#16151
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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Maria Malibran
1808 - 1836 (28 years)
Maria Felicia Malibran was a Spanish singer who commonly sang both contralto and soprano parts, and was one of the best-known opera singers of the 19th century. Malibran was known for her stormy personality and dramatic intensity, becoming a legendary figure after her death in Manchester, England, at age 28. Contemporary accounts of her voice describe its range, power and flexibility as extraordinary.
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Johannes Friedrich
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Johannes Friedrich was a German hittitologist who published the Hethitisches Elementarbuch , and the Kurzgefasstes Hethitisches Wörterbuch . A translation of his book "Entzifferung Verschollener Schriften und Sprachen" was published by Philosophical Library New York 1957: a study of Ancient Orient languages, including Egyptian hieroglyphics, cuneiform writing, Hittite hieroglyphics and other scripts and languages of the Old world.
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Max Margolis
1866 - 1932 (66 years)
Max Leopold Margolis was a Lithuanian Jewish and American philologist. Son of Isaac Margolis; educated at the elementary school of his native town, the Leibniz gymnasium, Berlin, and Columbia University, New York City . In 1891 he was appointed to a fellowship in Semitic languages at Columbia University, and from 1892 to 1897 he was instructor, and later assistant professor, of Hebrew language and Biblical exegesis at the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati. In 1897 he became assistant professor of Semitic languages in the University of California; in 1898, associate professor; and from 1902 the head of the Semitic department.
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Clarence Brown
1890 - 1987 (97 years)
Clarence Leon Brown was an American film director. Early life Born in Clinton, Massachusetts, to Larkin Harry Brown, a cotton manufacturer, and Katherine Ann Brown , Brown moved to Tennessee when he was 11 years old. He attended Knoxville High School and the University of Tennessee, both in Knoxville, Tennessee, graduating from the university at the age of 19 with two degrees in engineering. An early fascination in automobiles led Brown to a job with the Stevens-Duryea Company, then to his own Brown Motor Car Company in Alabama. He later abandoned the car dealership after developing an interest in motion pictures around 1913.
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Franz Brendel
1811 - 1868 (57 years)
Karl Franz Brendel was a German music critic, journalist and musicologist born in Stolberg, the son of a successful mining engineer named Christian Friedrich Brendel. Biography He was a student at the University of Leipzig, University of Berlin, and University of Freiburg up until the year 1840. In 1846 he began teaching music history at the Leipzig Conservatory, and in 1852 he published a well-regarded general history of European music. Brendel also published a book on Franz Liszt.
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Sergio Corbucci
1927 - 1990 (63 years)
Sergio Corbucci was an Italian film director, screenwriter and producer. He directed both very violent Spaghetti Westerns and bloodless Bud Spencer and Terence Hill action comedies. He is the older brother of screenwriter and film director Bruno Corbucci.
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Mikołaj Rudnicki
1881 - 1978 (97 years)
Mikołaj Rudnicki - was a Polish linguist. He finished his studies in Kraków. In 1911 he became a docent in Indoeuropean linguistics. In 1919 he became a professor at Uniwersytet Poznański. From 1945 he was a member of the Polish Academy of Learning.
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A. L. Lloyd
1908 - 1982 (74 years)
Albert Lancaster Lloyd , usually known as A. L. Lloyd or Bert Lloyd, was an English folk singer and collector of folk songs, and as such was a key figure in the British folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. While Lloyd is most widely known for his work with British folk music, he had a keen interest in the music of Spain, Latin America, Southeastern Europe and Australia. He recorded at least six discs of Australian Bush ballads and folk music.
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John Gilbert
1897 - 1936 (39 years)
John Gilbert was an American actor, screenwriter and director. He rose to fame during the silent era and became a popular leading man known as "The Great Lover". His breakthrough came in 1925 with his starring roles in The Merry Widow and The Big Parade. At the height of his career, Gilbert rivaled Rudolph Valentino as a box office draw.
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Domenico Cimarosa
1749 - 1801 (52 years)
Domenico Cimarosa was an Italian composer of the Neapolitan School and of the Classical period. He wrote more than eighty operas, the best known of which is Il matrimonio segreto ; most of his operas are comedies. He also wrote instrumental works and church music.
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Antonio Caldara
1671 - 1736 (65 years)
Antonio Caldara was an Italian Baroque composer. Life Caldara was born in Venice , the son of a violinist. He became a chorister at St Mark's in Venice, where he learned several instruments, probably under the instruction of Giovanni Legrenzi. In 1699 he relocated to Mantua, where he became maestro di cappella to the inept Charles IV, Duke of Mantua, a pensionary of France with a French wife, who took the French side in the War of the Spanish Succession. Caldara removed from Mantua in 1707, after the French were expelled from Italy, then moved on to Barcelona as chamber composer to Charles III, the pretender to the Spanish throne and who kept a royal court at Barcelona.
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Abu Sulayman Sijistani
932 - 1000 (68 years)
Abu Sulayman Muhammad Sijistani, also called al-Mantiqi , named for his origins in Sijistan or Sistan province in present-day Eastern Iran and Southern Afghanistan, became the leading Persian Islamic humanist philosopher in Baghdad.
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Vincent Starrett
1886 - 1974 (88 years)
Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett , known as Vincent Starrett, was a Canadian-born American writer, newspaperman, and bibliophile. Biography Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett was born above his grandfather's bookshop in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His father moved the family to Chicago in 1889 where Starrett attended John Marshall High School.
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Samuel Clarke
1599 - 1683 (84 years)
Samuel Clarke was an English clergyman and significant Puritan biographer. Life He was born 10 October 1599 at Wolston, Warwickshire, the son of Hugh Clarke , who was vicar of Wolston for forty years. Clarke was educated by his father till he was thirteen; then at the free school in Coventry; and when seventeen was entered at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was ordained about 1622, and held charges at Knowle in Warwickshire, Thornton-le-Moors in Cheshire, and Shotwick on the estuary of the Dee. Here, 2 February 1626, he married Katherine, daughter of Valentine Overton, rector of Bedworth, Wa...
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Benjamin Godard
1849 - 1895 (46 years)
Benjamin Louis Paul Godard was a French violinist and Romantic-era composer of Jewish extraction, best known for his opera Jocelyn. Godard composed eight operas, five symphonies, two piano and two violin concertos, string quartets, sonatas for violin and piano, piano pieces and etudes, and more than a hundred songs. He died at the age of 45 in Cannes of tuberculosis and was buried in the family tomb in Taverny in the French department of Val-d'Oise.
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Engelbert Humperdinck
1854 - 1921 (67 years)
Engelbert Humperdinck was a German composer. He is known widely for his opera Hansel and Gretel . Biography Humperdinck was born at Siegburg in the Rhine Province in 1854. After receiving piano lessons, he produced his first composition at the age of seven. His first attempts at works for the stage were two singspiele written when he was 13. His parents disapproved of his plans for a career in music and encouraged him to study architecture.
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Thomas Morley
1559 - 1602 (43 years)
Thomas Morley was an English composer, theorist, singer and organist of the Renaissance. He was one of the foremost members of the English Madrigal School. Referring to the strong Italian influence on the English madrigal, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians states that Morley was "chiefly responsible for grafting the Italian shoot on to the native stock and initiating the curiously brief but brilliant flowering of the madrigal that constitutes one of the most colourful episodes in the history of English music."
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Thea von Harbou
1888 - 1954 (66 years)
Thea Gabriele von Harbou was a German screenwriter, novelist, film director, and actress. She is remembered as the screenwriter of the science fiction film classic Metropolis and for the 1925 novel on which it was based. von Harbou collaborated as a screenwriter with film director Fritz Lang, her husband, during the period of transition from silent to sound films.
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Yakov Protazanov
1881 - 1945 (64 years)
Yakov Alexandrovich Protazanov was a Russian and Soviet film director and screenwriter, and one of the founding fathers of cinema of Russia. He was an Honored Artist of the Russian SFSR and Uzbek SSR .
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Victor Saville
1895 - 1979 (84 years)
Victor Saville was an English film director, producer, and screenwriter. He directed 39 films between 1927 and 1954. He also produced 36 films between 1923 and 1962. Biography Saville produced his first film, Woman to Woman, with Michael Balcon in 1923, and on the back of its success produced pictures for the veteran director Maurice Elvey, including the classic British silent Hindle Wakes . His first picture as director was The Arcadians . In 1929 he and Balcon worked together again on a talkie remake of Woman to Woman for Balcon's company, Gainsborough Pictures. This time Saville directed i...
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Emmerich Kálmán
1882 - 1953 (71 years)
Emmerich Kálmán was a Hungarian composer of operettas and a prominent figure in the development of Viennese operetta in the 20th century. Among his most popular works are Die Csárdásfürstin and Gräfin Mariza . Influences on his compositional style include Hungarian folk music , the Viennese style of precursors such as Johann Strauss II and Franz Lehár, and, in his later works, American jazz. As a result of the Anschluss, Kálmán and his family fled to Paris and then to the United States. He eventually returned to Europe in 1949 and died in Paris in 1953.
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Michel Richard Delalande
1657 - 1726 (69 years)
Michel Richard Delalande [de Lalande] was a French Baroque composer and organist who was in the service of King Louis XIV. He was one of the most important composers of grands motets. He also wrote orchestral suites known as Simphonies pour les Soupers du Roy and ballets.
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Mitchell Leisen
1898 - 1972 (74 years)
James Mitchell Leisen was an American director, art director, and costume designer. Film career He entered the film industry in the 1920s, beginning in the art and costume departments. He directed his first film in 1933 with Cradle Song and became known for his keen sense of aesthetics in the glossy Hollywood melodramas and screwball comedies he turned out.
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Kenneth Adam
1908 - 1978 (70 years)
Kenneth Adam was an English journalist and broadcasting executive, who from 1957 until 1961 served as the Controller of the BBC Television Service. Early life and education He was born in Nottingham. After attending Nottingham High School, Adam read history at St John's College, Cambridge, and graduated with a first-class degree. While at St John's he was both President of the Union and President of the University Liberal Club. After graduating, he joined the staff of the Manchester Guardian newspaper as a journalist at the age of just twenty-two. While working for the Guardian he also began...
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Maude Adams
1872 - 1953 (81 years)
Maude Ewing Adams Kiskadden , known professionally as Maude Adams, was an American actress and stage designer who achieved her greatest success as the character Peter Pan, first playing the role in the 1905 Broadway production of Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. Adams' personality appealed to a large audience and helped her become the most successful and highest-paid performer of her day, with a yearly income of more than $1 million during her peak.
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Géza von Bolváry
1897 - 1961 (64 years)
Géza von Bolváry was a Hungarian actor, screenwriter, and film director, who worked principally in Germany and Austria. Biography Géza von Bolváry was born in Budapest. He attended the Imperial Military Academy in Budapest and subsequently served in the Hungarian army . After World War I he left military service with the rank of Royal Hungarian Rittmeister. He then earned his living in the new Hungarian film industry. He began his career in about 1920 as an actor in various silent films, but soon changed to the Star-Film company, where he was first active as a director and made his debut as d...
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Clara Butt
1872 - 1936 (64 years)
Dame Clara Ellen Butt was an English dramatic contralto and one of the most popular singers from the 1890s through to the 1920s. She had an exceptionally fine contralto voice and an agile singing technique, and impressed contemporary composers such as Saint-Saëns and Elgar; the latter composed his Sea Pictures, Op. 37 with her voice in mind.
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Simon Mayr
1763 - 1845 (82 years)
Johann Simon Mayr , also known in Italian as Giovanni Simone Mayr or Simone Mayr , was a German composer. His music reflects the transition from the Classical to the Romantic musical era. In 1805 he founded the Bergamo Conservatory. He was an early inspiration to Rossini and taught and advocated for Donizetti.
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Michael William Balfe
1808 - 1870 (62 years)
Michael William Balfe was an Irish composer, best remembered for his operas, especially The Bohemian Girl. After a short career as a violinist, Balfe pursued an operatic singing career, while he began to compose. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he composed at least 29 operas, almost 250 songs, several cantatas and other works. He was also a noted conductor, directing Italian Opera at Her Majesty's Theatre for seven years, among other conducting posts.
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Josiah Willard Gibbs Sr.
1790 - 1861 (71 years)
Josiah Willard Gibbs Sr. was an American linguist and theologian, who served as professor of sacred literature at Yale University. He is chiefly remembered today for his involvement in the Amistad case and as the father of theoretical physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs.
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Rudolf Friml
1879 - 1972 (93 years)
Charles Rudolf Friml was a Czech-born composer of operettas, musicals, songs and piano pieces, as well as a pianist. After musical training and a brief performing career in his native Prague, Friml moved to the United States, where he became a composer. His best-known works are Rose-Marie and The Vagabond King, each of which enjoyed success on Broadway and in London and were adapted for film.
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Leroy Anderson
1908 - 1975 (67 years)
Leroy Anderson was an American composer of short, light concert pieces, many of which were introduced by the Boston Pops Orchestra under the direction of Arthur Fiedler. John Williams described him as "one of the great American masters of light orchestral music."
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Oscar Straus
1870 - 1954 (84 years)
Oscar Nathan Straus was a Viennese composer of operettas, film scores, and songs. He also wrote about 500 cabaret songs, chamber music, and orchestral and choral works. His original name was actually Strauss, but for professional purposes he deliberately omitted the final 's'. He wished not to be associated with the musical Strauss family of Vienna. However, he did follow the advice of Johann Strauss II in 1898 about abandoning the prospective lure of writing waltzes for the more lucrative business of writing for the theatre.
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Adolphe Cohn
1851 - 1930 (79 years)
Adolphe Cohn was a Franco-American educator, born in Paris. He was graduated "bachelier ès lettres" from the University of Paris in 1868, and studied law, historical criticism, and philology at various institutions of higher learning in Paris, receiving the degrees of LL.B. in 1873. A pupil of the École des Chartes, his thesis was called Vues sur l’histoire de l’organisation judiciaire en France du IXe au XIIIe siècle considérée au point de vue des juridictions extraordinaires and he got the diploma of "archiviste paléographe" in 1874. At the commencement of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, h...
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Mikio Naruse
1905 - 1969 (64 years)
Mikio Naruse was a Japanese filmmaker who directed 89 films spanning the period 1930 to 1967. Naruse is known for imbuing his films with a bleak and pessimistic outlook. He made primarily shōshimin-eiga films with female protagonists, portrayed by actresses such as Hideko Takamine, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Setsuko Hara. Because of his focus on family drama and the intersection of traditional and modern Japanese culture, his films have been compared with the works of Yasujirō Ozu. Many of his films in his later career were adaptations of the works of acknowledged Japanese writers. Titled a "major fi...
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Kid Ory
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Edward "Kid" Ory was an American jazz composer, trombonist and bandleader. One of the early users of the glissando technique, he helped establish it as a central element of New Orleans jazz. He was born near LaPlace, Louisiana and moved to New Orleans on his 21st birthday, to Los Angeles in 1910 and to Chicago in 1925. The Ory band later was an important force in reviving interest in New Orleans jazz, making radio broadcasts on The Orson Welles Almanac program in 1944, among other shows. In 1944–45, the group made a series of recordings for the Crescent label, which was founded by Nesuhi Erte...
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Pat O'Brien
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
William Joseph Patrick O'Brien was an American film actor with more than 100 screen credits. Of Irish descent, he often played Irish and Irish-American characters and was referred to as "Hollywood's Irishman in Residence" in the press. One of the best-known screen actors of the 1930s and 1940s, he played priests, cops, military figures, pilots, and reporters. He is especially well-remembered for his roles in Knute Rockne, All American , Angels with Dirty Faces , and Some Like It Hot . He was frequently paired onscreen with Hollywood star James Cagney. O'Brien also appeared on stage and televi...
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Nicola Porpora
1686 - 1768 (82 years)
Nicola Antonio Giacinto Porpora was an Italian composer and teacher of singing of the Baroque era, whose most famous singing students were the castrati Farinelli and Caffarelli. Other students included composers Johann Adolph Hasse, Matteo Capranica and Joseph Haydn.
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