Sergio Corbucci (1926 - 1990)

Sergio Corbucci was born in Rome. He started his career by directing mostly low-budget sword and sandal movies. Among his first spaghetti westerns were the films Grand Canyon Massacre (1964) (which he co-directed under the pseudonym, Stanley Corbett with Albert Band), as well as Minnesota Clay (1965), his first solo directed spaghetti western. Corbucci’s first commercial […]

Dino Risi (1916 - 2008)

Dino Risi (23 December 1916 – 7 June 2008) was an Italian film director. With Mario Monicelli, Luigi Comencini, Nanni Loy and Ettore Scola, he was one of the masters of Commedia all’italiana. He was born in Milan. Risi had two brothers, an older brother, Fernando, a cinematographer and a younger brother, Nelo (1920–2015) a director […]

Marisa Merlini (1923 - 2008)

Marisa Merlini (6 August 1923 – 27 July 2008) was an Italian character actress active in Italy’s post-World War II cinema. Merlini appeared in over fifty films during her career, which spanned from World War II to 2005. She was, perhaps, best known for her role in the 1953 film Pane, Amore e Fantasia, directed […]

Carlo Ponti (1912 - 2007)

Carlo Ponti was born in Magenta, Lombardy and studied law at the University of Milan. He joined his father’s law firm in Milan and became involved in the film business through negotiating contracts. Ponti attempted to establish a film industry in Milan in 1940 and produced Mario Soldati’s Piccolo Mondo Antico there, starring Alida Valli, […]

Vittorio De Sica (1901 - 1974)

Born into poverty in Sora, Lazio (1901), Vittorio De Sica began his career as a theatre actor in the early 1920s and joined Tatiana Pavlova’s theatre company in 1923. In 1933 he founded his own company with his wife Giuditta Rissone and Sergio Tofano. The company performed mostly light comedies, but they also staged plays […]

Marcello Mastroianni (1924 - 1996)

Marcello Mastroianni was born in Fontana Liri, a small village in the Apennines in the province of Frosinone, Lazio, and grew up in Turin and Rome. He was the son of Ida (née Irolle) and Ottone Mastroianni, who ran a carpentry shop, and the nephew of sculptor Umberto Mastroianni. During World War II, after the […]

Alessandro Blasetti (1970 - 1987)

Alessandro Blasetti was born in Rome, where he also died. After studying law at university, Blasetti chose to become a journalist and film critic. He worked for several film magazines and led a campaign for national film production, which had largely ceased by this point. In 1919 he made a brief foray into acting when […]

Paolo Stoppa (1906 - 1988)

Paolo Stoppa (6 June 1906 – 1 May 1988) was an Italian actor and dubber. Born in Rome, he began as a stage actor in 1927 in the theater in Rome and began acting in films in 1932. As a stage actor, his most celebrated works include those after World War II, when he met director […]

Agenore Incrocci (1919 - 2005)

Agenore Incrocci (4 July 1919 – 15 November 2005), best known as Age, was an Italian screenwriter, considered one of the fathers of the commedia all’italiana as one of the two members of the duo Age & Scarpelli, together with Furio Scarpelli. Incrocci was born in Brescia, into a family including several actors, such as his […]

Isabella Colbran (1785 - 1845)

Isabella Colbran, born in Madrid, studied under Girolamo Crescenti in Paris. By the age of twenty she had achieved fame throughout Europe for her voice. She moved to Naples, a hub of European music during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Teatro di San Carlo, built during the Bourbon dynasty, had been home to famous […]

Bernard Cigrand (1866 - 1932)

Bernard John Cigrand (October 1, 1866 – May 16, 1932), a dentist, has a strong claim to being considered the father of Flag Day in the United States. Born in Waubeka, Wisconsin, Cigrand practiced dentistry in Chicago, Batavia, and Aurora, and was the third dean of Columbian Dental College, now the University of Illinois at Chicago […]

Nate Champion (1857 - 1892)

The dramatic events of 1892 took place against a background of violent conflict over land use that stretched from 1889 to 1909. Historian Richard Maxwell Brown refers to the events in Wyoming as part of a wider “Western Civil War of Incorporation.” In the early days in Wyoming, most of the land was in the public […]

Stan Chambers (1923 - 2015)

Stanley Holroyd “Stan” Chambers (August 11, 1923 – February 13, 2015) was an American television reporter who worked for KTLA in Los Angeles from 1947 to 2010. Stan Chambers was born in Los Angeles. His career began shortly after KTLA became the first commercially licensed TV station in the western United States. His April 1949 on-scene […]

Madeleine Astor (1893 - 1940)

Madeleine Talmage Force was born on June 19, 1893, in Brooklyn, New York. She was the younger daughter of William Hurlbut Force (1852–1917) and Katherine Arvilla Talmage (1863–1930). Madeleine’s elder sister Katherine Emmons Force (1891–1956) was a real estate businesswoman and socialite. Through father William, she and Katherine had French ancestry and were grandnieces of […]

Margaret Brown (1867 - 1932)

Margaret Tobin was born in a two-room cottage, near the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri, on what is now known as Denkler’s alley. Her parents were Irish Catholic immigrants John Tobin (1823–1899) and Johanna Tobin (1825–1905); her siblings were Daniel Tobin (born 1863), Michael Tobin (born 1866), William Tobin (born 1869), and Helen Tobin (born […]

Charles Lightoller (1874 - 1952)

Charles Herbert Lightoller, DSC & Bar, RD (30 March 1874 – 8 December 1952) was the second officer on board the RMS Titanic and the most senior officer to survive the Titanic disaster. As an officer in charge of loading passengers into lifeboats, Lightoller not only enforced with utmost strictness the “women and children first” protocol; […]

Isidor Straus (1845 - 1912)

Isidor Straus was born into a Jewish family in Otterberg in the former Palatinate, then ruled by the Kingdom of Bavaria. He was the first of five children of Lazarus Straus (1809–1898) and his second wife Sara (1823–1876). His siblings were Hermine (1846–1922), Nathan (1848–1931), Jakob Otto (1849–1851) and Oscar Solomon Straus (1850–1925). In 1854 […]

Ida Straus (1849 - 1912)

Rosalie Ida Blun was born in 1849 in Worms, Germany to Nathan Blun (1815–1879) and his wife Wilhelmine “Mindel” (née Freudenberg; 1814–1868). She was the fifth of seven children including Amanda (1839–1907), Elias Nathan (1842–1878), Louis (1843–1927), Augusta Carolina (1845–1905), Moritz (1850–1858) and Abraham Blun (1853–1881). She emigrated to the United States with her family. In […]

Jesse Straus (1872 - 1936)

Jesse Straus was born Manhattan. He graduated from Harvard College in 1893. He and his brothers Percy and Herbert, both also Harvard graduates, donated funds that built Straus Hall in Harvard Yard. After college Jesse Straus was made to gain outside business experience before joining the family business. He worked as a clerk at the Manufacturers […]

Rodolfo Torre Cantú (1964 - 2010)

Rodolfo Torre Cantú was born in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, the fourth of five children of Ana María Cantú and Dr. Egidio Torre López, a distinguished public servant and PRI activist. He was married to Laura Graciela de la Garza Montoto, with whom he had three children: Laura, Rodolfo, and Paulina. Torre studied exclusively in institutions in […]

Édgar Morales Pérez (1973 - 2012)

Édgar Morales Pérez was born into an entrepreneur family, and studied at Civil Engineering at the Instituto Tecnológico de Matehuala. Upon graduation, he began working for Constructions Tribasa, a construction company that allowed him to participate in several infrastructure projects in Mexico and Guatemala. He then created his own construction company and began offering services […]

Eduardo Castro Luque (1963 - 2012)

Eduardo Castro Luque was born on 12 December 1963 in the Mexican northern city of Ciudad Obregón, Sonora. He was married to Rossana Coboj and had one boy named Eduardo. He held a bachelor’s degree in Business administration from the Sonora Institute of Technology. The 48-year-old politician had never held a political office before he was […]

María Salazar (1976 - 2012)

María Salazar was born in 1976 in Tiquicheo, a small town in the state of Michoacán, Mexico. She attended the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Morelia and earned a PhD in medicine. She began her political career by joining the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and from 2008 to 2011, she served as the […]

Randall Jarrell (1914 - 1965)

Randall Jarrell went on to teach at the University of Texas at Austin from 1939 to 1942, where he began to publish criticism and where he met his first wife, Mackie Langham. In 1942 he left the university to join the United States Army Air Forces. According to his obituary, he “[started] as a flying […]

Norman Shumway (1923 - 2006)

Norman Shumway was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He attended the University of Michigan for one year as an undergraduate until he was drafted by the Army in 1943, which sent him to John Tarleton Agricultural College in Stephenville, Texas for engineering training. He then underwent Army Specialized Training, which included nine months of pre-medical training […]

James Dickey (1923 - 1997)

James Dickey was born to lawyer Eugene Dickey and Maibelle Swift in Atlanta, Georgia, where he attended North Fulton High School in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood. In 1942 he enrolled at Clemson Agricultural College of South Carolina and played on the football team as a tailback. After one semester, he left school to enlist in the […]

Robert Warren (1905 - 1989)

While still an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University, Robert Warren became associated with the group of poets there known as the Fugitives, and somewhat later, during the early 1930s, Warren and some of the same writers formed a group known as the Southern Agrarians. He contributed “The Briar Patch” to the Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My […]

Frank Norris (1870 - 1902)

Frank Norris’s work often includes depictions of suffering caused by corrupt and greedy turn-of-the-century corporate monopolies. In The Octopus: A California Story, the Pacific and Southwest Railroad is implicated in the suffering and deaths of a number of ranchers in Southern California. At the end of the novel, after a bloody shootout between farmers and […]

Ida Tarbell (1857 - 1944)

Ida Tarbell began her career as a teacher at Poland Union Seminary in Poland, Ohio. She taught classes in geology, botany, geometry and trigonometry as well as languages, Greek, Latin, French and German. After two years, she realized teaching was too much for her and that she enjoyed writing more. As a suffragist, Tarbell had […]

Emma Goldman (1869 - 1940)

Emma Goldman (June 27 [O.S. June 15], 1869 – May 14, 1940) was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Born in Kovno, Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania) […]