Actress Juliet Prowse (no relation to *David *Prowse from Star Wars and A Clockwork Orange) was a South African dancer/actress who made a big splash in the movie Can Can, where she met Frank Sinatra. They briefly were engaged, but broke it off. Prowse later starred in the one-season TV series Mona McCluskey.
George Lucas has said that he loosely based Star Wars Emperor Palpatine’s corrupt rise to power on that of Richard Nixon.
Kenya’s Nixon Kiprotich won the silver medal in the 800-meter run at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.
Barcelona was IOC chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch’s hometown
Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, president of Mexico at least eleven times between 1833 and 1855, paid the equivalent of millions of dollars in today’s money for a tomb for his leg (amputated following the Battle of Vera Cruz) and commissioned a cork prosthesis that is today housed, along with one of Lincoln’s handwritten copies of the Gettysburg Address, in the Illinois state archives in Springfield, Illinois.
The Fourth District Normal School was founded in 1905 in Springfield, Missouri. It subsequently upgraded its name to Southwest Missouri State Teachers College (1919), Southwest Missouri State College (1945), and Southwest Missouri State University (1972). In 2005, it dropped all regional pretensions and became simply Missouri State University.
George C. Marshall, Secretary of State to President Harry S. Truman, Democrat of Missouri, threatened to resign if Truman granted diplomatic recognition to the new State of Israel in 1948. Truman had enormous respect for Marshall but went ahead and did it anyway.
Cult TV show Eerie, Indiana was a comedy about the strange doings in the town that gave the show its title. Omri Katz played Marshall Teller, whose could never convince his parents they were real.
There is a filial and numeric similarity in the Old Testament between the story of the villainous king Ahab (the son of Omri) and the prophet Gideon in that both men had 70 sons and in both cases all 70 were killed shortly after their father’s death. One of Gideon’s successors, the judge Abdon, “had forty sons and thirty grandsons, who rode on seventy donkeys”; apparently the notion of 70 male descendants was important, but Abdon’s sons appear to have survived okay. Hercules had at least 70 sons by some versions of his legend, 50 of whom were conceived in one night, but they were not killed after his death.
Bodybuilder Steve Reeves played in a long series of low-budget European epic movies. He is best known for playing the title role in Hercules and Hercules Unchained.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first film was Hercules in New York (1969), which currently has a rating of 2.8 on imdb.com.
What a coincidence. So does his governorship!
Hercules was both a Roman and a Greek mythological hero. But in Greek, his name was Heracles. Early Roman sources suggest the imported Greek hero supplanted a mythic Italic shepherd called Recaranus or Garanus, famous for his strength and who dedicated the Ara Maxima that became associated with the earliest Roman cult of Hercules.
The constellation Ara’s brightest star is designated Beta. Alpha Arae which should be the brightest by typical nomenclature is slightly dimmer.
VHS recorders and movies were outselling Betamax 4:1 by the early 1980s and by the mid-1980s Betamax had only a tiny share of the market and by the late 1980s no major films were released on Betamax, though Betamax VCRs continued to be produced until 2002. VHS died soon after, the last big budget film released to VHS format being the 2005 Viggo Mortensen film A History of Violence.
Irish actor Stuart Townsend was originally cast as Aragorn in the Peter Jackson-directed film trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Not long after shooting started, Jackson decided the dump Townsend, and asked Viggo Mortensen to take the role instead. Mortensen was initially reluctant, but his teenage son insisted he do it.
Viggo Mortensen’s 1987 performance in Bent at the Coast Playhouse, Los Angeles, won him a Dramalogue Critics’ Award. The play, about homosexual concentration camp prisoners, was originally brought to prominence by Ian McKellen, with whom Mortensen later costarred in The Lord of the Rings.
Bent Fabricius-Bjerre was the first Swedish artist to have a top 40 hit in th US (#2), and won a Grammy Award (using his stage name of Bent Fabric) for a song that still is commonly played at weddings and anniversary parties. The original title was “Around a Piano,” but record company executives changed it for the US audience for the far more familiar “Alley Cat.”
Ian McKellen was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Gods and Monsters. He has played an ambitious Nazi (Richard III), an aging Nazi (Apt Pupil) and a man who lost his family to the Nazis (X-Men).
Merging simulplays:
The Pianist is a biographical film about Władysław Szpilman, a Jewish piano player, during the Nazi control of Poland. The star, Adrien Brody, won the César (the French analogue of the Oscar) for his performance, the only American to win the César for Best Actor.
Well, “Award” was the common word of both posts, but whatever.
Most of occupied Poland was ruled by the Nazis from 1939-45 under what they termed the “General Government.” They preferred not even to use the word “Poland.”