Oliver Sacks (1933 - 2015)

Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE, FRCP (9 July 1933 – 30 August 2015) was a British neurologist, naturalist and author who spent his professional life in the United States. Oliver Sacks felt that the brain was the “most incredible thing in the universe” and therefore important to study. He became widely known for writing best-selling case […]

Daws Butler (1916 - 1988)

Daws Butler was born on November 16, 1916 in Toledo, Ohio, the only child of Ruth Butler and Charles Allen Butler. The family later moved from Ohio to Oak Park, Illinois, where Butler got interested in impersonating people. In 1935, the future voice master started as an impressionist, entering multiple amateur contests and winning most of them. […]

John Stephenson (1923 - 2015)

John Winfield Stephenson was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the oldest son of Ray and Martha Stephenson. Stephenson went to Ripon College and was active in campus drama. Stephenson wanted to be a lawyer and studied at the University of Wisconsin Law School. After serving in the United States Army Air Forces, as a gunner and […]

Mary Healy (1918 - 2015)

Mary Healy was born April 14, 1918, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Crowned Miss New Orleans in 1935, Healy performed as a singer in the New Orleans area. She made her first screen appearance in Josette (1938). In 1939 she had major film roles in Second Fiddle and Star Dust, in which she sang the title […]

Pierre Brice (1929 - 2015)

Pierre Brice was born in Brest, France. When he was 19, Brice enlisted in the French Army and fought in the First Indochina War. While patrolling in Indochina, one of his team triggered a mine and its explosion sent Brice whirling through the air, but left him virtually unhurt. Later he served as a paratrooper […]

Setsuko Hara (1920 - 2015)

Setsuko Hara was born Masae Aida (会田 昌江 Aida Masae?) in what is now Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama in a family with three sons and five daughters. Her elder sister was married to film director Hisatora Kumagai, which gave her an entry into the world of the cinema and she went to work for Nikkatsu Studios in […]

Saeed Jaffrey (1929 - 2015)

Saeed Jaffrey, OBE (Punjabi: ਸਈਦ ਜਾਫ਼ਰੀ, Urdu: سعید جعفری; Hindi: सईद जाफ़री; 8 January 1929 – 15 November 2015) was an Indian-born British actor whose versatility and fluency in multiple languages allowed him to straddle radio, stage, television and film in a career that spanned over six decades and more than a hundred and fifty […]

Lynn Borden (1937 - 2015)

Born Lynn Freyse in Detroit, Michigan to Bill (1898–1969) and Evelyn S. Freyse (1908–2003), her family moved to Cleveland, Ohio and later Tucson, Arizona, in hopes of coping with her mother’s health needs, which required a warm, dry climate. She had a brother, Steve. Lynn’s father, a Detroit native, was a cartoonist who drew the […]

Holly Woodlawn (1946 - 2015)

Holly Woodlawn was born as Haroldo Santiago Franceschi Rodriguez Danhakl in Juana Díaz, Puerto Rico, to an American soldier of German descent, and Aminta Rodriguez, a native Puerto Rican, and grew up in Miami Beach, where she came out at a young age. She adopted the name Holly from the heroine of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, […]

Richard Johnson (1927 - 2015)

Richard Johnson was born in Upminster, Essex, the son of Frances Louisa Olive (née Tweed) and Keith Holcombe Johnson. Johnson went to Felsted School, then trained at RADA and made his first professional appearances on stage in Manchester with John Gielgud’s company in a production of Hamlet in 1944. He served in the Royal Navy from […]

Terry Pratchett (1948 - 2015)

Terry Pratchett was born on 28 April 1948 in Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, England, the only child of David and Eileen Pratchett, of Hay-on-Wye[1] and he attended Holtspur School. His family moved to Bridgwater, Somerset, briefly in 1957, following which he passed his eleven plus exam in 1959, earning a place in High Wycombe Technical High […]

Melody Patterson (1949 - 2015)

Melody Patterson (April 16, 1949 – August 20, 2015) was an American actress known for her role as Wrangler Jane in the 1960s television series F Troop. Patterson, who began her career performing in plays at the age of four, attended the Hollywood Professional School and later studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in […]

Windell Middlebrooks (1979 - 2015)

Windell Middlebrooks was born in Fort Worth, Texas. He was an alumnus of Sterling College in Sterling, Kansas, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Theatre/Communications, the Los Angeles Film Studies Center, and University of California, Irvine, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts in acting in 2004. For one season, he worked at the […]

Shirley Stelfox (1941 - 2015)

Born at Dukinfield, Cheshire, on 11 April 1941, Shirley Stelfox early caught the acting bug, despite suffering from bilateral amblyopia, leaving her short-sighted. She managed to overcome this handicap to secure a place at RADA wherever classmates were Edward Fox, John Thaw and Sarah Miles. After Royal Academy of Dramatic Art Stelfox started straight at the […]

Jonathan Crombie (1966 - 2015)

Jonathan Crombie was born in Toronto on October 12, 1966. His father, David Crombie, was the mayor of Toronto from 1972 to 1978 and a Canadian federal Cabinet Minister in the 1980s. Crombie attended Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute, where he was spotted by casting agent Diane Polley performing in a production of The Wizard of […]

Harris Wittels (1984 - 2015)

Harris Wittels was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the son of Dr. Ellison Wittels and Maureen (née Davidson) Wittels, and raised in Houston, Texas. Wittels described his father as “the funniest dude alive”. He had one older sister, voiceover actress Stephanie Wittels. He was Jewish, and had his bar mitzvah at Temple Emanu-El, across the […]

Marjorie Lord (1918 - 2015)

In 1935, at the age of 16, Marjorie Lord made her Broadway debut in The Old Maid with Judith Anderson. Her other Broadway appearances came in Signature (1945), Little Brown Jug (1946), and The Girl in the Freudian Slip (1967). Although most of Lord’s success came in television, she said in 1963: “I am primarily a […]

Coleen Gray (1922 - 2015)

Coleen Gray was born Doris Bernice Jensen on October 23, 1922 in Staplehurst, Nebraska, the daughter of a farmer. After graduating from high school, she studied drama at Hamline University, and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts. She travelled to California, and worked as a waitress in a restaurant in La Jolla. After […]

George Coe (1929 - 2015)

George Coe (May 10, 1929 – July 18, 2015) was an American film, stage and television actor. George Coe was born George Julian Cohen in Jamaica, Queens, New York. His Broadway theater career began in 1957 and included turns as “M. Lindsey Woolsey” opposite Angela Lansbury in the original production of Mame; as “Owen O’Malley” in […]

George Cole (1925 - 2015)

George Cole was born in Tooting, London. He was given up for adoption at ten days old and adopted by George and Florence Cole, Tooting council employee and cleaner respectively. He attended secondary school in nearby Morden. He left school at 14 to be a butcher’s boy, and had an ambition to join the Merchant […]

Martin Milner (1931 - 2015)

Martin Milner was born on December 28, 1931, to film distributor Sam Gordon Milner and Paramount Theater circuit dancer Mildred (née Martin) in Detroit, Michigan. The family left Detroit when he was a young child and moved frequently before settling in Seattle, Washington, by the time he was nine. There he became involved in acting, […]

Alberta Watson (1955 - 2015)

Alberta Watson was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1955. She grew up in Toronto with her mother Grace, a factory worker, and her brother. She began performing with a local Toronto theater group, T.H.O.G. (Theater House of God), of the Bathurst Street United Church at age 15. Watson took a workshop for the Hair musical. While […]

Darren Shahlavi (1972 - 2015)

Darren Shahlavi was born to Iranian immigrant parents at Stockport, Cheshire, England on 5 August 1972. At the age of 7, Shahlavi started studying Judo in a rented acting theatre, and would arrive early to peek at the actors performing, after discovering Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan films he dreamed of being in action films […]

Stanley Baker (1928 - 1976)

William Stanley Baker was born in Ferndale, Rhondda Valley, Glamorgan, Wales, the youngest of three children. His father was a coal miner who lost a leg in a pit accident but continued working as a lift operator at the mine until his death. Baker grew up a self-proclaimed “wild kid” interested in only “football and […]

King Vidor (1894 - 1982)

King Vidor (pronounced “vee-dor”) was born in Galveston, Texas, where he survived the great Galveston Hurricane of 1900.  A freelance newsreel cameraman and cinema projectionist, Vidor made his debut as a director in 1913 with The Grand Military Parade. In Hollywood from 1915, he worked as a screenwriter and as director of a series of […]

Ronald Neame (1911 - 2010)

Ronald Neame’s parents were the photographer Elwin Neame and the actress Ivy Close. He studied at University College School and Hurstpierpoint College. His father died in 1923, and Neame took a job with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company as an office boy. Later, through his mother’s contacts in the British film industry, Neame started at Elstree […]

Mary Clare Absalom (1892 - 1970)

Mary Clare Absalom was born in 1892. She trained at a dramatic school and began her career on the London stage at the age of 18 in 1910. She appeared in the film The Black Spider in 1920, and thereafter divided her time between the stage and the cinema. In September 1936 she played the […]

Soledad Miranda (1943 - 1970)

Soledad Miranda was born Soledad Rendón Bueno on 9 July 1943 in Seville, Spain. Soledad (whose name translates as solitude or loneliness) was the niece of the famous Spanish singer-actress-flamenco dancer Paquita Rico. Soledad was the first child of parents who had little money and, eventually, six children. It was necessary to contribute to the […]

Sonny Tufts (1911 - 1970)

Bowen Charlton Tufts III (nicknamed “Sonny”) was born in Boston, Massachusetts into a prominent banking family. The Tufts family patriarch, Peter Tufts, sailed to America from Wilby, Norfolk, England in 1638. His great uncle was businessman and philanthropist Charles Tufts, for whom Tufts University is named. Sonny Tufts attended the Phillips Exeter Academy and later broke […]

Alec Clunes (1912 - 1970)

Alexander “Alec” Sheriff de Moro Clunes (17 May 1912 – 13 March 1970) was an English actor and theatrical manager Among the plays he presented were Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not For Burning. Alec Clunes gave the actor and dramatist Peter Ustinov his first break with his production The House of Regrets. His film career was […]