#14501
Michael Wilson
1914 - 1978 (64 years)
Michael Wilson was an American screenwriter. Life and career Early life Wilson was born and raised Roman Catholic in McAlester, Oklahoma. He graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1936 and did post-graduate fellowship work between 1937 and 1939. He taught English and began his writing career with short stories for magazines. Then, starting in 1941, he wrote or co-wrote 22 screenplays.
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Gustav Ucicky
1898 - 1961 (63 years)
Gustav Ucicky was an Austrian film director, screenwriter, and cinematographer. He was one of the more successful directors in Austria and Germany from the 1930s through to the early 1960s. His work covered a wide variety of genres, but he is most acclaimed for his work in romantic drama and drama films.
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Bronisław Kaper
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Bronisław Kaper was a Polish film composer who scored films and musical theater in Germany, France, and the USA. The American immigration authorities misspelled his name as Bronislau Kaper. He was also variously credited as Bronislaw Kaper, Bronislaw Kapper, Benjamin Kapper, and Edward Kane.
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Fernandel
1903 - 1971 (68 years)
Fernand Joseph Désiré Contandin , better known as Fernandel, was a French comic actor. Born near Marseille, France, to Désirée Bedouin and Denis Contandin, originating in Perosa Argentina, an Occitan town located in the province of Turin, Italy, he became a comedy star, first gaining popularity in French vaudeville, operettas, and music-hall revues. His stage name originated from his marriage to Henriette Manse, the sister of his best friend and frequent cinematic collaborator Jean Manse. So attentive was he to his wife that his mother-in-law amusingly referred to him as Fernand d'elle .
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Antony of Tagrit
801 - 900 (99 years)
Anthony of Tagrit was a 9th-century West Syrian Syriac theologian and rhetor. Anthony was based in Tagrit and is best remembered for his contribution to Syriac literature. One of his few surviving works The Book of the Rhetoric was translated to several languages including English.
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Reginald Barker
1886 - 1945 (59 years)
Reginald C. Barker was a pioneer film director. Biography Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Barker's family moved to Scotland when he was an infant and then to the United States. Living in California, Barker wrote, produced, and acted in his first play known as Granna Uile at the age of sixteen following which he acted and handled stage manager duties with a traveling stock company. When he was eighteen he was the leading man and played in many stock companies. Then he worked with Robert Hilliard in the production of the play named A Fool There Was. At age nineteen, he went to New York City where he worked as a stage manager for Henry Miller.
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Paul Gonsalves
1920 - 1974 (54 years)
Paul Gonsalves was an American jazz tenor saxophonist best known for his association with Duke Ellington. At the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, Gonsalves played a 27-chorus solo in the middle of Ellington's "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," a performance credited with revitalizing Ellington's waning career in the 1950s.
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Doris Lloyd
1896 - 1968 (72 years)
Hessy Doris Lloyd was an English–American film and stage actress. She is perhaps best known for her roles in The Time Machine and The Sound of Music . Lloyd appeared in two Academy Award winners and four other nominees.
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Bert Berns
1929 - 1967 (38 years)
Bertrand Russell Berns , also known as Bert Russell and Russell Byrd, was an American songwriter and record producer of the 1960s. His songwriting credits include "Twist and Shout", "Piece of My Heart", "Here Comes the Night", "Hang on Sloopy", "Cry to Me" and "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", and his productions include "Baby, Please Don't Go", "Brown Eyed Girl" and "Under the Boardwalk".
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Vladimir Bakaleinikov
1885 - 1953 (68 years)
Vladimir Romanovich Bakaleinikov, also Bakaleynikov and Bakaleinikoff was a Russian-American violist, music educator, conductor and composer. Life and career Bakaleinikov, the son of a noted clarinetist, was from a large musical family who lived in poverty. His elder brother was flautist, composer and conductor Nikolai Bakaleinikov , his younger brothers, both composers, were Mikhail Bakaleinikoff and Constantin Bakaleinikoff . "My father earned very little. We children helped him by playing at weddings, in restaurants, giving lessons, and later concertizing. We did not refuse any type of work.
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Nada Klaić
1920 - 1988 (68 years)
Nada Klaić was a Croatian historian. She was a Croatian medievalist of the 20th century. A substantial part of the work was devoted to criticism of medieval sources. Academic career Nada Klaić was born in Zagreb, the granddaughter of the historian Vjekoslav Klaić and sister of landscape architect Smiljan Klaić. She was a university professor and a prominent Croatian medievalist, graduated at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb, the same faculty where she was involved in teaching for 45 years. She started her teaching and scientific career at the faculty's Department of History in 1943, to become a full professor of the Croatian medieval history in 1969.
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Barry Gray
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Barry Gray was a British musician and composer best known for his collaborations with television and film producer Gerry Anderson. Life and career Born into a musical family in Blackburn, Lancashire, Gray was encouraged to pursue a musical career from an early age. Starting at the age of five – with piano lessons – he studied diligently and became a student at the Manchester Royal College of Music and at Blackburn Cathedral. He studied composition under the Hungarian born émigré composer Matyas Seiber. Gray's first professional job was for B. Feldman & Co. in London, where he gained experience in scoring for theatre and variety orchestras.
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Joseph Marx
1882 - 1964 (82 years)
Joseph Rupert Rudolf Marx was an Austrian composer, teacher and critic. Life and career Marx was born in Graz and pursued studies in philosophy, art history, German studies, and music at Graz University, earning several degrees including a doctorate in 1909. His thesis was an expansion of a 1907 scholarly study of tonality, in which he coined the term "atonality". He began composing seriously in 1908 and over the next four years he produced around 120 songs. In 1914 he joined the faculty of the Vienna Music Academy, later becoming the institution's director in 1922. When the school was reorga...
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Seán Ó Riada
1931 - 1971 (40 years)
Seán Ó Riada , was an Irish composer and arranger of Irish traditional music. Through his incorporation of modern and traditional techniques he became the single most influential figure in the revival of Irish traditional music during the 1960s.
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John English
1903 - 1969 (66 years)
John Wilkinson English was a British film editor and film director. He is most famous for the film serials he co-directed with William Witney for Republic Pictures such as Zorro's Fighting Legion and Drums of Fu Manchu.
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Vittorio Rieti
1898 - 1994 (96 years)
Vittorio Rieti was a Jewish-Italian-American composer. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Rieti moved to Milan to study economics. He subsequently studied music in Rome under Respighi and Casella, and lived there until 1940.
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Henry B. Walthall
1878 - 1936 (58 years)
Henry Brazeale Walthall was an American stage and film actor. He appeared as the Little Colonel in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation . Early life Henry B. Walthall was born March 16, 1878 on a cotton plantation owned by his father in Shelby County, Alabama. His father Junius Leigh Walthall had been a captain in the Confederate States Army. His sister, Anna Mae Walthall had a film career in the 1920s.
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Joseph Parry
1841 - 1903 (62 years)
Joseph Parry was a Welsh composer and musician. Born in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, he is best known as the composer of "Myfanwy" and the hymn tune "Aberystwyth". Parry was also the first Welshman to compose an opera; his composition, Blodwen, was the first opera in the Welsh language.
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Sergei Gerasimov
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Sergei Appolinarievich Gerasimov was a Soviet film director and screenwriter. The oldest film school in the world, the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography , bears his name. Early life and education Gerasimov was born on 21 May 1906.
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Charlie Rouse
1924 - 1988 (64 years)
Charlie Rouse was an American hard bop tenor saxophonist and flautist. His career is marked by his collaboration with Thelonious Monk, which lasted for more than ten years. Biography Rouse was born in Washington, D.C., United States. At first he worked with the clarinet, before turning to the tenor saxophone.
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Isaac Rülf
1831 - 1902 (71 years)
Isaac Rülf was a Jewish teacher, journalist and philosopher. He became widely known for his aid work and as a prominent early Zionist. Rülf was born in Rauischholzhausen, Hesse, Germany. He received a teaching certificate in 1849, became an assistant to the county rabbi and then taught in other small communities. He received his rabbinical certificate in 1854 from the University of Marburg and his Ph.D in 1865 at the University of Rostock. That year he became the rabbi of Memel, East Prussia.
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Willie "The Lion" Smith
1897 - 1973 (76 years)
William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholf Smith , nicknamed "The Lion", was an American jazz and stride pianist. Early life William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholf, known as Willie, was born in 1893 in Goshen, New York. His mother and grandmother chose his names to reflect different parts of his heritage: Joseph after Saint Joseph , Bonaparte , and Bertholf . William and Henry which were added for "spiritual balance". When he was three, his mother married John Smith, and Smith was added as the boy's surname, after his stepfather.
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J. Warren Kerrigan
1879 - 1947 (68 years)
George Jack Warren Kerrigan was an American silent film actor and film director. Controversy In May 1917, Kerrigan was nearing the end of a four-month-long personal appearance publicity tour that had taken him across the United States and into Canada. At one of the final stops, a reporter for The Denver Times asked Kerrigan if he would be joining the war. Kerrigan replied:
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Johann Winter von Andernach
1505 - 1574 (69 years)
Johann Winter von Andernach was a German Renaissance physician, university professor, humanist, translator of ancient, mostly medical works, and writer of his own medical, philological and humanities works.
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Leonard Rose
1918 - 1984 (66 years)
Leonard Joseph Rose was an American cellist and pedagogue. Biography Rose was born in Washington, D.C. His parents were Jewish immigrants, his father from Bragin, Belarus, and his mother from Kyiv, Ukraine. Rose took lessons from Walter Grossman, Frank Miller and Felix Salmond. After completing his studies at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music at age 20, he joined Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra, and almost immediately became associate principal. At 21 he was principal cellist of the Cleveland Orchestra and at 26 became the principal of the New York Philharmonic.
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Machito
1912 - 1984 (72 years)
Machito was a Latin jazz musician who helped refine Afro-Cuban jazz and create both Cubop and salsa music. He was raised in Havana with the singer Graciela, his foster sister. In New York City, Machito formed the Afro-Cubans in 1940, and with Mario Bauzá as musical director, brought together Cuban rhythms and big band arrangements in one group. He made numerous recordings from the 1940s to the 1980s, many with Graciela as singer. Machito changed to a smaller ensemble format in 1975, touring Europe extensively. He brought his son and daughter into the band, and received a Grammy Award in 1983,...
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Blue Mitchell
1930 - 1979 (49 years)
Richard Allen "Blue" Mitchell was an American trumpeter and composer who worked in jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, rock and funk. He recorded albums as leader and sideman for Riverside, Mainstream Records, and Blue Note.
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Fred Rose
1898 - 1954 (56 years)
Knowles Fred Rose was an American musician, Hall of Fame songwriter, and music publishing executive. Biography Born in Evansville, Indiana, United States, Rose started playing piano and singing as a small boy. In his teens, he moved to Chicago, Illinois where he worked in bars busking for tips, and finally vaudeville. Eventually, he became successful as a songwriter, penning his first hit for entertainer Sophie Tucker.
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Leo Meyer
1830 - 1910 (80 years)
Leo Karl Heinrich Meyer was a German philologist who spent much of his career in the Governorate of Livonia . Biography He was born at , a village in the present-day district of Hildesheim, near Hanover. He was educated at Göttingen and Berlin, where he was a student of the Brothers Grimm. From 1862 to 1865, he was professor in Göttingen, and in 1865 he became professor of comparative philology at Dorpat . One of his students there was Nikolai Anderson. From 1869 to 1899 he was the president of the Learned Estonian Society. In 1898 he again accepted a chair at Göttingen. He died in Göttingen.
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Pasquale Amato
1878 - 1942 (64 years)
Pasquale Amato was an Italian operatic baritone. Amato enjoyed an international reputation but attained the peak of his fame in New York City, where he sang with the Metropolitan Opera from 1908 until 1921.
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Muthuswami Dikshitar
1775 - 1835 (60 years)
Muthuswami Dikshitar , mononymously Dikshitar, was a South Indian poet, singer and veena player, and a legendary composer of Indian classical music, who is considered one of the musical trinity of Carnatic music. Muthuswami Dikshitar was born on 24 March 1775 in Tiruvarur near Thanjavur, in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu in India, to a family that is traditionally traced back to Virinichipuram in the northern boundaries of the state. His compositions, of which around 500 are commonly known, are noted for their elaborate and poetic descriptions of Hindu gods and temples and for capturing the essence of the raga forms through the vainika style that emphasises gamakas.
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Rex Stewart
1907 - 1967 (60 years)
Rex William Stewart Jr. was an American jazz cornetist who was a member of the Duke Ellington orchestra. Career As a boy he studied piano and violin; most of his career was spent on cornet. Stewart dropped out of high school to become a member of the Ragtime Clowns led by Ollie Blackwell. He was with the Musical Spillers led by Willie Lewis in the early 1920s, then with Elmer Snowden, Horace Henderson, Fletcher Henderson, Fess Williams, and McKinney's Cotton Pickers. In 1933 he led a big band at the Empire Ballroom in New York City. Beginning in 1934, he spent eleven years with the Duke Ellington band.
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Heddle Nash
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
William Heddle Nash was an English lyric tenor who appeared in opera and oratorio. He made numerous recordings that are still available on CD reissues. Nash's voice was of the light tenor class known as "tenore di grazia". The critic J. B. Steane referred to him as "the English lyric tenor par excellence, without equal then or now." He appeared in tenor roles in operas by Mozart, Verdi, Wagner and Puccini among others, at the Royal Opera House, and the Glyndebourne Festival. His operatic career lasted from 1924 to 1958.
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Bruce Lannes Smith
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Bruce Lannes Smith was an American political scientist, communication theorist, and propaganda specialist. His primary research focus was the various uses and techniques of propaganda and persuasion employed by governments that were considered enemies of the United States. He taught at Michigan State College and other institutions. After the Second World War he was involved with research on propaganda and mass persuasion on a mass audience while also questioning the methods used by the Nazi propaganda theorist Franz Six.
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Frida Leider
1888 - 1975 (87 years)
Frida Leider was a German operatic soprano. Leider was a dramatic soprano. Her most famous roles were Wagner's Isolde and Brünnhilde, Beethoven's Fidelio, Mozart's Donna Anna, and Verdi's Aida and Leonora. She made over 80 recordings, mainly for Polydor and HMV.
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Raymond Huntley
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Horace Raymond Huntley was an English actor who appeared in dozens of British films from the 1930s to the 1970s. He also appeared in the ITV period drama Upstairs, Downstairs as the pragmatic family solicitor Sir Geoffrey Dillon.
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Preston Foster
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Preston Stratton Foster , was an American actor of stage, film, radio, and television, whose career spanned nearly four decades. He also had a career as a vocalist. Early life Born in Ocean City, New Jersey, in 1900, Foster was the eldest of three children of New Jersey natives Sallie R. and Walter Foster. Preston had two sisters, Mabel and Anna; and according to federal census records, his family still lived in Ocean City in Cape May County at least as late as 1910. There his father supported the family working as a painter. Sometime between 1910 and 1918, the Fosters relocated to Pitman, New Jersey, where Preston's father was employed as a machinist.
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Noel Gay
1898 - 1954 (56 years)
Noel Gay was born Reginald Moxon Armitage. He also used the name Stanley Hill professionally. He was a successful British composer of popular music of the 1930s and 1940s whose output comprised 45 songs as well as the music for 28 films and 26 London shows. Sheridan Morley has commented that he was "the closest Britain ever came to a local Irving Berlin". He is best known for the musical, Me and My Girl.
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Henry Edwards
1882 - 1952 (70 years)
Henry Edwards was an English actor and film director. He appeared in more than 80 films between 1915 and 1952. He also directed 67 films between 1915 and 1937. Edwards married actress Chrissie White in 1924. She appeared in many of his films as did the couple's daughter, Henryetta Edwards. He was born in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset and died in Chobham, Surrey.
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Isaac ben Moses Arama
1420 - 1494 (74 years)
Isaac ben Moses Arama was a Spanish rabbi and author. He was at first principal of a rabbinical academy at Zamora ; then he received a call as rabbi and preacher from the community at Tarragona, and later from that of Fraga in Aragon. He officiated finally in Calatayud as rabbi and head of the Talmudical academy. Upon the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, Arama settled in Naples, where he died in 1494.
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Franz Xaver Gruber
1787 - 1863 (76 years)
Franz Xaver Gruber was an Austrian primary school teacher, church organist and composer in the village of Arnsdorf, who is best known for composing the music to "Stille Nacht" . Life Gruber was born on 25 November 1787 in the village of Hochburg-Ach, Upper Austria, the son of linen weavers, Josef and Maria Gruber. His given name was recorded in the baptismal record as "Conrad Xavier," but this was later changed to "Franz Xaver". The Hochburger schoolteacher Andreas Peterlechner gave him music lessons.
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Clarence Budington Kelland
1881 - 1964 (83 years)
Clarence Budington "Bud" Kelland was an American writer. Prolific and versatile, he was a prominent literary figure in his heyday, and he described himself as "the best second-rate writer in America".
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Salomon Jadassohn
1831 - 1902 (71 years)
Salomon Jadassohn was a German pianist, composer, and teacher at the Leipzig Conservatory. Life Jadassohn was born to a Jewish family living in Breslau, the capital of the Prussian province of Silesia. This was a generation after the emancipation of the Jews in Central European German-speaking lands and during a time of relative tolerance. First educated locally, Jadassohn enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1848, just a few years after it had been founded by Felix Mendelssohn. There he studied composition with Moritz Hauptmann, Ernst Richter and Julius Rietz, as well as piano with Ignaz Moscheles.
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Bukka White
1909 - 1977 (68 years)
Booker T. Washington "Bukka" White was an American Delta blues guitarist and singer. Life and career to the 1950s Booker T. Washington White was born on a farm south of Houston, in northeastern Mississippi. He was born on November 12; various years between 1900 and 1909 are recorded – census data suggests 1904. Bukka is a phonetic spelling of White's first name; he was named after the African-American educator and civil rights activist Booker T. Washington. White was a first cousin of B.B. King's mother . His father John White was a railroad worker, and also a musician who performed locally, primarily playing the fiddle, but also mandolin, guitar and piano.
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Gaspar Sanz
1640 - 1710 (70 years)
Francisco Bartolomé Sanz Celma , better known as Gaspar Sanz, was a Spanish composer, guitarist, and priest born to a wealthy family in Calanda in the comarca of Bajo Aragón, Spain. He studied music, theology and philosophy at the University of Salamanca, where he was later appointed Professor of Music. He wrote three volumes of pedagogical works for the baroque guitar that form an important part of today's classical guitar repertory and have informed modern scholars in the techniques of baroque guitar playing.
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Richard Lewis
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Richard Lewis CBE was an English tenor of Welsh parentage. Life Born Thomas Thomas in Manchester to Welsh parents, Lewis began his career as a boy soprano and studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music from 1939 to 1941, and later at the Royal Academy of Music. He made his operatic debut in 1939, and from 1947 onwards, sang at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera and at Covent Garden . He made his debut in the United States in 1955.
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Theodore Thomas
1835 - 1905 (70 years)
Theodore Thomas was a German-American violinist, conductor, and orchestrator. He is considered the first renowned American orchestral conductor and was the founder and first music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra .
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Viola Dana
1897 - 1987 (90 years)
Viola Dana was an American film actress who was successful during the era of silent films. She appeared in over 100 films, but was unable to make the transition to sound films. Early life Born Virginia Flugrath on June 26, 1897, in Brooklyn, New York City, where she was raised, she was the middle sister of three siblings who all became actresses. Her sisters were known as Edna Flugrath and Shirley Mason. Dana appeared on the stage at the age of three. She read Shakespeare and particularly identified with the teenage Juliet. She enjoyed a long run at the Hudson Theater in Manhattan. Between 19...
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