Bernhard Wicki (1919 - 2000)

Bernhard Wicki (28 October 1919 – 3 January 2000) was an Austrian actor and film director. Wicki studied in the city of Breslau such topics as Art History, History and German Literature. In 1938, he transferred to the drama school of the Staatliches Schauspielhaus in Berlin. In 1939, because of his membership in the Bündischen Jugend […]

Virginia Fox (1902 - 1982)

Virginia Fox Zanuck (April 2, 1902 – October 14, 1982) was an American actress who starred in many silent films of the 1910s and 1920s. Virginia Fox was born in Wheeling, West Virginia (though her grave erroneously lists Charleston, W.Va. as her place of birth), the daughter of Marie (née Oglseby) and Frederick Fox. While on vacation […]

Richard Zanuck (1934 - 2012)

Richard Zanuck married three times. On January 14, 1958, he married Lili Charlene Gentle (b. March 4, 1940), an actress from Birmingham, Alabama, and second cousin of Tallulah Bankhead. The marriage, which produced two daughters, Virginia and Janet, was dissolved in 1968. On October 26, 1969, Zanuck and his protégé, actress Linda Harrison, together with […]

Brad Grey (1957 - 2017)

Brad Grey was formerly chairman and chief executive officer of Paramount Pictures Corporation. Grey was named CEO in 2005. In his position, Grey was responsible for overseeing all feature film development and production for films distributed by Paramount Pictures Corporation including Paramount Pictures, Paramount Vantage, Paramount Classics, Paramount Insurge, MTV Films and Nickelodeon Movies. He […]

Steve Palermo (1949 - 2017)

Steve Palermo was born on October 9, 1949 in Worcester, Massachusetts. He studied education at Norwich University, Leicester Junior College and Worcester State College. While in school, he worked as a baseball umpire. Barney Deary, who headed Major League Baseball’s Umpire Development Program, discovered Palermo working a Little League all-star game. As a result, Palermo […]

Peace Pilgrim (1908 - 1981)

Peace Pilgrim (July 18, 1908 – July 7, 1981) born Mildred Lisette Norman, was an American non-denominational spiritual teacher, mystic, pacifist, vegetarian activist and peace activist. In 1952, she became the first woman to walk the entire length of the Appalachian Trail in one season. She also walked across the United States to speak with […]

Dorothy Day (1897 - 1980)

Dorothy Day, Obl.S.B., (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was an American journalist, social activist, and Catholic convert. Day initially lived a bohemian lifestyle before gaining fame as a social activist after her conversion. She later became a key figure in the Catholic Worker Movement and earned a national reputation as a political radical, perhaps […]

Eudora Welty (1909 - 2001)

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909, the daughter of Christian Webb Welty (1879–1931) and Mary Chestina (Andrews) Welty (1883–1966). She grew up with younger brothers Edward Jefferson and Walter Andrews. Eudora’s mother was a school teacher. Eudora soon developed a love of reading, reinforced by her mother who believed that […]

John Kennedy Toole (1937 - 1969)

John Kennedy Toole (/ˈtuːl/; December 17, 1937 – March 26, 1969) was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, whose posthumously published novel A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He also wrote The Neon Bible. Although several people in the literary world felt his writing skills were praiseworthy, Toole’s novels were […]

Walker Percy (1916 - 1990)

Walker Percy was born in 1916 in Birmingham, Alabama, as the first of three boys to LeRoy Pratt Percy and Martha Susan Phinizy. His father’s Mississippi Protestant family included his great-uncle LeRoy Percy, a U.S. Senator, and LeRoy Pope Percy, a Civil War hero. In February 1917, Percy’s grandfather committed suicide. This seemed to set […]

Flannery O’Connor (1925 - 1964)

Regarding her emphasis of the grotesque, Flannery O’Connor said: “anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” Her texts usually take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters, while […]

Eugene O’Neill (1888 - 1953)

After his experience in 1912–13 at a sanatorium where he was recovering from tuberculosis, he decided to devote himself full-time to writing plays (the events immediately prior to going to the sanatorium are dramatized in his masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night). Eugene O’Neill had previously been employed by the New London Telegraph, writing poetry […]

Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856)

Robert Schumann (8 June 1810 – 29 July 1856) was a German composer and influential music critic. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era. Schumann left the study of law, intending to pursue a career as a virtuoso pianist. He had been assured by his teacher Friedrich Wieck that he could […]

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975)

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (Russian: Дми́трий Дми́триевич Шостако́вич (help·info), tr. Dmitriy Dmitrievich Shostakovich, pronounced [ˈdmʲitrʲɪj ˈdmʲitrʲɪɪvʲɪtɕ ʂəstɐˈkovʲɪtɕ]; 25 September [O.S. 12 September] 1906 – 9 August 1975) was a Russian pianist and composer of the Soviet period. He is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. Dmitri Shostakovich achieved fame in the Soviet Union under the patronage of Soviet […]

Tennessee Williams (1911 - 1983)

In the late 1930s, as the young playwright struggled to have his work accepted, Tennessee Williams supported himself with a string of menial jobs that included a notably disastrous stint as caretaker on a chicken ranch in Laguna Beach, California. In 1939, with the help of his agent, Audrey Wood, he was awarded a $1,000 […]

Lillian Hellman (1905 - 1984)

Lillian Florence Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American dramatist and screenwriter known for her success as a playwright on Broadway, as well as her left-wing sympathies and political activism. She was blacklisted after her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) at the height of the anti-communist campaigns […]

Gregg Toland (1904 - 1948)

Gregg Toland, A.S.C. (May 29, 1904 – September 28, 1948) was an American cinematographer noted for his innovative use of lighting and techniques such as deep focus, examples of which can be found in his work on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home. Toland was born in Charleston, Illinois on May […]

Lee Garmes (1898 - 1978)

Lee Garmes, A.S.C. (May 27, 1898 – August 31, 1978) was an American cinematographer. During his career, he worked with directors Howard Hawks, Max Ophüls, Josef von Sternberg, Alfred Hitchcock, King Vidor, Nicholas Ray and Henry Hathaway, whom he had met as a young man when the two first came to Hollywood in the silent […]

Alvah Bessie (1904 - 1985)

Alvah Bessie became initially known for his translations of avant-garde French literature, including Songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs  and The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau. During the 1930s, Bessie became alarmed at the rise of fascism, and began working for the anti-fascist cause. No stranger to soldiering, through 1938 Bessie fought as a volunteer in the […]

Byron Haskin (1899 - 1984)

Byron Conrad Haskin (April 22, 1899 – April 16, 1984) was an American film and television director. He was born in Portland, Oregon. Byron Haskin is known for directing The War of the Worlds (1953), one of many films where he teamed with producer George Pal. In his early career, he was a special effects artist, […]

Ben Hecht (1894 - 1964)

Ben Hecht /ˈhɛkt/ (February 28, 1894 – April 18, 1964) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist and novelist. A journalist in his youth, he went on to write thirty-five books and some of the most entertaining screenplays and plays in America. He received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or […]

Ranald MacDougall (1915 - 1973)

Ranald MacDougall (March 10, 1915 – December 12, 1973) was an American screenwriter who scripted such films as Mildred Pierce (1945), The Unsuspected (1947), June Bride (1948), and The Naked Jungle (1954), and shared screenwriting credit for 1963’s Cleopatra. He also directed a number of films, including 1957’s Man on Fire with Bing Crosby and […]

William C. Mellor (1903 - 1963)

William C. Mellor, A.S.C. (29 June 1903 – 30 April 1963) was a cinematographer who worked at Paramount, MGM and 20th Century Fox during a career that spanned three decades. After earning his stripes on a string of B-movies in the 1930s, he first started making serious inroads as a leading cinematographer in 1940 when […]

Clifford Odets (1906 - 1963)

Clifford Odets (July 18, 1906 – August 14, 1963) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and director. Odets was widely seen as successor to Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill as O’Neill began to retire from Broadway’s commercial pressures and increasing critical backlash in the mid-1930s. From early 1935 on, Odets’ socially relevant dramas proved extremely influential, […]

Ernest Haller (1896 - 1970)

With his older brother’s help, Ernest Haller first joined the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, also known as the Biograph Studio or Biograph, in 1914 as an actor. However, he seemed to have realized his true passion fairly quickly, for he switched to the camera department just within a year of joining the studio. At […]

Jerry Wald (1911 - 1962)

Born Jerome Irving Wald to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, he had a brother and sons who were active in show business. He began writing a radio column for the New York Evening Graphic, while studying at New York University. This led to him producing several Rambling ‘Round Radio Row featurettes for Vitaphone, […]

Irving Ravetch (1920 - 2010)

Irving Ravetch was born to a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Sylvia (Shapiro) and I. Shalom Ravetch, a rabbi. His mother was born in Palestine and his father in the Ukraine. Ravetch was an aspiring playwright when he enrolled at University of California, Los Angeles. Following graduation, he joined the young […]

Martin Ritt (1914 - 1990)

Unable to work in the television industry, Martin Ritt returned to the theater for several years. By 1956, the Red Scare had decreased in intensity, and he turned to film directing. His first film as director was Edge of the City (1957), an important film for Ritt and an opportunity to give voice to his […]

Robert Alan Aurthur (1922 - 1978)

Robert Alan Aurthur (June 10, 1922 – November 20, 1978) was an American screenwriter, director and producer. In the early years of television, he wrote for Studio One and then moved on to write episodes of Mister Peepers (1952–53). He followed with teleplays for Campbell Playhouse (1954), Justice (1954), Goodyear Television Playhouse (1953–54) and Producers’ Showcase(1955). […]

Gene Saks (1921 - 2015)

Gene Saks was born Jean Michael Saks in New York City, the son of Beatrix (née Lewkowitz) and Morris J. Saks. He studied at Cornell University and trained for acting at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York with the German director Erwin Piscator. Gene Saks made his acting debut on Broadway in […]