#16951
Yakov Zak
1913 - 1976 (63 years)
Yakov Izrailevich Zak was a Soviet and Russian pianist and pedagogue. People's Artist of the USSR . Born in Odessa, Zak studied piano at the Odessa Conservatory with Maria Starkhova, took classes on special harmony with Mykola Vilinsky, and later studied with Heinrich Neuhaus in Moscow, graduating in 1935. Having made his debut in 1935, he rose to prominence when he won First Prize and the Mazurka Prize at the III International Chopin Piano Competition in 1937. From 1935 Zak taught at the Moscow Conservatory, becoming a professor in 1947 and being granted a chair in 1965. His pupils include E...
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Erika Köth
1925 - 1989 (64 years)
Erika Köth was a German operatic coloratura soprano, particularly associated with the roles of Zerbinetta and Zerlina. Köth began a musical studies in Darmstadt with Elsa Blank in 1942, and after an interruption resumed them in 1945. She made her stage debut in Kaiserslautern as Philine in Mignon, in 1948, and then sang in Karlsruhe . She made her debut at the Munich State Opera and the Vienna State Opera in 1953, and at the Berlin State Opera in 1961. She appeared regularly at the Salzburg Festival , as the Queen of the Night and Konstanze and Sophie, and in Bayreuth , as the Woodbird. She a...
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Jimmie Rodgers
1897 - 1933 (36 years)
James Charles Rodgers was an American singer-songwriter and musician who rose to popularity in the late 1920s. Widely regarded as the "Father of Country Music", he is best known for his distinctive yodeling. Rodgers was known as "The Singing Brakeman" and "America's Blue Yodeler". He has been cited as an inspiration by many artists, and he has been inducted into multiple halls of fame.
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Henry Blue Kline
1905 - 1951 (46 years)
Henry Blue Kline was an American writer. He is perhaps best known for his contribution to the volume I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, as a member of the Southern Agrarians. Kline received an M.A. from Vanderbilt University in 1929. From 1930 to 1933, he taught at the University of Tennessee. He then worked for the Civil Works Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority. From 1944 to 1949, he worked as a journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He worked for the Atomic Energy Commission from 1949 until his death.
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Thomas Attwood Walmisley
1814 - 1856 (42 years)
Thomas Attwood Walmisley was an English composer and organist. Life and career He was born in London, the son of Thomas Forbes Gerrard Walmisley , a well-known organist and composer of church music and glees. Thomas Attwood was his godfather, and the boy was educated in music under their tuition.
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Cyril Smith
1909 - 1974 (65 years)
Cyril James Smith OBE was a virtuoso concert pianist of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and a piano teacher. Personal life Smith was born at Costa Street, Middlesbrough, England, the son of Charles Smith, a foundry bricklayer, and Eva Harrison, and had an older brother and sister. He married Andrée Antoinette Marie Paty in 1931, but the couple divorced.
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Edgar Sampson
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Edgar Melvin Sampson , nicknamed "The Lamb", was an American jazz composer, arranger, saxophonist, and violinist. Born in New York City, he began playing violin aged six and picked up the saxophone in high school. He worked as an arranger and composer for many jazz bands in the 1930s and 1940s. He composed two well-known jazz standards: "Stompin' at the Savoy", and "Don't Be That Way".
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Alexander Goldenweiser
1875 - 1961 (86 years)
Alexander Borisovich Goldenweiser was a Russian and Soviet pianist, teacher and composer. Goldenweiser was born in Kishinev, Bessarabia, Russia. In 1889, he was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Alexander Siloti . He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1895 in the piano class of Pavel Pabst , winning the Gold Medal for Piano, in 1897 – in the composition class of Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov. He also studied composition with Anton Arensky and counterpoint with Sergei Taneyev .
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Eddie Durham
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Edward Durham was an American jazz guitarist, trombonist, composer, and arranger. He was one of the pioneers of the electric guitar in jazz. The orchestras of Bennie Moten, Jimmie Lunceford, Count Basie, and Glenn Miller took great benefit from his composing and arranging skill.
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Bill Thompson
1913 - 1971 (58 years)
William H. Thompson was an American radio personality and voice actor, whose career stretched from the 1930s until his death. He was a featured comedian playing multiple roles on the Fibber McGee and Molly radio series, and was the voice of Droopy in most of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio theatrical cartoons from 1943 to 1958.
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Nikolai Golovanov
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
Nikolai Semyonovich Golovanov , PAU, was a Soviet conductor and composer, who was married to the soprano Antonina Nezhdanova. He conducted the premiere performances of a number of works, among them Nikolai Myaskovsky's Sixth Symphony in May 1924.
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Doug Watkins
1934 - 1962 (28 years)
Douglas Watkins was an American jazz double bassist. He was best known for being an accompanist to various hard bop artists in the Detroit area, including Donald Byrd and Jackie McLean. Biography Watkins was born in Detroit, Michigan, United States. An original member of the Jazz Messengers, he later played in Horace Silver's quintet and freelanced with Gene Ammons, Kenny Burrell, Donald Byrd, Art Farmer, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan, Sonny Rollins, and Phil Woods among others.
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Henry Hugh Pierson
1815 - 1873 (58 years)
Henry Hugh Pierson was an English composer resident from 1845 in Germany. He was born Henry Hugh Pearson and his middle name is sometimes given as Hugo. His original name was Henry Hugh Pearson, in Germany he used Heinrich Hugo Pierson. He had success in his adopted country with his operas and songs but little in his own, and his music is now rarely performed.
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David Evans
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
David Evans was a Welsh musician, academic and composer. Evans was born at Resolven, Glamorgan. He worked in the coal industry as a teenager, but music was always his primary interest. He won a music scholarship and became a pupil of Joseph Parry, which led to his qualifying at University College, Cardiff, in 1895. He went on to become organist and choirmaster of Jewin Calvinistic Methodist Church in London. He succeeded Joseph Parry, his former teacher, in the Music department at Cardiff, where he was appointed a professor in 1908. Among his students there were Morfydd Owen, Grace Williams a...
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Edward Ballantine
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Edward Ballantine , was an American composer and professor of music. Biography Edward Ballantine was born in Oberlin, Ohio, on August 6, 1886, the son of William Gay Ballantine, the fourth president of Oberlin College, and Emma Frances Atwood. One brother Arthur Atwood was the senior member of the New York law firm of Root, Clark, Buckner & Ballantine—later Dewey, Ballantine, Bushby, Palmer & Wood. Another brother Henry Winthrop was Professor of Law, at Boalt Hall School of Law. Through his paternal grandfather, Rev. Elisha Ballantine, he is distantly related to four U.S. Presidents, and desce...
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Peter Agricola
1525 - 1585 (60 years)
Peter Agricola was a German Renaissance humanist, educator, classical scholar and theologian, diplomat and statesman, disciple of Martin Luther, friend and collaborator of Philipp Melanchthon. Successively tutor to several young princes of German sovereign states and rector of schools in Ulm and Lauingen, where he created and developed the Gymnasium Illustre, he became an important councilor and State minister of the Dukes of Zweibrücken and Palatinate-Neuburg, carrying out many missions in the German Holy Roman Empire and supporting the Protestant Reformation.
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Edward Howell
1846 - 1898 (52 years)
Edward Howell, FRAM was a British cellist and music professor of the late 19th century. He studied cello at the Royal Academy of Music in London later becoming professor of cello at the Royal College of Music, the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music in London.
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Lucky Millinder
1910 - 1966 (56 years)
Lucius Venable "Lucky" Millinder was an American swing and rhythm-and-blues bandleader. Although he could not read or write music, did not play an instrument and rarely sang, his showmanship and musical taste made his bands successful. His group was said to have been the greatest big band to play rhythm and blues, and gave work to a number of musicians who later became influential at the dawn of the rock and roll era. He was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in 1986.
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Giacomo Orefice
1865 - 1922 (57 years)
Giacomo Orefice was an Italian composer. He was born on 27 August 1865 in Vicenza, which was then part of the Austrian Empire, but was annexed into Italy in the following year. He studied under Alessandro Busi and Luigi Mancinelli at the Liceo Musicale di Bologna, and later became professor of composition at the Milan Conservatory. He died in Milan on 22 December 1922.
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Marcel Grandjany
1891 - 1975 (84 years)
Marcel Georges Lucien Grandjany was a French-American harpist and composer. Biography Early life Marcel Grandjany was born in Paris and began the study of the harp at the age of eight with Henriette Renié. At age eleven, he was admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris, where he studied with Alphonse Hasselmans, winning the coveted Premier Prix at age thirteen.
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Arthur Farwell
1872 - 1952 (80 years)
Arthur Farwell was an American composer, conductor, educationalist, lithographer, esoteric savant, and music publisher. Interested in American Indian music, he became associated with the Indianist movement and founded the Wa-Wan Press to publish music in this genre. He combined teaching, composing and conducting in his career, working on both coasts and in Michigan.
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Justus Christian Henry Helmuth
1745 - 1825 (80 years)
Justus Christian Henry Helmuth was a German-American Lutheran clergyman. Biography His father died when the son was a mere boy, but a nobleman, Gotthilf August Francke, sent him to the orphan house in Halle, and afterward to the University of Halle, where he received a thorough education in the classics and theology. He was ordained to the ministry at Wernigerode in 1769, and in the same year went to the United States in response to an urgent call from Lutheran congregations in Pennsylvania.
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Arnold Rosé
1863 - 1946 (83 years)
Arnold Josef Rosé was a Romanian-born Austrian Jewish violinist. He was leader of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for over half a century. He worked closely with Brahms. and Gustav Mahler. Gustav Mahler was his brother-in-law. Although not known internationally as a soloist he was a great orchestral leader and player of chamber music. He was leading the famous Rosé Quartet for several decades.
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Charlie Shavers
1920 - 1971 (51 years)
Charles James Shavers was an American jazz trumpeter who played with Dizzy Gillespie, Nat King Cole, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Dodds, Jimmie Noone, Sidney Bechet, Midge Williams, Tommy Dorsey, and Billie Holiday. He was also an arranger and composer, and one of his compositions, "Undecided", is a jazz standard.
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Costache Aristia
1800 - 1880 (80 years)
Costache or Kostake Aristia was a Wallachian-born poet, actor and translator, also noted for his activities as a soldier, schoolteacher, and philanthropist. A member of the Greek colony, his adolescence and early youth coincided with the peak of Hellenization in both Danubian Principalities. He first appeared on stage at Cișmeaua Roșie in Bucharest, and became a protege of Lady Rallou. She is claimed to have sponsored his voyage to France, where Aristia became an imitator of François-Joseph Talma.
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Alfred Wallenstein
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Alfred Wallenstein was an American cellist and conductor. A successful solo and orchestral cellist in his early life, Wallenstein took up conducting in the 1930s and served as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1943 to 1956.
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Gezina van der Molen
1892 - 1978 (86 years)
Gezina Hermina Johanna van der Molen was a Dutch legal scholar and resistance fighter during the Second World War. From 1924 to 1929, she studied law at the Free University of Amsterdam — the first female student to do so — and was also the first woman to obtain a doctoral degree from there. She dealt with numerous issues: the rights of women, apartheid in South Africa, the United Nations, the South Moluccas and New Guinea.
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Anatoli Papanov
1922 - 1987 (65 years)
Anatoli Dmitrievich Papanov was a Soviet and Russian actor, drama teacher, and theatre director at the Moscow Satire Theatre where he served for almost 40 years. A prominent character actor, Papanov is mostly remembered for his comedy roles in a duo with his friend Andrei Mironov, although he had many dramatic roles as well. As a voice actor he contributed to over hundred cartoons. He was named People's Artist of the USSR in 1973 and awarded the USSR State Prize posthumously.
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Claude Hopkins
1903 - 1984 (81 years)
Claude Driskett Hopkins was an American jazz stride pianist and bandleader. Biography Claude Hopkins was born in Alexandria, Virginia, United States. Historians differ in respect of the actual date of his birth. His parents were on the faculty of Howard University. A talented stride piano player and arranger, he left home at the age of 21 to become a sideman with the Wilbur Sweatman Orchestra, but stayed less than a year. In 1925, he left for Europe as the musical director of The Revue Negre which starred Josephine Baker with Sidney Bechet in the band.
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Elly Ney
1882 - 1968 (86 years)
Elly Ney was a German romantic pianist who specialized in Beethoven, and was especially popular in Germany. Career She was born in Düsseldorf, where her mother was a music instructor and her father was a registrar. Her grandmother introduced her to the works of Beethoven, and supported her piano playing. She studied at Cologne with Isidor Seiss and Karl Bötcher. After winning the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1901, she studied in Vienna with Theodor Leschetizky, with whom she only had two lessons, and Emil von Sauer. She taught at the Cologne Conservatory for three years, then became a touring virtuoso.
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Victor Ewald
1860 - 1935 (75 years)
Victor Vladímirovich Ewald , was a Russian engineer, architect, and composer of music, mainly for conical brass instruments. Biography Victor Ewald was born in Saint Petersburg and died in Leningrad. Ewald was a professor of Civil Engineering in St. Petersburg, and was also the cellist with the Beliaeff Quartet for sixteen years. This quartet was the most influential ensemble in St. Petersburg in the late 19th century, introducing much of the standard quartet literature to Russian concertgoers. He also collected and published Russian folk songs much like other composers of his time.
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Russell Procope
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Russell Keith Procope was an American clarinetist and alto saxophonist who was a member of the Duke Ellington orchestra. Before Ellington Procope was born in New York City, United States, and grew up in San Juan Hill, where he attended school with Benny Carter. His first instrument was the violin, but he switched to clarinet and alto saxophone. He began his professional career in 1926 as a member of Billy Freeman's orchestra. He recorded with Jelly Roll Morton at the age of 20, and played with bands led by Benny Carter, Chick Webb , Fletcher Henderson , Tiny Bradshaw, Teddy Hill, King Oliver,...
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Filmer Hubble
1904 - 1969 (65 years)
Filmer Edwin Hubble was a Canadian organist, choir conductor, adjudicator, and music educator of English birth. Life and career Born in Dulwich, he immigrated to Canada in 1921 at the age of 17. He settled in Winnipeg where he studied music with Hugh Ross and served as assistant organist at Holy Trinity Anglican Church during the 1920s. He served as organist/choirmaster as many Winnipeg churches during the rest of his life, including St Stephen's Broadway United where he worked from 1943 until his death 26 years later. Under his leadership the St Stephen's choir was twice awarded the prestigi...
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Morgan Lewis
1906 - 1968 (62 years)
William Morgan "Buddy" Lewis, Jr. was a writer of jazz songs, some of which were also recorded in the pop music genre. Lewis was born in Rockville, Connecticut and died in New York City. He wrote songs and Broadway theatre scores with lyricist Nancy Hamilton including "How High the Moon" and "The Old Soft Shoe".
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Robert Sour
1905 - 1985 (80 years)
Robert Sour was a lyricist and composer, and the president of Broadcast Music Incorporated . He was also one of the jurors in the murder trial of Eddie Lee Mays, who became the last man executed in New York.
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George Houston Bass
1938 - 1990 (52 years)
George Houston Bass was an American playwright, director and writer. He lived and worked in Providence, Rhode Island. He founded the Rites and Reason Theater at Brown University in September 1970. He was also the literary secretary to and the executor of the literary estate of poet Langston Hughes. Bass founded the Langston Hughes Society in 1981 and the society's publication, the Langston Hughes Review, in 1982.
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Mikhail Press
1871 - 1938 (67 years)
Mikhail Isaakovich Press, also known as Michael Press, was a Russian-American violinist, conductor and music educator. Press began studying violin with Tissen at the age of eight in Vilnius, and made his first public appearance at ten years old. At the age of thirteen he was concert master in the Vilna Opera House. For some years he was conductor of the Karatayev Opera Company, travelling all over Russia.
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Lillian Russell
1860 - 1922 (62 years)
Lillian Russell was an American actress and singer. She became one of the most famous actresses and singers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, praised for her beauty and style, as well as for her voice and stage presence; a reviewer referred to her as "the most beautiful actress of the legitimate stage."
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Maria Ivogün
1891 - 1987 (96 years)
Maria Ivogün was a distinguished soprano singer of Hungarian origin. She was an especially outstanding interpreter of the works of Mozart: her recording of the aria of the Queen of the Night became legendary.
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Emil Ábrányi
1882 - 1970 (88 years)
Emil Ábrányi was a Hungarian composer, conductor, and opera director. Life He was conductor at the Royal Hungarian Opera House from 1911–19, and director there from 1919 to 1920. In 1921, he became the director at the Budapest Municipal Theatre, where he remained until 1926. For many years he taught conducting at the Budapest Academy of Music. He composed twelve operas of which only six have been performed professionally. He was the grandson of the composer Kornél Ábrányi.
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James Cutler Dunn Parker
1828 - 1916 (88 years)
James Cutler Dunn Parker was an American organist, educator and composer. Biography James Cutler Dunn Parker was born in Boston on June 2, 1828, the son of Samuel Hale Parker. He graduated from Harvard in 1848. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Parker went to the Leipzig Conservatory in 1851, where he studied piano with Ignaz Moscheles and Louis Plaidy, composition with Julius Rietz and Ernst Richter, and music theory and harmony with Moritz Hauptmann.
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Enrico Mainardi
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Enrico Mainardi was an Italian cellist, composer, and conductor. At the age of thirteen, in 1910, Mainardi had already begun his career as a cello virtuoso who toured the concert halls of Europe. He later taught at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, and also held summer classes in Salzburg and Lucerne. Pupils of his who later became distinguished included Siegfried Palm, Miklós Perényi, Michael Steinkühler, Heidi Litschauer, Erkki Rautio and Joan Dickson.
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Guy Warrack
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Guy Douglas Hamilton Warrack was a Scottish composer, music educator and conductor. He was the son of John Warrack of the Leith steamship company, John Warrack & Co., founded by Guy's grandfather, also called John.
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Karl Straube
1873 - 1950 (77 years)
Montgomery Rufus Karl Siegfried Straube was a German church musician, organist, and choral conductor, famous above all for championing the abundant organ music of Max Reger. Career Born in Berlin, Straube studied organ under Heinrich Reimann there from 1894 to 1897 and became a widely respected concert organist. In 1897 he was appointed organist at Willibrordi-Dom in Wesel, but left in 1902 to take up the position of organist at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig.
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Don Walker
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Don Walker was a prolific Broadway orchestrator, who also composed music for musicals and one film and worked as a conductor in television. Biography Walker was born in Lambertville, New Jersey. He attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He and his wife, Audrey, had a daughter, Anne Liebgold, and a son, David. Walker died in New Hope, Pennsylvania in 1989 at the age of 81.
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Frederic Cliffe
1857 - 1931 (74 years)
Frederic Cliffe was an English composer, organist and teacher. Life Cliffe was born in Lowmoor, near Bradford, Yorkshire. As a youth, he showed a promising musical aptitude and was enrolled as a scholar of the National Training School of Music, the parent of the Royal College of Music, under its first Principal Arthur Sullivan. As well as Sullivan his teachers there included John Stainer, Ebenezer Prout and Franklin Taylor . In 1873 at the age of sixteen he was appointed organist to the Bradford Festival Choral Society. As organist to the Leeds Festival, Cliffe took part in the first performance of Sullivan's cantata The Golden Legend on 6 October 1886.
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Dick Haymes
1918 - 1980 (62 years)
Richard Benjamin Haymes was an Argentinian singer, songwriter and actor. He was one of the most popular male vocalists of the 1940s and early 1950s. He was the older brother of Bob Haymes, an actor, television host, and songwriter.
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Denis Sanders
1929 - 1987 (58 years)
Denis Sanders was an American film director, screenwriter and producer who directed the debut performances of Robert Redford and Tom Skerritt in the 1962 film War Hunt. He won two Academy Awards, the first for Best Short Subject in 1955 for A Time Out of War that had served as his master's degree thesis at UCLA and which he co-scripted with his brother Terry Sanders; and the second for Best Documentary in 1970 for Czechoslovakia 1968. In 1958, he teamed up again with Terry Sanders to adapt Norman Mailer's World War II novel The Naked and the Dead.
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Jacobo Ficher
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Jacobo Ficher was a Russian-born Argentine composer, violinist, conductor, and music educator. Life Ficher was born in Odessa, in the Russian Empire, to Alexander Ficher, a trombonist in the Odessa Philharmonic Orchestra, and his wife Iente Mirl Gotz. He began to study the violin at the age of five, but his lessons were interrupted when his mother died. In 1903 he was able to resume his violin studies with Pyotr Stolyarsky, and later with M. T. Hait. From 1912 to 1917 he was enrolled at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where he continued his violin studies with Sergei Korguyev and Leopold Auer.
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Judy Holliday
1921 - 1965 (44 years)
Judy Holliday was an American actress, comedian and singer. She began her career as part of a nightclub act before working in Broadway plays and musicals. Her success as Billie Dawn in the 1946 stage production of Born Yesterday led to her being cast in the 1950 film version for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. She was known for her performance on Broadway in the musical Bells Are Ringing, winning a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical and reprising her role in the 1960 fi...
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