#14701
John Hammond
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
John Henry Hammond II was an American record producer, civil rights activist, and music critic active from the 1930s to the early 1980s. In his service as a talent scout, Hammond became one of the most influential figures in 20th-century popular music. He is the father of blues musician John P. Hammond.
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Louise Brooks
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Mary Louise Brooks was an American film actress and dancer during the 1920s and 1930s. She is regarded today as an icon of the flapper culture, in part due to the bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career.
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Adolphe Adam
1803 - 1856 (53 years)
Adolphe Charles Adam was a French composer, teacher and music critic. A prolific composer for the theatre, he is best known today for his ballets Giselle and Le corsaire , his operas Le postillon de Lonjumeau and Si j'étais roi and his Christmas carol "Minuit, chrétiens!" .
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Charles Koechlin
1867 - 1950 (83 years)
Charles-Louis-Eugène Koechlin , commonly known as Charles Koechlin, was a French composer, teacher and musicologist. Among his better known works is Les Heures persanes, a set of piano pieces based on the novel Vers Ispahan by Pierre Loti and The Seven Stars Symphony, a 7 movement symphony where each movement is themed around a different film star who were popular at the time of the piece's writing .
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Shinkichi Hashimoto
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Shinkichi Hashimoto was a Japanese linguist, born in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture, Japan. Biography Hashimoto is especially noted for the discovery of Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai, which makes it clear that Old Japanese made more syllabic distinctions than later periods of the language. This discovery led him to hypothesize that Old Japanese had eight vowels, while modern Japanese has only five. His systematic description of the Japanese grammar also laid the foundations of language education for Japanese children.
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Michel Simon
1895 - 1975 (80 years)
Michel Simon was a Swiss-French actor. He appeared in many notable French films, including La Chienne , Boudu Saved from Drowning , L'Atalante , Port of Shadows , The Head , and The Train . Early years Simon was born on 9 April 1895 in Geneva, Switzerland to a Catholic butcher and a Protestant mother. He left his family and moved to Paris, where he first lived at the Hotel Renaissance, Saint-Martin Street, then in Montmartre. He worked many different jobs to survive, such as giving boxing lessons and peddling smuggled lighters.
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John Cassavetes
1929 - 1989 (60 years)
John Nicholas Cassavetes was an American actor and filmmaker. He began as a television and film actor before helping to pioneer modern American independent cinema as a director and writer, often financing and distributing his films with his own income. AllMovie called him "an iconoclastic maverick", while The New Yorker suggested in 2013 that he "may be the most influential American director of the last half century."
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Jean Epstein
1897 - 1953 (56 years)
Jean Epstein was a French filmmaker, film theorist, literary critic, and novelist. Although he is remembered today primarily for his adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, he directed three dozen films and was an influential critic of literature and film from the early 1920s through the late 1940s. He is often associated with French Impressionist Cinema and the concept of photogénie.
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Jenny Lind
1820 - 1887 (67 years)
Johanna Maria Lind was a Swedish opera singer, often called the "Swedish Nightingale". One of the most highly regarded singers of the 19th century, she performed in soprano roles in opera in Sweden and across Europe, and undertook an extraordinarily popular concert tour of the United States beginning in 1850. She was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music from 1840.
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Louis M. Lyons
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Louis Martin Lyons was an American journalist in Massachusetts and curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Biography Lyons was born in Boston in 1897 and was a graduate of Massachusetts Agricultural College, now known as the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Lyons was a reporter for The Boston Globe in 1919 and from 1923 to 1946; In 1971, he published a history of the first 100 years of that newspaper. In 1940, he took the position of curator for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, where he worked until retiring in 1964. Lyons also wro...
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Tetsuji Morohashi
1883 - 1982 (99 years)
Tetsuji Morohashi was an important figure in the field of Japanese language studies and Sinology. He is best known as chief editor of the Dai Kan-Wa jiten, a comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters, or kanji.
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Ruggero Leoncavallo
1857 - 1919 (62 years)
Ruggero Leoncavallo was an Italian opera composer and librettist. Although he produced numerous operas and other songs throughout his career it is his opera Pagliacci that remained his lasting contribution, despite attempts to escape the shadow of his greatest success.
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Sam Peckinpah
1925 - 1984 (59 years)
David Samuel Peckinpah was an American film director and screenwriter. His 1969 Western epic The Wild Bunch received an Academy Award nomination and was ranked No. 80 on the American Film Institute's top 100 list. His films employed a visually innovative and explicit depiction of action and violence as well as a revisionist approach to the Western genre.
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Jacques Ibert
1890 - 1962 (72 years)
Jacques François Antoine Marie Ibert was a French composer of classical music. Having studied music from an early age, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire and won its top prize, the Prix de Rome at his first attempt, despite studies interrupted by his service in World War I.
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Florent Schmitt
1870 - 1958 (88 years)
Florent Schmitt was a French composer. He was part of the group known as Les Apaches. His most famous pieces are La tragédie de Salome and Psaume XLVII . He has been described as "one of the most fascinating of France's lesser-known classical composers".
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John Ross
1777 - 1856 (79 years)
Sir John Ross was a Scottish Royal Navy officer and polar explorer. He was the uncle of Sir James Clark Ross, who explored the Arctic with him, and later led expeditions to Antarctica. Biography Early life John Ross was born in Balsarroch, West Galloway, Scotland, on , the son of the Reverend Andrew Ross of Balsarroch, Minister of Inch in Wigtownshire, and Elizabeth Corsane, daughter of Robert Corsane, the Provost of Dumfries. His family home was on the shore of Loch Ryan, at Stranraer.
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Percy French
1854 - 1920 (66 years)
William Percy French was an Irish songwriter, author, poet, entertainer and painter. Life French was born at Clooneyquinn House, near Tulsk, County Roscommon, the son of an Anglo-Irish landlord, Christopher French, and Susan Emma French . He was the third of nine children. His younger sister, Emily later Emily de Burg Daly was also a writer.
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Paul Muni
1895 - 1967 (72 years)
Paul Muni was an American stage and film actor from Chicago. He started his acting career in the Yiddish theater and during the 1930s, he was considered one of the most prestigious actors at the Warner Bros. studio and was given the rare privilege of choosing his own parts.
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Anton Rubinstein
1829 - 1894 (65 years)
Anton Grigoryevich Rubinstein was a Russian pianist, composer and conductor who became a pivotal figure in Russian culture when he founded the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He was the elder brother of Nikolai Rubinstein, who founded the Moscow Conservatory.
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Graham Thurgood
1900 - Present (126 years)
Graham Thurgood is a retired professor of linguistics at California State University, Chico. Thurgood graduated with a Ph.D. in linguistics from University of California, Berkeley, where he studied under James Matisoff.
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William Allan Neilson
1869 - 1946 (77 years)
William Allan Neilson was a Scottish-American educator, writer and lexicographer, graduated in the University of Edinburgh in 1891 and became a PhD in Harvard University in 1898. He was president of Smith College between 1917 and 1939.
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Adolf Tobler
1835 - 1910 (75 years)
Adolf Tobler was a Swiss-German linguist and philologist. Born in Hirzel in Zürich, Switzerland, he was the brother of linguist Ludwig Tobler . Adolf Tobler died in Berlin, Germany. He studied Romance philology at the universities of Zürich and Bonn, receiving his doctorate in 1857. At Bonn, he was influenced by the teachings of Friedrich Christian Diez and Nicolaus Delius. After graduation, he worked as a schoolteacher at the Solothurn cantonal school, then at the gymnasium in Bern. In 1867, he relocated to the University of Berlin, where from 1871 up until his death, he held the chair of Romance philology.
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Otis Redding
1941 - 1967 (26 years)
Otis Ray Redding Jr. was an American singer and songwriter. He is regarded as one of the greatest singer-songwriters in the history of American popular music and a seminal artist in soul music and rhythm and blues. Nicknamed the "King of Soul", Redding's style of singing gained inspiration from the gospel music that preceded the genre. His singing style influenced many other soul artists of the 1960s.
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Nellie Melba
1861 - 1931 (70 years)
Dame Nellie Melba was an Australian operatic lyric coloratura soprano. She became one of the most famous singers of the late Victorian era and the early 20th century, and was the first Australian to achieve international recognition as a classical musician. She took the pseudonym "Melba" from Melbourne, her home town.
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Edward Denison Ross
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Sir Edward Denison Ross was an orientalist and linguist, specializing in languages of the Middle East, Central and East Asia. He was the first director of the University of London's School of Oriental Studies from 1916 to 1937.
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Bohuslav Martinů
1890 - 1959 (69 years)
Bohuslav Jan Martinů was a Czech composer of modern classical music. He wrote 6 symphonies, 15 operas, 14 ballet scores and a large body of orchestral, chamber, vocal and instrumental works. He became a violinist in the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, and briefly studied under Czech composer and violinist Josef Suk. After leaving Czechoslovakia in 1923 for Paris, Martinů deliberately withdrew from the Romantic style in which he had been trained. During the 1920s he experimented with modern French stylistic developments, exemplified by his orchestral works Half-time and La Bagarre. He also adop...
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Alfred Jeanroy
1859 - 1953 (94 years)
Alfred Jeanroy was a French linguist. Jeanroy was a leading scholar studying troubadour poetry, publishing over 600 works. He established an influential view of the second generation of troubadours divided into two camps: “idealists” and “realists” .
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Gustave Charpentier
1860 - 1956 (96 years)
Gustave Charpentier was a French composer, best known for his opera Louise. Life and career Charpentier was born in Dieuze, Moselle, the son of a baker, and with the assistance of a rich benefactor he studied violin at the conservatoire in Lille before entering the Paris Conservatoire in 1881. There he took lessons in composition under Jules Massenet and had a reputation of wanting to shock his professors. In 1887 he won the Prix de Rome for his cantata Didon. During the time in Rome that the prize gave him, he wrote the orchestral suite Impressions d'Italie and began work on the libretto an...
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Tom Brown
1662 - 1704 (42 years)
Thomas Brown , also known as Tom Brown, was an English translator and satirist, largely forgotten today save for a four-line gibe that he may have written concerning John Fell. Biography Early life Brown was born at either Shifnal or Newport in Shropshire; he is identified with the Thomas Brown, son of William and Dorothy Brown, who was recorded christened on 1 January 1663 at Newport. His father, a farmer and tanner, died when Thomas was eight years old. He took advantage of the free schooling offered in the county, attending Adams' Grammar School at Newport, before going up to Christ Churc...
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Lyubomir Andreychin
1910 - 1975 (65 years)
Lyubomir Andreychin was a Bulgarian linguist. Correspondent Member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences since 1951. His principal field of scientific research included the grammar and stylistics of modern Bulgarian.
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Richard Tauber
1891 - 1948 (57 years)
Richard Tauber was an Austrian lyric Tenor and film actor. He sang the tenor role in number of operas, including Don Giovanni by Mozart and Da Ponte. Early life Richard Tauber was born in Linz, Austria, to Elisabeth Seifferth , a widow and an actress who played soubrette roles at the local theatre, and Richard Anton Tauber, an actor; his parents were not married and his father was reportedly unaware of the birth as he was touring North America at the time. The child was given the name Richard Denemy; he was sometimes known as [Carl] Richard Tauber, and also used his mother's married name, Sei...
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Angus Cameron
1941 - 1983 (42 years)
Angus Fraser Cameron was a Canadian linguist and lexicographer. Life Cameron was born in Nova Scotia on 11 February 1941 and educated at Truro Senior High School and Mount Allison University before winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford. He was then a lecturer at Mount Allison University before completing a post-graduate degree at Oxford in 1968 entitled "Old English nouns of colour: a semantic study". This was the starting point for his later lexicographical work. In 1968, he was appointed as a lecturer in the Department of English and Centre for Medieval Studies by the Un...
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Ferdinand Justi
1837 - 1907 (70 years)
Ferdinand Justi was a German linguist and Orientalist. He finished his studies of linguistics at the University of Marburg and the University of Göttingen. In 1861 he lived in Marburg, where in 1865 he became associate and in 1869 full professor of comparative linguistics and Germanic philology.
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Kenneth More
1914 - 1982 (68 years)
Kenneth Gilbert More, CBE was an English film and stage actor. Initially achieving fame in the comedy Genevieve , he appeared in many roles as a carefree, happy-go-lucky gent. Films from this period include Doctor in the House , Raising a Riot , The Admirable Crichton , The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw and Next to No Time . He also played more serious roles as a leading man, beginning with The Deep Blue Sea , Reach for the Sky , A Night to Remember , North West Frontier , The 39 Steps and Sink the Bismarck .
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Hans von Bülow
1830 - 1894 (64 years)
Freiherr Hans Guido von Bülow was a German conductor, virtuoso pianist, and composer of the Romantic era. As one of the most distinguished conductors of the 19th century, his activity was critical for establishing the successes of several major composers of the time, especially Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms. Alongside Carl Tausig, Bülow was perhaps the most prominent of the early students of the Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist and conductor Franz Liszt; he gave the first public performance of Liszt's Sonata in B minor in 1857. He became acquainted with, fell in love with and eventually married Liszt's daughter Cosima, who later left him for Wagner.
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Robert Aldrich
1918 - 1983 (65 years)
Robert Burgess Aldrich was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. An iconoclastic and maverick auteur working in many genres during the Golden Age of Hollywood, he directed mainly films noir, war movies, westerns and dark melodramas with Gothic overtones. His most notable credits include Vera Cruz , Kiss Me Deadly , The Big Knife , Autumn Leaves , Attack , What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? , Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte , The Flight of the Phoenix , The Dirty Dozen , and The Longest Yard .
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Louis Feuillade
1873 - 1925 (52 years)
Louis Feuillade was a French filmmaker of the silent era. Between 1906 and 1924, he directed over 630 films. He is primarily known for the crime serials Fantômas, Les Vampires and Judex made between 1913 and 1916.
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Bill Evans
1929 - 1980 (51 years)
William John Evans was an American jazz pianist and composer who worked primarily as the leader of his trio. His interpretations of traditional jazz repertoire, his ways of using impressionist harmony and block chords, and his trademark rhythmically independent, "singing" melodic lines, continue to influence jazz pianists today.
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Olaf Broch
1867 - 1961 (94 years)
Olaf Broch was a Norwegian linguist. He was born in Horten, and was a brother of children's writer Lagertha Broch, zoologist Hjalmar Broch, and social worker Nanna Broch. He was a professor of Slavic languages at the University of Oslo from 1900 to 1937. Among his works are Slawische Phonetik from 1911, Håndbok i elementær fonetikk from 1921, and Proletariatets diktatur from 1923. He translated works by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky into Norwegian. He was decorated Commander of the Order of St. Olav in 1946.
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Douglas Sirk
1897 - 1987 (90 years)
Douglas Sirk was a German film director best known for his work in Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s. However, he also directed comedies, westerns, and war films. Sirk started his career in Germany as a stage and screen director, but he left for Hollywood in 1937 after his Jewish wife was persecuted by the Nazis.
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Hans Stumme
1864 - 1936 (72 years)
Hans Stumme was a German linguist, known for his research of Semitic and other Afroasiatic languages. He studied at the universities of Tübingen, Halle, Leipzig and Strasbourg, obtaining his habilitation in 1895. While a student at Leipzig, his teachers were Ludolf Krehl, Albert Socin and Friedrich Delitzsch. In 1900 he became an associate professor of Oriental philology at Leipzig, where in 1909 he was named an honorary professor of Neo-Arabic and Hamitic languages.
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Zdzisław Stieber
1903 - 1980 (77 years)
Zdzisław Stieber, was a Polish linguist and Slavist. He was born in Szczakowa, then part of the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia . His family was of assimilated German descent in Poland for generations. He died in Warsaw.
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André Grétry
1741 - 1813 (72 years)
André Ernest Modeste Grétry was a composer from the Prince-Bishopric of Liège , who worked from 1767 onwards in France and took French nationality. He is most famous for his opéras comiques. Biography He was born at Liège, his father being a poor musician. He was a choirboy at the church of St. Denis . In 1753 he became a pupil of Jean-Pantaléon Leclerc and later of the organist at St-Pierre de Liège, Nicolas Rennekin, for keyboard and composition and of Henri Moreau, music master at the collegiate church of St. Paul. But of greater importance was the practical tuition he received by attending the performance of an Italian opera company.
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Ahatanhel Krymsky
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
Ahatanhel Yukhymovych Krymsky was a Ukrainian Orientalist, linguist, polyglot , literary scholar, folklorist, writer, and translator. He was one of the founders of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1918 and a full member of it and of the Shevchenko Scientific Society from 1903.
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Leopold Mozart
1719 - 1787 (68 years)
Johann Georg Leopold Mozart was a German composer, violinist, and theorist. He is best known today as the father and teacher of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and for his violin textbook Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule .
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Charles-Valentin Alkan
1813 - 1888 (75 years)
Charles-Valentin Alkan was a French composer and virtuoso pianist. At the height of his fame in the 1830s and 1840s he was, alongside his friends and colleagues Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, among the leading pianists in Paris, a city in which he spent virtually his entire life.
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Régis Blachère
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Régis Blachère was a French orientalist and translator of the Qur'an. Bibliography 1975: Analecta, Institut français de Damas, Damas, 1975.2002: Le Coran, Presses universitaires de France, , 1956: Dans les pas de Mahomet, Hachette.1960: Dictionnaire arabe-français-anglais , .1967: Dictionnaire arabe-français-anglais Arabic/French/English Dictionary - Langue classique et moderne, Maisonneuve et Larose.1958: Éléments de l'arabe classique, Quatrième édition revue et corrigée, G.-P. Maisonneuve.1970: Exercices d'arabe classique, Adrien Maisonneuve, Extraits des principaux géographes arabes du Moy...
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Qian Xuantong
1887 - 1939 (52 years)
Qian Xuantong was a Chinese linguist and writer considered to be a leading figure of the Doubting Antiquity School, along with Gu Jiegang. He was a professor of literature at National Peking University.
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Preston Sturges
1898 - 1959 (61 years)
Preston Sturges was an American playwright, screenwriter, and film director. Sturges took the screwball comedy format of the 1930s to another level, writing dialogue that, heard today, is often surprisingly naturalistic and mature, despite the farcical situations. It is not uncommon for a Sturges character to deliver an exquisitely turned phrase and take an elaborate pratfall within the same scene.
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Umberto Giordano
1867 - 1948 (81 years)
Umberto Menotti Maria Giordano was an Italian composer, mainly of operas. His best-known work in that genre was Andrea Chénier . He was born in Foggia in Apulia, southern Italy, and studied under Paolo Serrao at the Conservatoire of Naples. His first opera, Marina, was written for a competition promoted by the music publishers Casa Sonzogno for the best one-act opera, remembered today because it marked the beginning of Italian verismo. The winner was Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana. Giordano, the youngest contestant, was placed sixth among seventy-three entries with his Marina, a work which g...
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