Tom Foley (1929 - 2013)

Foley was born in Spokane, Washington, the son of Helen Marie (née Higgins), a school teacher, and Ralph E. Foley, a Superior Court Judge. He was of Irish Catholic descent. In 1946, he graduated from the Jesuit-run Gonzaga Preparatory School in Spokane. He went on to attend Gonzaga University in Spokane and the University of […]

Bill Young (1930 - 2013)

Young was born in Harmarville, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, in 1930. He had Irish, German, and Swiss ancestry. He grew up in a Pennsylvania coal town in a shotgun shack. His father abandoned the family and a flood washed away their home at age 6. An uncle had a hunting camp in Florida, so […]

Lou Scheimer (1928 - 2013)

Early in Filmation’s history, Scheimer also contributed a number of guest or secondary voices for the various productions. Amongst these was the voice of N’kima, Tarzan’s monkey companion in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle (1976–81).  Scheimer played a significant role in the creation of the cartoon He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Bravestarr. […]

Jovanka Broz (1924 - 2013)

She was born on 7 December 1924 to an ethnic Serbian farming family in Pećane, in the kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians, present day Croatia. World War II broke out when she was nearly 15-years-old. The family was forced to flee the Ustasha regime that took power in the newly created Nazi-puppet Independent State […]

Noel Harrison (1934 - 2013)

He was born in Kensington in London in 1934. His mother Collette Thomas was the first of Rex Harrison’s six wives; they divorced in 1940. Harrison lived with his mother’s parents in Bude, North Cornwall, during World War II. At fifteen his mother took him out of school at Radley to live in the Swiss […]

Sir Anthony Caro (1924 - 2013)

Caro was born in New Malden, England to a Jewish family and was the youngest of three children. When Caro was 3, his father, a stockbroker, moved the family to a farm in Churt, Surrey. Caro was educated at Charterhouse School where his housemaster introduced him to Charles Wheeler. In the holidays he studied at […]

Marcia Wallace (1942 - 2013)

Marcia Wallace Marcia Karen Wallace was born in Creston, Iowa on November 1, 1942, the eldest of three children of Arthur “Poke” Wallace and wife Joann. Her father owned and operated “Wallace Sundries”, a general merchandise store, where Marcia, her sister Sharon, and brother Jim would often help out. While in high school, a teacher […]

Charlie Trotter (1959 - 2013)

For five years after college, he worked and studied in Chicago, San Francisco (at the California Culinary Academy), Florida and Europe.  Trotter was the host of the 1999 PBS cooking show The Kitchen Sessions with Charlie Trotter, in which he details his recipes and cooking techniques. He likened cooking to an improvisational jazz session in […]

John Tavener (1944 - 2013)

Tavener was born on 28 January 1944 in Wembley, London. His parents ran a family building firm and his father was also an organist at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Frognal, Hampstead. At the age of 12, Tavener was taken to Glyndebourne to hear Mozart’s The Magic Flute, a work he loved for the rest […]

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. […]