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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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Stevie Nicks
Biography
Stephanie Lynn "Stevie" Nicks (born May 26, 1948) is an American singer-songwriter, best known for her work with Fleetwood Mac and an extensive solo career, which collectively have produced over forty Top 50 hits and sold over 140 million albums. She has been noted for her ethereal visual style and symbolic lyrics. Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac on December 31, 1974, along with her then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham. Fleetwood Mac's second album after the incorporation of Nicks and Buckingham, 1977's Rumours, produced four U.S. Top 10 singles (including Nicks' song "Dreams", which was the band's first and only U.S. number one) and remained at #1 on the American albums chart for 31 weeks, as well as reaching the top spot in various countries around the world. To date the album has sold over 40 million copies worldwide, making it the ninth highest selling album of all time. Nicks began her solo career in 1981 with the 8 million selling album Bella Donna, and she has produced six more solo studio albums to date. Her seventh solo studio album entitled In Your Dreams, and her first in ten years, has completed production with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics fame at the helm, and was released on May 3, 2011. After the release of her first solo album, Rolling Stone deemed her "The Reigning Queen of Rock and Roll". Having overcome cocaine addiction, and dependency on tranquilizers, Nicks remains a popular solo performer. As a solo artist, she has garnered eight Grammy Award nominations and, with Fleetwood Mac, has a further five nominations (one of her nominations with Fleetwood Mac won the 1977/1978 award for Album of the Year for Rumours). As a member of Fleetwood Mac, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.
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Olivia Colman
Biography
Sarah Caroline Sinclair CBE (born January 30, 1974), known professionally as Olivia Colman, is an English actress. Known for her comedic and dramatic roles in film and television, she has received various accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, two Emmy Awards, three British Academy Television Awards and three Golden Globe Awards.
She was acclaimed for her performance in the ITV crime-drama series Broadchurch (2013–2017), for which she received a British Academy Television Award for Best Actress. She played Queen Elizabeth II from 2019 to 2020 in the Netflix period-drama series The Crown, for which she received a Golden Globe Award and a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series.
For her portrayal of Anne, Queen of Great Britain in the period black-comedy film The Favourite (2018), Colman received the Academy Award for Best Actress. She received additional Academy Award nominations for her performances in The Father (2020) and The Lost Daughter (2021). Other notable film and television credits include Hot Fuzz (2007), Tyrannosaur (2011), The Iron Lady (2011), Hyde Park on Hudson (2012), Locke (2013), The Lobster (2015), Fleabag (2016-2019), Murder on the Orient Express (2017), The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021), Landscapers (2021), Empire of Light (2022), Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022), Secret Invasion (2023), Wonka (2023), Wicked Little Letters (2023) and Paddington in Peru (2024).
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Bai Jingting
Biography
Bai Jing Ting is a Chinese actor born in Beijing, China. He studied at Capital Normal University's Music College, majoring in recording. He can play the piano and achieved a grade of ten in the non-professional players' level assessment.
Jing Ting began his acting career during the academic year of 2014. He made his debut in the web series "Back in Time". He is known for the series Ordinary Glory, You Are My Hero, Reset, New Life Begins, Destined, Always On The Move and The First Frost. He is the founder of 'GoodBai' merchandise and café, and artist management 'Bai Jingting Studio'.
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Kevin Eldon
Biography
Kevin Eldon is a British Actor, Comedian and Songwriter. He featured in the major British TV comedies of the 1990s including Fist of Fun, Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, Big Train, Brass Eye and Jam. In 2013, Eldon appeared in his own BBC sketch series It's Kevin. He has also appeared in minor speaking roles in the HBO series Game of Thrones. Eldon was born in Chatham, Kent. He has been a practising Buddhist since 1990. He has two children with his wife Holly, who he met in late 2005 on the set of Hyperdrive, where she was the art director.
Eldon occupies half a page in Oliver Gray's book called Volume – A Cautionary Tale of Rock and Roll Obsession; this includes coverage of punk-era Hampshire where, in late 1978, with two schoolmates from Bay House School, Gosport, Eldon started a band named Virginia Doesn't. Virginia Doesn't's career peaked with a session broadcast on Radio One's John Peel Show on 18 October 1979. In early 1980, Virginia Doesn't morphed into The Time, in which Eldon was again the front man. The Time recorded and performed from April 1980 until August 1982, during which time the band gigged extensively and played support slots with The Jam, Joe Jackson's Jumpin' Jive and Bad Manners. The Time had songs included on several self-released tape compilations, although they never secured a recording contract. In August 1982, The Time became Gerry Hackett & The Fringes, a spoof Sixties revival band. On 6 November 1983 Gerry Hackett & The Fringes appeared on BBC South's 'The Cellar Show' presented by John Sessions. Eldon started on the stand-up circuit in the early 1990s performing an act in-character as the political poet Paul Hamilton, but has also, on occasion, done stand-up as himself.
On the circuit, Eldon formed a friendship with stand-up comedian Stewart Lee, which would later lead to an invitation to work with him on the radio series Lee & Herring's Fist of Fun with Lee's comedy partner Richard Herring. Lee and Herring would usually refer to him as "the actor Kevin Eldon", in reference to his claim to being an actor rather than a comedian. Eldon's work sat well with that of Lee and Herring, and he continued to work with them on many of their projects, including The Lee & Herring Radio Show, Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy. He played recurring characters Simon Quinlank (the self-styled "King of Hobbies") and 'Rod Hull', a nonsensical version of Rod Hull with a prosthetic limb and an obsession with jelly, especially the 'green' variety. In 1994 and 1997, he appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as part the comedy troupe Cluub Zarathustra; other comedians in the troupe including Roger Mann, Johnny Vegas, Simon Munnery, and later Stewart Lee. They were given a Channel 4 pilot, which led to the television series Attention Scum! The book You Are Nothing by Robert Wringham praises the performers' talent. From March 2009, Eldon appeared in Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle in a number of the show's sketches most often with Paul Putner.
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Alfredo del Diestro
Biography
Actor and film director, born in Valparaíso Chile, October 7, 1885, died in Mexico City in 1951. Son of Spanish merchant Juan del Diestro and Italian pianist Matilde Cavaletti, Alfredo del Diestro spent his adolescence in Havana with his parents. In 1900 he returned to Colombia with the theatrical company Juan del Diestro, formed by him and his younger brother Juan. The company remained in the country until 1903, when it resumed its transhumance through Central America and the Caribbean. In Havana he met the Mexican actress Emma Roldán, and married her.
In 1920, when he was doing a season at the Municipal Theater of Cali, he met Francisco Antonio Posada, who proposed him to co-direct with the Spaniard Máximo Calvo the silent feature film María. Del Diestro did the art direction, directed the dialogues and the staging. He returned to Mexico in 1924, where he continued working in film. His most outstanding performance was in the feature film Allá en el rancho grande, made in 1936.
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Will Hindle
Biography
Will "William Mayo" Hindle (December 29, 1929 – April 7, 1987) was an independent American filmmaker of personal visual 16mm movies.
From 1958 to 1976, he made ten 16 mm motion pictures. He employed complex rear-projection rephotography, slow motion, and subtle tinting techniques in his work. His movies have been widely praised for their astonishing cinematic techniques and deep personal feeling.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Will Hindle, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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Owen Land
Biography
George Landow (1944 – June 8, 2011), also known as Owen Land, was a painter, writer, playwright, photographer, and experimental filmmaker. Shortly after the release of his film On the Marriage Broker Joke... (1977), Landow rearranged his name to Owen Land, an anagram of "Landow N.E." He has also worked under pen names Orphan Morphan and Apollo Jize.
According to film historian Mark Webber, Land made early films as a teenager, and his later films, made mostly during the 1960s and 1970s, are some of the first examples of the "structural film" movement. Land's films usually involve wordplay, and have been described by Webber as having a humor & wit that separates his films from the "boring" world of avant-garde cinema. Webber also said that he was inspired by Joyce, Beckett, and Ionesco. While the humorous aspects of his films makes them appealing to audiences who are not familiar with the perceived hermetic and insular world of avant-garde film, many of his works function as sharp parody of the experimental & "structural film" movement. The book Two Films By Owen Land (Lux, London) features the complete scripts of Landow/Land's films Wide Angle Saxon and On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed?, as well as footnotes written by Land interpreting the many references and elements of these two films and a filmography by Mark Webber. Released in May 2011, the book "Dialogues - a film by Owen Land" (Paraguay Press, Paris) features the complete script of his last film, as well as two interviews with the artist.
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Goldie Hawn
Biography
Goldie Jeanne Hawn (born November 21, 1945) is an American actress, director, producer, and occasional singer. She started as a dancer, first in New York and then in Los Angeles. On the cast of TV's Laugh-In, the mod comedy show of the late 1960s, she flubbed jokes in a bikini and became one of the show's most popular co-stars. She then proved the ding-a-ling act was just an act -- she won an Oscar for a supporting role in Cactus Flower (1969, with Walter Matthau) and turned in a solid performance in Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express (1974).
She had her first blockbuster, Private Benjamin in 1980, and has since had a steady career as a leading lady in hits and misses, often acting as her own producer. Some of her movies include Shampoo (1975, starring Warren Beatty), Overboard (1987, with Kurt Russell), Bird on a Wire (1990, with Mel Gibson), Death Becomes Her (1992, with Bruce Willis), Housesitter (1992, with Steve Martin), The First Wives Club (1996, with Diane Keaton), and The Banger Sisters (2002, with Susan Sarandon), among many others.
She has been in a decades-long relationship with actor Kurt Russell and is the mother of actress Kate Hudson, actor Oliver Hudson, and actor Wyatt Russell.
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Stan VanDerBeek
Biography
American experimental filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek began his career in the 1950’s after having studied art and architecture in New York and North Carolina.
His earliest period (1955-1965) is marked by his animated painting and collage films which the artist and critic Daryl Chin regarded as having an “enormous vitality, bounding inventiveness and incendiary wit which was shared by such other collagists as Robert Breer, Bruce Conner, Dick Preston.” Films such as Science Friction (1959, 10’), Breathdeath (1963, 15’), A la Mode (1959, 7’) and Achoo Mr. Kerrooschev (1960, 2’) are from this period.
In the 1960’s, in the context of his expanded cinema research, Vanderbeek started his audacious project of the “Movie Drome” theater, a space that allowed him to create an appropriate environment for his synesthetic works, which included film, performance and dance among other disciplines. The filmmaker spent about 10 years developing this project, which consisted of a huge dome that surrounded the audience and engulfed them in the images projected all around them.
From the mid-1960’s, Vanderbeek ‘s appetite for exploring new technologies increased and tools such as video played a major part in the filmmaker’s work. This can be seen in his computer-animated films from this period such as Symmetricks (1972, 6’) and the Poemfield series of 8 computer generated animations (1966-1971). His work with computers and experiments with holograms reflected his desire to use the most complex technology to get as close as possible to the functioning of the human nervous system.
In addition to his creative work in the fields of film and video art, Vanderbeek was a faculty member and artist-in-residence at a number of major universities. He died in 1984.
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