Today's Birthdays 1/9

[do_re_milla]

Posted: 1/10/04 at 12:06am

Dame Gracie Fields 1/9/1898 - 9/27/1979 English entertainer - comedienne: Walter, Walter, I Took My Harp to A Party, The Biggest Aspidistra in the World; singer: Sally, Now is the Hour, Around the World

Vilma Bánky (Lonchit) 1/9/1898 - 3/18/1991 performer - film's Son of the Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle

Sir Rudolf Bing 1/9/1902 - 9/2/1997 manager: Metropolitan Opera House [1950-1972]

Ray Bolger 1/9/1904 performer - This triple threat will appear in numerous shows and in 1948 star in Where's Charley?, the musical version of Charley's Aunt. A yellow brick road will stretch out before him in Hollywood.

Simone de Beauvoir 1/9/1908 - 4/14/1986 French feminist writer

Richard Milhous Nixon 1/9/1913 - 4/22/1994 37th president of the United States (1969-74), the first American president to resign from office following his involvement in the Watergate scandal; source mat'l

Herbert Lom 1/9/1917 performer - Son of the Pink Panther and others in Pink Panther series, Ten Little Indians, King Solomon’s Mines, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Dorian Gray, Spartacus, War and Peace, The Seventh Veil, Secret Mission

Brian Friel 01/09/1929 writer - Philadelphia, Here I Come!; Dancing at Lughnasa; Translations (Dana Delany, Brian Dennehy, Rufus Sewell)

Bob Denver 01/09/1935 performer - Play It Again, Sam [replacement]; tv's The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis [I still remember how he exclaimed "Wo-rk!", Gilligan’s Island, Back to the Beach, Wackiest Wagon Train in the West

Susannah York 1/9/1941 - performer - film's Devices and Desires, Superman 2, The Awakening, Superman: The Movie, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, A Man for All Seasons, Tom Jones, Tunes of Glory

J. K. Simmons 01/09/1955 performer, used to be my neighbor - A Change in the Heir [1 of my fav flops](Mary Stout, Judy Blazer, Jeffrey Herbst); 1992 Guys and Dolls; Laughter on the 23rd Floor (Nathan Lane, Randy Graff, Mark Linn-Baker)

Joely Richardson 1/9/1965 performer - film's The Patriot, Behaving Badly, Lady Chatterley, 101 Dalmatians, The Affair of the Necklace

SHOWS THAT OPENED ON THIS DATE:

1910 Musical-comedy star Peggy Wood makes her New York City debut in The Old Town at the Globe Theatre. Wood will appear in several Noel Coward plays, including the New York premiere of Blithe Spirit.

1911 Sigmund Romberg writes his first complete Broadway score for The Whirl of the World, which opens today at the Winter Garden. A brochure describes it thus: "An Isle of Gorgeousness, Fun and Music, Entirely Surrounded by Girls." The formula proves a winner, running 161 performances.

1929 Elmer Rice captures a Street Scene at the Playhouse Theatre in New York. This stark drama about tenement life will win the Pulitzer Prize and run for 601 performances. The 1947 revival is set to music with a score by Kurt Weill and lyrics by poet Langston Hughes.

1941 Two sweet little old ladies help nudge melancholy people off to a better world in the macabre comedy Arsenic and Old Lace which opens its 1444-performance run today at the Fulton Theatre. Jean Adair and Josephine Hull play the sisters and Boris Karloff plays their brother.

1947 Ella Logan and Albert Sharpe look to the rainbow in Fred Saidy and Yip Harburg's Finian's Rainbow, about a leprechaun who turns human when his crock of gold is stolen and buried near Fort Knox. The show opens a 725-performance run tonight. David Wayne and Michael Kidd will go on to win the very first Tony Awards for Best Supporting Actor and Best Choreographer, respectively.

1961 - The play, Rhinoceros, opened on Broadway, starring two of the theatre’s true stars -- Eli Wallach and Zero Mostel.

1962 Romulus, satirizing the end of the Roman Empire, will have a much shorter life than its subject, with just 69 performances to its calender. Gore Vidal adapted this Friedrich Duerrenmatt work. Cyril Ritchard stars.

1968 Some of first openly gay characters seen on the Broadway stage are played by Milo O'Shea and Eli Wallach in Charles Dyer's The Staircase, which runs 61 performances at the Biltmore Theatre.

ON THIS DAY IN:

The Surveyor 7 space probe made a soft landing on the moon, marking the end of the American series of unmanned explorations of the lunar surface.

Reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, speaking by telephone from the Bahamas to reporters in Hollywood, said a purported biography of him by Clifford Irving was a fake.

(sources: IBDB, NYT's ON THIS DAY, 440.com’s Those Were The Days, Playbill.com)

Milla