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26 May, 2012

Walt Disney



Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O. Disney, he was co-founder of Walt Disney Productions, which later became one of the best-known motion picture producers in the world. The corporation is now known as The Walt Disney Company and had an annual revenue of approximately US$36 billion in the 2010 financial year.
Disney is particularly noted as a film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created some of the world's most well-known fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, for whom Disney himself provided the original voice. During his lifetime he received four honorary Academy Awards and won 22 Academy Awards from a total of 59 nominations, including a record four in one year, giving him more awards and nominations than any other individual in history. Disney also won seven Emmy Awards and gave his name to the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in the U.S., as well as the international resorts Tokyo Disney Resort, Disneyland Paris, and Hong Kong Disneyland.
The year after his December 15, 1966 death from lung cancer in Burbank, California, construction began on Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. His brother Roy Disney inaugurated the Magic

David Swift



David Swift was an American film actor, writer, director and producer. He is best known for his 1967 film, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and the Disney films Parent Trap franchise.


From a young age, Swift had a talent for drawing and rode a freight train to California to pursue his goal of working for Walt Disney. He worked as an usher at a Hollywood theatre to pay for night classes where he studied art at Hollywood High School. Swift started work with Disney as an assistant animator under Ward Kimball in 1938 and worked his way up to becoming a writer, director and producer putting Disney on the map with "Pollyanna" followed by "The Parent Trap." This made Swift a Disney legend.

After World War II service with the 8th Air Force, Swift became a radio and television writer. He attracted acclaim as the creator of Mr. Peepers.

Swift rejoined Disney as the writer and director of Polyanna, followed by The Parent Trap. After making Love Is a Ball, Swift was then contracted to Columbia Pictures for The Interns, Under the Yum Yum Tree and Good Neighbor Sam, the latter two with Jack Lemmon. He also created the show Camp Runamuck.

Papers relating to his television writing and film career are housed at the Special Collections & University Archives at the University of Iowa.

Shortly after reuniting with actress Hayley Mills to record DVD commentaries for Pollyanna and The Parent Trap in 2001, Swift died of heart failure.



Nicholas Fisk


Nicholas Fisk is the pseudonym of David Higginbottom, a writer of science fiction books, mainly for children. His works include Grinny, You Remember Me, Space Hostages and Trillions. He also wrote the Starstormers series of novels.

Gordon Bunshaft


Gordon Bunshaft was an architect educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


Born in Buffalo, New York to Russian immigrant parents of a Jewish decent, where he attended Lafayette High School, an architecturally significant building, Bunshaft was a modernist whose early influences included Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. His best-known design is the Lever House, built as a corporate headquarters for the soap company Lever Brothers. His design for the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Branch Bank (1953), the first post-war 'transparent' bank on the east coast, is a modernist gem.

Bunshaft worked with Edward Durell Stone, worked three months for industrial designer Raymond Loewy, whom he considered a phony, and eventually became a partner in the New York office of the young firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

Bunshaft's only single-family residence is the 2300 square foot (210 m²) Travertine House, built for his own family. On his death he left the house to MoMA, which sold it to Martha Stewart in 1995. Her extensive remodeling stalled amid an acrimonious planning dispute with a neighbor, and when she sold the house to textile magnate Donald Maharam in 2005 he described the house as "decrepit and largely beyond repair" and demolished it.

In the 1950s, Bunshaft was hired by the State Department's Office of Foreign Building Operations as a collaborator on the design for several U.S. consulates in Germany.

His minimalist approach extended beyond his architecture. Upon receiving the Pritzker Prize in 1988, for which he nominated himself, he gave the shortest speech of any winner in the award's history, stating:

In 1928, I entered the MIT School of Architecture and started my architectural trip. Today, 60 years later, I've been given the Pritzker Architecture Prize for which I thank the Pritzker family and the distinguished members of the selection committee for honoring me with this prestigious award. It is the capstone of my life in architecture. That's it.

Bunshaft's personal papers are held by the Department of Drawings & Archives in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University; his architectural drawings remain with SOM. He is buried next to his wife and parents in the Temple Beth El cemetery on Pine Ridge Road in Buffalo, New York.

Cornelis Berkhouwer



Cornelis Berkhouwer was a Dutch-European politician.

He was a Member of the European Parliament between 1964 and 1984, for the Dutch People's Party for Freedom and Democracy, which sat as part of the Liberal Democrat group in the Parliament. Between 13 March 1973 and 10 March 1975, he served as President of the European Parliament.



Juan José Calandria


Juan José Calandria (1902 – 1980), Uruguayan painter and sculptor.


Calandria was born in Canelones, Uruguay in 1902.

Upon graduating from school, he studied at the Escuela de Artes Decorativos and the Escuela Industrial with an architectural career in mind. He became so interested in sculpture, however, that he soon devoted his entire time to studies in that field.

By the time he was eighteen, Calandria had had a one-man show with ensuing honors and commissions. At this time, he also won the most important art scholarship offered in Uruguay -- a four-year period of study abroad. When it was decided that he was too young to accept this honor, he was not discouraged. He continued his studies and won the award again when he was twenty-two. He won his first gold medal and the Grand Prize at the Exposición Agropecuria e Industrial in Canelones, Uruguay.

After extensive travels in Europe, Calandria settled in Paris where he stayed for the next fourteen years, working under the guidance of Antoine Bourdelle, Charles Despiau and Marcel Gimond. He soon became Gimond's assistant at the Académie Colarassi and also held classes in his own studio. Calandria was awarded the Gold Medal at the 1937 Paris Exhibition, where several of his sculptures were on exhibit in the Uruguayan Pavilion. His work was well known and admired in the French capital by 1939, where he exhibited in many galleries, the Salon des Tuileries and Printemps, and the Exposition des Artistes Contemporains, the latter a great honor.

War was declared while Calandria was vacationing in Greece. He sailed at once for New York, spending nearly a year there and exhibiting several times. Thereafter, he went back to Uruguay and in 1941 was appointed Consul to New Orleans. He was married that same year in New York to Challis Walker and moved to the south were the Calandrias have lived ever since.

Calandria has exhibited his paintings and sculpture in North and South America and in Europe.

When he retired from Consular duties in 1958, he was then free to give all of his time to his art, which flourished both in quality and success. At about the same time, his work became increasingly abstract and remained so during his lifetime.

He taught sculpture in Paris, drawing at the Arts and Crafts Club in New Orleans during the war, and held classes in painting and sculpture for adults and children in his Pontalba studio in the French Quarter. Later, he held classes in sculpture for several years in the Calandria School of Painting and Sculpture located at Gallier Hall and, thereafter, in his Jefferson Avenue studio. He also gave lectures and demonstrations in the New Orleans area.

His exhibition at the International Trade Mart was his last large and major exhibition. Plagued with arthritis, he nevertheless continued to work on his knees, as any other position was impossible. Forced to stop sculpture, he continued to paint prolifically and was more than prepared for another large one-man show. However, in 1978, a new illness set in. Another exhibition would have been too difficult and during the last two years of his life, he stopped painting altogether. He died in 1980.

Paul Comly French


Paul Comly French was an American reporter, writer, anti-war activist and non-profit executive.


Paul C. French was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a Quaker family. He was a writer for The Philadelphia Record newspaper. He was married twice; first to Marie who died in 1943 and left him with two sons Paul and Peter. His second wife was Dorothy, with whom he had a son Bruce and daughter Susan. His brother Charles C. French was also a writer and a professor.

He served for a time as Smedley Butler's personal secretary in Philadelphia.

As a reporter he covered the Lindbergh kidnapping for the Philadelphia Record in 1932. It was to French, who was then writing both for the Record and the New York Post, that former General Butler in 1934 shared his allegations of a Business Plot to depose President Roosevelt.

French was initially the assistant to the first director of the Pennsylvania Writers Project (PWP), Logan B. Sisson. The project began in July 1935. French replaced Sisson within the year.

French’s term was marred by an acrimonious relationship with Henry Alsberg the national director of the Federal Writers Project and, among all the state directors, was one of the few to constantly balk at the editorial dictates of the Washington staff. In a letter dated June 23, 1939, French appealed to the executive director of Pennsylvania’s Historical Commission, Maj. Frank Melvin, for assistance in convincing Alsberg to finally publish the state’s guide. He accused the national office of being overly concerned with details, citing “the copy cannot be considered final because our margins are an inch and a quarter, instead of an inch, and our indents for paragraphs are ten rather than five spaces.” French was also unable to broker a truce between the Newspaper Guild and the Writers Union, two leftwing labor organizations with writers on the PWP staff that eventually conspired to oust French in 1939.

By the summer of 1939, shifting political winds had left the Federal Writers Project out to dry. The previous year, both the Dies Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities and the House appropriations committee attacked the Federal Writers Project for being a hotbed of Communism, accusations based mainly on the radical leanings of some writers in the project’s frenetic New York City office. Alsberg successfully defended the FWP from the trumped-up charges, but negative publicity during the hearings left a bitter aftertaste in the public’s mind.

He was the first Executive Secretary for the National Service Board for Religious Objection and served from 1940 until 1947. The National Service Board for Religious Objectors (NSBRO) was a voluntary association of religious organizations which acted as a voice for the churches and conscientious objectors to the Selective Service System in the United States in matters regarding the administration of the draft of conscientious objectors. It was created on 26 November 1940 as a merger of the short-lived National Council for Religious Objectors (NCRO) with the Civilian Service Board. The NCRO had been established on 11 October 1940 by joint action of the Mennonite Central Committee, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Brethren Service Committee.

The function of the NSBRO was to serve as the liaison between the churches and other groups having conscientious objectors to military service among their members. Although it did not administer any Civilian Public Service (CPS) projects or camps, it performed a valuable service. It was not the sole channel to the National Selective Service office for those groups who administered CPS, since they could and did on occasion deal directly with Selective Service, but it nevertheless carried most of the liaison work. For this purpose it was organized into the following sections: Camp Section, Complaint Section, and Assignment Section. The Camp Section worked in connection with the selection of sites for CPS camps; the Complaint Section helped men who were not properly classified or were denied their claim to conscientious objector status; the Assignment Section was the channel for transmitting the assignment to the proper CPS camp for the COs who were being drafted.

In 1947 French became Executive Director of CARE. CARE (originally "Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe", and later "Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere"), was founded in 1945 with the idea to secure financial backing for overseas food relief packages for a devastated Europe. The relief came in "CARE Packages", which were U.S. Army surplus 10-in-1 food parcels left over from the planned U.S. invasion of Japan. The service let Americans send the packages to friends and families in Europe. Each CARE Package cost $10 and was guaranteed to reach its addressee within four months. He in 1950 he became convinced the organization had oultived its purpose, the board of directors disagreed and French left the organization.

Pablo Neruda


Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda.


Neruda became known as a poet while still a teenager. He wrote in a variety of styles including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and erotically-charged love poems such as the ones in his 1924 collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language." Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was his personal colour of hope.

On July 15, 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people in honor of Communist revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes. During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions and served a stint as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When Chilean President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in a house basement in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close collaborator to socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.

Neruda was hospitalized with cancer at the time of the Chilean coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet. Three days after being hospitalized, Neruda died of heart failure.

Joe Colombo


Joe Colombo, born Cesare Colombo was an Italian industrial designer.


Cesare "Joe" Colombo was until 1949 educated at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, the academy of fine arts, in Milano as a painter and studied afterwards until 1954 Architecture at Politecnico di Milano University.

In 1951 he joined the Movimento Nucleare, founded by Sergio D´Angelo and Enrico Baj. The following four years Colombo was active as a painter and sculptor of the abstract Expressionism and exhibited his works with other members in Milano, Torino, Verviers, Venice and Brussels.

In 1955 Colombo joined the Art Concept Group, but gave up his painting to promote his Design Career. Before he cooperated at an exhibition for the tenth Triennale of 1954 and documented the Ceramic Designs of an international meeting in Albisola. For his presentation Colombo created for example three exterior seatings which were combined with a "shrinelike" presentation of TVs.

In 1959, Colombo had to take over the family company, which produced electric appliances, and started to experiment with new construction and production technologies. In 1962 Colombo opened his own interior design and architecture projects, mostly for lodges and skiing.

Colombo designed products for Oluce, Kartell, Bieffe, Alessi, Flexform and Boffi.

Colombo died in 1971 on his 41st birthday.



Dr. Harald Lesch


Harald Lesch is a German physicist, astronomer, natural philosopher, author, television presenter, professor of physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) and professor of natural philosophy at the Munich University of Philosophy.


After completing secondary school in 1978 at the Theo-Koch-Schule in Grünberg, Hesse, Lesch studied physics at the University of Giessen, then at the University of Bonn, where he completed his doctoral degree in 1987 and worked at the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy. From 1988 to 1991 he was a research assistant at the state observatory at Heidelberg-Königstuhl. In 1992 he was a visiting professor at the University of Toronto. In 1994 he was habilitated at the University of Bonn.

Since 1995 Lesch has been a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the LMU Munich. Additionally, he teaches natural philosophy at the University for Philosophy in Munich. His main areas of research are cosmic plasma physics, black holes, and neutron stars. He is the expert on astrophysics in the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (German Research Society) and a member of the Astronomische Gesellschaft (Astronomical Society). He is also a textbook author.

Lesch has made television appearances for the longstanding, self-presented production of the channel BR-alpha: alpha-Centauri, Lesch & Co., Denker des Abendlandes (Thinkers of the Western World), and Alpha bis Omega (From Alpha to Omega). He also presented shorter television series. His presentations attempt to make complex physical or philosophical issues more accessible to the public. In 2005 he was awarded the Communicator Prize by the DFG and the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft (Foundation for German Scholarship) for his television appearances and publications. To honor his work on making scientific findings understandable to the broad public, the Naturforschende Gesellschaft zu Emden (nature research society) awarded him an honorary membership on March 15, 2011.

John Hewitt



John Harold Hewitt was born in Belfast, Ireland, was the most significant Irish poet to emerge before the 1960s generation of poets that included Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley. He was appointed the first writer-in-residence at Queen's University Belfast in 1976. His collections include The Day of the Corncrake (1969) and Out of My Time: Poems 1969 to 1974 (1974). He was also made a Freeman of the City of Belfast in 1983, and was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Ulster and Queen's University Belfast.


From November 1930 to 1957, Hewitt held positions in the Belfast Museum Art Gallery.

Hewitt was appointed Director of the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum where he worked until retirement in 1972.



Jaroslav Hasek




Jaroslav Hašek was a Czech humorist, satirist, writer and socialist anarchist, best known for his novel The Good Soldier Švejk, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures, which has been translated into sixty languages. He also wrote some 1,500 short stories. He was a journalist, bohemian, and practical joker.







Richard Boleslavsky



Richard Boleslavsky was a Polish film director, actor and teacher of acting.

Richard Boleslavsky was born Bolesław Ryszard Srzednicki on February 4, 1889 in Dębowa Góra, in tsarist Russia-ruled Poland. He graduated from the Tver Cavalry Officers School. He trained as an actor at the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre under Konstantin Stanislavski and his assistant Leopold Sulerzhitsky, where he was introduced to the 'system'.

During World War I, Boleslavsky fought as a cavalry lieutenant on the tsarist Russian side until the fall of the Russian Empire. He left Russia after the October Revolution of 1917 for his native Poland, where he directed his first movies. As his birth name was difficult to pronounce (even for Poles), he took the name Ryszard Bolesławski. His Miracle at the Vistula (Cud nad Wisłą) was a semi-documentary about the miraculous victory of the Poles at the Vistula River over the superior Soviet Russian forces during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921.

In the 1920s, he made his way to New York City, where, now known as "Richard Boleslavsky" (the English spelling of his name), he began to teach Stanislavski's 'system' (which, in the US, developed into Method acting) with fellow émigré Maria Ouspenskaya. In 1923, he founded the American Laboratory Theatre in New York. Among his students were Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Harold Clurman, who were all founding members of the Group Theatre (1931–1940), the first American acting ensemble to utilize Stanislavski's techniques.

Offered a contract to direct Hollywood films, Boleslavsky made several significant films with some of the major stars of the day, until his death a few weeks short of his 48th birthday, on January 17, 1937. He is interred in the Calvary Cemetery, East Los Angeles.

For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Boleslavsky has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7021 Hollywood Blvd.

Cecil James Sharp



Cecil James Sharp was the founding father of the folklore revival in England in the early 20th century, and many of England's traditional dances and music owe their continuing existence to his work in recording and publishing them.


Sharp was born in Camberwell, London, and was educated at Uppingham, but left at 15 and was privately coached for the University of Cambridge, where he rowed in the Clare College boat and graduated B.A. in 1882.

Sharp decided to immigrate to Australia on his father's suggestion. He arrived in Adelaide in November 1882 and early in 1883 obtained a position as a clerk in the Commercial Bank of South Australia. He read some law, and in April 1884 became an associate to the chief justice, Sir Samuel James Way. He held this position until 1889 when he resigned and gave his whole time to music. He had become assistant organist at St Peter's cathedral soon after he arrived, and had been conductor of the government house choral society and the cathedral choral society. Later on he became conductor of the Adelaide Philharmonic, and in 1889 entered into partnership with I. G. Reimann as joint director of the Adelaide school of music. He was very successful as a lecturer but about the middle of 1891 the partnership was dissolved. The school was continued under Reimann, and in 1898 developed into the Elder conservatorium of music in connection with the university. Sharp had made many friends and an address with over 300 signatures asked him to continue his work at Adelaide, but he decided to return to England and arrived there in January 1892. During his stay in Adelaide he composed the music for two light operas, Sylvia, which was produced at the Theatre Royal Adelaide, on 4 December 1890, and The Jonquil. The libretto in each case was written by Guy Boothby. He also wrote the music for some nursery rhymes which were sung by the cathedral choral society.

In 1892 Sharp returned to England and on 22 August 1893 at East Clevedon, Somerset, he married Constance Dorothea Birch, also a music lover. They had three daughters and a son. Also in 1893 he was taken on as a music teacher by Ludgrove School, a preparatory school then in North London. During his seventeen years in the post, he took on a number of other musical jobs.

From 1896 Sharp was Principal of the Hampstead Conservatoire of Music, a half-time post which provided a house. In July 1905 he resigned from this post after a prolonged dispute about payment and his right to take on students for extra tuition. He had to leave the Principal's house, and apart from his position at Ludgrove his income was henceforth derived largely from lecturing and publishing on folk music.

Sharp taught and composed music. Because music pedagogy of his time originated from Germany and was entirely based on tunes from German folk music, Sharp, as a music teacher, became interested in the vocal and instrumental (dance) folk music of the British Isles, especially the tunes. He felt that speakers of English (and the other languages spoken in Britain and Ireland) ought to become acquainted with the patrimony of melodic expression that had grown up in the various regions there. Sharp became interested in traditional English dance when he saw a group of morris dancers with their concertina player William Kimber at the village of Headington Quarry, just outside of Oxford, at Christmas 1899. At this time, morris dancing was almost extinct, and the interest generated by Sharp's notations kept the tradition alive.

The revival of the morris dances started when Mary Neal, the organiser of the Esperance Girls' Club in London, used Sharp's (then unpublished) notations to teach the traditional dances to the club's members in 1905. Their enthusiasm for the dances persuaded Sharp to publish his notations in the form of his Morris Books, starting in 1907.

Between 1911 and 1913 Sharp published a three-volume work, The Sword Dances of Northern England, which described the obscure and near-extinct Rapper sword dance of Northumbria and Long Sword dance of Yorkshire. This led to the revival of both traditions in their home areas, and later elsewhere.

At a time when state-sponsored mass public schooling was in its infancy, Sharp published song books intended for use by teachers and children in the then-being-formulated music curriculum. These song books often included arrangements of songs he had collected with piano accompaniment composed by Sharp himself, arrangements intended for choral singing. Although it has been alleged that, had they heard them, traditional singers (who in England virtually always sang unaccompanied) might well have found Sharp's piano parts distracting, the arrangements with piano accompaniment did help Sharp in his goal of disseminating the sound of English folk melodies to children in schools, thus acquainting them with their national musical heritage.

The schools project also explains Sharp's bowdlerisation of some of the song texts, which, at least among English folk songs, often contained erotic double entendres, when not outright bawdy and or violent. However, Sharp did accurately note such lyrics in his field notebooks, which, given the prudery of the Victorian era could never have been openly published, thus preserving them for posterity. An example of the transformation of a formerly erotic song into one suitable for all audiences is the well-known "The Keeper."



In 1911 Sharp founded the English Folk Dance Society, which promoted the traditional dances through workshops held nationwide, and which later merged with the Folk Song Society in 1932 to form the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). The current London headquarters of the EFDSS is named Cecil Sharp House in his honour.

Sharp's work coincided with a period of nationalism in classical music, the idea being to reinvigorate and give distinctiveness to English classical composition by grounding it in the characteristic melodic patterns and recognisable tone intervals and ornaments of its national folk music. Among the composers who took up this goal was Ralph Vaughan Williams, who carried out his own field work in folk song in Norfolk. The use of folk songs and dance melodies and motifs in classical music to inject vitality and excitement, is of course as old as "La Folia" and Marin Marais' "Bells of St. Genevieve" ("Sonnerie de Ste-Geneviève du Mont-de-Paris"), but the attempt to give music a sense of place was novel to the Historical particularism of late nineteenth century Romanticism.

During the years of the First World War, Sharp found it difficult to support himself through his customary efforts at lecturing and writing, and decided to make an extended visit to the United States. The visit, made with his collaborator Maud Karpeles during the years 1916–1918, was a great success. Large audiences came to hear Sharp lecture about folk music, and Sharp also took the opportunity to do field work on English folk songs that had survived in the more remote regions of southern Appalachia, pursuing a line of research pioneered by Olive Dame Campbell. Travelling through the mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, Sharp and Karpeles recorded a treasure trove of folk songs, many using the pentatonic scale and many in versions quite different from those Sharp had collected in rural England. Generally, Sharp recorded the tunes, while Karpeles was responsible for the words.

Sharp was greatly struck by the dignity, courtesy, and natural grace of the people who welcomed him and Karpeles in the Appalachians, and he defended their values and their way of life in print.

Sharp's work in promoting English folk song dance traditions in the US is carried on by the Country Dance and Song Society (CDSS).



Ferdinand Marian



Ferdinand Marian was an Austrian theatre and film actor, best known for playing the leading character of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer in the Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß.


Born in Vienna, the son of an opera singer, Marian turned to the stage early, though he never attended any drama classes. He ran away from home and abandoned his studies as an engineer to work as an extra at several Austrian and German theatres. In 1938 he joined the ensemble of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, where he was acclaimed for his performance as Iago in Shakespeare's Othello.

Marian had also appeared in movies like Curtis Bernhardt's Der Tunnel since 1933, and had his breakthrough starring together with Zarah Leander in 1937's La Habanera directed by Detlef Sierck. His role as Don Pedro added to his image as an adorable but devious womanizer.

Marian's career was overshadowed by his appearance as the title character in Jud Süß, a notorious antisemitic German movie directed by Veit Harlan. This 1940 film, made under the supervision of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, is widely considered to be one of the most hateful depictions of Jews in film. Several film stars had rejected the title role; Marian, urged by Goebbels and fearing consequences by the Reichsfilmkammer, did not dare to refuse.

His depiction of the title character followed Nazi propaganda stereotypes of Jews as being materialistic, immoral, cunning and untrustworthy. However, he gave a well-acted, multi-layered performance, which ultimately contributed to the film's convincibility. With the exception of Marian's character – who shaved off his beard and wore Gentile attire for most of the story – the actors playing Jewish male characters were made up to look unappealing and alien (non-German). There were also scenes that purported to show Jewish religious services.

Marian also appeared in the 1941 propaganda movie Ohm Krüger, playing Cecil Rhodes side by side with Emil Jannings and Gustaf Gründgens, who both had rejected the role of Jud Süß the year before. In 1943 he starred as Cagliostro in Josef von Báky's fantasy comedy Münchhausen.

Marian's personal life contradicted his role in the film Jud Süß. He had a daughter from his first marriage to Jewish pianist, Irene Saager. His second wife's former husband Julius Gellner was also Jewish and Marian and his wife protected him from reprisals by hiding him in their home.

Marian died in a road accident in 1946 near the village of Dürneck (today part of Freising) in Bavaria.





Olof Gollcher



Olof Frederick Gollcher was an artist, scholar, philanthropist, as well as an ardent collector of objets d’art and historical items. 


Donald Wilson



Donald Wilson was a British television writer and producer, best known for his work on the BBC's adaptation of The Forsyte Saga in 1967.


His initial career was in the film industry, working for MGM at Elstree Studios, where he was Assistant Director of such films as Jericho (1937) and Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). During the war he worked on documentary films, and then in 1955 was recruited to BBC Television by the then Head of Drama, Michael Barry. As the Head of the Script Department, Wilson was ultimately responsible for overseeing the commissioning and development of all the original scripts and adaptations transmitted by BBC Television.

When the Script Department was rendered redundant by Sydney Newman’s radical shake-up of the BBC Drama Department after his arrival as its head in 1962, the highly respected Wilson was given one of the most senior positions under Newman as Head of Serials. In this position, Wilson was responsible for overseeing the creation and development of a series that Newman himself had originally conceived; an educational science-fiction adventure serial for children entitled Doctor Who. It was Wilson, together with Newman and staff writer C. E. Webber, who co-wrote the first format document for the program.

Wilson was responsible for much of the early development work on the show, although he did strongly attempt to dissuade producer Verity Lambert from using writer Terry Nation’s script featuring a race of aliens named Daleks. However, once the script had been made and transmitted to great success, he called Lambert into his office to admit that she clearly knew the show better than he did and told her that he would no longer interfere with her decisions.

In 1965, Wilson gave up his position as Head of Serials to concentrate on realizing a long-held ambition of bringing The Forsyte Saga to the screen. Acting as both adapter and producer, Wilson created one of the BBC’s most popular and successful drama serials of all time, which was a huge hit on its eventual screening on BBC Two in 1967, and was quickly repeated on BBC One. Later, he acted as adapter and producer again on such prestigious costume dramas as The First Churchills (1969) and Anna Karenina (1977).

He went on to work for Anglia Television before retiring to his home in Gloucestershire, where he died at the age of 91 in March 2002.

Prince Lasha




William B. Lawsha, better known as Prince Lasha was an American jazz alto saxophonist, flautist, and clarinetist.


He was born in Fort Worth, Texas, where he came of age studying and performing alongside fellow musicians John Carter, Ornette Coleman, King Curtis, Charles Moffett, and Dewey Redman.

Lasha moved to California during the 1950s. In the 1960s, Prince Lasha was active in the burgeoning free jazz movement, of which his Fort Worth cohort Ornette Coleman was a pioneer. Lasha worked closely with saxophonist Sonny Simmons, with whom he recorded two albums, The Cry and Firebirds, for Contemporary Records. The latter album received five stars and an AMG Albumpick at Allmusic. Lasha also appeared on recordings by Eric Dolphy (Iron Man and Conversations) and the Elvin Jones/Jimmy Garrison Sextet featuring McCoy Tyner (Illumination!).

In the 1970s, Lasha and Sonny Simmons made additional recordings under the name Firebirds. In 2005, Lasha recorded the album The Mystery of Prince Lasha with the Odean Pope Trio. Lasha died on December 12, 2008 in Oakland, California.

Charles Vachek



Charles Vachek is a Czech film director and film teacher.

Born in 1940. Studied direction at the Prague Film Academy (FAMU) under Elmar Klos. In 1963 he shot his thesis film, Moravian Hellas, in Strážnice, then-Czechoslovakia, about their traditional folk celebrations. The film’s unusual approach—blending humor and intellectual aggression—caused furor and indignation as well as admiration in official cultural and political circles. It took several years for it to be allowed to be screened publicly. As a director with the Krátký Film studio in Prague in 1968, Vachek shot the film Elective Affinities a legendary portrait of the protagonists of the Prague Spring during the presidential elections of that year.


He had to leave Krátký Film with the onset of the post-1968 “normalization” process, working in manual trades until emigrating with his family in 1979 to the USA via France. Due to his wife’s bad health, he eventually returned. In the 1980s he worked as a driver. After 1989 he returned to Krátký Film and, over time, completed an extensive film tetralogy that portrays Czech society from the 1990s to the next century in his inimitable style.

Since 1994 he has taught at FAMU in the Documentary Film Department88, **becoming its head in 2002. With his films and professional stance he has influenced many younger artists. In 2004 he published a book, The Theory of Matter, which is an important conceptual milestone as regards his newest film, Záviš, the Prince of Pornofolk Under the Influence of Griffith’s In¬tolerance and Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, or The Foundation and Doom of Czechoslovakia [1918 – 1992] . In 2008, the AMU publishing house released Karel Vachek, etc. by Martin Švoma, which can be purchased also in our e-shop.







Josephus Antonius van Kemenade



Josephus Antonius van Kemenade is a Dutch politician .


Jos van Kemenade, originally a Catholic , was a member of the Labor Party member of parliament , minister and commissioner of the Queen . On 5 April 2002 he was appointed Minister of State . He is the son of Mary Everardus Albertus van Kemenade and Margaret Obee.

Prof. Dr. Van Kemenade was professor of educational sociology at Nijmegen, when Joop den Uyl him to The Hague in 1973 took to the education portfolio in his new form government for its expense.

Once on the government plush, Van Kemenade emerged into a true creative, but also much criticized minister. He formulated plans for the so-called Middle school and encouraged the mother secondary school and the Open University as a second-chance education.

In the period 1978-1981 he was member of parliament and group secretary, and he launched an extensive private member with respect to adult .

In 1981 he became minister again, this time in the cabinet Van Agt II . He was regarded then as the 'Crown Prince' of Joop den Uyl .

After leaving national politics, he became university administrator, mayor of Eindhoven (1988-1992) and Queen's Commissioner in England (1992-2002).

He is Minister of State . He was most recently, between 2005 and 2009, active as chairman of the Council for Public Administration . By 1 July 2009 , he succeeded as such by Jacques Wallage .

Joseph P. Cotton


Mr. Joseph Potter Cotton, a prominent corporate lawyer, and served as Under Secretary of State from 1929 until 1931.