When production began on the television series Star Trek: Voyager, Canadian film actress Genevieve Bujold was cast as Captain Elizabeth Janeway.
However, after only two days of production, Bujold quit the series, due to her discomfort with the demanding production workload of a weekly television series, and disagreement with the show’s producers over how she envisioned her character, versus how they wanted the character portrayed.
Production of the show was halted for three weeks, during which Kate Mulgrew – who had lost out to Bujold during the original casting – was ultimately cast as a renamed Captain Kathryn Janeway.
You can have a look at (a very stiff and awkward IMHO) Bujold in the role here.
In play:
American actress Kate Mulgrew has, among many other roles, from time to time played Katharine Hepburn in the 2002 one-person play Tea at Five. Especially early in her career, Mulgrew was often compared to Hepburn, although she has described the comparison as “odious.”
Darjeeling tea is considered by many to be the best in the world. The top leaves are harvested four times a year in what are called flushes. Connoisseurs claim they can taste the differences between the different flushes as each one throughout the year gives tea different characteristics.
The Darjeeling district is in the state of West Bengal which is one of the 28 states of India. India also has 8 UTs, Union Territories, and the UTs are governed by the central government of India, while the 28 states have their own state government systems. The state of West Bengal is in eastern India and adjacent to Bangladesh.
The flag of Bangladesh looks something like a combination of the old flag of Libya (a solid green field) and the longstanding flag of Japan (a red circle). However, the red circle is slightly off-center to the left, unlike on the Japanese flag.
The Concert for Bangladesh was actually two benefit concerts, held on August 1st, 1971, at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The concerts were organized by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, to raise awareness of, and fund relief efforts for, the people of what was then called East Bangladesh, in the wake of war and a massive cyclone (hurricane) which devastated the region.
Originally credited as a performance by “George Harrison and Friends,” in addition to Harrison and Shankar (and his band), the performers included Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Leon Russell, and Badfinger.
The concerts yielded a live triple album and a documentary film, as well as raising millions in donations (though much of the money was tied up in legal wrangling for years); it served as a model for later charitable concerts, including Live Aid.
Actress Kelly Preston was the wife of John Travolta for nearly 30 years. They met in 1987 while filming The Experts (1989). Her first film audition was for the role of Emmeline in The Blue Lagoon (1980), but she lost out to the younger Brooke Shields, aged 15 at the time when Preston was 18. Kelly Preston died in 2020 of breast cancer at the age of 57.
Three Emmelines were prominent in the women’s suffrage movement: Pankhurst and Pethick-Lawrence in Great Britain, and Wells in the United States. Pankhurt’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was the subject of a British commemorative coin in 2003.
“Emma” is a 1974 song by the British soul group Hot Chocolate. It describes a man and woman who have known each other since childhood, and struggle to make a living as adults. Hot Chocolate is better known by their two biggest hits: “You Sexy Thing” and “Every 1’s a Winner.”
Noted American aviator Charles Lindbergh secretly fathered seven children by three different German women, two of them sisters, beginning in 1957. The women each kept this secret, at Lindbergh’s request. The children did not learn who their father was until about a decade after his death.
Charles Lindbergh was fundamental to enabling organ transplants. In 1938, 11 years after his historic flight across the Atlantic, he co-authored this book with Nobel Prize-winning French surgeon Alexis Carrel to cultivate whole organs.
The Lindbergh perfusion pump was the first to enable transplanted organs to survive outside the human body. This method helped to enable organ transplants.
The first organ transplant took place in 1954 when J. Hartwell Harrison transplanted a kidney from Ronald Herrick to his identical twin Richard Herrick. They were 22 years old at that time. Richard Herrick survived for eight years and died in 1962, of complications from his original chronic nephritis. Ronald Herrick died in December 2010 of unrelated causes.
Ronald Wilson Reagan, born in Illinois but elected as a Republican of California, was the first divorced person to be elected President of the United States.
The 1984 science-fiction film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock featured two comic actors as Klingons.
Christopher Lloyd, who had already become well-known as Reverend Jim Ignatowski in the television sitcom Taxi, played Captain Kruge, the commander of a Klingon warship; a year later, Lloyd would star as Doc Brown in the hit film Back to the Future.
John Larroquette played Maltz, the only member of the Klingon crew to survive their encounter with Kirk and company; later that same year, Larroquette would rise to fame as Assistant District Attorney Dan Fielding in the series Night Court.
In the late 1980s, Ronald McDonald appeared in a holiday commercial with kids and animated woodland creatures in which they skated on a frozen pond. The littlest boy was so small and unathletic that he quickly got left behind, and started walking away unhappily.
But Ronald saw him, scooped him up, and spun him around in his arms on the ice a few times in a lovely display of inclusiveness.
It was my favorite commercial as a kid, and contributed to the adult that I am today, always trying to include people.
The McDonald’s restaurant chain was founded in 1940, in San Bernardino, California, by brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald. They began franchising their concept in 1953, and hired Ray Kroc as their franchising agent in 1954; Kroc became frustrated with the McDonald brothers’ desire to keep the chain small, and fought with them for control of the company, finally buying them out in 1961.
