The national anthem of Poland is Mazurek Dąbrowskiego (“Dąbrowski’s Mazurka”). Its alternate titles include Pieśń Legionów Polskich we Włoszech (“Song of the Polish Legions in Italy”) and Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła (“Poland Is Not Yet Lost” or “Poland Has Not Yet Perished”).
Liberace was the son of an Italian immigrant father (Salvatore) and a first generation Polish-American mother (Franziska Zuchowska) as reflected in his given names, Wladziu Valentino. Wladziu was later Americanized as Walter though from an early age his friends called him Lee; Valentino was actually in honor of Rudolph Valentino whose movies his mother loved.
In Dr. Dre’s and Tupac Shakur’s hit 1995 rap song “California Love,” Dre sings about all of his bling, boasting that he was “lookin’ like I robbed Liberace.”
Tennis uses the word “love” to indicate a zero score. The origin of the term is disputed, but the OED leans to the explanation that it derives from “for love,” meaning “for nothing” (originally referring to bets being made).
Motzart’s middle name was not “Amadeus” but “Theophilus”. Both mean “Love of God” but Theophilus is Greek and he Latinized it which was not unusual at the time.
The aforementioned Ian McKellen as originated the role of Salieri in the Broadway production of Amadeus, opposite Tim Curry’s Mozart. Both men were nominated for the best actor Tony; McKellen won it.
Tim Curry plays a mysterious traveling magician in the recent British TV miniseries A Cranford Christmas.
(I saw him in late 1985 in London in She Stoops to Conquer. He was wonderful - best stage acting I’ve ever seen, bar none.)
Tim Curry’s breakout role was as Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show movie.
The stage role was originated by Terrence Mann, who also originated the role of Rum Tug Tugger in CATS and the Beast in Beauty and the Beast. When his next original role was as a person in Frank Wildhorn’s The Scarlett Pimpernal, the line was “Terrence Mann finally gets to play one.”
Baroness Emma Orczy fled with her parents from a revolution in her native Hungary. Penniless, she turned to writing books to support herself. She became a best-selling author in 1904 with a novel and play about a British aristocrat, Sir Percy Blakeney, who rescued other aristocrats from the Terror following the French Revolution and forming the template for the modern superhero with his alternate identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Orczy also created one of the first armchair detectives, the Old Man in the Corner.
Audrey Hepburn was the daughter of a penniless Dutch baroness, Ella Van Heemstra and of Joseph Ruston, a social climbing Anglo-Irish banker who added his grandmother’s maiden name to make the family surname Hepburn-Ruston due to an inheritance. Her parents divorced largely because her father was a Nazi sympathizer and during the war her mother’s family (including her sons by a previous marriage) suffered terribly; Hepburn said that seeing Jewish children being deported and nursing her brother from severe malnutrition after a time in a concentration camp inspired her work with UNICEF and other children’s agencies later.
In 1993, Audrey Hepburn won a posthumous spoken-word Grammy for her recording of fairy tales set to a background of Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite. The selections on Audrey Hepburn’s Enchanted Tales are “The Sleeping Princess”, “Tom Thumb”, “Laideronette, Empress of the Pagodas”, and “Beauty and the Beast".
P.T. Barnum’s midget celebrity couple, Gen. and Mrs. Tom Thumb, visited a bemused President Abraham Lincoln in the White House during the Civil War.
General and Mrs. Thumb- aka Charles Sherwood Stratton and the former Lavinia Warren- often appeared with their counterparts, Anna Swan and her husband Martin Bates, who were 7’5 and 7’9 respectively. (Picture) The Thumbs had no children- she was terrified of pregnancy because her sister, also a little person, had died giving birth- but often posed with a baby said to be their’s as one of Barnum’s publicity ploys. The Bates had two children who weighed a reported 18 and 23 pounds at birth, but sadly both were stillborn.
Tom Thumb was the first American-built steam locomotive used on a common-carrier railroad, entering service on the new Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1830. It was designed and built by Peter Cooper, who founded the tuition-free Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, at Cooper Square and Astor Place.
Lincoln credited his speech at the Cooper Union in February 1860 with introducing himself to the influential Eastern and New England Republicans who would be key to him winning the Republican nomination that year, and ultimately the Presidency. He spoke about the Framers’ understanding of Congress’s powers to limit the spread of slavery.
Framers, aka framing carpenters, typically use one of three general methods to build the structural support of a house: post-and-beam, balloon, and, the most common today in the US, platform.
Gloria Vanderbilt had four sons: Stanley and Chris Stokowski were born during her marriage to her second husband, Leopold Stokowski (who was more than 40 years her senior); and Carter and Anderson Cooper, the sons of her fourth husband, Mississippi born writer Wyatt Cooper (a few years her junior). Her son Chris has been estranged from his mother since 1977 and Carter committed suicide in 1988; Gloria (who lost most of her wealth many years ago) currently resides in a property owned by her son Anderson.
Brothers Mort and Walker Cooper played together on the St. Louis Cardinals teams of 1942-1945. Mort was a pitcher, and Walker a catcher, so they were frequently batterymates.
Mort Walker is best known for his cartooning career, as the creator of both Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois. Beetle, who has been the nemesis of Sgt. Orville Snorkel for over 60 years now, was based on Walker’s frat brothers at the University of Missouri, which has a bronze statue of him in front of the Alumni Center.
Then-Texas Gov. George Walker Bush selected the man who was leading his Vice Presidential search team, Dick Cheney, to actually be his running mate in 2000. Cheney, a Republican originally from Wyoming, had earlier served as a congressman, White House chief of staff and secretary of defense.