Today's Birthdays 11/5
Today's Birthdays 11/5
#1Today's Birthdays 11/5
Posted: 11/4/06 at 10:59pm
Anna Leonowens 11/5/1834 - 1/19/1914 English writer and governess to children of king Mongkut of Siam, source material - The King & I
Charles MacArthur 11/05/1895 - Apr 21, 1956 Writer, Source Material, Director, father of James MacArthur (adopted), husband of Helen Hayes (1928 - 1956) his death, newsman-turned-playwright, whose wisecracking oeuvre includes The Front Page, Twentieth Century (the play on which the musical On the Twentieth Century is based, Eugenie Leontovich, Moffat Johnston, Wm. Frawley), Johnny on a Spot, Lulu Belle, Off the Record and the libretto to the Rodgers and Hart musical Jumbo. He was also married to actress Helen Hayes.
Natalie Schafer 11/05/1900 - Apr 10, 1991 performer, Wife of Louis Calhern (1934 - 1942) divorced - orig Lady in the Dark; Six Characters in Search of an Author; Romanoff and Juliet (Peter Ustinov, Jack Gilford, Marianne Deeming, Elizabeth Allen); tv's & film's Mrs. Howell on television's "Gilligan's Island"; The Survivors, Forever Darling, The Time of Your Life
Etta Moten 11/05/1901 - Jan 2, 2004 performer - Fast and Furious; Lysistrata (Rex Ingram, Sidney Poitier)
Joel McCrea 11/5/1905 - Oct 20, 1990 performer - film's Ride the High Country, The Oklahoman, Four Faces West, Buffalo Bill, Barbary Coast; my favs The More The Merrier; Sullivan's Travels
Roy Rogers 11/05/1911 - Jul 6, 1998, husband of Dale Evans (1947 - 199 his death, performer - 1947 Topaze (Tilly Losch); tv's & film's King of the Cowboys
John McGiver 11/5/1912 - 9/9/1975 performer - tv's & film's Midnight Cowboy, The Manchurian Candidate, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Patty Duke Show, Mr. Terrific, Many Happy Returns, The Jimmy Stewart Show
Vivien Leigh 11/05/1913 - Jul 7, 1967 performer, godmother of Juliet Mills, wife of Laurence Olivier (1940 - 1960) divorced - Romeo and Juliet; Caesar and Cleopatra; Antony and Cleopatra; Duel of Angels; Tovarich; Ivanov (John Gielgud, Miller Lide, Paula Laurence); Academy Award-winning actress: Gone with the Wind [1939], A Streetcar Named Desire [1951]; Ship of Fools, Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, Anna Karenina
Elke Sommer 11/5/1940 performer - tv's film's A Shot in the Dark, The Prize, The Oscar, Prisoner of Zenda; Ewig rauschen die Gelder; Miss Italy [1959]
Sam Shepard 11/05/1943 Writer, performer - one of the cornerstones of the Off-Off-Broadway movement in the 1960s, with plays like The Unseen Hand and The Tooth of Crime, who went slightly more mainstream with works including True West, All for Love and Pulitzer-winner Buried Child. Contributed a sketch to the long-running revue Oh! Calcutta; "Curse of the Starving Class," "Simpatico," "Fool for Love," "A Lie of the Mind," and "Eyes for Consuela"; film's Days of Heaven, The Pelican Brief, The Right Stuff, Steel Magnolias, Voyager; playwright: Silent Tongue, Far North, Fool for Love, Zabriskie Point, Paris Texas
John Hillner 11/05/1952 - Performer, Stage Manager - 2004 La Cage aux Folles; Crazy For You, 1995 Company; Footloose; The Graduate
Howard McGillin 11/05/1953 performer - The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Cleo Laine, Betty Buckley, Judy Kuhn, Donna Murphy, Rob Marshall); Anything Goes; 1993 She Loves Me (Boyd Gaines, Judy Kuhn, Sally Mayes, Louis Zorich, Lee Wilkof); 1994 Sunday in the Park with George
Andrea McArdle 11/05/1963 Mother of Alexis Kalehoff; performer - Annie, Starlight Express, State Fair (Kathryn Crosby, John Davidson, Scott Wise; Donna McKechnie)
Tatum O’Neal 11/5/1963 Academy Award-winning actress: Paper Moon [1973]; Bad News Bears, Little Darlings
SHOWS THAT OPENED ON THIS DATE:
1923 Leon Gordon's popular melodrama White Cargo opens at the Greenwich Village Theatre and stays for 257 performances. Billed as "a vivid play of the primitive," it's the story of British plantation owners who succumb to the African jungle heat and moisture -- and sexual charms of "halfbreed" temptress Tondelayo. It will be filmed five times, most notably in 1942 with Hedy Lamarr as Tondelayo.
1931 Raymond Massey stars as Hamlet for 28 performances at the Broadhurst Theatre.
1941 Summoned by a medium, the spirit of a wife returns in ghost form to flirt with her still-living husband, and bedevil is new wife in Noel Coward's sparkling comedy, Blithe Spirit, which opens today at the Morosco Theatre, and brightens wartime Broadway for 657 performances. (Leonora Corbett, Peggy Wood, Clifton Webb)
1959 Paddy Chayevsky's supernatural thriller The Tenth Man, opens at the Booth Theatre, beginning a 623-performance run. (Lou Jacobi, Gene Saks, Jack Gilford)
1980 Christopher Reeve, Swoosie Kurtz, and Amy Wright are the stars in Fifth of July by Lanford Wilson, which opens tonight at the New Apollo Theatre. The show was a success Off-Broadway as a Circle Rep production in 1978, and will also be a success on Broadway, running for 511 performances and winning Kurtz a Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award.
1979 A Kurt Weill Cabaret with Martha Schlamme, Alvin Epstein, Pianist the wonderful Steven Blier [I studied with Martha Schlamme. She was a wonderful performer & teacher. Would give my right arm to work w/Blier.]
1987 Stephen Sondheim's elaborate interweaving of many fairy tales, Into the Woods, opens tonight at the Martin Beck Theatre. The famous score includes the hits "No One Is Alone" and "Agony," along with the title song. James Lapine, who also wrote the book, directs Joanna Gleason and Bernadette Peters in this show.
1989 3 Penny Opera with Maureen McGovern, Alvin Epstein, Sting, Alvin Epstein, Georgia Brown, Larry Marshall, Josh Mostel, Anne Kerry Ford, Fiddle Viracola
1995 Master Class with Zoe Caldwell, Audra McDonald
ON THIS DAY IN:
1872 Suffragist Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 for attempting to vote in a presidential election.
1930 - Sinclair Lewis, novelist, playwright, and social critic, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was the first American to win the prize and went to him “for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters.” Lewis wrote 22 novels and three plays
1940 President Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term in office, beating Republican challenger Wendell L. Willkie.
1942 - America’s ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, George M. Cohan, died at age 64. Cohan was a legendary songwriter whose spirited and star-spangled tunes lit up Broadway and will be a part of Americana forever.
1989 Pianist Vladimir Horowitz died in New York at age 85.
2002 Vinnette Carroll, a Tony Award nominee who was the first black woman to direct on Broadway, and one of the creators of the gospel sensation, Your Arms Too Short to Box With God, along with Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope and Never Jam Today, dies in her sleep at her home in Lauderhill, FL, at age 80.
(sources: IBDB, IMDB, NYT's ON THIS DAY, 440.com’s Those Were The Days, Playbill.com)
Milla
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