Day of the Dolphin (1973) starring George C. Scott. Merle's post-apocalyptic novel Malevil (1972) was also adapted into a 1981 film. His 1952 novel La mort est mon métier was adapted into a 1977 film, his 1962 novel L'île was filmed as a 1987 miniseries and Le propre de l'homme (1989) was adapted into a 1996 TV movie.
Among Merle's other works are the 1950 play Flamineo, based on John Webster's The White Devil, the 1948 biography Oscar Wilde (extended in 1955 as Oscar Wilde, or The Destiny of Homosexuality), and various translations including Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. In 1965 Merle wrote Moncada: premier combat de Fidel Castro and Ahmed Ben Bella, and around this time translated the diaries of Che Guevara. Until the invasion of Afghanistan by the Red Army, Merle was a sympathizer of the French Communist Party. He said: "I was just a minor militant, and my fellow Reds did not approve of what I wrote. As for the student riots of May 1968, I never believed in the reality of that revolution. The only thing of value that came out of it was the liberation of sexual relationships."
Merle's "major achievement" was his 13-book series of historical novels, Fortune de France (1977–2003), which recreate 16th and 17th century France through the eyes of a fictitious Protestant doctor turned spy. A "genuine scholar of language", Merle wrote the novels using many of the appropriate French speech rhythms and idioms of the historical period. The series made Merle a household name in France, with the author repeatedly called the Alexandre Dumas of the 20th century.
Merle was married three times, and had four sons and two daughters. He died in 2004 at age 95 of a heart attack in Montfort-l'Amaury, France.
Source: Article "Robert Merle" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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J. R. R. Tolkien
Biography
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE, was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high-fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. He served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford from 1945 to 1959. He was at one time a close friend of C. S. Lewis —they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972. After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda, and Middle-Earth within it. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term “legendarium” to the larger part of these writings. While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the father of modern fantasy literature —or, more precisely, of high fantasy. In 2008, The Times ranked him sixth on a list of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
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Natalie Portman
Biography
Natalie Portman (born Natalie Hershlag, June 9, 1981) is an actress with dual American and Israeli citizenship. Her first role was in the 1994 action thriller Léon: The Professional, opposite Jean Reno. She was later cast as Padmé Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy (released in 1999, 2002 and 2005).
Born in Jerusalem to an Israeli father and American mother, Portman grew up in the eastern United States from the age of three. She studied dancing and acting in New York, and starred in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace while still at high school on Long Island. In 1999, Portman enrolled at Harvard University to study psychology, alongside her work as an actress; she completed a bachelor's degree in 2003. During her studies she starred in a second Star Wars film and opened in New York City's The Public Theater production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull in 2001.
Portman won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award for starring in the 2004 drama Closer, appeared in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith the following year, and won a Constellation Award for Best Female Performance and the Saturn Award for Best Actress for her starring role in the political thriller V for Vendetta (2006). She played leading roles in the historical dramas Goya's Ghosts (2006) and The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), and also appeared in Thor (2011) and its 2013 sequel. In 2010, Portman starred in the psychological thriller film Black Swan. Her performance received widespread critical acclaim and she earned her first Academy Award for Best Actress, her second Golden Globe Award, the SAG Award, the BAFTA Award and the BFCA Award in 2011. In 2016, she portrayed First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in the biographical drama Jackie. She was nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award and won the BFCA for Best Actress. In May 2008, Portman served as the youngest member of the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival jury. The same year she directed a segment of the collective film New York, I Love You. Her first feature film as a director, A Tale of Love and Darkness, was released in 2015.
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Michael Carreras
Biography
Michael Henry Carreras (21 December 1927 – 19 April 1994) was a British film producer and director. He was known for his association with Hammer Films, being the son of founder James Carreras, and taking an executive role in the company during its most successful years.
As producer, he worked on The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958) and The Curse of the Werewolf (1960) and She (1965) among over sixty other films. He also wrote a smaller number of screenplays. He later turned to directing, with The Savage Guns / Tierra brutal (1961), Maniac (1963), The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964), Slave Girls (1967), The Lost Continent (1968) and Shatter (1975) among others. In 1971, he took over directing Blood from the Mummy's Tomb after director Seth Holt died partway through filming. Carreras died from cancer in London on 19 April 1994.
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Nuno Leal Maia
Biography
Nuno Leal Maia (Santos, October 17, 1947) is a Brazilian actor and football coach. Graduated in performing arts at the School of Communication and Arts at the University of São Paulo, his first work was in 1973, participating in the two feature films Anjo Loiro and A Virgem; however, it was in the film Act of Violence, in which he played a prisoner who dismembered women, which earned him the Air France Award for Best Actor. On the other hand, his television debut began in 1976, playing Acioli in the soap opera Estúpido Cupido; but his consecration only came in 1984, as Bertazzo in Vereda Tropical, being elected Best Actor by the APCA Trophy.
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Daniel Mesguich
Biography
Daniel Mesguich (born 15 July 1952) is a French actor and director in theater and opera, and professor of stage acting school.
In 1970, he was admitted into the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique, after which he opened the Théâtre du Miroir ("Mirror Theater"), with whom he opened a course in drama. After ten years, he returned to the school to teach at the request of Jean-Pierre Miquel, becoming the youngest professor on campus. He is currently the director of the school. He has acted in over a hundred plays, fifty operas in France and abroad, and some 40 movies and television pieces.
The actor William Mesguich is his son.
Source: Article "Daniel Mesguich" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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John Maybury
Biography
John Maybury (born 25 March 1958) is an English filmmaker and artist. He first came to prominence as the director of the music video for the Pet Shop Boys 1984 single "West End Girls". In 2005 he was named as one of the 100 most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain.
During the 1980s, Maybury produced a number of short films and music videos including for Sinéad O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U", which was voted #35 in a Channel 4 poll of the greatest pop music videos and received various awards, and "West End Girls" by the Pet Shop Boys, a defining 1980s video. In 1998, Maybury produced his first full-length feature Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, a biopic on the life of painter Francis Bacon starring Derek Jacobi and Daniel Craig. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. In 2005, he directed The Jacket with Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley. In 2008 his film The Edge of Love, a biopic on the life of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas starring Sienna Miller, Cillian Murphy, Matthew Rhys and Keira Knightley premiered. He also directed the final episode of the HBO/BBC Rome series.
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Fu'ad Aït Aattou
Biography
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Fu'ad Aït Aattou (b. 2 November 1980) is a French actor and model of Berber descent.
Fu'ad Aït Aattou grew up in the north of France. He went to Paris to attend acting school for three years, after which he started a career in modeling, and in 2007 played the lead in The Last Mistress opposite Asia Argento and Roxane Mesquida after he was discovered by director Catherine Breillat in a Paris café.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Fu'ad Aït Aattou, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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