Rita Hayworth (1918 - 1987)

Rita Hayworth Margarita Carmen Cansino was born on October 17, 1918, in Brooklyn, New York, into a family of dancers. Her father, Eduardo was a dancer as was his father before him. He emigrated from Spain in 1913. Rita’s mother met Eduardo in 1916 and were married the following year. Rita, herself, studied as a […]

Bobby Hatfield (1940 - 2003)

Bobby Hatfield The duo, whose 42-year career featured pop standbys like “Unchained Melody,” “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” were in Kalamazoo to kick off a four-day series of performances in Michigan and Ohio.”It’s a shock, a real shock,” Cohen said during a telephone interview. Medley, he said, was “broken […]

George Harrison (1943 - 2001)

George Harrison A master musician, a film producer and actor, best known as the lead guitarist and occasionally lead vocalist of The Beatles, George Harrison was born February 25, 1943, in Liverpool, Merseyside, England. He was also the youngest of four children, born to Harold and Louise Harrison. Like his future band mates, Harrison was […]

Jonathan Harris (1914 - 2002)

Jonathan Harris Jonathan Harris, a versatile character actor perhaps best known for his role as the villainous Dr. Smith in the science-fiction fantasy series ”Lost in Space” on CBS television, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 87 and lived in the Encino section of Los Angeles. He had been hospitalized for a back […]

Leonard Nimoy (1931 - 2015)

Leonard Simon Nimoy was born on March 26, 1931 in the West End of Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Iziaslav, Soviet Union (now Ukraine). His parents left Iziaslav separately—his father first walking over the border into Poland—and reunited in the United States. His mother, Dora (née Spinner), was a homemaker, […]

Oliver Hardy (1892 - 1957)

Oliver Hardy Although his parents were never in show business, as a young boy Oliver Hardy was a gifted singer and, by age eight, was performing with minstrel shows. In 1910 he ran a movie theatre, which he preferred to studying law. In 1913 he became a comedy actor with the Lubin Company in Florida […]

Jack Haley (1897 - 1979)

Jack Haley Full name: John Joseph Haley, was the actor who played the part of the Tin Woodman and Hickory in MGM‘s 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz. An established song-and-dance man, Haley was loaned to the MGM studio by his contract-holder, 20th Century Fox, on 4 November 1938. Haley replaced Buddy Ebsen, the actor who […]

Edmund Gwenn (1877 - 1959)

Edmund Gwenn Gwenn was born Edmund Kellaway in Wandsworth, London, on September 26, 1877. He was the oldest boy in the family, which at that time meant he was the only one who really mattered. His father was a British civil servant, and he groomed Edmund to take a position of power in the Empire. […]

Merv Griffin (1925 - 2007)

Merv Griffin He is best remembered as the host of his CBS television talk show, “The Merv Griffin Show,” which ran from 1965 to 1986. Additionally, he created the game shows “Jeopardy!” (1964), “Wheel of Fortune” (1975), “Ruckus” (1991), “Click” (1997), and “Merv Griffin’s Crosswords” (2007) with his own television production companies, Merv Griffin Enterprises […]

Horton Foote (1916 - 2009)

Foote began as an actor after studying at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1931–32. After getting better reviews for plays he had written than his acting, he focused on writing in the 1940s and became one of the leading writers for television during the 1950s, beginning with an episode of The Gabby Hayes Show. The Trip […]

Lorne Greene (1915 - 1987)

Lorne Greene He is most remembered for his role as ‘Ben Cartwright’ on the 1960s television western series “Bonanza,” and as ‘Commander Adama’ in the 1970s television science fiction series “Battlestar Galactica.” Born in Ottawa, Canada, he began his career while attending Canada’s Queen’s University, and after his graduation, started work in radio broadcasting. His […]

Paul Harvey (1918 - 2009)

Harvey was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The son of a policeman killed in 1921, Harvey made radio receivers as a young boy. He attended Tulsa Central High School where a teacher, Isabelle Ronan, was “impressed by his voice.” On her recommendation, he started working at KVOO in Tulsa in 1933, when he was 14. His […]

Willem Johan Kolff (1911 - 2009)

Born in Leiden, Netherlands, Kolff was the eldest of a family of 5 boys. Kolff studied medicine in his hometown at Leiden University, and continued as a resident in internal medicine at Groningen University. One of his first patients there was a 22-year old man who was slowly dying of renal failure. This prompted Kolff […]

James Whitmore (1921 - 2009)

Born in White Plains, New York to Florence Belle (née Crane) and James Allen Whitmore, Sr., a park commission official, Whitmore attended Amherst Central High School in Snyder, New York for three years, before transferring to the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, on a football scholarship. He went on to study at Yale University, also […]

Betty Grable (1916 - 1973)

Betty Grable During her lifetime, she would become one of the most prolific singing actresses of her time, starring in over one hundred films, including ‘Pin Up Girl’ and ‘How To Marry A Millionaire’. In 1929, the Grable family went on holiday to California, and Lilian, Betty’s Mother, decided that she and her daughter should […]

Ron Goldman (1968 - 1994)

Ron Goldman Murder Victim. He and a casual friend, Nicole Brown Simpson, were found murdered at her Brentwood condominium, just outside her front door. Ronald Goldman, a waiter at a nearby restaurant, was returning eyeglasses that she had accidentally left there at dinner that night. He is considered an accidental victim of the murder, either […]

John Updike (1932 - 2009)

Updike’s most famous work is his “Rabbit” series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and the novella “Rabbit Remembered”), which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1982) and Rabbit At […]

Patrick McGoohan (1928 - 2009)

McGoohan was born in Astoria, Queens, New York City to Thomas McGoohan and Rose Fitzpatrick, who were living in the United States after emigrating from Ireland to seek work. He was brought up as a Roman Catholic. Shortly after he was born, McGoohan’s parents moved back to Mullaghmore, County Leitrim, Ireland, and seven years later, […]

Pat Hingle (1924 - 2009)

Hingle was born Martin Patterson Hingle in Miami, Florida (some sources say Denver, Colorado), the son of Marvin Louise (née Patterson), a schoolteacher and musician, and Clarence Martin Hingle, a building contractor. Hingle enlisted in the U.S. Navy in December 1941, dropping out of the University of Texas. He served on the destroyer USS Marshall […]

Joseph L. Trueblood (1956 - 2003)

Joseph L. Trueblood (December 26, 1956 – June 13, 2003), a 46-year-old white male, was executed by lethal injection at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, Indiana on June 13, 2003. Trueblood was found guilty of the 1988 murder of Susan Bowsher, a 23-year-old white female, Ashlyn Bowsher, a 2½-year-old white female, and William […]

Carlos DeLuna (1962 - 1989)

DeLuna was charged with killing a gas station attendant, 24-year-old Wanda Lopez, on the evening of February 4, 1983, in Corpus Christi, Texas. The young woman died from multiple stab wounds, apparently from a buck knife. Lopez was killed while on the phone with the police, having just called 911 to report a suspicious person […]

Charles Brooks Jr. (1942 - 1982)

Brooks was raised in a wealthy family in Fort Worth, Texas. He attended I.M. Terrell High School (named after its first principal Isaiah Milligan Terrell), where he played football.  He had a prior criminal history, having served time at the United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth for illegal possession of firearms.  On December 14, 1976, Brooks went […]

Fanny Brice (1891 - 1951)

Fanny Brice She was really Fannie Borach, daughter of a saloon-keeper on Forsythe Street in the crowded Lower East Side, where she was born in 1892. Her first appearance on any stage took place when she was 13 at Keeney’s Theatre in Brooklyn, where she won an amateur night contest singing, “When You Know You’re […]

Walter Brennan (1894 - 1974)

Walter Brennan In many ways the most successful and familiar character actor of American sound films and the only actor to date to win three Oscars for Best Supporting Actor, Walter Brennan attended college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studying engineering. While in school he became interested in acting and performed in school plays. He worked some […]

Charles Boyer (1899 - 1978)

Charles Boyer Born in Figeac, France, he was a distinguished performer who appeared in more than 80 films between 1920 and 1976. He began his career in the theater and made his big screen debut in was “L’homme du large” (1920). Relocating to America, he became a US citizen in 1942 and performed on Broadway, […]

Stephen Boyd (1931 - 1977)

Stephen Boyd Stephen Boyd was born William Millar on July 4, 1931, at Glengormley, Northern Ireland, one of nine children of Martha Boyd and Canadian truck driver James Alexander Millar, who worked for Fleming’s on Tomb Street in Belfast. He attended Glengormley & Ballyrobert primary school and then moved on to Ballyclare High School and […]

Ernest Borgnine (1917 - 2012)

Ernest Borgnine Film and television actor Ernest Borgnine, who won an Academy Award for his portrayal of a lovelorn butcher in 1955’s “Marty,” has died at age 95, his manager said Sunday. The thick-set, gap-toothed Borgnine built a reputation for playing heavies in early films like “From Here to Eternity” and “Bad Day at Black […]

Richard Boone (1917 - 1981)

Richard Boone  Richard Boone, the actor best known for his role as the hired gun Paladin in the ”Have Gun Will Travel” television series, is dead at the age of 63. A spokesman at Craig Funeral Home in St. Augustine said today that Mr. Boone’s body was to be cremated and a private service held. […]

Ray Bolger (1904 - 1987)

Ray Bolger Ray Bolger, the loose-limbed song-and-dance man who became known to millions as the Scarecrow in ”The Wizard of Oz,” died yesterday of cancer in Los Angeles. He had his 83d birthday last Saturday and lived in Beverly Hills. Among his many roles on stage, screen and television in a career than spanned six […]

Mel Blanc (1908 - 1989)

Mel Blanc Mel Blanc, the voice of Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Barney Rubble, Daffy Duck and countless other animated vertebrates, died Monday afternoon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He was 81 and had been hospitalized since May 19 suffering from heart disease and related medical problems, said hospital spokesman Ron Wise. With Blanc when he died […]