#14851
Vivian Vance
1909 - 1979 (70 years)
Vivian Vance was an American actress best known for playing Ethel Mertz on the sitcom I Love Lucy , for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress, among other accolades. She also starred alongside Lucille Ball in The Lucy Show from 1962 until she left the series at the end of its third season in 1965. In 1991, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She is most commonly identified as Lucille Ball’s longtime comedic foil from 1951 until her death in 1979.
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César Chesneau Dumarsais
1676 - 1756 (80 years)
César Chesneau, sieur Dumarsais or Du Marsais was a French philosophe, grammarian and contributor to the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. He was a prominent figure in what became known as the Enlightenment, and contributed to Diderot's Encyclopédie. After his death, Jacques-Philippe-Augustin Douchet and Nicolas Beauzée, who were both teachers at the École royale militaire, took over his work.
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Sammy Fain
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Sammy Fain was an American composer of popular music. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he contributed numerous songs that form part of The Great American Songbook, and to Broadway theatre. Fain was also a popular musician and vocalist.
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A. E. Meeussen
1912 - 1978 (66 years)
Achille Emile Meeussen, also spelled Achiel Emiel Meeussen, or simply A.E. Meeussen was a distinguished Belgian specialist in Bantu languages, particularly those of the Belgian Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. Together with the British scholar Malcolm Guthrie he is regarded as one of the two leading experts in Bantu languages in the second half of the 20th century.
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Vsevolod Pudovkin
1893 - 1953 (60 years)
Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin was a Soviet film director, screenwriter and actor who developed influential theories of montage. Pudovkin's masterpieces are often contrasted with those of his contemporary Sergei Eisenstein, but whereas Eisenstein utilized montage to glorify the power of the masses, Pudovkin preferred to concentrate on the courage and resilience of individuals. He was granted the title of People's Artist of the USSR in 1948.
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Big Bill Broonzy
1893 - 1958 (65 years)
Big Bill Broonzy was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. His career began in the 1920s, when he played country music to mostly African-American audiences. In the 1930s and 1940s, he navigated a change in style to a more urban blues sound popular with working-class black audiences. In the 1950s, a return to his traditional folk-blues roots made him one of the leading figures of the emerging American folk music revival and an international star. His long and varied career marks him as one of the key figures in the development of blues music in the 20th century.
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Morita Sōhei
1881 - 1949 (68 years)
Morita Yonematsu , known under pen name Morita Sōhei , was a novelist and translator of Western literature active during the late Meiji, Taishō and early Shōwa periods of Japan. Early life Morita was born into a farming family what is now Gifu, Gifu Prefecture. At the age of 15, he was selected for the Imperial Japanese Navy's preparatory course, and sent to boarding school in Tokyo. He managed to avoid conscription into the military, and attended what is now Kanazawa University, where he met his future wife, and then went on to graduate from Tokyo Imperial University. He returned to Gifu, but...
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Rutland Boughton
1878 - 1960 (82 years)
Rutland Boughton was an English composer who became well known in the early 20th century as a composer of opera and choral music. He was also an influential communist activist within the Communist Party of Great Britain .
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Boris Unbegaun
1898 - 1973 (75 years)
Boris Ottokar Unbegaun was a Russian-born German linguist and philologist, expert in Slavic studies: Slavic languages and literature. He worked in universities of France, Great Britain and the United States.
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Fedor Polikarpov-Orlov
1665 - 1731 (66 years)
Fedor Polikarpov-Orlov was a Russian writer, translator, and printer. He is most noted for his Slavonic Bukvar that was widely used by Slavic-speakers both in Europe and throughout the Russian Empire. The historic significance of the 1701 Primer as a sample of book-printing trade lies in the fact that it was the first time in the history of Moscow book-printing that it was attempted to teach students the elements of not only one language but of three at the same time: Slavic, Greek and Latin.
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William Alwyn
1905 - 1985 (80 years)
William Alwyn , was an English composer, conductor, and music teacher. Life and music William Alwyn was born William Alwyn Smith in Northampton, the son of Ada Tyler and William James Smith. He showed an early interest in music and began to learn to play the piccolo. At the age of 15 he entered the Royal Academy of Music in London where he studied flute and composition. He was a virtuoso flautist and for a time was a flautist with the London Symphony Orchestra. Alwyn served as professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music from 1926 to 1955.
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Carl Marstrander
1883 - 1965 (82 years)
Carl Johan Sverdrup Marstrander was a Norwegian linguist, known for his work on the Irish language. His works, largely written in Norwegian, on the Celtic and Norse components in Norwegian culture, are considered important for modern Norway.
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Kirsten Flagstad
1895 - 1962 (67 years)
Kirsten Malfrid Flagstad was a Norwegian opera singer, who was the outstanding Wagnerian soprano of her era. Her triumphant debut in New York on 2 February 1935 is one of the legends of opera. Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the longstanding General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera said, “I have given America two great gifts — Caruso and Flagstad.”
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Jill Ireland
1936 - 1990 (54 years)
Jill Dorothy Ireland was an English actress and singer. She appeared in 16 films with husband Charles Bronson, and was involved in two of Bronson’s other films as a producer. Early life Born in Hounslow, Ireland was the daughter of a wine importer.
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Moritz Moszkowski
1854 - 1925 (71 years)
Moritz Moszkowski was a German composer, pianist, and teacher of Polish-Jewish descent. His brother Alexander Moszkowski was a famous writer and satirist in Berlin. Ignacy Paderewski said: "After Chopin, Moszkowski best understands how to write for the piano, and his writing embraces the whole gamut of piano technique." Although less known today, Moszkowski was well respected and popular during the late nineteenth century.
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Wakamatsu Shizuko
1864 - 1896 (32 years)
Wakamatsu Shizuko was a Japanese educator, translator, and novelist best known for translating Little Lord Fauntleroy written by Frances Hodgson Burnett. She is also known for introducing literature with Christianity for children's novels.
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Barbu Solacolu
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Barbu Solacolu was a Romanian poet, translator, civil servant and social scientist. Born into a prosperous and intellectual family, he became a late affiliate of the Symbolist movement, bringing to it his own leftist sympathies and agrarianism. Despite spending the early stages of World War I among non-interventionists such as Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești and Ioan Slavici, he eventually servd with distinctions as a cavalry commander, and also participated in the Hungarian–Romanian War. Solacolu trained as an economist in Weimar Germany, returning to serve the Romanian state as a civil servant. He...
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William Castle
1914 - 1977 (63 years)
William Castle was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. Orphaned at 11, Castle dropped out of high school at 15 to work in the theater. He came to the attention of Columbia Pictures for his talent for promotion and was hired. He learned the trade of filmmaking and became a director, acquiring a reputation for being able to churn out competent B-movies quickly and on budget. He eventually struck out on his own, producing and directing thrillerss, which, despite their low budgets, he effectively promoted using gimmicks, a trademark for which he is best known. He was als...
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Tim Hardin
1941 - 1980 (39 years)
James Timothy Hardin was an American folk and blues songwriter. As well as releasing his own material, several of his songs, including "If I Were a Carpenter" and "Reason to Believe", became hits for other artists.
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Johnnie Ray
1927 - 1990 (63 years)
John Alvin Ray was an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. Highly popular for most of the 1950s, Ray has been cited by critics as a major precursor to what became rock and roll, for his jazz and blues-influenced music, and his animated stage personality. Tony Bennett called Ray the "father of rock and roll", and historians have noted him as a pioneering figure in the development of the genre.
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P. L. Travers
1899 - 1996 (97 years)
Pamela Lyndon Travers was an Australian-British writer who spent most of her career in England. She is best known for the Mary Poppins series of books, which feature the eponymous magical nanny. Goff was born in Maryborough, Queensland, and grew up in the Australian bush before being sent to boarding school in Sydney. Her writing was first published when she was a teenager, and she also worked briefly as a professional Shakespearean actress. Upon emigrating to England at the age of 24, she took the name "Pamela Lyndon Travers" and adopted the pen name P. L. Travers in 1933 while writing the ...
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Henri Vieuxtemps
1820 - 1881 (61 years)
Henri François Joseph Vieuxtemps was a Belgian composer and violinist. He occupies an important place in the history of the violin as a prominent exponent of the Franco-Belgian violin school during the mid-19th century. He is also known for playing what is now known as the Vieuxtemps Guarneri del Gesù, a violin of superior workmanship.
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Jean Painlevé
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Jean Painlevé was a photographer and filmmaker who specialized in underwater fauna. He was the son of mathematician and twice prime minister of France Paul Painlevé. Upbringing A few days after Painlevé was born, his mother, Marguerite Petit de Villeneuve, died from complications arising from an infection contracted during childbirth. Painlevé, an only son, was raised by his father's sister Marie, a widow.
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Beniamino Gigli
1890 - 1957 (67 years)
Beniamino Gigli was an Italian opera singer . He is widely regarded as one of the greatest tenors of his generation. Early life Gigli was born in Recanati, in the Marche, the son of a shoemaker who loved opera. His parents did not, however, view music as a secure career. Beniamino's brother Lorenzo became a well-known painter.
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Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was an Italian composer, pianist and writer. He was known as one of the foremost guitar composers in the twentieth century with almost one hundred compositions for that instrument. In 1939 he immigrated to the United States and became a film composer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for some 200 Hollywood movies for the next fifteen years. He also wrote concertos for Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky.
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Shelly Manne
1920 - 1984 (64 years)
Sheldon "Shelly" Manne was an American jazz drummer. Most frequently associated with West Coast jazz, he was known for his versatility and also played in a number of other styles, including Dixieland, swing, bebop, avant-garde jazz, and later fusion. He also contributed to the musical background of hundreds of Hollywood films and television programs.
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Michael Chekhov
1891 - 1955 (64 years)
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Chekhov , known as Michael Chekhov, was a Russian-American actor, director, author, and theatre practitioner. He was a nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov and a student of Konstantin Stanislavski. Stanislavski referred to him as his most brilliant student.
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René Binet
1732 - 1812 (80 years)
René Binet was a French professor and translator. He was born near Beauvais and became professor of rhetoric at the collège du Plessis, rector of the Université de Paris in 1791, then proviseur of the lycée Bonaparte.
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Felix Weingartner
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
Paul Felix Weingartner, Edler von Münzberg was an Austrian conductor, composer and pianist. Life and career Weingartner was born in Zara, Dalmatia, Austrian Empire , to Austrian parents. The family moved to Graz in 1868, and his father died later that year. He studied with Wilhelm Mayer . In 1881 he went to Leipzig to study philosophy, but soon devoted himself entirely to music, entering the Conservatory in 1883 and studying in Weimar as one of Franz Liszt's last pupils. Liszt helped produce the world premiere of Weingartner's opera Sakuntala in 1884 with the Weimar orchestra. According to L...
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Lili Boulanger
1893 - 1918 (25 years)
Marie-Juliette Olga "Lili" Boulanger was a French composer and the first female winner of the Prix de Rome composition prize. Her older sister was the noted composer and composition teacher Nadia Boulanger.
Go to ProfileRichard Long was an American sound designer. He is known as the preeminent sound designer of the disco era, having installed systems at clubs including Paradise Garage, Dorian Gray, Studio 54, City Hall, and Max's Kansas City.
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William Penny
1809 - 1892 (83 years)
Captain William Penny was a Scottish shipmaster, whaler and Arctic explorer. He undertook the first maritime search for the ships of Sir John Franklin. In 1840, Penny established the first whaling station in the Cumberland Sound area on Kekerten Island.
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Daniel Adam z Veleslavína
1546 - 1599 (53 years)
Daniel Adam z Veleslavína , was a Czech lexicographer, publisher, translator, and writer. Adam Veleslavín studied at the University of Prague, and from 1569 to 1576 he was professor there. When he married the daughter of the publisher Jiří Melantrich z Aventina , he was forced to leave the university . He started working at the print press and later took it over.
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Sylvester Primer
1842 - 1913 (71 years)
Sylvester Primer was an American linguist and philologist known for his pioneering work in 1887 on the dialect of the European-American residents of Charleston, South Carolina. He published language studies in both English and German, and an 1880 work in German was reprinted in 2010. He also published several annotated scholarly editions of important German-language and Spanish-language dramas from the 18th and 19th centuries. He taught for more than 20 years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also headed the Romance language department as well as a new German-language department.
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Betty Compson
1897 - 1974 (77 years)
Betty Compson was an American actress and film producer who got her start during Hollywood's silent era. She is best known for her performances in The Docks of New York and The Barker, the latter of which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
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Johann Kaspar Zeuss
1806 - 1856 (50 years)
Johann Kaspar Zeuss was a German historian and founder of Celtic philology. He is credited with demonstrating that the Celtic languages belong to the Indo-European group. Life Zeuss was born in Kronach, Upper Franconia, and studied at the gymnasium of Bamberg. His parents wished him to enter the priesthood, but he chose a scholarly career, inclining particularly to historical and linguistic studies. He entered the University of Munich and after graduating, taught at the gymnasium there. In 1837 his book Die Herkunft der Baiern von den Markomannen , which brought him an honorary PhD from the University of Erlangen.
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Son House
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Edward James "Son" House Jr. was an American Delta blues singer and guitarist, noted for his highly emotional style of singing and slide guitar playing. After years of hostility to secular music, as a preacher and for a few years also working as a church pastor, he turned to blues performance at the age of 25. He quickly developed a unique style by applying the rhythmic drive, vocal power and emotional intensity of his preaching to the newly learned idiom. In a short career interrupted by a spell in Parchman Farm penitentiary, he developed his musicianship to the point that Charley Patton, th...
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Felix Hirsch
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Felix Eduard Hirsch was a journalist for the Berliner Tageblatt and latterly; historian, librarian and professor at Bard College in New York. As a journalist in Berlin, Hirsch was involved in the infamous libel case of Kurt Soelling.
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William Boyce
1711 - 1779 (68 years)
William Boyce was an English composer and organist. Like Beethoven later on, he became deaf but continued to compose. He knew Handel, Arne, Gluck, Bach, Abel, and a very young Mozart, all of whom respected his work.
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Tex Ritter
1905 - 1974 (69 years)
Woodward Maurice "Tex" Ritter was a pioneer of American country music, a popular singer and actor from the mid-1930s into the 1960s, and the patriarch of the Ritter acting family . He is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame.
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Johann Friedrich Reichardt
1752 - 1814 (62 years)
Johann Friedrich Reichardt was a German composer, writer and music critic. Early life Reichardt was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, to lutenist and Stadtmusiker Johann Reichardt . Johann Friedrich began his musical training, in violin, keyboard, and lute, as a child. He was a student of Timofey Belogradsky, who in turn was a student of Sylvius Leopold Weiss. When Reichardt was ten years old, his father took the choir in which he sang, the "Wunderknaben", on a concert tour in East Prussia.
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Alexander Freiman
1879 - 1968 (89 years)
Alexander Arnoldovich Freiman was a Polish-Soviet researcher of the Iranian languages. Literary works The editor of Sogdiysky sbornik, 1934Zadachi iranskoy filologii, 1946Chorezmsky yazyk. Materially i issledovaniya, 1959Osetinsko-russko-nemetsky slovar, 3 vols., 1927–1934
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Chris Wood
1944 - 1983 (39 years)
Christopher Gordon Blandford Wood was a British rock musician, best known as a founding member of the rock band Traffic, along with Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi and Dave Mason. Career Born in Quinton, a suburb of Birmingham, Chris Wood had an interest in music and painting from early childhood. Self-taught on flute and saxophone, which he began playing at the age of 15, he began to play locally with other Birmingham musicians who would later find international fame in music: Christine Perfect , Carl Palmer, Stan Webb and Mike Kellie. Wood played with Perfect in 1964 in the band Shades of Blue a...
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Antonio Moreno
1887 - 1967 (80 years)
Antonio Garrido Monteagudo , better known as Antonio Moreno or Tony Moreno, was a Spanish-born American actor and film director of the silent film era and through the 1950s. Early life and silent films Born in Madrid, Spain, Moreno emigrated to New York in 1901 and settled in Massachusetts, where he completed his education. Although he claimed to have attended Williston Seminary in Easthampton, Massachusetts, the Archives of the school, now the Williston Northampton School, have no record of his having done so. He became a stage actor in regional theater productions. In 1912, he moved to Hollywood, California, where he was signed to Biograph Studios, and began his career in bit parts.
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Val Lewton
1904 - 1951 (47 years)
Val Lewton was a Russian-American novelist, film producer and screenwriter best known for a string of low-budget horror films he produced for RKO Pictures in the 1940s. His son, also named Val Lewton, was a painter and exhibition designer.
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Johnny Green
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
John Waldo Green was an American songwriter, composer, musical arranger, conductor and pianist. He was given the nickname "Beulah" by colleague Conrad Salinger. His most famous song was one of his earliest, "Body and Soul" from the revue Three's a Crowd. Green won four Academy Awards for his film scores and a fifth for producing a short musical film, and he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. He was also honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
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Harry Warren
1893 - 1981 (88 years)
Harry Warren was an American composer and the first major American songwriter to write primarily for film. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song eleven times and won three Oscars for composing "Lullaby of Broadway", "You'll Never Know" and "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe". He wrote the music for the first blockbuster film musical, 42nd Street, choreographed by Busby Berkeley, with whom he would collaborate on many musical films.
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Giovanni Bononcini
1670 - 1747 (77 years)
Giovanni Bononcini was an Italian Baroque composer, cellist, singer and teacher, one of a family of string players and composers. Biography Early years Bononcini was born in Modena, Italy, the oldest of three sons. His father, Giovanni Maria Bononcini , was a violinist and a composer, and his younger brother, Antonio Maria Bononcini, was also a composer. An orphan from the age of 8, Giovanni Battista studied in the music school of Giovanni Paolo Colonna at San Petronio Basilica in Bologna .
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Henri Herz
1803 - 1888 (85 years)
Henri Herz was a virtuoso pianist, composer and piano manufacturer, Austrian by birth and French by nationality and domicile. He was a professor in the Paris Conservatoire for more than thirty years. Among his major works are eight piano concertos, a piano sonata, rondos, nocturnes, waltzes, marches, fantasias, and numerous sets of variations.
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Eric Dolphy
1928 - 1964 (36 years)
Eric Allan Dolphy Jr. was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist and bandleader. Primarily an alto saxophonist, bass clarinetist, and flautist, Dolphy was one of several multi-instrumentalists to gain prominence during the same era. His use of the bass clarinet helped to establish the unconventional instrument within jazz. Dolphy extended the vocabulary and boundaries of the alto saxophone, and was among the earliest significant jazz flute soloists.
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