#13551
Totò
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
Antonio Griffo Focas Flavio Angelo Ducas Comneno Porfirogenito Gagliardi De Curtis di Bisanzio , best known by his stage name Totò , or simply as Antonio de Curtis, and nicknamed il principe della risata , was an Italian actor, comedian, screenwriter, dramatist, poet, singer and lyricist. He was commonly referred to as one of the most popular Italian performers of all time. He is best known for his funny and sometimes cynical character as a comedian in theatre and then in many successful films shot from the 1940s to the 1960s, but he also worked with many iconic Italian film directors in drama...
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Marin Marais
1656 - 1728 (72 years)
Marin Marais was a French composer and viol player. He studied composition with Jean-Baptiste Lully, often conducting his operas, and with master of the bass viol Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe for six months. In 1676 he was hired as a musician to the royal court of Versailles and was moderately successful there, being appointed in 1679 as ordinaire de la chambre du roy pour la viole, a title he kept until 1725.
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George M. Cohan
1878 - 1942 (64 years)
George Michael Cohan was an American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer. Cohan began his career as a child, performing with his parents and sister in a vaudeville act known as "The Four Cohans". Beginning with Little Johnny Jones in 1904, he wrote, composed, produced, and appeared in more than three dozen Broadway musicals. Cohan wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards "Over There", "Give My Regards to Broadway", "The Yankee Doodle Boy" and "You're a Grand Old Flag". As a co...
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James Aronson
1915 - 1988 (73 years)
James Aronson was an American journalist. He founded the National Guardian. He was a graduate of Harvard College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Career Aronson, known as "Jim" to his friends, worked at several publications prior to founding the National Guardian. He worked on the staffs of the Boston Evening Transcript, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Post and The New York Times from 1946 to 1948.
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Julius Watkins
1921 - 1977 (56 years)
Julius Watkins was an American jazz musician who played French horn. Described by AllMusic as "virtually the father of the jazz French horn", Watkins won the Down Beat critics poll in 1960 and 1961 for Miscellaneous Instrument.
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Jean Vigo
1905 - 1934 (29 years)
Jean Vigo was a French film director who helped establish poetic realism in film in the 1930s. His work influenced French New Wave cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Biography Vigo was born to Emily Clero and the militant anarchist Miguel Almereyda. Much of Vigo's early life was spent on the run with his parents. His father was imprisoned and probably murdered in Fresnes Prison on 13 August 1917, although the death was officially a suicide. Some speculated that Almereyda's death was hushed up on orders of the Radical politicians Louis Malvy and Joseph Caillaux, who were later punished for wartime treason.
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Ernest Bloch
1880 - 1959 (79 years)
Ernest Bloch was a Swiss-born American composer. Bloch was a preeminent artist in his day, and left a lasting legacy. He is recognized as one of the greatest Swiss composers in history. As well as producing musical scores, Bloch had an academic career that culminated in his recognition as Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley in 1952.
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Sarah Siddons
1755 - 1831 (76 years)
Sarah Siddons was a Welsh actress, the best-known tragedienne of the 18th century. Contemporaneous critic William Hazlitt dubbed Siddons as "tragedy personified". She was the elder sister of John Philip Kemble, Charles Kemble, Stephen Kemble, Ann Hatton, and Elizabeth Whitlock, and the aunt of Fanny Kemble. She was most famous for her portrayal of the Shakespearean character Lady Macbeth, a character she made her own.
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Donny Hathaway
1945 - 1979 (34 years)
Donny Edward Hathaway was an American soul singer, keyboardist, songwriter, backing vocalist, and arranger who Rolling Stone described as a "soul legend". His most popular songs include "The Ghetto", "This Christmas", "Someday We'll All Be Free", and "Little Ghetto Boy". Hathaway is also renowned for his renditions of "A Song for You", "For All We Know", and "I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know", along with "Where Is the Love" and "The Closer I Get to You", two of many collaborations with Roberta Flack. He has been inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame and won one Grammy Award from four nominations.
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Hisui Sugiura
1876 - 1965 (89 years)
was a Japanese graphic designer who was a pioneer of modern Japanese graphic design. Early life He was born in Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture in 1876. He graduated from the Japanese-style painting department of Tokyo School of Art, which is the present Tokyo University of the Arts, in 1901.
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Gertrude Buck
1871 - 1922 (51 years)
Gertrude Buck was one of a group of powerful female rhetoricians of her time. She strived to inspire young women to take on leadership roles within the democracy using the written word. She wrote many books, plays, articles, and poems relating to her cause. Buck dedicated her life to "challenging the patriarchal paradigm with her reformist views of pedagogy and rhetoric".
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Tod Browning
1880 - 1962 (82 years)
Tod Browning was an American film director, film actor, screenwriter, vaudeville performer, and carnival sideshow and circus entertainer. He directed a number of films of various genres between 1915 and 1939, but was primarily known for horror films, and was often cited in the trade press as the Edgar Allan Poe of cinema.
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Guillaume de Machaut
1300 - 1377 (77 years)
Guillaume de Machaut was a French composer and poet who was the central figure of the style in late medieval music. His dominance of the genre is such that modern musicologists use his death to separate the from the subsequent movement. Regarded as the most significant French composer and poet of the 14th century, he is often seen as the century's leading European composer.
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Max Bruch
1838 - 1920 (82 years)
Max Bruch was a German Romantic composer, violinist, teacher, and conductor who wrote more than 200 works, including three violin concertos, the first of which has become a prominent staple of the standard violin repertoire.
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Louis Prima
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Louis Leo Prima was an American trumpeter, singer, entertainer, and bandleader. While rooted in New Orleans jazz, swing music, and jump blues, Prima touched on various genres throughout his career: he formed a seven-piece New Orleans-style jazz band in the late 1920s, fronted a swing combo in the 1930s and a big band group in the 1940s, helped to popularize jump blues in the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s, and performed frequently as a Vegas lounge act beginning in the 1950s.
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Frank Kearns
1917 - 1986 (69 years)
Frank Kearns was an American broadcast journalist for CBS News from 1958 until 1971, although he first began with CBS in 1953 as a freelance correspondent, or "stringer", stationed in Cairo, Egypt.
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Fritz Reiner
1888 - 1963 (75 years)
Frederick Martin Reiner was an American conductor of opera and symphonic music in the twentieth century. Hungarian born and trained, he emigrated to the United States in 1922, where he rose to prominence as a conductor with several orchestras. He reached the pinnacle of his career while music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1950s and early 1960s.
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Woody Herman
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Woodrow Charles Herman was an American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, singer, and big band leader. Leading groups called "The Herd", Herman came to prominence in the late 1930s and was active until his death in 1987. His bands often played music that was cutting edge and experimental; their recordings received numerous Grammy nominations.
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Constant Lambert
1905 - 1951 (46 years)
Leonard Constant Lambert was a British composer, conductor, and author. He was the founder and music director of the Royal Ballet, and he was a major figure in the establishment of the English ballet as a significant artistic movement.
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Frank Tashlin
1913 - 1972 (59 years)
Frank Tashlin , also known as Tish Tash and Frank Tash, was an American animator and filmmaker. He was best known for his work on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of animated shorts for Warner Bros., as well as his work as a director of live-action comedy films.
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Bud Abbott
1897 - 1974 (77 years)
William Alexander "Bud" Abbott was an American comedian, actor and producer. He was best known as the straight man half of the comedy duo Abbott and Costello. Early life Abbott was born in Asbury Park, New Jersey on October 2, 1897, into a show business family. His parents, Rae Fisher and Harry Abbott, had met while working for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. She was a bareback rider of German Jewish background and he was a concessionaire and forage agent. Bud was the third of the couple's four children. When Bud was a toddler, the family relocated to Harlem, then to the Coney Island section of...
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Robert Benchley
1889 - 1945 (56 years)
Robert Charles Benchley was an American humorist best known for his work as a newspaper columnist and film actor. From his beginnings at The Harvard Lampoon while attending Harvard University, through his many years writing essays and articles for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and his acclaimed short films, Benchley's style of humor brought him respect and success during his life, from his peers at the Algonquin Round Table in New York City to contemporaries in the burgeoning film industry.
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Richard Oswald
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
Richard Oswald was an Austrian film director, producer, screenwriter, and father of German-American film director Gerd Oswald. Early career Richard Oswald, born in Vienna as Richard W. Ornstein, began his career as an actor on the Viennese stage. He made his film directorial debut at age 34 with The Iron Cross and worked a number of times for Jules Greenbaum. In 1916, Oswald set up his own production company in Germany, writing and directing most of his films himself. His pre-1920 efforts include such literary adaptations as The Picture of Dorian Gray , Peer Gynt , the once scandalous Different from the Others and Around the World in Eighty Days .
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Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji
1892 - 1988 (96 years)
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was an English composer, music critic, pianist and writer whose music, written over a period of seventy years, ranges from sets of miniatures to works lasting several hours. One of the most prolific 20th-century composers, he is best known for his piano pieces, notably nocturnes such as Gulistān and Villa Tasca, and large-scale, technically intricate compositions, which include seven symphonies for piano solo, four toccatas, Sequentia cyclica and 100 Transcendental Studies. He felt alienated from English society by reason of his homosexuality and mixed ancestry, and...
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Théophile Cart
1855 - 1931 (76 years)
Théophile Cart was a French Esperantist professor and linguist. Beginning in 1907, Cart was an editor for Lingvo Internacia.
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Giovanni Battista Viotti
1755 - 1824 (69 years)
Giovanni Battista Viotti was an Italian violinist whose virtuosity was famed and whose work as a composer featured a prominent violin and an appealing lyrical tunefulness. He was also a director of French and Italian opera companies in Paris and London. He personally knew Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven.
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Nikolai Shelgunov
1824 - 1891 (67 years)
Nikolai Vasil'evich Shelgunov was a Russian forestry professor, journalist, and literary critic, who became a notable figure of the Russian nihilist movement. Nikolai was born the son of a nobleman, on in Saint Petersburg. He studied at the Imperial Forestry Institute in Saint Petersburg, graduating in 1841 and joining the staff of the forestry department of the Ministry of State Domains. By the late 1850s he was appointed professor at the Forestry Institute.
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John Robert Moore
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
John Robert Moore was an American biographer and bibliographer of Daniel Defoe. Early life and education John Robert Moore was born in Pueblo, Colorado, the son of an Episcopalian minister. Moore attended the University of Missouri where he received an A.B. in 1910 and an A.M. in 1914. After completing his degrees at the University of Missouri, he went to Harvard University where he earned a Ph.D. in 1917 with a dissertation on ballads.
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Mahalia Jackson
1911 - 1972 (61 years)
Mahalia Jackson was an American gospel singer, widely considered one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century. With a career spanning 40 years, Jackson was integral to the development and spread of gospel blues in black churches throughout the U.S. During a time when racial segregation was pervasive in American society, she met considerable and unexpected success in a recording career, selling an estimated 22 million records and performing in front of integrated and secular audiences in concert halls around the world.
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Giuseppe Guarneri
1698 - 1744 (46 years)
Bartolomeo Giuseppe "del Gesù" Guarneri was an Italian luthier from the Guarneri family of Cremona. He rivals Antonio Stradivari with regard to the respect and reverence accorded his instruments, and for many prominent players and collectors his instruments are the most coveted of all. Instruments made by Guarneri are often referred to as Del Gesùs.
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Emilio Fernández
1904 - 1986 (82 years)
Emilio "El Indio" Fernández Romo was a Mexican film director, actor and screenwriter. He was one of the most prolific film directors of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. He is best known for his work as director of the film María Candelaria , which won the Palme d'Or award at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival. As an actor, he worked in numerous film productions in Mexico and in Hollywood. He was the father of the Mexican actor Jaime Fernández.
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Giovanni Pacini
1796 - 1867 (71 years)
Giovanni Pacini was an Italian composer, best known for his operas. Pacini was born in Catania, Sicily, the son of the buffo Luigi Pacini, who was to appear in the premieres of many of Giovanni's operas. The family was of Tuscan origin, living in Catania when the composer was born.
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Antal Doráti
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Antal Doráti was a Hungarian-born conductor and composer who became a naturalized American citizen in 1943. Biography Antal Doráti was born in Budapest, where his father Alexander Doráti was a violinist with the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra and his mother Margit Kunwald was a piano teacher.
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Victor Herbert
1859 - 1924 (65 years)
Victor August Herbert was an American composer, cellist and conductor of English and Irish ancestry and German training. Although Herbert enjoyed important careers as a cello soloist and conductor, he is best known for composing many successful operettas that premiered on Broadway from the 1890s to World War I. He was also prominent among the Tin Pan Alley composers and was later a founder of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers . A prolific composer, Herbert produced two operas, a cantata, 43 operettas, incidental music to 10 plays, 31 compositions for orchestra, nine b...
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Leo McCarey
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Thomas Leo McCarey was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He was involved in nearly 200 films, including the critically acclaimed Duck Soup, Make Way for Tomorrow, The Awful Truth, Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary's, My Son John and An Affair To Remember.
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Carl August Hagberg
1810 - 1864 (54 years)
Carl August Hagberg , was a Swedish linguist and translator. He was a member of the Swedish Academy, occupying a seat from 1851 until his death. He was the son of Carl Peter Hagberg. Hagberg is most famous for being the first person to produce a Swedish translation of the Complete Works of Shakespeare, the twelve volumes of his translation was issued between 1847 and 1851. Several of his translations were, however, based on the work of Johan Henrik Thomander, who had produced a collected edition of Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Richard II and Twelfth Night i...
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Gabdulkhay Akhatov
1927 - 1986 (59 years)
Gabdulkhay Khuramovich Akhatov was a Soviet Tatar Linguist, Turkologist and an organizer of science and then a second doctorate of Philology in 1965, attaining professorship in 1970. Akhatov graduated with honors from Kazan State Pedagogical Institute in 1951 and later from graduate school in 1954. He became a member of the Higher Attestation Commission of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and was also chairman of the specialized boards for doctoral and master's theses in a number of universities across the now-defunct USSR.
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Buddy Rich
1917 - 1987 (70 years)
Bernard "Buddy" Rich was an American jazz drummer, songwriter, conductor, and bandleader. He is considered one of the most influential drummers of all time. Rich was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He discovered his affinity for jazz music at a young age and began drumming at the age of two. He began playing jazz in 1937, working with acts such as Bunny Berigan, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, and Harry James. From 1942 to 1944, Rich served in the U.S. Marines. From 1945 to 1948, he led the Buddy Rich Orchestra. In 1966, he recorded a big-band style arrangement of songs from West Side Story.
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Terence MacDonagh
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
John Alfred Terence MacDonagh was an English oboist and cor anglais player, particularly known as one of the four members of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's so-called "Royal Family" of woodwind players.
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Farinelli
1705 - 1782 (77 years)
Farinelli was the stage name of Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi , a celebrated Italian castrato singer of the 18th century and one of the greatest singers in the history of opera. Farinelli has been described as having had soprano vocal range and as having sung the highest note customary at the time, C6.
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Victor Sjöström
1879 - 1960 (81 years)
Victor David Sjöström , also known in the United States as Victor Seastrom, was a pioneering Swedish film director, screenwriter, and actor. He began his career in Sweden, before moving to Hollywood in 1924. Sjöström worked primarily in the silent era; his best known films include The Phantom Carriage , He Who Gets Slapped , and The Wind . Sjöström was Sweden's most prominent director in the "Golden Age of Silent Film" in Europe. Later in life, he played the leading role in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries .
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Albert Henry Ross
1881 - 1950 (69 years)
Albert Henry Ross , , was an English advertising agent and freelance writer known for writing the Christian apologetics book Who Moved the Stone? and And Pilate Said. Biography Ross was born on 1 January 1881 in Kings Norton, Worcestershire just slightly south of Birmingham. His father, John Charles Ross was a wine merchant who operated different businesses in Birmingham. His mother was Mary Ann Ross and she was born in Hollingbourne, Kent in 1850. His parents were married in 1878. His mother died in Aston, Birmingham in 1912, and his father died in Aston, Birmingham in 1914.
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Mike Todd
1909 - 1958 (49 years)
Michael Todd was an American theater and film producer, celebrated for his 1956 Around the World in 80 Days, which won an Academy Award for Best Picture. Actress Elizabeth Taylor was his third wife. Todd was the third of Taylor's seven husbands, and the only one whom Taylor did not divorce - Todd died in a private plane accident a year after their marriage. He was the driving force behind the development of the eponymous Todd-AO widescreen film format.
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Carlos Chávez
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Carlos Antonio de Padua Chávez y Ramírez was a Mexican composer, conductor, music theorist, educator, journalist, and founder and director of the Mexican Symphonic Orchestra. He was influenced by native Mexican cultures. Of his six symphonies, the second, or Sinfonía india, which uses native Yaqui percussion instruments, is probably the most popular.
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Lennox Berkeley
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Sir Lennox Randal Francis Berkeley CBE was an English composer. Biography Berkeley was born on 12 May 1903 in Oxford, England, the younger child and only son of Aline Carla , daughter of Sir James Charles Harris, former British consul in Monaco, and Royal Navy Captain Hastings George FitzHardinge Berkeley , the illegitimate and eldest son of George Lennox Rawdon Berkeley, the 7th Earl of Berkeley . He attended the Dragon School in Oxford, going on to Gresham's School, in Holt, Norfolk and St George's School in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. He studied French at Merton College, Oxford, graduating with a fourth class degree in 1926.
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George Jones
1811 - 1891 (80 years)
George Jones was an American journalist who, with Henry Jarvis Raymond, co-founded the New-York Daily Times, now The New York Times. Biography Jones was born in 1811 in Poultney, Vermont, and moved to Granville, Ohio, for a time. He moved back to Vermont after his parents died. Jones was employed at the Northern Spectator.
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Baldassare Galuppi
1706 - 1785 (79 years)
Baldassare Galuppi was an Italian composer, born on the island of Burano in the Venetian Republic. He belonged to a generation of composers, including Johann Adolph Hasse, Giovanni Battista Sammartini, and C. P. E. Bach, whose works are emblematic of the prevailing galant music that developed in Europe throughout the 18th century. He achieved international success, spending periods of his career in Vienna, London and Saint Petersburg, but his main base remained Venice, where he held a succession of leading appointments.
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Thomas Betterton
1635 - 1710 (75 years)
Thomas Betterton , the leading male actor and theatre manager during Restoration England, son of an under-cook to King Charles I, was born in London. Apprentice and actor Betterton was born in August 1635 in Tothill Street, Westminster. He was apprenticed to John Holden, Sir William Davenant's publisher, and possibly later to a bookseller named John Rhodes, who had been wardrobe-keeper at the Blackfriars Theatre. In 1659, Rhodes obtained a license to set up a company of players at the Cockpit Theatre in Drury Lane; and on the reopening of this theatre in 1660, Betterton made his first appearan...
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Richard Amsel
1947 - 1985 (38 years)
Richard Amsel was an American illustrator and graphic designer. His career was brief but prolific, including movie posters, album covers, and magazine covers. His portrait of comedian Lily Tomlin for the cover of Time is now part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian Institution. He was associated with TV Guide for thirteen years.
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Theodor Capidan
1879 - 1953 (74 years)
Theodor Capidan was an Ottoman-born Romanian linguist. An ethnic Aromanian from the Macedonia region, he studied at Leipzig before teaching school at Thessaloniki. Following the creation of Greater Romania at the end of World War I, Capidan followed his friend Sextil Pușcariu to the Transylvanian capital Cluj, where he spent nearly two decades, the most productive part of his career. He then taught in Bucharest for a further ten years and was marginalized late in life under the nascent communist regime. Capidan's major contributions involve studies of the Aromanians and the Megleno-Romanians, as well as their respective languages.
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