Winston Churchill was America’s most popular novelist 110 years ago, most notably for the massive best seller Richard Carvel. He was so well known that when the future prime minister began to write, he used the byline “Winston S. Churchill” to help avoid confusion.
For a long time that was true, but no more: Honorary citizenship of the United States - Wikipedia. Personally, I think Gen. von Stueben, Washington’s Valley Forge drillmaster, should also be so honored.
Ian McKellen starred in a movie remake of Shakespeare’s Richard III that very creepily reimagined the play as a British Fascist drama in the Thirties.
In the novel Code of the Woosters, P.G. Wodehouse introduced Sir Roderick Spode, a comical British fascist modeled after Sir Oswald Mosley. Spode was leader of an inept band of goose steppers caleld the Black Shorts.
Oswald Mosley’s son Max Mosley was the longtime president of the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, the rulemaking body for Formula 1 and other motorsports racing. He previously was a co-founder of March Engineering, an open-wheel racing team.
Max Mosley was uncomfortably in the public eye two years ago when News of the World, a British tabloid newspaper, released video footage of him engaged in sadomasochistic sexual acts with five prostitutes in a scenario that the paper said involved Nazi role-playing; Mosley denied any Nazi theme.
Max, a movie written and directed by Menno Meyjes, stars John Cusak as the fictional Jewish art dealer Max Rothman, who befriends a young Adoph Hitler just after World War I, and sees promise in his paintings, just as he’s getting involved with the Nazis. It has the immortal line “You’re an awfully hard man to like, Hitler, but I’m gonna try.”
John Cusack’s sister Joan played Debbie, aka “the Black Widow”, a serial killer who intends to make Fester the latest of her wealthy husbands to die in an “accident” in Addams Family Values.
College basketball coach Rick Majerus regularly (and accurately) compares his appearance to that of Uncle Fester on the sitcom The Addams Family.
Artist Charles Addams often was Jackie Kennedy’s escort at social engagements after JFK had been assassinated. And once The Addams Family appeared on TV, no cartoon featuring the family characters ever appeared in The New Yorker again (where nearly all of them had appeared previously), since editor Wallace Shawn banned them.
Trivia about Addams Family cast members from the original sitcom: Carolyn Jones (Morticia) was the ex-wife of entertainment mogul Aaron Spelling, 6’10 Ted Cassidy (Lurch/Thing), who was completely bald IRL, drove a Plymouth Valiant factory customized so that he could sit/drive from the back seat, Jackie Coogan (Fester) was in Guinness Book of World Records for many years as the youngest self made millionaire (though barely any was left when he came of age) and John Astin (Gomez) is now a faculty member at his alma mater Johns Hopkins University where he occasionally does a one man showbased on Poe.
Nitpick: William Shawn was the editor of the New Yorker; actor Wallace Shawn is his son.
When the original Plymouth Valiant was being designed, it was called the Falcon after the Chrysler Falcon concept car, but the name was changed when Henry Ford II asked permission to use “Falcon” for his company’s own soon-to-be-introduced compact.
The movie The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, starring Andrew “Dice” Clay, was a box office and critical failure in the US (winning the Razzie that year in a tie vote with Ghosts Can’t Do It; Clay won Worst Actor) but was inexplicably a cult hit in Norway.
Ghosts appear in four of Shakespeare’s plays: Banquo’s ghost appears to Macbeth, Julius Caesar’s ghost appears to Brutus, ***Hamlet ***is visited by his father’s ghost, and ***Richard III ***beholds the ghosts of several people he killed.
There are no accounts contemporary of Richard III claiming he was a hunchback as he was portrayed in Shakespeare, and the portrait said to show a hunchback was later found to be doctored- the raised right shoulder was added much later.
All three Kings of England named “Richard” died violent deaths: Richard I (the Lionhearted) shot by an arrow while besieging a castle, Richard II by assassination (accounts often say by having a red-hot poker shoved up his butt), and Richard III at Bosworth Field.
Richard the Lionhearted’s wife, Berengaria of the House of Jiminez, holds the distinction of being the only queen consort of England never to set foot in England; Richard married her in Sicily while en route to the Third Crusade and to cement an alliance with her brother, King Sancho VI of Navarre, and rarely saw her for the next few years due to war and his imprisonment, then installed her in one of his castles in France when ordered by the Pope to reunite with her. (Some historians believe she may have visited England after Richard’s death, but she definitely did not while queen consort.)
Before the nation of Italy was formed in 1861, the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of Sicily merged in 1816 and became known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
Emma Hamilton began her rise through British society as the mistress of Sir William Hamilton, British envoy to Naples. She later met Lord Nelson, the naval hero, and their romance became the stuff of legend.
Naples is traditionally considered the birthplace of pizza. Traditionally a poor person’s meal, it became broadly popular in 1889 when Queen Margherita requested some to find out how the poor people of the city lived. A baker named Raffaele Esposito cannily made one with ingredients the colors of the Italian flag (red tomato sauce, white mozzarella, green basil) and named it for her. Pizza Margherita is a standard recipe even today.