Leslie Nielsen’s brother Erik was the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada from 1984 - 1986.
In the 1981 movie The Postman Always Rings Twice, there’s a scene showing Jack Nicholson shooing a boy scout away from a cash register. The boy scout is future UFC champion Chuck Liddell, age 12.
The four members of Queen all hold or held college or advanced degrees: a Bachelor of Science in Biology, a First Class Honours Degree in Electronics, a Diploma in Art and Graphic Design, and PhD in Astrophysics.
Iron Maiden lead singer Bruce Dickenson is an Olympic class fencer, and was once rated 7th in foil in Great Britain.
Vladimir Putin is a 6th dan black belt in Judo.
Married With Children star Ed O’Neill holds a black belt in Brazillian Jiu Jitsu under Rorian Gracie.
Rats, such as the rat that starred in the 1971 movie Willard, can’t vomit.
1940 GOP presidential nominee Wendell Willkie was fired on the first day of his summer job in 1909 after he drove a busload of Yellowstone Park tourists into a ditch.
Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and many other children’s books, helped to develop the Wade-Dahl-Till valve when his son developed hydrocephaly after his baby carriage was struck by a car. The device is used to drain the excess cerebrospinal fluid.
Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s attorney for his assisted-suicide trials was Geoffrey Feiger, whose brother is Doug Feiger. Doug Feiger and his friends are known as The Knack, who recorded ‘My Sharona’.
Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca, is the sister of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, whose sons were the little boys that neighbor J.M. Barrie used as the basis for his stories about Peter Pan and Neverland. Daphne and Sylvia also had a brother who was a famous stage actor in his day and later played Captain Hook … and du Maurier brand cigarettes (which you might know of if you are Canadian or if you were one of those artsy smokers in college who sought out unusual brands at tobacconists) are named after him.
He was also married to Patricia Neal, who played in The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Fountainhead, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and won an Academy Award for her work in Hud.
And here is Sharon’s web site.
Sharona, obviously.
John Lithgow was in that same dorm at that time.
Bruce Willis and John Goodman roomed together in their starving actor days. Willis later made a guest appearance on Roseanne
Reflective sigh… mmmmm.
Has anybody heard from/of/around her lately?
In the 1960s, aspiring actor Dustin Hoffman shared a tiny apartment with Gene Hackman and Hackman’s wife. When the Hackmans got tired of him, Hoffman moved in with Robert Duvall.
The powerful “I could have done more” scene from Schindler’s List unfortunately was dramatic coda only- it never happened. It wasn’t that Schindler didn’t feel that way- he regretted not having done more til the end of his days- or that he didn’t feel connection to the Jews, but he had no time to say goodbye. He was a wanted war criminal and had to hit the ground running. In real life the version was actually a bit more Hollywood than Hollywood’s version- he left in his limo just like in the movie, but with two of “his” Jews as guards/valets/character witnesses, his wife, and his girlfriend (they lived in a menage-a-trois at the time).
The first person who wanted to make a movie of Schindler’s List (or Schindler’s Ark) was Martin Scorcese, but author Kenneally and the Schindlerjuden he interviewed for the novel did NOT like his ideas. Among other things he wanted to see the Holocaust (i.e. the entirety of what’s in the Spielberg movie) only in flashbacks; for the movie himself he wanted to focus on Schindler after the war, continually bungling in romance and in business and mooching off of the Jews he saved in the war. While it probably could still have been a great movie, I just don’t think it would have been as inspiring. (Source: an interview with Liam Neeson discussing the movie.)
Duvall’s first movie role was the part of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird.
RAMBLING LEES FROM VIRGINIA TECH AND A HECKUVA TANGLED GENEALOGY LESSON (but one that does have- what I at least consider a- morbidly funny sidestory)
Duvall’s full name is Robert E(dward) Lee Duvall. He’s sometimes listed as a descendant of Robert E. Lee, which he’s not, but he was named that due to a family connection. (His family was from Virginia but moved to California before he was born.)
Harper Lee is also said to be a descendant of Robert E., and that’s also wrong. There is a family connection, but pretty much every southerner whose ancestors have been in the south since before the Revolution can find a connection to this family. The Lees came over in the 1630s; the first generation that Robert descended from had 6 sons and every subsequent generation had a bunch of boys as well, and so Lee became a very common surname and most derived from the same source. They were not all aristocratic or even wealthy. (In my own family they had even taken to spelling the name Lea due to illiteracy, though they and many other Leas became Lees again after Robert was deified.)
Since the Lees had tons of sons and many did own slaves, pretty much every southerner white or black can find a connection. As a matter of fact, Alex Haley’s ancestor Chicken George (Ben Vereen in the movie) was, per family tradition, the son of the slave Kizzy and her master- Tom Lea (same Lee/Lea family, though very distant from Robert Augustus Virginius Chancellorsvillius Lee).
On an interesting aside to the above, some of the white/legitimate descendants of Tom Lea, all of them born many years after he died of course, were outraged at the portrayal of their ancestor in the book and in the movie. (The book uses his real name, the miniseries changed it to Moore.) In book/miniseries (he’s played by Chuck Connors) he’s seen as a “po cracker farmboy” who rises to a prosperous planter through cockfighting, loves raping slaves, and has no children other than those with slave women; impossible to prove one way or the other about his lust for slaves [certainly wouldn’t be surprising], but the real man- though he was a champion cockfighter- was more your garden variety gentry planter and had a huge white family as well.
In any case, some of his white descendants decided to sue Haley for some huge settlement (they’d have had to have stood in line of course as Haley was frequently sued after ROOTS) but not surprisingly pretty much every lawyer told assured them they’d be laughed out of court (though the fuss may be why they changed the name in the miniseries). Instead they decided to raise money to make their own movie version of the story (Kizzy rapes Massa Tom?) and to do this they sold a privately published pamphlet that included two great things that go great together: refutation of rape and pecan pie recipes. (The cousin who sent it is very old and very matter-of-fact about slavery and the like but she thought this overly earnest gesture was every bit as hysterically funny as I did.)
The reason I know this: a very distant cousin on my own Lea side sent me a photocopied copy of it. It’s about 5 pages and was sold for about $2. Apparently they fell just a little short of the 20 million or so they’d have needed to sell to make their own miniseries, plus Brando and Nicholson kept pulling out of the project (arguments over who was going to be Massa Tom and who was going to be Kizzy, I suspect; it was always rumored that Brando was the Kizzy in such relationships).
Just a bit of super arcane trivia that might be of interest to someone somewhere and that I’ve wanted to share on the Dope before but never really had a thread where it was relevant. God but I love the detritus of earnest indignation.
Is it ‘pee-can’ or ‘pickahn’?
My eyeglasses have got to be changed. Absolutely true: I saw your post and thought it said “peecan and pickaninny” and though “damn, that would have been a good name for the Lea family book”.
Must run as I have to go to hell now.
Really?
Settles back and gets comfy.
Do tell!
I remember reading Roots in high school. The mini-series was a HUGE event, and they had excerpts of the book in the newspaper, but I didn’t get around to reading the book until later. The latter part of the book struck me as rather rushed, with a lot of “begats,” flying by the generations until we get to ta-da Alex.
Sam Houston is the only person to have served in the U. S. Senate after previously having been the Chief Exective Officer of a foreign nation. He was President of the Republic of Texas, and after Texas joined the Union, became a Senator from Texas.