Charles Chaplin was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era.
Charlie Chaplin, considered to be one of the most pivotal stars of the early days of Hollywood, lived an interesting life both in his films and behind the camera.
Chaplin was born in Walworth, London, England on April 16th, 1889 to Charles and Hannah (Hill) Chaplin, both music hall performers, who were married on June 22nd, 1885. After Charles Sr. separated from Hannah to perform in New York City, Hannah then tried to resurrect her stage career. Unfortunately, her singing voice had a tendency to break at unexpected moments.
Chaplin began his official acting career at the age of eight, touring with The Eight Lancashire Lads.
He traveled west to California in December 1913 and signed on with Keystone Studios’ popular comedy director Mack Sennett, who had seen Chaplin perform on stage in New York.
Chaplin’s life and career was full of scandal and controversy. His first big scandal was during World War I, during which time his loyalty to England, his home country, was questioned. He had never applied for US citizenship, but claimed that he was a «paying visitor» to the United States. Many British citizens called Chaplin a coward and a slacker. Chaplin’s later film El gran dictador (1940), which was his first «talkie», also created a stir. In the film, Chaplin plays a humorous caricature of Adolf Hitler.
Chaplin was married four times and had a total of 11 children.
In contrast to many of his boisterous characters, Chaplin was a quiet man who kept to himself a lot. He also had an «un-millionaire» way of living. Even after he had accumulated millions, he continued to live in shabby accommodations.
In 1921, Chaplin was decorated by the French government for his outstanding work as a filmmaker, and was elevated to the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1952. In 1972, he was honored with an Academy Award for his «incalculable effect in making motion pictures the art form of the century.» He was awarded Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire in the 1975 Queen’s Honours List for his services to entertainment. Chaplin’s other works included musical scores he composed for many of his films. He also authored two autobiographical books, «My Autobiography» in 1964 and its companion volume, «My Life in Pictures» in 1974.
Chaplin died of natural causes on December 25, 1977 at his home in Switzerland. In 1978, Chaplin’s corpse was stolen from its grave and was not recovered for three months; he was re-buried in a vault surrounded by cement. Charlie Chaplin was considered one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of American cinema, whose movies were and still are popular throughout the world, and have even gained notoriety as time progresses. His films show, through the Little Tramp’s positive outlook on life in a world full of chaos, that the human spirit has and always will remain the same.
Liza Minnelli was born on March 12, 1946, in Los Angeles, California. Her mother, actress Judy Garland, was a famous performer and occasionally included Minnelli in her performances. Minnelli pursued a stage career as a teenager and performed on Broadway. While her first appearances were with her superstar mother, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli has been able to step out of her mother’s shadow to establish a substantial career as a performer. In addition to Garland, Liza’s father Vincente Minnelli was also well known in Hollywood for his work as a director. Minnelli made her film debut as a toddler in the musical comedy In the Good Old Summertime (1949), which starred her mother and Van Johnson. Her parents divorced in 1951, and Minnelli divided her time between her parents. Her mother married producer Sid Luft in 1952, and Minnelli soon was a big sister to half-siblings Lorna (born in 1952) and Joey (born in 1955). Minnelli had a difficult relationship with her mother over the years as Minnelli tried to care for Garland who suffered from an addiction to pills and from depression. In the 1950s, her father married again and had a daughter, Christiana Nina, with his second wife Georgette Magnani. Minnelli remained close to her father throughout the rest of his life.
Aspiring Actress
As a teenager, Minnelli gave up on school and went to New York City to pursue a stage career. She landed a role in the off-Broadway revival of the musical Best Foot Forward in 1963, which brought her strong reviews. Around this time, Minnelli also appeared on her mother’s short-lived television series, The Judy Garland Show. Minnelli also performed with her mother during Garland’s stint at the Palladium in London and wowed audiences and her mother with her vocal prowess. According to The New York Times, Minnelli said «It was like Mama suddenly realized I was good.» In her first leading Broadway role, Minnelli appeared as the title character in Flora, The Red Menace in 1965. The light musical comedy poked fun at the 1930s communist movement. While it only ran for a few weeks, the musical brought Minnelli a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. She was only 19 at the time, making her one of the youngest performers to ever win the award. Minnelli went on to co-star in the dramatic comedy Charlie Bubbles (1967) opposite Albert Finney. Playing an offbeat misfit named Pookie, she received her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her work in the 1969 film The Sterile Cuckoo. During the production of her next film, Otto Preminger’s Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1969), Minnelli suffered a great loss. Her mother died from an accidental drug overdose on June 22
Mainstream Success
Two years later, Minnelli landed her greatest film role, playing floundering nightclub singer Sally Bowles in the musical Cabaret (1972), which was set in Germany in the 1930s. The film, directed by Bob Fosse, showcased her singing talents as well as her range as an actress. For her efforts, Minnelli won the Academy Award for Best Actress. The film won eight awards in total, including a Best Supporting Actor award for Joel Grey and Best Director for Fosse. Minnelli’s hot streak continued with the television special, Liza with a Z, which was produced by Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse. The show won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Single Program—Variety and Popular Music in 1973. After those great successes, however, Minnelli’s film career hit a rough patch with such flops as Lucky Lady (1975) and A Matter of Time (1976), which was directed by her father. The musical New York, New York (1977) gave her a chance to work with famed director Martin Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro. Despite the stellar cast and crew, the film bombed at the box office and received mostly negative reviews. Again working with Scorsese, Minnelli returned to Broadway in The Act in 1977. She played a washed-up singer trying to revive her musical career. Giving an outstanding performance, Minnelli netted her second Tony Award for Best Actress in a musical. A few years later, she had another success on the big screen with the romantic comedy Arthur (1981). Minnelli co-starred with Dudley Moore as a waitress who falls in love with a wealthy, but often inebriated man.
Veteran Performer
By the mid-1980s, Minnelli was ready to tackle her own problems with drugs and alcohol. She went to the Betty Ford Clinic for rehabilitation. After getting sober, Minnelli toured extensively and acted in several forgettable films, including Rent-A-Cop (1987) and Arthur 2: On the Rocks (1988), a sequel that failed to recapture the magic of the 1981 hit. In 1986, Minnelli lost her father who died of heart failure. She participated in the critically acclaimed documentary, Minnelli on Minnelli: Liza Remembers Vincente, the following year, which received several Emmy Award nominations. Around this time, she teamed up Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. for a world tour called The Ultimate Event. Her acting career perked up in recent years, with her humorous guest appearances on the series Arrested Development in 2004 and 2005 and her role in Sex and the City 2 (2010). For the most part, however, Minnelli has focused on live performances. She gives numerous concerts each year around the world. Unlucky in love, Minnelli has been married four times. Her first marriage was to Australian singer-songwriter Peter Allen, which lasted from 1967 to 1972. From 1974 to 1979, Minnelli was married to Jack Haley Jr. Her longest union was with sculptor Mark Gero, spanning from 1979 to 1992. Her 2002 marriage to producer David Gest ended after 16 months.
Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and promoting economic and financial modernization. Reared in a poor family on the western frontier, Lincoln was mostly self-educated. He became a country lawyer, an Illinois state legislator, and a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives, but failed in two attempts at a seat in the United States Senate.
Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend Federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on the states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained within the Union. The Civil War had begun.
«I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families–second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks…. My father … removed from Kentucky to … Indiana, in my eighth year…. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up…. Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher … but that was all.»
Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many years. His law partner said of him, «His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.»
Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to the war. In his planning for peace, the President was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay down their arms and join speedily in reunion.
The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural Address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.: «With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds…. «
On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln’s death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.
Dame Agatha Christie (15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays.
She didn’t go to school but was educated at home. She was a bright child, who taught herself to read by the age of five. She liked reading and she also took piano, singing, dancing, tennis… lessons.
she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections (especially those featuring Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple), and her successful West End plays.
Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time.
Her books have been translated into at least 103 languages.
Agatha Christie went to school in Paris at age of sixteen to study music. She married Archibald Christie in 1914, and they had a daughter called Rosalind in 1919.
Many of her books and short stories have been filmed, some more than once (Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and 4.50 from Paddington for instance), and many have been adapted for television, radio, video games and comics.
Agatha Christie became a Dame of the British Empire in 1971.
Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976 at age 85 from natural causes at her Winterbrook House in the north of Cholseyparish, adjoining Wallingford in Oxfordshire (formerly part of Berkshire). She is buried in the nearby churchyard of St Mary’s, Cholsey.
William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, in England in 1564. While his exact birth date is unknown, it is most often celebrated on April 23, the feast of St. George. He was the third of seven children born to John and Mary Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s father was a tanner and glove maker. He was also a fairly prominent political figure, being an alderman of Stratford for years, and serving a term as «high bailiff» (mayor). He died in 1601, leaving little land to William. Not much is known of Mary Shakespeare, except that she had a wealthier family than John. William Shakespeare attended a very good grammar school in Stratford-upon- Avon, though the time period during which he attended school is not known. His instructors were all Oxford graduates, and his studies were primarily in Latin. Little else is known of his boyhood. In 1582 at 18 years of age, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a lady seven or eight years older than he from Shottery, a village a mile from Stratford. Their first daughter, Susanna, was born in 1583, followed by twins in 1585, Hamnet and Judith. By 1592, Shakespeare was an established playwright in London. The plague kept the theaters closed most of the time, and it was during this time that Shakespeare wrote his earliest sonnets and poems. Shakespeare did most of his theater work in a district northeast of London, in two theaters owned by James Burbage, called the Theatre and the Curtain. In 1598, Burbage moved to Bankside and built the famous Globe Theatre, in which Shakespeare owned stock. Around this time, Shakespeare applied for and got a coat of arms, with the motto: Non sanz droict (not without right). This gave him the standing of a gentleman, something that was not generally associated with actors, who were considered to be in the same class with vagrants and criminals.
William-Shakespeare. Personality of the month.
In 1603, Shakespeare’s theatrical company was taken under the patronage of King James I, and became known as the King’s Company. In 1608, the company acquired the Blackfriars Theatre. Shakespeare soon joined the group of the now famous writers who gathered at Mermaid Tavern, located on Bread Street in Cheapside. Among others, some of the writers who frequented the Tavern were Sir Walter Raleigh (the founder), and Ben Jonson. Shakespeare retired from theatre in 1610 and returned to Stratford. In 1613 the Globe Theatre burned down, but Shakespeare remained quite wealthy and contributed to the building of the new Globe Theatre . Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616 and was buried in the chancel of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford. A monument to Shakespeare was set up on the north wall of the chancel, with a bust of Shakespeare. The bust and the engraving by Droeshout that prefixed the First Folio are the only renderings of Shakespeare that are considered to be accurate. In Shakespeare’s will, he left most of his property to Susanna and her daughter, except for his «second-best bed,» which he left to his wife.
Blog de la Academia Paraninfo 