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1-15 of 15
- Actress
- Soundtrack
Born into a prominent Mormon family in Utah, Laraine Day's acting career began after her parents moved to Long Beach, California, where she joined the Long Beach Players. She appeared in her first film in 1937 in a bit part, then did leads in several George O'Brien westerns. Signing a contract with MGM, she achieved popularity playing the part of Nurse Lamont in that studio's "Dr. Kildare" series. An attractive, engaging performer, she had leads in several medium-budget films for various studios, but never achieved major stardom. She was married for 13 years to baseball manager Leo Durocher, and took such an active interest in his career and the sport of baseball in general that she became known as "The First Lady of Baseball".- Writer
- Actor
- Director
Norman Mailer, the Brooklyn-born and -bred writer who fought for what he characterized as the "heavyweight championship" of American letters after the 1961 death of Ernest Hemingway, never came close to his dream of writing the Great American novel, but he was a colossus of American culture and literature in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. When he died in 2007 at the age of 84, Mailer towered above all other American writers of his and subsequent generations,according to his "New York Times" obituary. A primal life force whose writing elucidated the human condition among America and Americans better than any of his contemporaries for better than three decades, Mailer likely will rank with Herman Melville and Hemingway as among the greatest writers produced by the United States. Although denied the Nobel Prize that he had long coveted (winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Mailer believed that the near-fatal stabbing of his second-wife Adele Morales by himself in 1960 attributed to his failure to win the big prize), Mailer will be the writer that future generations go to to understand the America of the late 1940s through at least the early '80s. "Advertisements for Myself" (1959), "An American Dream (1966)" (1965), "The Armies of the Night" (1969) and "Executioners Song, The (1980) (TV)_" -- one compendium of odds and ends interlaced with Mailer's musings, one novel, and two books of "journalism" that he classified as novels -- will be mandatory on the reading lists of universities 100 years in the future.
Norman Mailer was born in January 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, to Fanny (Schneider), who ran a nursing/housekeeping agency, and Isaac Barnett Mailer, an accountant. His family was Jewish. Mailer entered Harvard College in 1939 at the age of 16 to study engineering at a time when there was still a quota on Jews at the Ivy League universities, to keep them the province of the WASPs that still controlled the control up to and through World War II. (Mailer would be a commentator on WASPs and their loosening grip on America and American culture in the post-World War II period. He saw the space project and the landing of a man on the moon as the apotheosis of WASP culture.) He fell in love with literature at Harvard, and began his first attempts at creative writing. Mailer took his degree in 1943, was drafted into the Army the following year and served briefly with a rifle company in the Philippines. His experiences as an infantryman would be the genesis of his 1948 novel "The Naked and The Dead", one of the first of the World War II novels written by the men who had fought it.
Mailer would never have termed the generation that went to war in 1941-45 "The Greatest Generation", a concept alien to such post-war writers as Mailer's erstwhile friend James Jones (author of "From Here to Eternity", "Catch-22" author Joseph Heller, or populist American historian Howard Zinn, all of whom served in the War. The officers and enlisted men of Mailer's novel "The Naked and the Dead" are not saints, nor are they on noble missions, let alone quests for something as abstract as "democracy". Democracy is not a staple of Norman Mailer's Army. The officers, as a class, represent an insidious form of fascism -- in kind, if not degree -- in this war against fascism. Published in 1948, "The Naked and The Dead" was a bestseller and made its 25 year old author famous and relatively well-off, financially. Mailer would never have to toil at any craft other than writing for the rest of the nearly 60 years allotted to him. His next two novels, "Barbary Shore" (1951) and "The Deer Park" (1954) were artistic and commercial failures. For 10 years after the publication of "The Deer Park" until "An American Dream" (serialized in "Esquire Magazine" in 1964, rewritten and published as a novel in 1965), Mailer eschewed tackling another novel. Instead, he turned to journalism and revolutionized what had been one of the ghettos of American letters. If there had been no Norman Mailer, perhaps there would have been a "New Journalism", but it would have been poorer as he was its greatest exponent. "New Journalism" was a moniker hung on a particularly personal type of reflection added to the pedantic Who, What, Where & How? of traditional reporting. Rather than exile himself from the story in the interest of an impossible-to-obtain "neutrality" that is so dear to the mainstream American newspaper and magazine culture currying favor with advertisers beyond the truss & body building equipment slums of the old "Men's magazines", Mailer injected himself into the story and wrote about how he was effected by events. His seminal article about the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" (Superman being John F. Kennedy and the Supermarket the Los Angeles where the DNC was held, as well as the new post-War America at large") might very well be considered as the starting point of the New Journalism. The article was published in the November 1960 issue of "Esquire Magazine." Tom Wolfe and other masters of the "New Journalism," which stressed a kind of irreverence towards the subject, soon followed.
In an American society that is still enthralled to Victorian-era concepts of class (Virginia Woolf denounced authors who wrote for money, a reflection of the aristocratic disdain for anyone who made rather than inherited money as vulgarians whose seed was tainted by contact with the till), Mailer's achievement was looked down upon. Rather than being hailed for revolutionizing American letters, Mailer was treated patronizingly by the Literary Establishment. Yet, the serious literary novel now is as nearly dead as all the Cassandras of the 1960s and '70s prognosticated, replaced by "non-fiction" memoirs, in which writers no longer hide behind fictive personas to tell stories, but take full-credit for living lives as full of foul incidents as any novel ever published. (That many of these "true tales" are fiction is beside the point.) Ironically, Norman Mailer, who longed to write the Great American novel, likely must bear the lion's share of responsibility for the death of the novel and the rise of the confessional "non-fiction" book, as he elevated "mere journalism" into an art form. Reporting became and art when Mailer married his beautiful writing with naked confession that made him a world-class celebrity in the 1960s and '70s, featured as a regular staple on television talk shows. Simply put, without Norman Mailer, there would not be American literature as we know it.
As concerns Hollywood, Mailer wrote a novel about Hollywood ("The Deer Park") and the first "serious" biography of Marilyn Monroe, which got him (and Monroe) the cover of the July 16 1973 edition of "Time Magazine." He made three improvisational films in the late 1960s: Wild 90 (1968), Beyond the Law (1968) and Maidstone (1970) and directed the 1987 adaptation of his own neo-noir novel Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987). He despised the 1958 movie made from The Naked and the Dead (1958), but had better luck with The Executioner's Song (1982) (1979), for which he wrote the screenplay for the 1982 telefilm. In 1983, Mailer was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Limited Series or a Special for his work, three years after his 1979 "novel" (Mailer had characterized his "The Armies of the Night" as "The novel as history, history as a novel") had won him his second Pulitzer Prize, for Fiction. ("Armies" had conquered him his first, for General Non-Fictionm in 1969.)
Norman Mailer died of acute renal failure at New York City's Sinai Hospital on November 10, 2007. He was 84 years old.- Donda West was born on 12 July 1949 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA. She was married to Ray West. She died on 10 November 2007 in Marina del Rey, California, USA.
- Trudy Wroe was born on 25 May 1931 in Los Angeles, California, USA. She was an actress, known for Big Town (1950), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) and The Bob Cummings Show (1955). She was married to Don Durant. She died on 10 November 2007 in Orange County, California, USA.
- Sarah Branch was born on 7 January 1938. She was an actress, known for Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960), Secret Agent (1964) and Hell Is a City (1960). She was married to John Grant Lithiby. She died on 10 November 2007 in Esher, Surrey, England, UK.
- Carolyn was born on Feb. 18, 1942 in Salt Lake City, Utah where she began at a very early age her love of the arts, being actively involved in music performance and dance.
She studied viola, bass and piano, sang in various groups and performed in dance with her brother Steve, before finding her true calling and passion in beauty pageants. She took her very first title at the young age of 16, being crowned Miss Sugarhouse. She continued very successfully winning numerous titles from all over the state until 1961 when she took the prestigious title of Miss Utah, going on to represent the state at the 1962 Miss America Pageant, where millions of fans cheered her on as she won the talent competition, and was then crowned 2nd runner-up to Miss America.
This was all done while she attended the University of Utah, majoring in Theatre Arts. She was then offered a contract with Warner Brothers and moved to California to pursue her acting, having appeared in films with Troy Donahue, Carey Grant and other notables and had also been featured on The Tonight Show and The Red Skelton Show. Two years later, she moved to New York where she was offered a scholarship to pursue theatre with the legendary Broadway producer David Merrick. While in New York, she met the man that would sweep her of her feet, John Kay Aldous, Jr. Although they were both from Salt Lake City, attended the same high school, and the same university, they did not meet until in New York. After dating for two years they wed on September 4, 1964. They then moved to the Washington D.C. area, where she gave birth to and raised her two sons. She was active in the PTA, the LDS church, and sang in the championship Barbershop group "Sweet Adelines". She was a dedicated mother, and stayed active by studying Tae Kwon Do with her family, where she attained the rank of black belt.
One of her notable achievements was her role as producer and founder of the east coast performing cast of "Voices of Destiny", a youth group performing musical theatre with a positive message. They relocated to Orlando, FL in 1989, where she became involved again with the pageant system as a coach, having successfully coached various local winners, a Miss Utah, a Miss Florida, a Miss Kansas and the 1997 Miss America. Kay and Carolyn moved to their dream home in Montana when Kay retired. Shortly after his passing, she returned back to her childhood home of Salt Lake, to be near her two sons. Everyone who new Carolyn was enamored by her charm, grace, kindness and compassion. She actively attended the LDS temple and served a Welfare Mission for the church. Her passions were music, dance, and family history.
A Funeral Service was held at the Foothill 6th Ward Chapel of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah on Friday, November 16, 2007. She was buried at her Ranch in Kila, Montana beside her husband John who had died 13 years earlier. - Black Anwar was born on 10 July 1941 in Dacca, Bengal Presidency, British India [now in Dhaka, Bangladesh]. He was an actor, known for Byathar Daan (1989), Nawab Sirajuddaula (1989) and Ononto Prem (1977). He died on 10 November 2007 in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
- Actor
- Composer
Vladimir Volkov was born on 14 August 1929 in Khorol, Ukrainian SSR, USSR [now Poltava Oblast, Ukraine]. He was an actor and composer, known for Mekhanicheskaya syuita (2002), Hetmanski kleinody (1993) and Chyornyy kapitan (1973). He died on 10 November 2007.- Frank Cox was born on 4 December 1920 in Cardiff, Wales, UK. He was an actor, known for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972), Date with a Dream (1948) and Up Jumped a Swagman (1965). He was married to Estelle Miles. He died on 10 November 2007 in England, UK.
- Costume and Wardrobe Department
- Costume Designer
Jack Bear was born on 19 October 1920 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. He was a costume designer, known for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), The Party (1968) and The Odd Couple (1968). He died on 10 November 2007 in Ferndale, California, USA.- Edith Mill was born on 16 August 1925 in Vienna, Austria. She was an actress, known for Heiße Ernte (1956), Geliebtes Fräulein Doktor (1954) and Zwei Menschen (1952). She was married to Richard König. She died on 10 November 2007 in Port Moody, British Columbia, Canada.
- Judy Arnold was born on 17 May 1939 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Judy was a producer, known for Walking to Waldheim (1997). Judy was married to Newt Arnold. Judy died on 10 November 2007 in Encino, California, USA.
- Bob Gray was born in 1926 in Florida, USA. He was an actor, known for The Grim Reaper (1976), The Second Coming (1980) and The Burning Hell (1974). He died on 10 November 2007 in Jacksonville, Florida, USA.
- Director
- Producer
- Actor
José Abreu was a director and producer, known for Contos da Rua (1996), Diário de Maria (1998) and Três Maneiras de Chegar a Lado Nenhum (1991). He died on 10 November 2007 in Melgaço, Portugal.- Producer
- Production Manager
Tatsurô Shigaki was a producer and production manager, known for The Detective Story (1979), Yomigaeru kinrô (1979) and Yajû shisubeshi (1980). He died on 10 November 2007 in Meguro, Tokyo, Japan.