Charles Hamlin (1861 - 1938)

Charles Sumner Hamlin (August 30, 1861 – April 24, 1938) was an American lawyer. He was the first Chairman of the Federal Reserve, serving from 1914 to 1916. Charles Hamlin was born in Boston, Massachusetts on August 30, 1861, and graduated from Harvard University in 1886. From 1893 to 1897 and again from 1913 to 1914 […]

Bobby Jones (1902 - 1971)

Bobby Jones Hall of Fame Golfer. Though his career was brief, and while he competed as an amateur, he is considered by many to have been the greatest practitioner of his game that ever lived. Born to a distinguished family of wealth and position, he was a child prodigy in golf and was instructed by […]

Bobby Vee (1943 - 2016)

Bobby Vee If you’ve never experienced a funeral where the priest spoke of “jam sessions” and the Eucharist was followed by rock ‘n roll, then you’ve likely never been to a funeral quite like Bobby Vee’s. Hundreds of mourners gathered at the St. John’s Abbey church at midday Wednesday for the funeral of the pop […]

Kay Starr (1922 - 2016)

Kay Starr In a career spanning seven decades, Kay Starr was primarily a solo act, but she also accompanied hard-swinging jazzmen such as Coleman Hawkins, Nat “King” Cole and Count Basie, the folksy country and western entertainer Tennessee Ernie Ford and the clean-cut pop crooner Pat Boone, among many others. Kay Starr made her professional […]

Eddie Carnett (1916 - 2016)

Eddie Carnett Major League Baseball’s oldest living former player tag has shifted, with the passing Monday night of a Connecticut man who had been carrying that honor. Mike Sandlock, an Old Greenwich native and resident of Cos Cob, died late Monday night, nearly six months past his 100th birthday. His son, also named Mike, stated […]

Anthony St Laurent (1970 - 2016)

Anthony St Laurent Anthony St Laurent was born of Italian parents, his father died when he was young and his mother remarried and both of them took her new husbands last name, St. Laurent. In July 1993, Robert DeLuca and Anthony St Laurent along with 24 others were indicted for running a bookmaking operation out […]

Janet Reno (1938 - 2016)

Janet Reno Janet Reno, the first woman to serve as U.S. attorney general, died Monday from complications related to Parkinson’s disease. She was 78 years old, and her remarkable life ― including a career that continued for years after her initial diagnosis ― reveals just how productive and purposeful life can be with the neurological condition. The […]

Nora Kaye (1920 - 1987)

Nora Kaye was born Nora Koreff in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Louise (1895-1973) and Gregory Joseph Koreff (1893-1976). She later changed her surname to Kaye. In 1936, she joined the American Ballet, directed by George Balanchine. She later became a member of the Radio City Music Hall corps de ballet […]

Ima Hogg (1882 - 1975)

Ima Hogg (July 10, 1882 – August 19, 1975), known as “The First Lady of Texas”, was an American philanthropist, patron and collector of the arts, and one of the most respected women in Texas during the 20th century. Hogg was an avid art collector, and owned works by Picasso, Klee, and Matisse, among others. […]

Ella Hall (1896 - 1981)

Ella Hall (March 17, 1896 – September 3, 1981) was an American actress of the silent era. She appeared in 94 films between 1912 and 1933. She was the mother of B-movie actress Ellen Hall. She was born Ella Hall in New York, New York, and moved to Hollywood in the early days of silent films, […]

Calvin Griffith (1911 - 1999)

The son of a minor league baseball player, Calvin Griffith was the nephew of Clark Griffith, the Hall of Fame former pitcher and manager who became president of the Senators in 1920. He raised Calvin from the age of 11, but did not adopt him when Calvin’s father died a year later. Calvin’s widowed mother […]

Julia Howe (1819 - 1910)

Julia Howe was born in New York City. She was the fourth of seven children born to an upper middle class couple. Her father, Samuel Ward III, was a Wall Street stockbroker, well-to-do banker, and strict Calvinist. Her mother, the occasional poet Julia Rush Cutler, was related to Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox” of the […]

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 […]