Before he played Will Truman on Will & Grace Eric McCormack’s biggest TV role was ex Confederate gambler Clay Mosby on Lonesome Dove: the Series. He said to get the accent he used he watched Shelby Foote’s scenes from the Ken Burns The Civil War miniseries for hours on end.
Shelby Foote spoke to the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable in Sept. 2000 (and I was there!). He argued that novelists need to be more like historians in terms of accuracy, but historians need to be more like novelists in terms of telling an interesting, engaging story.
Sir Bedivere has rarely been more than a spear-carrier in the “King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table” saga, but he was the first Arthurian knight known to have appeared in the legends, beginning around the 9th century. Guinevere appeared at least as early as the 11th century, but Lancelot did not appear as a major character until the 12th century.
The romance between Guinevere and Lancelot was the example that Gaston Paris used when identifying the concept of “courtly love,” a secret and usually unconsummated love between a man and a woman of a king’s or queen’s court.
Due to its prominence in the textile industry, North Carolina’s Gaston County regularly tops the USA’s annual list of most bales of cotton consumed in any county.
Louis Jourdan played Gaston LaChaise, a bored playboy who falls in love with a teenager he has known since she was a small child in the musical GIGI, based on a story by Collette. Leslie Caron played Gigi.
The four given names of Prince William of Wales, Duke of Cambridge, are William Arthur Philip Louis.
In 1963, Patty Duke won a Best Supporting Oscar for her role in The Miracle Worker, making her the youngest person to win a competitive Oscar (it was routine for child stars of the 30s and 40s to be given special Oscars – Shirley Temple and Margaret O’Brien were given them). She has since been supplanted by Tatum O’Neal, who won Best Supporting Actress in 1974.
Pianist Oscar Peterson, a Montreal native, is widely considered the greatest jazz musician Canada ever produced. Known for his technical proficiency as well as improvisational skill, Peterson was called the “Maharaja of the keyboard” by Duke Ellington, although his own strongest influence was Art Tatum.
A vicious hit in a 1977 Pre-season NFL, delivered by Jack Tatum, left Darryl Stingley a quadrapalegic, on a ball Stinley wasn’t going to be able to catch anyway.
In her autobiography, actress Tatum O’Neal claims she was named after Art Tatum.
Ken and Jarvis Tatum were teammates with the California Angels during the 1969 and 1970 seasons, but were not brothers.
The California Angels started out their history in Los Angeles, where they played in Wrigley Field, named after Phil Wrigley, who owned a minor league team there as well as the Cubs. Later, they moved in as tenants to the larger Dodger Stadium, but called it Chavez Ravine (named for the area where it was built) for their home games.
The 1950’s TV show “Home Run Derby” was filmed at Wrigley Field in California.
The 1960s TV show Car 54 Where Are You? (way ahead of its time in terms of multiculturalism) was only recently released on DVD and the extras include interviews with Charlotte Rae and the few surviving actors and writers associated. Biggest surprise: almost to a person they all hated Joe E. Ross who played Gunther Toody; he was evidently many times more obnoxious and crude than his character and had the show been on another year he’d have been fired. Fred Gwynne was evidently very much like his character Muldoon- quiet, shy, and sophisticated.
Fred Gwynne was a Harvard graduate and former president of The Harvard Lampoon. He is also an accomplished artist: his children’s books The King Who Rained and A Chocolate Moose for Dinner – which he wrote and also illustrated – are still in print.
While Tom Paxton is usually catagorized as a “folk singer,” he has written many children’s songs, three of which have been turned into children’s books: The Marvelous Toy (first song he wrote), Jennifer’s Rabbit, and We’re Going To The Zoo.
“We’re Going to the Zoo” was once featured in a Monty Python’s Flying Circus skit.
The first gorilla born in captivity anywhere was Colo, a native of the Columbus (Ohio) Zoo and Aquarium (Colo - get it?), born in 1956 and still living there today. The zoo is best known, however, for being the springboard of the career of TV personality Jack Hanna.
The Bonzo Dog Band’s first album, Gorilla, was “dedicated to Kong, who must have been a great bloke.”