Gregory Peck holds the record for being a cast member in the most Oscar-winning films: 13 (including Guns of Navarone). He shares this record with two other people:
William Holden
John Ratzenberger (yes, Cliff Clavin from Cheers)
William Holden was Ronald Reagan’s best man when the future president married Nancy Davis in 1952.
Ronald Reagan’s televised speech in favor of Barry Goldwater’s doomed bid for the Presidency in 1964 is often credited with dramatically increasing the actor’s profile in conservative circles.
The Democratic response to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 slogan “in your heart, you know he’s right”, namely, “in your guts, you know he’s nuts” has been credited to Bill Moyers.
One of the bumper stickers for Goldwater’s campaign was AuH2064, the chemical symbols for gold plus water plus the year.
I thought it was BaAuH2O64 - Barium = Barry M.) Anyhoo …
The Chad Mitchell Trio, which at the time still had Chad Mitchell, who met the other members when they were all students at Gonzaga, satirized the clean-scrubbed Larence Welkish Goldwater crowd in their vaudeville-style song “Barry’s Boys”, soft-shoeing along with “You too can join the crew/Tippecanoe and Nixon, too”.
When Chad Mitchell left the Chad Mitchell Trio he was replaced by John Denver. The group was then renamed the “Mitchell Trio.”
John Denver was an amateur pilot and died when he crashed an experimental Rutan airplane he was flying solo over the Pacific Ocean.
John Denver’s Annie’s Song was written as an ode to his wife, and was supposedly written in about ten-and-a-half minutes on a ski lift in Aspen, Colorado,
The musical Annie Get Your Gun was developed for theater by Dorothy Fields. Originally, Fields was supposed to write the lyrics (she is a fine lyricist) while Jerome Kern, her sometime partner, would write the music. Unfortunately, Kern died before he could begin the score, so Fields asked Irving Berlin to take over, knowing that Berlin wrote his own lyrics. Berlin was nervous about writing a book musical (his earlier shows were revues), but eventually wrote a classic score.
Mary Hayley Bell’s novel Whistle Down the Wind was made into a movie starring her daughter Hayley Mills. It was first made into a stage musical by Russell Labey and Richard Taylor (why am I just now finding this out?) and later by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jim Steinman.
My user name comes from the song “Annie Christmas” from the latter show. I won Jim Steinman’s black jacket with the original logo embroderied on the back in a raffle!
Inherit the Wind is a stage play loosely based on the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, in which science (in the form of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution) was thought to be pitted against religion. In the actual trial, former U.S. Secretary of State and religious fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan served as prosecutor; noted criminal defense lawyer Clarence Darrow led the defense.
The main purpose of the Scopes Monkey Trial was to get publicity for the town of Dayton, TN. George Rappleyea, a local businessman, started on the plan to break the law, and recruited Scopes, who not only taught evolution, but encouraged his students to testify against him.
On an episode of Ellen Degeneres’s sitcom Emma Thompson portrayed an alterniversion of herself. Amongst other things learned about her was that she was a closeted lesbian, a total lush, had done soft core porn, and was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio rather than England.
African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio. He published a newspaper called the Dayton Tattler for the city’s black residents, but his investors included a couple of his white acquaintances who’d later become famous as aviation pioneers.
In the Robert Altman movie Brewster McCloud Stacy Keach played Abraham Wright, a fictional third Wright brother (though the Wrights did have 5 other siblings), an Ebeneezer Scrooge like landlord and businessman whose driver is the title character (played by Bud Cort).
Brewster McCloud starred several actors who had been in Altman’s previous film, MASH*. Rene Auberjonois made random pronouncements, just as he had as Father Mulcahy, John Schuck was again earnest but clueless, and Sally Kellerman got nekkid (and stayed that way for far longer). Set mainly in the Houston Astrodome, it was also the film debut of Shelly Duvall, and the penultimate appearance of Margaret Hamilton.
Alexander Hamilton, a trusted Revolutionary War aide to Gen. George Washington and later first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, had a scandalous affair while in office. He did himself no favors by writing a political pamphlet in which he tried to defend himself.
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Lord Byron had a scandalous affair with his half-sister, whom he had scarcely known as a child.