#16201
Karl Richter
1926 - 1981 (55 years)
Karl Richter was a German conductor, choirmaster, organist, and harpsichordist. Early life and education Karl Richter was born in Plauen to Christian Johannes Richter, a Protestant pastor, and Clara Hedwig Richter. He studied first in Dresden, where he was a member of the Dresdner Kreuzchor and later in Leipzig, where he received his degree in 1949. He studied with Günther Ramin , Karl Straube and Rudolf Mauersberger.
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Henryk Szeryng
1918 - 1988 (70 years)
Henryk Szeryng was a Polish-Mexican violinist. Early years He was born in Warsaw, Poland on 22 September 1918 into a wealthy Jewish family. The surname "Szeryng" is a Polish transliteration of his Yiddish surname, which nowadays would be spelled "Shering" in the modern Yiddish-to-English transliteration.
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Joe Venuti
1903 - 1978 (75 years)
Giuseppe "Joe" Venuti was an American jazz musician and pioneer jazz violinist. Considered the father of jazz violin, he pioneered the use of string instruments in jazz along with the guitaristist Eddie Lang, a friend since childhood. Through the 1920s and early 1930s, Venuti and Lang made many recordings as leader and as featured soloists. He and Lang became so well known for their 'hot' violin and guitar solos that on many commercial dance recordings they were hired to do 12- or 24-bar duos towards the end of otherwise stock dance arrangements. In 1926, Venuti and Lang started recording for...
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Samuel Silas Curry
1847 - 1921 (74 years)
Samuel Silas Curry was an American professor of elocution and vocal expression. He is the namesake of Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts. Early life and education Born on a small farm in Chatata, Tennessee, he was the son of James Campbell Curry and Nancy Young Curry, and shared kinship with famed frontiersmen Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Growing up on a frontier farm, he learned what it meant to work hard and gained a love of the natural world which would influence his later work. He was a teenager during the tumultuous years of the American Civil War, and experienced hardships when ...
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Alan Bush
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Alan Dudley Bush was a British composer, pianist, conductor, teacher and political activist. A committed communist, his uncompromising political beliefs were often reflected in his music. He composed prolifically across a range of genres, but struggled through his lifetime for recognition from the British musical establishment, which largely ignored his works.
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John Stainer
1840 - 1901 (61 years)
Sir John Stainer was an English composer and organist whose music, though seldom performed today , was very popular during his lifetime. His work as choir trainer and organist set standards for Anglican church music that are still influential. He was also active as an academic, becoming Heather Professor of Music at Oxford.
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Myra Hess
1890 - 1965 (75 years)
Dame Julia Myra Hess, was an English pianist best known for her performances of the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms. Career Early life Julia Myra Hess was born on 25 February 1890 to a Jewish family in South Hampstead, London. She was the youngest of four children and began piano lessons at the age of five. She studied at the Guildhall School of Music and at the Royal Academy of Music under Tobias Matthay, after winning a scholarship to the latter in 1903 at age 12.
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Lee Morgan
1938 - 1972 (34 years)
Edward Lee Morgan was an American jazz trumpeter and composer. One of the key hard bop musicians of the 1960s and a cornerstone of the Blue Note label, Morgan came to prominence in his late teens, recording with bandleaders like John Coltrane, Curtis Fuller, Dizzy Gillespie, Hank Mobley and Wayne Shorter, and playing in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.
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Matthias Lexer
1830 - 1892 (62 years)
Matthias Lexer , later Matthias von Lexer , was a German lexicographer, author of the principal dictionary of the Middle High German language, Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch von Matthias Lexer, completed in 1878 in three volumes. This dictionary was founded upon the base of the Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch by Benecke, Müller and Zarncke, completed in 1866 in three volumes.
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Ludwig Minkus
1826 - 1917 (91 years)
Ludwig Minkus , also known as Léon Fyodorovich Minkus , was an Austrian composer of ballet music, a violinist and teacher of music. Minkus is noted for the music he composed during his career in St. Petersburg, Russia. Beginning in 1871 Minkus served in the official post of Composer of Ballet Music to the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres, a position he held until it was abolished upon his retirement in 1886. During his long career in St. Petersburg, Minkus composed for the original works and revivals staged by the ballet masters Arthur Saint-Léon and Marius Petipa. Among the composer's most celebrated compositions is his score for La source , Don Quixote ; and La Bayadère .
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Ed Wood
1924 - 1978 (54 years)
Edward Davis Wood Jr. was an American filmmaker, actor, and pulp novel author. In the 1950s, Wood directed several low-budget science fiction, crime and horror films that later became cult classics, notably Glen or Glenda , Jail Bait , Bride of the Monster , Plan 9 from Outer Space and Night of the Ghouls . In the 1960s and 1970s, he moved towards sexploitation and pornographic films such as The Sinister Urge , Orgy of the Dead and Necromania , and wrote over 80 lurid pulp crime and sex novels.
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Mieczysław Horszowski
1892 - 1993 (101 years)
Mieczysław Horszowski was a Polish-American pianist who had one of the longest careers in the history of the performing arts. Life Early life Horszowski was born in Lwów , Austria-Hungary . He was first taught piano by his mother, a pupil of Karol Mikuli, who had himself been a pupil of Frédéric Chopin. He became a pupil of Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna at the age of seven; Leschetizky had studied with Beethoven's pupil Carl Czerny. Leschetizky's sister-in-law, Angele Potocka, referred to Horszowski as "a wunderkind of high order".
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Thomas Cooper
1517 - 1594 (77 years)
Thomas Cooper was an English bishop, lexicographer, theologian, and writer. Life Cooper was born in Oxford, England, where he was educated at Magdalen College. He became Master of Magdalen College School and afterwards practised as a physician in Oxford.
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Lowell George
1945 - 1979 (34 years)
Lowell Thomas George was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer, who was the primary guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and founder/leader for the rock band Little Feat.
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Michael Haydn
1737 - 1806 (69 years)
Johann Michael Haydn was an Austrian composer of the Classical period, the younger brother of Joseph Haydn. Life Michael Haydn was born in 1737 in the Austrian village of Rohrau, near the Hungarian border. His father was Mathias Haydn, a wheelwright who also served as "Marktrichter", an office akin to village mayor. Haydn's mother Maria, Koller, had previously worked as a cook in the palace of Count Harrach, the presiding aristocrat of Rohrau. Mathias was an enthusiastic folk musician, who during the journeyman period of his career had taught himself to play the harp, and he also made sure t...
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Balraj Sahni
1913 - 1973 (60 years)
Balraj Sahni was an Indian film and stage actor, who is best known for , Do Bigha Zameen , Chhoti Bahen , Kabuliwala , Waqt and Garam Hawa . He was the brother of Bhisham Sahni, noted Hindi writer, playwright, and actor.
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Charles Vidor
1900 - 1959 (59 years)
Charles Vidor was a Hungarian film director. Among his film successes are The Bridge , The Tuttles of Tahiti , The Desperadoes , Cover Girl , Together Again , A Song to Remember , Over 21 , Gilda , The Loves of Carmen , Rhapsody , Love Me or Leave Me , The Swan , The Joker Is Wild , and A Farewell to Arms .
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Veit Harlan
1899 - 1964 (65 years)
Veit Harlan was a German film director and actor. Harlan reached the highpoint of his career as a director in the Nazi era; most notably his antisemitic film Jud Süß makes him controversial. While viewed critically for his ideologies, a number of critics consider him a capable director on the grounds of such work as his Opfergang .
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Sigismond Thalberg
1812 - 1871 (59 years)
Sigismond Thalberg was an Austrian composer and one of the most distinguished virtuoso pianists of the 19th century. Family Thalberg was born in Pâquis near Geneva on 8 January 1812. According to his own account, he was the illegitimate son of Moritz, Prince of Dietrichstein and Maria Julia Bydeskuty von Ipp, from a Hungarian family of lower nobility. In 1820, Julia married Baron Alexander Ludwig . However, according to his birth certificate, he was the son of Joseph Thalberg and Fortunée Stein, both from Frankfurt-am-Main.
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Colin Cherry
1914 - 1979 (65 years)
Edward Colin Cherry was a British cognitive scientist whose main contributions were in focused auditory attention, specifically the cocktail party problem regarding the capacity to follow one conversation while many other conversations are going on in a noisy room. Cherry used shadowing tasks to study this problem, which involve playing two different auditory messages to a participant's left and right ears and instructing them to attend to only one. The participant must then shadow this attended message.
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Kurt Eisner
1867 - 1919 (52 years)
Kurt Eisner was a German politician, revolutionary, journalist, and theatre critic. As a socialist journalist, he organized the socialist revolution that overthrew the Wittelsbach monarchy in Bavaria in November 1918, which led to his being described as "the symbol of the Bavarian revolution". He is used as an example of charismatic authority by Max Weber. Eisner subsequently proclaimed the People's State of Bavaria but was assassinated by far-right German nationalist Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley in Munich on 21 February 1919.
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Leopold Godowsky
1870 - 1938 (68 years)
Leopold Mordkhelovich Godowsky Sr. was a Lithuanian-born American virtuoso pianist, composer and teacher. He was one of the most highly regarded performers of his time, known for his theories concerning the application of relaxed weight and economy of motion within pianistic technique – principles later propagated by his pupils, such as Heinrich Neuhaus.
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Vincent Persichetti
1915 - 1987 (72 years)
Vincent Ludwig Persichetti was an American composer, teacher, and pianist. An important musical educator and writer, he was known for his integration of various new ideas in musical composition into his own work and teaching, as well as for training many noted composers in composition at the Juilliard School.
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Robert J. Flaherty
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Robert Joseph Flaherty, was an American filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature-length documentary film, Nanook of the North . The film made his reputation and nothing in his later life fully equaled its success, although he continued the development of this new genre of narrative documentary with Moana , set in the South Seas, and Man of Aran , filmed in Ireland's Aran Islands. Flaherty is considered the father of both the documentary and the ethnographic film.
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André Levinson
1887 - 1933 (46 years)
André Yacovlev Levinson, Андрей Яковлевич Левинсон [Andrey Yakovl'evich Levinson], November 1, 1887, St. Petersburg - December 3, 1933, Paris At the University of Sankt Peterburg he had been a professor of Romance languages. With regard to ballet, he then championed "pure academic dance". Accordingly, he opposed many innovations advanced by choreographer Michel Fokine and impresario Sergei Diaghilev of Ballets Russes. In 1918 Levinson left Russia for Lithuania, then Germany, arriving in Paris in 1921. He taught a course in Russian literature at the Sorbonne. Then Ballets Russes regularly perf...
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Ernst Fraenkel
1881 - 1957 (76 years)
Ernst Eduard Samuel Fraenkel was a German linguist who made major contributions to the fields of Indo-European linguistics and Baltic studies. Life Fraenkel was born in Berlin. He began his studies in 1899 in classical philology, Sanskrit, and Indo-European linguistics with Johannes Schmidt at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In 1905 he defended his dissertation on ancient Greek denominal verbs. From 1906 to 1908 he studied with August Leskien, an expert on the Baltic languages, in Leipzig. He became Privatdozent at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel in 1909, and was promoted to "außerordentlicher Professor" in 1916 and to "ordentlicher Professor" in 1920.
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Albert Ayler
1936 - 1970 (34 years)
Albert Ayler was an American avant-garde jazz saxophonist, singer and composer. After early experience playing R&B and bebop, Ayler began recording music during the free jazz era of the 1960s. However, some critics argue that while Ayler's style is undeniably original and unorthodox, it does not adhere to the generally accepted critical understanding of free jazz. In fact, Ayler's style is difficult to categorize in any way, and it evoked incredibly strong and disparate reactions from critics and fans alike. His innovations have inspired subsequent jazz musicians.
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Nicolas Slonimsky
1894 - 1995 (101 years)
Nicolas Slonimsky , born Nikolai Leonidovich Slonimskiy , was a Russian-born American musicologist, conductor, pianist, and composer. Best known for his writing and musical reference work, he wrote the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns and the Lexicon of Musical Invective, and edited Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians.
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Paavo Ravila
1902 - 1974 (72 years)
Paavo Ilmari Ravila was a Finnish linguist and rector of the University of Helsinki. Biography Ravila started his studies at the University of Turku in 1921, the same year the university was founded. He received his master's degree in philosophy 1924 and continued his education in Finno-Ugric languages at the University of Helsinki under professors Yrjö Wichmann, Frans Äimä and J. J. Mikkola. He earned his PhD in 1932 and was professor of Finnish and related languages at the University of Turku from 1934 to 1949. He spent the rest of his career at the University of Helsinki, first as professo...
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Ben Lyon
1901 - 1979 (78 years)
Ben Lyon was an American film actor and a studio executive at 20th Century-Fox who later acted in British radio, films and TV. Early life and career Lyon was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Alvine W. and Ben Lyon, a travelling salesman. His family was Jewish. Lyon entered films in 1918 after a successful appearance on Broadway opposite Jeanne Eagels. He attracted attention in the highly successful film Flaming Youth and steadily developed into a leading man. He was successfully paired with some of the leading actresses of the silent era, including Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson, Colleen Moore, Barbara La Marr, Viola Dana, Anna Q.
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Silas Bent
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Silas Bent IV , son of Silas Bent III and Ann Elizabeth Bent was an American journalist, author, and lecturer. He spent nearly three decades as a journalist, including time as a freelance writer, and spent a year as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Bent authored several books and articles, many critiquing the practices of newspapers in their reporting. He was married to Elizabeth Sims.
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Emil Gilels
1916 - 1985 (69 years)
Emil Grigoryevich Gilels was a Soviet pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest pianists of all time. His sister Elizaveta, three years his junior, was a renowned violinist. His daughter Elena became a successful pianist.
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Alan Civil
1929 - 1989 (60 years)
Alan Civil OBE was a British horn player. Civil began to play the horn at a young age, and joined the famous Royal Artillery Band and Orchestra at Woolwich, while still in his teens. He studied the instrument under Aubrey Brain, father of Dennis Brain.
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Robert Z. Leonard
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Robert Zigler Leonard was an American film director, actor, producer, and screenwriter. Biography He was born in Chicago, Illinois. At one time, he was married to silent star Mae Murray with the two forming Tiffany Pictures to film eight motion pictures that were released by MGM.
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Edgar G. Ulmer
1904 - 1972 (68 years)
Edgar Georg Ulmer was a Jewish-Moravian, Austrian-American film director who mainly worked on Hollywood B movies and other low-budget productions, eventually earning the epithet 'The King of PRC', due to his extremely prolific output for the Poverty Row studio. His stylish and eccentric works came to be appreciated by auteur theory-espousing film critics in the years following his retirement. Ulmer's most famous productions include the horror film The Black Cat and the film noir Detour .
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Eugen Jochum
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Eugen Jochum Biography Jochum was born to a Roman Catholic family in Babenhausen, near Augsburg, Germany; his father was an organist and conductor. Jochum studied the piano and organ in Augsburg, enrolling in its Academy of Music from 1914 to 1922. He then studied at the Munich Conservatory, with his composition teacher being Hermann von Waltershausen; it was there that he changed his focus to conducting, his teacher being Siegmund von Hausegger, who conducted the first performance of the original version of the Ninth Symphony of Anton Bruckner and made the first recording of it.
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Pete Ham
1947 - 1975 (28 years)
Peter William Ham was a Welsh singer, songwriter and guitarist best known as a lead vocalist of and composer for the 1970s rock band Badfinger, whose hit songs include "No Matter What", "Day After Day" and "Baby Blue". He also co-wrote the ballad "Without You", a worldwide number-one hit for Harry Nilsson that has become a standard covered by hundreds of artists. Ham was granted two Ivor Novello Awards related to the song in 1973.
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Florence Lawrence
1886 - 1938 (52 years)
Florence Lawrence was a Canadian-American stage performer and film actress. She is often referred to as the "first movie star", and was long thought to be the first film actor to be named publicly until evidence published in 2019 indicated that the first named film star was French actor Max Linder. At the height of her fame in the 1910s, she was known as the "Biograph Girl" for work as one of the leading ladies in silent films from the Biograph Company. She appeared in almost 300 films for various motion picture companies throughout her career.
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Karl Lentzner
1842 - 1905 (63 years)
Karl Lentzner was a German-born linguist who published works pertaining to Australian English vocabulary in the late 19th century. His Colonial English: A Glossary of Australian, Anglo-Indian, Pidgin English, West Indian, and South African Words was published by Kegan Paul, London & Ehrhardt Karras, Halle-Leipzig, in 1891. This is the first dictionary of colonial Australian, with slang, words introduced from Aboriginal languages and pidgin.
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Clifford Brown
1930 - 1956 (26 years)
Clifford Benjamin Brown was an American jazz trumpeter and composer. He died at the age of 25 in a car crash, leaving behind four years' worth of recordings. His compositions "Sandu", "Joy Spring", and "Daahoud" have become jazz standards. Brown won the DownBeat magazine Critics' Poll for New Star of the Year in 1954; he was inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 1972.
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Knut Jungbohn Clement
1803 - 1873 (70 years)
Knut Jungbohn Clement was a Danish linguist. Biography He was educated at Kiel and Heidelberg, and became PhD in 1835. At the expense of the Danish government he made a three years' tour through Great Britain and continental Europe, and on his return to Denmark became a professor in the University of Kiel, and delivered before large and enthusiastic classes lectures on history, politics, economy, and criticism. He had taken an active part in the question of the Schleswig-Holstein duchies, and in 1866, when they were given up in consequence of the Austro-Prussian War, he emigrated to the Unite...
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Sonny Boy Williamson II
1912 - 1965 (53 years)
Alex or Aleck Miller , known later in his career as Sonny Boy Williamson, was an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter. He was an early and influential blues harp stylist who recorded successfully in the 1950s and 1960s. Miller used various names, including Rice Miller and Little Boy Blue, before calling himself Sonny Boy Williamson, which was also the name of a popular Chicago blues singer and harmonica player. To distinguish the two, Miller has been referred to as Sonny Boy Williamson II.
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Maria Yudina
1899 - 1970 (71 years)
Maria Veniaminovna Yudina was a Soviet pianist. Early life and education Maria Yudina was born to a Jewish family in Nevel, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire. She was the fourth child of Veniamin Yudin, a renowned physiologist and forensic expert, and his first wife, Raisa Yakovlevna Yudina . Yudina studied at the Petrograd Conservatory under Anna Yesipova and Leonid Nikolayev. She also briefly studied privately with Felix Blumenfeld. Her classmates included Dmitri Shostakovich and Vladimir Sofronitsky. In 1921–22 Yudina attended lectures at the historical-philological department of Petrogr...
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Imogen Holst
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Imogen Clare Holst was a British composer, arranger, conductor, teacher, musicologist, and festival administrator. The only child of the composer Gustav Holst, she is particularly known for her educational work at Dartington Hall in the 1940s, and for her 20 years as joint artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. In addition to composing music, she wrote composer biographies, much educational material, and several books on the life and works of her father.
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Zoilus
400 BC - 320 BC (80 years)
Zoilus was a Greek grammarian and literary critic from Amphipolis in Eastern Macedonia, then known as Thrace. He took the name Homeromastix later in life. Biography According to Vitruvius , Zoilus lived during the age of Ptolemy Philadelphus, by whom he was crucified as the punishment of his criticisms on the king; but this account should probably be rejected as a fiction based on Zoilus' reputation. Vitruvius goes on to state that Zoilus also may have been stoned at Chios or thrown alive upon a funeral pyre at Smyrna. Either way Vitruvius felt it was just as well since he deserved to be dead for slandering an author who could not defend himself.
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Martita Hunt
1900 - 1969 (69 years)
Martita Edith Hunt was an Argentine-born British theatre and film actress. She had a dominant stage presence and played a wide range of powerful characters. She is best remembered for her performance as Miss Havisham in David Lean's Great Expectations.
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Joseph Szigeti
1892 - 1973 (81 years)
Joseph Szigeti was a Hungarian violinist. Born into a musical family, he spent his early childhood in a small town in Transylvania. He quickly proved himself to be a child prodigy on the violin, and moved to Budapest with his father to study with the renowned pedagogue Jenő Hubay. After completing his studies with Hubay in his early teens, Szigeti began his international concert career. His performances at that time were primarily limited to salon-style recitals and the more overtly virtuosic repertoire; however, after making the acquaintance of pianist Ferruccio Busoni, he began to develop a...
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Athene Seyler
1889 - 1990 (101 years)
Athene Seyler, CBE was an English actress. Early life She was born in Hackney, London; her German-born grandparents moved to the United Kingdom, where her grandfather Philip Seyler was a merchant in London. Athene Seyler was educated at Coombe Hill School in Surrey, a progressive co-educational school which disliked petitionary prayer and whose advanced biology classes studied Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Seyler took part in an anti-blood sports demonstration, during which pupils captured the fox from the local hunt.
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Ted Heath
1900 - 1969 (69 years)
George Edward Heath was a British musician and big band leader. Heath led what is widely considered Britain's greatest post-war big band, recording more than 100 albums, which sold over 20 million copies. The most successful band in Britain during the 1950s, it remained in existence as a ghost band long after Heath died, surviving in such a form until 2000.
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Lupino Lane
1892 - 1959 (67 years)
Henry William George Lupino professionally Lupino Lane, was an English actor and theatre manager, and a member of the famous Lupino family, which eventually included his cousin, the screenwriter/director/actress Ida Lupino. Lane started out as a child performer, known as 'Little Nipper', and went on to appear in a wide range of theatrical, music hall and film performances. Increasingly celebrated for his silent comedy short subjects, he is best known in the United Kingdom for playing Bill Snibson in the play and film Me and My Girl, which popularized the song and dance routine "The Lambeth W...
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