Mike McCormack (1930 - 2013)

McCormack was drafted by the New York Yanks in the 1951 NFL Draft. After one year of play, he then served two years of military service in the United States Army before being traded to the Browns. In his first season with the team, he played on the defensive line, with his fumble recovery in […]

Mary Anna Morrison Jackson (2014 - 2014)

Mary Anna Morrison – popularly known by friends and family as “Anna” – was born at Cottage Home, the family plantation near Lincolnton, North Carolina. Her father, Robert Hall Morrison, was a Presbyterian preacher and the first president of Davidson College, and her mother, Mary Graham, was the niece of William Alexander Graham, a Senator […]

Doris Lessing (1919 - 2013)

Lessing was born in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran), on 22 October 1919, to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler (née McVeagh), both British subjects. Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital where he was recovering from […]

Syd Field (1935 - 2013)

Sydney Alvin Field (December 19, 1935 − November 17, 2013) was an American screenwriting guru who wrote several books on the subject of screenwriting. He also conducted workshops and seminars on the subject of producing salable screenplays. Hollywood film producers have increasingly used his ideas on structure as a guideline to a proposed screenplay’s potential. […]

Diane Disney Miller (1933 - 2013)

Diane Disney Miller (December 18, 1933 – November 19, 2013) was the elder and only biological child of Walt Disney and his wife Lillian Bounds Disney. Diane and her husband, Ron W. Miller, had seven children. She had a younger sister, Sharon Mae Disney, whom the Disneys adopted at birth in 1936. Sharon died in […]

Frederick Sanger (1918 - 2013)

Frederick Sanger was born on 13 August 1918 in Rendcomb, a small village in Gloucestershire, England, the second son of Frederick Sanger, a general practitioner, and his wife, Cicely Sanger (née Crewdson). He was one of three children. His brother, Theodore, was only a year older, while his sister May (Mary) was five years younger. […]

Sylvia Browne (1936 - 2013)

Sylvia Browne Browne grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, the daughter of Celeste (née Coil) and William Lee Shoemaker. Her father held several different jobs, working at times in mail delivery, in jewelry sales, and as a vice president of a major freight line. Browne was raised mostly as a Catholic, and was said to […]

Jane Kean (1923 - 2013)

Kean and her older sister, Betty (1914 (some sources cite 1915 or 1916) – 1986), formed a comedy duo that worked the nightclub circuit throughout the 1940s/50s, and the two appeared on Broadway as sisters in the short-lived 1955 musical, Ankles Aweigh. Jane Kean was the sister-in-law of actor Lew Parker, best known as Lou […]

Jim Hall (1930 - 2013)

Born in Buffalo, New York, before moving to Cleveland, Ohio, Hall was from a musical family, his mother played the piano, his grandfather violin, and his uncle guitar. He began playing the guitar at age ten when his mother gave him an instrument as a Christmas present. As a teenager in Cleveland, he performed professionally, […]

Tom Laughlin (1931 - 2013)

Laughlin was born in Minneapolis, and reared in Milwaukee, where he attended Washington High School. While in high school, he was involved in an athletic controversy that made headlines throughout the city. The controversy involved Laughlin being forced to attend another school for a brief period, making him ineligible to play football at his previous […]

Peter O’Toole (1932 - 2013)

O’Toole was born in 1932. Some sources give his birthplace as Connemara, County Galway, Ireland while others cite Leeds in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. O’Toole himself was not certain of his birthplace or date, noting in his autobiography that, while he accepted 2 August as his birthdate, he had a birth certificate from […]

Edgar Bronfman (1929 - 2013)

Bronfman was born in Montreal into the Jewish Canadian Bronfman family, the son of Samuel Bronfman and Saidye Rosner Bronfman. Sam and Saidye were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who settled and raised their four children in Montreal. Sam and his brother Allan built the family’s first liquor distillery in 1925 near Montreal. They later […]

James Avery (1945 - 2013)

James Avery James LaRue Avery (November 27, 1945 – December 31, 2013) was an American actor. He played patriarch and Judge Philip Banks in the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990−96). This character was ranked #34 in TV Guide’s “50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time.” He also provided the voice of Shredder in […]

Tommy Ramone (1952 - 2014)

Erdélyi was Jewish, and was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1949, to parents who had survived the Holocaust by being hidden by neighbors, though many of his relatives were victims of the Nazis. The family emigrated to the US when Ramone was aged four and he grew up in Forest Hills, New York.  Tommy and […]

Meshach Taylor (1947 - 2014)

Taylor was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Hertha Mae (née Ward) and Joseph T. Taylor, former dean of students at Dillard University in New Orleans, who was also the first dean of arts and sciences at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis.  After the family moved from New Orleans to Indianapolis, Taylor graduated from Crispus […]

Eli Wallach (1915 - 2014)

Wallach was born in Red Hook, Brooklyn, at 156 Union St., a son of Jewish immigrants Abraham and Bertha (Schorr) Wallach, both from Poland. He had a brother and two sisters, with his family being the only Jews in an otherwise Italian American neighborhood. His parents owned Bertha’s Candy Store. Wallach graduated in 1936 from […]

Bob Hoskins (1942 - 2014)

Hoskins was born in Bury St Edmunds, West Suffolk on 26 October 1942 to Robert Hoskins, a bookkeeper and lorry driver, and Elsie (Hopkins) Hoskins, a cook and nursery school teacher. His grandmother was a Romani. From the age of 2 weeks old, he was brought up in Finsbury Park, London. Hoskins left school at […]

Phyllis Frelich (1944 - 2014)

Frelich was born in Devils Lake, North Dakota to deaf parents Esther (née Dockter) and Phillip Frelich, and was the eldest of nine siblings (all deaf). She attended North Dakota School for the Deaf, graduating in 1962, and then went on to study at Gallaudet College (now known as Gallaudet University), a school for the […]

Malik Bendjelloul (1977 - 2014)

Bendjelloul was born in Ystad in Sweden, 55 kilometres (34 mi) east of Malmö, the son of Algerian-born physician Hacène Bendjelloul and Swedish translator and painter Veronica Schildt Bendjelloul. He was the brother of journalist Johar Bendjelloul and the nephew of actors Peter and Johan Schildt. Bendjelloul grew up in central and southern Sweden (Ängelholm) […]

Elaine Stritch (1925 - 2014)

Elaine Stritch was born on February 2, 1925, in Detroit, Michigan, the youngest daughter of Mildred (née Jobe; 1893–1987), a homemaker, and George Joseph Stritch (1892–1987), an executive with B.F. Goodrich. Her Roman Catholic family was well-off. Stritch’s father was of Irish descent, her mother of Welsh. Samuel Cardinal Stritch, Archbishop of Chicago from 1940 […]

Sid Caesar (1922 - 2014)

Caesar was the youngest of three sons born to Jewish immigrants living in Yonkers, New York. His father was Max Ziser and his mother was Ida (née Raphael). They likely were from Dambrowa Tarnowska, Poland. Reports state that the surname “Caesar” was given to Max, as a child, by an immigration official at Ellis Island. […]

Lauren Bacall (1924 - 2014)

Lauren Bacall Was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in The Bronx, New York, the only child of Natalie (née Weinstein-Bacal), a secretary who later legally changed her surname to Bacall, and William Perske, who worked in sales. Both her parents were Jewish. According to Bacall’s own statement, her mother emigrated from Kingdom […]

Jim Lange (1932 - 2014)

Lange began his radio broadcasting career in the Twin Cities after winning an audition as a teenager. He graduated from St. Thomas Academy high school, going on to the University of Minnesota on a scholarship from the Evans Scholars Foundation. After graduating from the University of Minnesota and serving in the Marines, Lange moved to […]

William Clay Ford Sr. (1925 - 2014)

Born on March 14, 1925, in Detroit, Michigan to Edsel Ford and Eleanor Lowthian Clay, Ford served in the U.S. Navy Air Corps during World War II. Following the war, Ford married Martha Parke Firestone, the granddaughter of Harvey Firestone and Idabelle Smith Firestone, on June 21, 1947. They had four children together: Martha Parke […]

Fred Phelps (1929 - 2014)

Phelps was born in Meridian, Mississippi, the elder of two children to Catherine Idalette Johnston and Fred Wade Phelps. His father was a railroad policeman for the Columbus and Greenville Railway and his mother was a homemaker.  On September 3, 1935, when Phelps was five years old, his mother died of esophageal cancer at the […]

Kate O’Mara (1939 - 2014)

O’Mara was born Frances Meredith Carroll to John F. Carroll, an RAF flying instructor, and actress Hazel Bainbridge (born 1909/1910 – died 7 January 1998). Her younger sister is actress Belinda Carroll. After boarding school she attended art school before becoming a full-time actress.  O’Mara married Jeremy Young in 1961, but the couple divorced in […]

Peaches Geldof (1989 - 2014)

Geldof was born in London on 13 March 1989, the second daughter of famed singer and Live Aid founder Bob Geldof and Paula Yates and a granddaughter of Hughie Green. She had two sisters, Pixie Geldof, Fifi Trixibelle Geldof and one half-sister, Tiger Lily Hutchence.  She grew up in Chelsea, London, and Faversham, Kent, and […]

Basil Paterson (1926 - 2014)

Paterson was born in Harlem on April 27, 1926, the son of Leonard James and Evangeline Alicia (Rondon) Paterson. His father was born on the island of Carriacou in the Grenadines and arrived in the United States aboard the S.S. Vestris on May 16, 1917 in New York City. His mother was born in Kingston, […]

Joan Rivers (1933 - 2014)

Rivers was born Joan Alexandra Molinsky in Brooklyn, New York in 1933. She was the younger daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants Beatrice (née Grushman; January 6, 1906 – October 1975) and Meyer C. Molinsky (December 7, 1900 – January 1985). Her elder sister, Mrs. Barbara Waxler, died on June 3, 2013, aged 82. Rivers was […]

Edmund Szoka (1927 - 2014)

Edmund Casimir Szoka (September 14, 1927 – August 20, 2014) was an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He was President Emeritus of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State and President Emeritus of the Governatorate of Vatican City State, having previously served as Bishop of Gaylord from 1971 to 1981 and Archbishop of […]