Patrick Stewart wore a toupee when he played Sejanus, the Roman soldier who assumed dictatorial powers under Tiberius, in the 1970s BBC miniseries of Robert Graves’ I CLAVDIVS.
Powers Boothe won an Emmy portraying Jim Jones in Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones.
Powers Boothe played Curly Bill Brocius, the infamous gunfighter, alongside Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer in Tombstone.
Joseph Wardell, aka “Curly Joe” DeRita, was Moe and Larry’s partner in “The Three Stooges Meet Hercules” and “Around the World in a Daze.”
Jack Palance won an Oscar for playing Curly in City Slickers and later played Curly’s identical twin Duke in the sequel; he had earlier played Count Dracula, a gladiator in Bar Abbas, and been the host of Ripley’s Believe it or Not with his daughter Holly.
Holly Hunter earned a degree in drama from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, after which she moved to New York City and roomed with fellow actress Frances McDormand.
Scotsman Andrew Carnegie, who was for a time the richest man in the world, shared a bedroom with his mother until she died when he was 52, whereupon he married his secretary and fathered his only child (a daughter he named Margaret after his mother) in his early 60s.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead published Continuities in Cultural Evolution while she was in her early 60’s.
Not long before losing a tennis match to Billy Jean King in prime time, Bobby Riggs had trounced the #1 ranked woman player, Margaret Smith Court.
Margaret “The Iron Lady” Thatcher was the British prime minister at the time of the Falklands War, and was accused by an opposition politician of “glorying in slaughter.”
Marvel Comics superhero Tony “Iron Man” Stark was imprisoned by Asian guerillas in the original Iron Man storyline. This was changed to Afghani Jihadis for the recent film.
Sherlock Holmes’ friend Dr. Watson had served in the British Army, treating soldiers wounded in battle with Afghani tribesmen.
In A Study in Scarlet Watson mentions his war wound as being in his shoulder “grazing the subclavian artery,” while In The Sign of the Four he states that his wounded leg hurt, and in The Noble Bachelor, he says the bullet “in one of his limbs” bothered him.
Fans of the Conan Doyle stories disagree about many of their details, including how many times Watson was married, if he ever visited the U.S. or Australia, and why he seemed to get so many details wrong, to say nothing of Holmes’s childhood and college experiences.
Conan O’Brien’s thesis at Harvard was entitled “Literary Progeria in the works of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner”; he traveled to Milledgeville, Georgia (O’Connor’s hometown) and Jackson, Missississippi (site of Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak) when researching but admitted in a latercommencement address “during my discussions with Pauly Shore, it doesn’t come up much”.
Robert E. Howard’s first “Conan the Barbarian” story, “The Phoenix on the Sword”, appeared in Weird Tales magazine in December, 1932.
According to St. Clement, the phoenix builds itself a nest of frankincense and myrrh.
(I had a more amusing response to Sampiro’s post):
Johnny Cash really did propose to June Carter on stage, though after singing Jackson, not, as in the movie, in the middle of the song. The song concerns Jackson, Missississippi, of which the city is named after Pres. Andrew Jackson; the state takes its name (meaning “Gre-great river”) from a river named by a stuttering Ojibwe.
Winston Churchill’s government was toppled and he was replaced by Clement Attlee before the end of World War 2.
World War II broke out on Sept. 1, 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland. It ended on Sept. 2, 1945, with the Japanese surrender in Toyko Bay on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri.
Maine, formerly part of Massachusetts, became a new state as part of the Missouri Compromise.