#13501
Mohamed Salah Ben Mrad
1881 - 1979 (98 years)
Mohamed Salah Ben Mrad , was a Tunisian theologian, journalist and intellectual. In 1931 he published Mourning on Haddad's Woman objecting to the expanded rights for women which were advocated by Tahar Haddad in his book Our Women in the Sharia and Society published one year earlier.
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George J. Adler
1821 - 1868 (47 years)
George J. Adler was a noted philologist and linguist. Early years Adler was born to John J. Adler and an unnamed mother in Germany in 1821. He arrived in the United States in 1833, with his parents, who settled in New York city, where the boy attended the public schools and entered the university of the city of New York, from which he was graduated valedictorian in 1844. Two years later he became a professor of German language at New York University, which position he filled for eight years.
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Hjalmar Falk
1859 - 1928 (69 years)
Peterolsen Groth Hjalmar Seierstedt Falk was a Norwegian linguist and philologist. A professor of philology at the University in Kristiania for about thirty years, he is particularly known for his etymological dictionary of the Norwegian and Danish language in cooperation with Alf Torp.
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Nino Rota
1911 - 1979 (68 years)
Giovanni Rota Rinaldi , better known as Nino Rota , was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. He also composed the music for two of Franco Zeffirelli's Shakespeare screen adaptations, and for the first two installments of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather trilogy, earning the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Godfather Part II .
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Alberto Ginastera
1916 - 1983 (67 years)
Alberto Evaristo Ginastera was an Argentine composer of classical music. He is considered to be one of the most important 20th-century classical composers of the Americas. Biography Ginastera was born in Buenos Aires to a Spanish father and an Italian mother. During his later years, he preferred to use the Catalan and Italian pronunciation of his surname – , with an initial soft 'G' like that of English 'George' – rather than with a Spanish 'J' sound .
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Gabriel Pierné
1863 - 1937 (74 years)
Henri Constant Gabriel Pierné was a French composer, conductor, pianist and organist. Biography Gabriel Pierné was born in Metz. His family moved to Paris, after Metz and part of Lorraine were annexed to Germany in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, gaining first prizes for solfège, piano, organ, counterpoint and fugue. He won the French Prix de Rome in 1882, with his cantata Edith. His teachers included Antoine François Marmontel, Albert Lavignac, Émile Durand, César Franck and Jules Massenet .
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Jelly Roll Morton
1890 - 1941 (51 years)
Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe , known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American ragtime and jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer of Louisiana Creole descent. Morton was jazz's first arranger, proving that a genre rooted in improvisation could retain its essential characteristics when notated. His composition "Jelly Roll Blues", published in 1915, was one of the first published jazz compositions. He also claimed to have invented the genre.
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Bob Wills
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
James Robert Wills was an American Western swing musician, songwriter, and bandleader. Considered by music authorities as the founder of Western swing, he was known widely as the King of Western Swing . He was also noted for punctuating his music with his trademark "ah-haa" calls.
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Herbert Wilcox
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Herbert Sydney Wilcox CBE was a British film producer and director. He was one of the most successful British filmmakers from the 1920s to the 1950s. He is best known for the films he made with his third wife Anna Neagle.
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Francesco Cavalli
1602 - 1676 (74 years)
Francesco Cavalli was a Venetian composer, organist and singer of the early Baroque period. He succeeded his teacher Claudio Monteverdi as the dominant and leading opera composer of the mid 17th-century. A central figure of Venetian musical life, Cavalli wrote more than forty operas, almost all of which premiered in the city's theaters. His best known works include Ormindo , Giasone and La Calisto .
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Gene Vincent
1935 - 1971 (36 years)
Vincent Eugene Craddock , known as Gene Vincent, was an American musician who pioneered the styles of rockabilly and rock and roll. His 1956 top ten hit with his backing band the Blue Caps, "Be-Bop-a-Lula", is considered a significant early example of rockabilly. His chart career was brief, especially in his home country of the US, where he notched three top 40 hits in 1956 and 1957, and never charted in the top 100 again. In the UK, he was a somewhat bigger star, racking up eight top 40 hits from 1956 to 1961.
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Karol Szymanowski
1882 - 1937 (55 years)
Karol Maciej Szymanowski was a Polish composer and pianist. He was a member of the modernist Young Poland movement that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th century. Szymanowski's early works show the influence of the late Romantic German school as well as the early works of Alexander Scriabin, as exemplified by his Étude Op. 4 No. 3 and his first two symphonies. Later, he developed an impressionistic and partially atonal style, represented by such works as the Third Symphony and his Violin Concerto No. 1. His third period was influenced by the folk music of the Polish Górale people, including the ballet Harnasie, the Fourth Symphony, and his sets of Mazurkas for piano.
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Manuel Moschopoulos
1265 - 1316 (51 years)
Manuel Moschopoulos , was a Byzantine commentator and grammarian, who lived during the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th century and was an important figure in the Palaiologan Renaissance. Moschopoulos means "little calf," and is probably a nickname.
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Étienne Méhul
1763 - 1817 (54 years)
Étienne Nicolas Méhul was a French composer of the classical period. He was known as "the most important opera composer in France during the Revolution". He was also the first composer to be called a "Romantic". He is known particularly for his operas, written in keeping with the reforms introduced by Christoph Willibald Gluck and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
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Dexter Gordon
1923 - 1990 (67 years)
Dexter Gordon was an American jazz tenor saxophonist, composer, and bandleader. He was among the most influential early bebop musicians, which included other greats such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell. Gordon's height was , so he was also known as "Long Tall Dexter" and "Sophisticated Giant". His studio and performance career spanned more than 40 years.
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Ferdinand Sommer
1875 - 1962 (87 years)
Ferdinand Sommer was a German classical and Indo-European philologist. From 1893 he studied at the universities of Marburg and Freiberg, where he was a pupil of Rudolf Thurneysen. In 1899 he obtained his habilitation from the University of Leipzig with the thesis Die Komparationssuffixe im Lateinischen . In 1902 he was named professor of Indo-European linguistics, Sanskrit and classical philology at the University of Basel, and later on in his career, he held professorships in Indo-European linguistics at the universities of Rostock , Jena and Bonn . From 1926 to 1951 he was a professor of c...
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Robert Dick Wilson
1856 - 1930 (74 years)
Robert Dick Wilson, PhD, DD was an American linguist and Presbyterian Old Testament scholar who devoted his life to prove the reliability of the Hebrew Bible. In his quest to determine the accuracy of the original manuscripts, Wilson learned 45 languages, including Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, as well as all the languages into which the Scriptures had been translated up to 600 AD.
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Agustín Lara
1897 - 1970 (73 years)
Ángel Agustín María Carlos Fausto Mariano Alfonso del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Lara y Aguirre del Pino , known as Agustín Lara, was a Mexican composer and performer of songs and boleros. He is recognized as one of the most popular songwriters of his era. His work was widely appreciated not only in Mexico but also in Central and South America, the Caribbean and Spain. After his death, he has also been recognized in the United States, Italy and Japan.
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Edmund Kean
1787 - 1833 (46 years)
Edmund Kean was a celebrated British Shakespearean stage actor born in England, who performed, among other places, in London, Belfast, New York, Quebec, and Paris. He was known for his short stature, tumultuous personal life, and controversial divorce.
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Gjergj Pekmezi
1872 - 1938 (66 years)
Gjergj Pekmezi was an Albanian linguist, philosopher, folklorist and diplomat. In 1916, he became a member of the Literary Commission of Shkodër, which established the first standard form of the Albanian language.
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Stoyko Stoykov
1912 - 1969 (57 years)
Stoyko Ivanov Stoykov was a Bulgarian linguist, Slavist. Biography Graduated Slavic Philology at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", . Specialized phonetics, dialectology, and Slavic linguistics in Prague, Czech Republic . Was granted PhD by the Univerzita Karlova . Worked at the Institute for Bulgarian Language of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences as an assistant , as a head of the Section for Bulgarian Dialectology with Linguistic Atlas and as a deputy director of the same institute . Also, worked in the Sofia University as an assistant , associate professor , and professor . Was Dean of the Phylological Faculty and Deputy Rector of the same university .
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François-Adrien Boieldieu
1775 - 1834 (59 years)
François-Adrien Boieldieu was a French composer, mainly of operas, often called "the French Mozart". His date of birth was also cited as December 15 by his biographer and writer Lucien Augé de Lassus and as September 15 by some local press releases.
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Robert Calvert
1945 - 1988 (43 years)
Robert Newton Calvert was a South African-British writer, poet, and musician. He is principally known for his role as lyricist, performance poet and lead vocalist of the space rock band Hawkwind. Early life Calvert was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and moved with his parents to England when he was two. He attended school in London and Margate, living in a flat in Arlington House. Having finished school he joined the Air Training Corps, in which he became a corporal and played trumpet for the 438 Squadron band. He then went on to college in Canterbury. After leaving college, and having been ...
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Konstantinas Sirvydas
1579 - 1631 (52 years)
Konstantinas Sirvydas was a Lithuanian religious preacher, lexicographer, and one of the pioneers of Lithuanian literature from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, at the time a confederal part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was a Jesuit priest, a professor at the Academia Vilnensis, and the author of, among other works, the first grammar of the Lithuanian language and the first trilingual dictionary in Lithuanian, Latin, and Polish . Famous for his eloquence, Sirvydas spent 10 years of his life preaching sermons at St. Johns' Church in Vilnius .
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Abraham Ecchellensis
1605 - 1664 (59 years)
Ibrahim al-Haqilani was a Maronite Catholic philosopher and linguist involved in the translation of the Bible into Arabic. He translated several Arabic works into Latin, the most important of which was the Chronicon orientale attributed to Ibn al-Rahib.
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William Hartnell
1908 - 1975 (67 years)
William Henry Hartnell was an English actor. He is best remembered for his portrayal of the first incarnation of the Doctor in Doctor Who from 1963 to 1966. In film, Hartnell notably appeared in Brighton Rock , The Mouse That Roared and This Sporting Life . He was associated with military roles, playing Company Sergeant Major Percy Bullimore in the ITV sitcom The Army Game and Sergeant Grimshaw, the title character in the first Carry On film Carry On Sergeant .
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Walter Damrosch
1862 - 1950 (88 years)
Walter Johannes Damrosch was a Kingdom of Prussia-born American conductor and composer. He was the director of the New York Symphony Orchestra and conducted the world premiere performances of various works, including Aaron Copland's Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, George Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F and An American in Paris, and Jean Sibelius' Tapiola. Damrosch was also instrumental in the founding of Carnegie Hall. He also conducted the first performance of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 with the composer himself as soloist.
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Munis Tekinalp
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
Moiz Cohen was a Turkish writer, philosopher, and journalist of Jewish heritage. He became an ideologue of different movements at different times: Ottomanism, Pan-Turkism, and Kemalism. Born to a Jewish family, he later changed his name to Munis Tekinalp.
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Frank Martin
1890 - 1974 (84 years)
Frank Martin was a Swiss composer, who spent much of his life in the Netherlands. Childhood and youth Born into a Huguenot family in the Eaux-Vives quarter of Geneva, the youngest of the ten children of a Calvinist pastor named Charles Martin, Frank Martin started to improvise on the piano prior to his formal schooling. At the age of nine he had already written a few songs, without external musical instruction. At age 12, he attended a performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion and was deeply affected by it.
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Roberto Rossellini
1906 - 1977 (71 years)
Roberto Gastone Zeffiro Rossellini was an Italian film director, screenwriter and producer. He was one of the most prominent directors of the Italian neorealist cinema, contributing to the movement with films such as Rome, Open City , Paisan , and Germany, Year Zero . He is also known for his films starring Ingrid Bergman, Stromboli , Europe '51 , Journey to Italy , Fear , and Joan of Arc at the Stake .
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Pierre Fournier
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Pierre Léon Marie Fournier was a French cellist who was called the "aristocrat of cellists" on account of his elegant musicianship and majestic sound. Biography Pierre Fournier was born in Paris, the son of a French Army general. His mother taught him to play the piano, but he had a mild case of polio as a child and lost dexterity in his feet and legs. Having difficulties with the piano pedals, he turned to the cello.
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Richard Armour
1906 - 1989 (83 years)
Richard Willard Armour was an American poet and prose writer who wrote more than 65 books. Life and works Armour was born in San Pedro, Los Angeles, California the only child of Harry W. and Sue Wheelock Armour. His father was a druggist, and Armour's autobiographical Drug Store Days recalls his childhood in both San Pedro and Pomona. He attended Pomona College and Harvard University, where he studied with the eminent Shakespearean scholar George Lyman Kittredge and obtained a Ph.D. in English philology. He was married to Kathleen Stevens and they had two children, Geoffrey and Karin, and he...
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Louis Spohr
1784 - 1859 (75 years)
Louis Spohr , baptized Ludewig Spohr, later often in the modern German form of the name Ludwig was a German composer, violinist and conductor. Highly regarded during his lifetime, Spohr composed ten symphonies, ten operas, eighteen violin concerti, four clarinet concerti, four oratorios, and various works for small ensemble, chamber music, and art songs. Spohr invented the violin chinrest and the orchestral rehearsal mark. His output spans the transition between Classical and Romantic music, but fell into obscurity following his death, when his music was rarely heard. The late twentieth centu...
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Frank Loesser
1910 - 1969 (59 years)
Frank Henry Loesser was an American songwriter who wrote the music and lyrics for the Broadway musicals Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, among others. He won a Tony Award for Guys and Dolls and shared the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for How to Succeed. He also wrote songs for over 60 Hollywood films and Tin Pan Alley, many of which have become standards, and was nominated for five Academy Awards for best song, winning once for "Baby, It's Cold Outside".
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Harl McDonald
1899 - 1955 (56 years)
Harl McDonald was an American composer, conductor, pianist and teacher. McDonald was born in Boulder, Colorado, and studied at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Redlands, and the Leipzig Conservatory. He was appointed a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania in 1927 and enjoyed other appointments at the University including the Director of the Music Department and Director of the University's Choral Society and the University of Pennsylvania Glee Club. Among his students there was Ann Wyeth McCoy. In addition to his administrative duties with the University, McDona...
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Harry Bloom
1913 - 1981 (68 years)
Harry Saul Bloom was a South African journalist, novelist, activist and lecturer. Early life and career Solomon Harris Bloom was born into a Jewish South African family. He was educated at the University of the Witwatersrand, obtaining his law degree in 1937. He subsequently became an advocate in Johannesburg. In 1940, he married Beryl Cynthia Gordon, after knowing her three weeks, and they moved to London, living in Old Compton Street during the Blitz. Writing under the pseudonyms Walter and Beryl Storm , they worked as war correspondents during the Second World War, and covered the Nurember...
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Mack Reynolds
1917 - 1983 (66 years)
Dallas McCord "Mack" Reynolds was an American science fiction writer. His pen names included Dallas Ross, Mark Mallory, Clark Collins, Dallas Rose, Guy McCord, Maxine Reynolds, Bob Belmont, and Todd Harding. His work focused on socioeconomic speculation, usually expressed in thought-provoking explorations of utopian societies from a radical, sometime satiric perspective. He was a popular author from the 1950s to the 1970s, especially with readers of science fiction and fantasy magazines.
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Fritz Helmuth Ehmcke
1878 - 1965 (87 years)
Fritz Helmuth Ehmcke was a German graphical designer, typographer and illustrator. Born in Inowrocław, Prussia , Ehmcke was educated as a lithographer in Berlin during 1893–1897. In 1900, he was a co-founder of Steglitzer Werkstatt. From 1903, he taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Düsseldorf, from 1913 to 1938 in Munich, during 1920-1921 also in Zürich. During 1946 to 1948, he was professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.
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Robert Shackleton
1919 - 1986 (67 years)
Robert Shackleton CBE was an English French language philologist and librarian. Shackleton was born in Todmorden, West Riding of Yorkshire. He was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, and taught French at Brasenose College, Oxford, from 1946 to 1966. He also served as college librarian from 1948 to 1966. From 1966 to 1979 he served as Bodley's Librarian, the director of the Bodleian Library. From 1979 to 1986 he was Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the university, a position that carried with it a Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford.
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Celia Johnson
1908 - 1982 (74 years)
Dame Celia Elizabeth Johnson, was an English actress, whose career included stage, television and film. She is especially known for her roles in the films In Which We Serve , This Happy Breed , Brief Encounter and The Captain's Paradise . For Brief Encounter, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. A six-time BAFTA Award nominee, she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie .
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Harold Williams
1876 - 1928 (52 years)
Harold Whitmore Williams was a New Zealand journalist, foreign editor of The Times and polyglot who is considered to have been one of the most accomplished polyglots in history. He is said to have known over 58 languages, naturally including his native English. He "proved to know every language of the Austrian Empire", Hungarian, Czech, Albanian, Serbian, Romanian, Swedish, Basque, Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Coptic, Egyptian, Hittite, Old Irish, and other dialects.
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Alessandro Blasetti
1900 - 1987 (87 years)
Alessandro Blasetti was an Italian film director and screenwriter who influenced Italian neorealism with the film Quattro passi fra le nuvole. Blasetti was one of the leading figures in Italian cinema during the Fascist era. He is sometimes known as the "father of Italian cinema" because of his role in reviving the struggling industry in the late 1920s.
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Lester Young
1909 - 1959 (50 years)
Lester Willis Young , nicknamed "Pres" or "Prez", was an American jazz tenor saxophonist and occasional clarinetist. Coming to prominence while a member of Count Basie's orchestra, Young was one of the most influential players on his instrument. In contrast to many of his hard-driving peers, Young played with a relaxed, cool tone and used sophisticated harmonies, using what one critic called "a free-floating style, wheeling and diving like a gull, banking with low, funky riffs that pleased dancers and listeners alike".
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Flavius Mithridates
1445 - 1489 (44 years)
Flavius Mithridates was an Italian Jewish humanist scholar, who flourished at Rome in the second half of the 15th century. He is said to be from Sicily, and was a Christian convert, known for preaching impressively if tendentiously. He also had a knowledge of Arabic.
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Gene Krupa
1909 - 1973 (64 years)
Eugene Bertram Krupa , was an American jazz drummer, bandleader and composer. Krupa is widely regarded as one of the most influential drummers in the history of popular music. His drum solo on Benny Goodman's 1937 recording of "Sing, Sing, Sing" elevated the role of the drummer from an accompanist to an important solo voice in the band.
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Françoise Rosay
1891 - 1974 (83 years)
Françoise Rosay was a French opera singer, diseuse, and actress who enjoyed a film career of over sixty years and who became a legendary figure in French cinema. She went on to appear in over 100 movies in her career.
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Lupe Vélez
1908 - 1944 (36 years)
María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez , known professionally as Lupe Vélez, was a Mexican actress, singer, and dancer during the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. Vélez began her career as a performer in Mexican vaudeville in the early 1920s. After moving to the United States, she made her first film appearance in a short in 1927. By the end of the decade, she was acting in full-length silent films and had progressed to leading roles in The Gaucho , Lady of the Pavements and Wolf Song , among others. Vélez made the transition to sound films without difficulty. She was one of the first successful Mexican actresses in Hollywood.
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Luigi Russolo
1885 - 1947 (62 years)
Luigi Carlo Filippo Russolo was an Italian Futurist painter, composer, builder of experimental musical instruments, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises . Russolo completed his secondary education at Seminary of Portograuro in 1901, after which he moved to Milan and began gaining interest in the arts. He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of noise music concerts in 1913–14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921. He designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called Intonarumori.
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George Pal
1908 - 1980 (72 years)
George Pal was a Hungarian-American animator, film director and producer, principally associated with the fantasy and science-fiction genres. He became an American citizen after emigrating from Europe.
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Bix Beiderbecke
1903 - 1931 (28 years)
Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke was an American jazz cornetist, pianist and composer. Beiderbecke was one of the most influential jazz soloists of the 1920s, a cornet player noted for an inventive lyrical approach and purity of tone, with such clarity of sound that one contemporary famously described it like "shooting bullets at a bell”. His solos on seminal recordings such as "Singin' the Blues" and "I'm Coming, Virginia" demonstrate a gift for extended improvisation that heralded the jazz ballad style, in which jazz solos are an integral part of the composition. Moreover, his use of extende...
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