Bernard Grebanier

Bernard Grebanier was an American drama historian, critic, writer and poet, most notable for his studies of the works of William Shakespeare.

Grebanier was a professor of English at Brooklyn College from 1926 until 1964. In 1941 he was quoted in evidence presented to the Supreme Court of the United States denouncing a former associate professor as a Communist during the professor's appeal against dismissal from his position.

Grebanier was friendly with other drama critics in the greater New York City but perhaps none was a better friend than New York Evening Post editor and chief drama critic Joseph Cookman. When Cookman died in 1944, the Post selected Grebanier's tribute to run in the paper among the dozens of tributes sent in.

His Shakespeare classes enrolled hundreds of students every semester. His method of teaching involved a line-by-line reading of Shakespeare's plays, interspersed with commentary on art, politics, and human psychology. Most influential of his books are "The Heart of Hamlet," "The Truth About Shylock," and "Playwriting": In these he 1) characterizes Hamlet as misunderstood by critics, as the hero is neither passive, delaying, crazy, or acting crazy, but rather a Renaissance man who tackles the difficult task of proving Claudius guilty and then proceeds to exact revenge; 2) maintains that Shakespeare does not pursue the question of anti-Semitism in "The Merchant of Venice" but rather uses the stereotype of the Jewish moneylender to ask critical questions about cold-hearted bankers and human compassion; 3) establishes fundamental concepts in the structure of drama that still prevail in creative writing courses across the country. Among his published works are :

The Uninhibited Byron (1970)
Barron's Simplified Approach to Chaucer
"An Introduction to Imaginative Literature" (with Seynour Reiter) (1960)
The Heart of Hamlet (1960)
Playwrighting: How to Write for the Theatre (1961)
The Truth About Shylock (1962)
"The Great Shakespeare Forgery" (1965)
Then Came Each Actor (1975)
Last Harvest: Poems of Bernard Grebanier (1980)

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism.

His work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines.

Sartre was also noted for his open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, "bad faith") and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism and Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture.

He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature but refused it, saying that he always declined official honours and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution".

He died on April 15, 1980 at the age of 74.

Stanley Holloway

Stanley Augustus Holloway was an English actor and entertainer famous for his comic and character roles on stage and screen, especially that of Alfred Doolittle in My Fair Lady. He was also renowned for his recordings of comic monologues.

He was born on the 1 October 1890 in Manor Park, East Ham, Essex, England, and attended The Worshipful School of Carpenters in Stratford nearby. His first job was as a clerk in Billingsgate fish market, but from 1907 he was performing in end of pier concert parties at English east coast seaside resorts, including Walton-on-the-Naze and Clacton-on-Sea where he appeared for three years in Bert Graham and Will Bentley's concert party at the West Cliff Theatre, 1911 - 1913. He was then recruited by established comedian Leslie Henson to feature as a support in Henson’s own more prestigious concert-party. He planned a career as a singer and went to Milan to train his voice, but the outbreak of war in 1914 changed his plans.

In World War I, he enlisted in the Connaught Rangers infantry regiment. After the war he joined the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1920 as a Temporary Constable but left by the beginning of 1921.

After the war, he found his first big success in the show The Co-Optimists which ran from 1921 until 1927 and was then filmed. A second run of the show from 1929 developed his comic song and monologue repertoire, which launched his recording career with records of his own created character, "Sam Small," and Marriott Edgar's "The Ramsbottoms" selling world wide.

He spent the 1930s appearing in a series of cheaply made movies, but which included some notable work in Squibs (1935) and The Vicar of Bray (1937). He also recorded "With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm", a ditty by R. P. Weston and Bert Lee about the ghost of Anne Boleyn haunting the Tower of London, seeking revenge on Henry VIII for having her beheaded.

His career changed again in 1941 when he played in a major film production of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. He then took patriotic, morale boosting, light comic roles in The Way Ahead (1944), This Happy Breed (1944) and The Way to the Stars (1945).

After World War Two he had notable roles in the smash hit Brief Encounter, as Mr. Crummles in Nicholas Nickleby, and a cameo role as the grave digger in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet. He then became a mainstay of the Ealing Comedies productions, making classics like Passport to Pimlico, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Titfield Thunderbolt.

His film output had made him enough of a public name in the United States to land him the part of Alfred P. Doolittle in the Broadway stage smash hit My Fair Lady, after Jimmy Cagney turned it down. He had a long association with the show appearing in the original 1956 Broadway production, the 1958 London version and the film version of 1964. He entitled his autobiography Wiv a Little Bit of Luck after the song he performed in these productions. He received his only Academy Award nomination for the performance, but lost to Peter Ustinov.

He was still performing English character parts into his eighties. He died in a Littlehampton nursing home on 30 January 1982, aged 91.

Admiral Arleigh Burke

Arleigh Albert Burke was an admiral of the United States Navy who distinguished himself during World War II and the Korean War, and who served as Chief of Naval Operations during the Eisenhower administration.

Burke died on 1 January 1996, at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. He was 94 years old.

Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. His work has been influential not only in psychiatry but also in anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies. As a notable research scientist based at the famous Burghölzli hospital, under Eugen Bleuler, he came to the attention of the Viennese founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated on an initially joint vision of human psychology. Freud saw in the younger man the potential heir he had been seeking to carry on his "new science" of psychoanalysis. Jung's researches and personal vision, however, made it impossible for him to bend to his older colleague's doctrine and a breach became inevitable. This break was to have historic as well as painful personal repercussions that have lasted to this day. Jung was also an artist, craftsman and builder as well as a prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some are still awaiting publication.

Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extraversion and introversion.

Jung's unique approach to psychology has been influential in counter-cultural movements in Europe, the United States and elsewhere since the 1930s. He emphasized understanding the psyche through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, world religion and philosophy. Although he was a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician, much of his life's work was spent exploring other realms, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as well as literature and the arts. His most notable ideas include the concept of archetypes, the collective unconscious and synchronicity.

Jung emphasized the importance of balance and harmony. He cautioned that modern people rely too heavily on science and logic and would benefit from integrating spirituality and appreciation of unconscious realms.

Jung died in 1961 in Zürich, after a short illness.

Paul Kruger

Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, better known as Paul Kruger and fondly known as Oom Paul was State President of the South African Republic. He gained international renown as the face of Boer resistance against the British during the South African or Second Boer War (1899-1902).

He started as a field cornet in the commandos, eventually becoming Commandant-General of the South African Republic. He was appointed member of a commission of the Volksraad, the republican parliament that was to draw up a constitution. People began to take notice of the young man and he played a prominent part in ending the quarrel between the Transvaal leader, Stephanus Schoeman, and M.W. Pretorius.

In 1873, Kruger resigned as Commandant-General, and for a time he held no office and retired to his farm, Boekenhoutfontein. However, in 1874 he was elected to the Executive Council and shortly after that became Vice-President of the Transvaal.

Following the annexation of the Transvaal by Britain in 1877, Kruger became the leader of the resistance movement. During the same year, he visited Britain for the first time as leader of a deputation. In 1878, he was part of a second deputation. A highlight of his visit to Europe was when he ascended in a hot air balloon and saw Paris from the air.

The First Boer War, also known as the "First War of Independence", started in 1880, and the British forces were defeated in the decisive battle at Majuba in 1881. Once again, Kruger played an important role in the negotiations with the British, which led to the restoration of the Transvaal's independence under British suzerainty.

On 30 December 1880, at the age of 55, Kruger was elected President of the Transvaal. One of his first aims was the revision of the Pretoria Convention of 1881, the agreement between the Boers and the British that ended the First Boer War. Therefore, he again left for Britain in 1883, empowered to negotiate with Lord Derby. Kruger and his companions also visited the Continent and this visit became a triumph in countries such as Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Spain. In Germany, he attended an imperial banquet at which he was presented to the Emperor, Wilhelm I, and spoke at length with Bismarck.

In the Transvaal, things changed rapidly after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand. This momentous discovery was to have far-reaching political repercussions and to give rise to the uitlander, or foreigner, problem, which was eventually to cause the fall of the Republic. Kruger acknowledged in his memiors that General Joubert predicted the events that were to follow afterwards, declaring that instead of rejoicing for the discovery of gold, they should be weeping because it will "cause our land to be soaked in blood."

At the end of 1895, the failed Jameson raid took place; Jameson was forced to surrender, taken to Pretoria and handed over to his British countrymen for punishment.

In 1898, Kruger was elected President for the fourth and last time.

On 11 October 1899, the Second Boer War broke out. On 7 May the following year, Kruger attended the last session of the Volksraad, and left Pretoria on 29 May as Lord Roberts was advancing on the town. For weeks he either stayed in a house at Waterval Onder or in his railway carriage at Machadodorp in the then Eastern Transvaal, now Mpumalanga. In October, he left South Africa on the Dutch warship De Gelderland, sent by the Queen of the Netherlands Wilhelmina, which had simply ignored the British naval blockade of South Africa. His wife was too ill to travel and remained in South Africa; she died on 20 July 1901.

Kruger went to Marseille and stayed for a while in The Netherlands, before moving to Clarens, Switzerland, where he died on 14 July 1904. He was buried on 16 December 1904 in the Heroes Acre of the Church Street cemetery, Pretoria.
Kruger was a large squarely built man, with dark brown hair and brown eyes. In later years his hair went snowy white. He wore a beard, but never a mustache. He mostly went dressed in a black frock coat with a top hat. Never far from his pipe, he was a chain smoker. The image of Kruger in his top hat and frock coat, smoking his pipe was used to great effect in the Anglo-Boer war by British cartoonists.

Curd Jurgens

Curd Gustav Andreas Gottlieb Franz Jürgens was a German-Austrian stage and motion-picture actor. He was usually billed in English-speaking films as Curt Jurgens.

Jürgens was born in the Munich neighborhood of Solln, Bavaria, Germany. His father was a trader from Hamburg and his mother a French teacher. He began his working career as a journalist before becoming an actor at the urging of his actress wife, Louise Basler. He spent much of his early acting career on the stage in Vienna. Critical of the Nazis in his native Germany, in 1944 he was shipped to a concentration camp as a "political unreliable." Jürgens survived and after the war, became an Austrian citizen.

Like many multilingual German-speaking actors, Jürgens went on to play soldiers in innumerable war movies. Notable performances in this vein include a meditative officer in the epic The Longest Day. His breakthrough screen role came in Des Teufels General (1955, The Devil's General) and he came to Hollywood following his appearance in the sensational 1956 Roger Vadim directed French film Et Dieu... créa la femme (And God Created Woman) starring Brigitte Bardot. In 1957, Jürgens made his first Hollywood film, The Enemy Below. Jürgens became an international film star. He eventually gained the role of the villain in Roger Moore's favorite James Bond film in The Spy Who Loved Me as Karl Stromberg, a sociopath industrialist seeking to transform the world into an ocean paradise. His last film appearance was as Maître Legraine, beside Alain Delon and Claude Jade in the Soviet spy-thriller Teheran 43 in 1981. He appeared as General Vladimir in the BBC TV series Smiley's People in 1982.

Although he appeared in over 100 films, Jürgens considered himself primarily a stage actor. He also directed a few films with limited success, and wrote screenplays.

Jürgens maintained a home in France, but frequently returned to Vienna to perform on stage and that was where he died of a heart attack in 1982. He was interred in the city's Zentralfriedhof. Jürgens had suffered another heart attack several years before.

Gerard Walschap

Jacob Lodewijk Gerard, Baron Walschap, was a Belgian writer.

He went to highschool at the Klein seminarie in Hoogstraten, and later in Asse. His Flemish awareness was in these days encouraged by the priest and poet Jan Hammenecker. In Leuven, he entered the school for priests, but did not finish them to be ordained as a priest.

In 1923, he became secretary at the redaction of the weekly magazine Het Vlaamsche land. In 1925, he married with Marie-Antoinette Theunissen in Maaseik, and a year later their son, Hugo is born. Alice Nahon acts as a nurse and wrote a poem to the occasion Aan Hugo's fijne stemmeke. In 1927, his second son, Guido, is born. In 1930, his third son, Lieven, is born, and in 1932, his daughter Caroline. In 1935, he narrowly escapes death, as he becomes a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning in the bathroom, but he is saved by his spouse. His fourth son, Bruno, was born in 1938.

As a writer he started his literary career with romantic poetry and Catholicism inspired theatre plays. In 1928, he publishes his first novel Waldo. He became widely known with his novel Adelaide, which appeared in 1929, and which was the first of a series of novels. Although initially well-received, the book caused him the rancour of the clergy, and his books were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. This adverse reaction, which was not intended by Walschap, hurt him and after a long inner struggle and doubt he abandoned his faith and became a secular humanist. This inner struggle, would remain of significant importance in his literary work. Adelaide became part of the De familie Roothooft.

In part of his work he considers society a burden which is hard to bear, such as in De bejegening van Christus (1940). In his work he also glorifies the extremes of society, such as the primitive life in Volk and De dood in het dorp (1930), and the almost aggressive freedom in Het kind (1939) and De consul (1943) and the expression of worriless freedom in probably his most famous work Houtekiet (1939).

His novel Zwart en wit of 1948, deals with the collaboration with Nazism and the repression after World War II. Zuster Vergilia, of 1951, deals with the eternal fight between faith and disbelief. In his book Oproer in Kongo from 1953, he wrote about colonialism, which he conceived after along journey through Belgian Congo in 1951. As a writer he reveals his own inner self in Het gastmaal (1966) en Het avondmaal (1968), by using a modernistic writing style.

He received several literary prices, among which in 1968, the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, and in 1975 he was knighted and made a Baron. He died on 25 October 1989.

Trevor Howard

Trevor Howard, born Trevor Wallace Howard-Smith, was an English film, stage and television actor. 

Trevor Wallace Howard-Smith was born in Cliftonville, Margate, Kent, England, on 29 September, 1913, the only son and elder child of Arthur John Howard-Smith, who worked as Ceylon representative for Lloyd's of London, and his Canadian wife, Mabel Grey Wallace, nurse. Until he was five he lived in Colombo, Ceylon, but then travelled with his mother until the age of eight, when he was sent to school at Clifton College, Bristol and afterwards attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, acting on the London stage for several years before World War II. His first paid work was in the play Revolt in a Reformatory (1934), before he left RADA in 1935 to take small roles. That year he was spotted by a Paramount studio talent scout but turned down the offer of film work in favour of a career in theatre. This decision seemed justified when, in 1936, he was invited to join the Stratford Memorial Theatre and, in London, given the role of one of the students in French without Tears by Terence Rattigan, which ran for two years. He returned to Stratford in 1939. At the outbreak of World War II, Howard volunteered for the RAF and British Army but was turned down by both. However, in 1940, after working at the Colchester repertory theatre, he was called up into the Royal Corps of Signals, airborne division, becoming a Second Lieutenant, before he was invalided out in 1943. Although stories of his courageous wartime service earned him much respect among fellow actors and fans alike, files held in the Public Records Office reveal he had actually been discharged from the Army for mental instability and having a 'psychopathic personality'. These stories of war heroism were originally fabricated, without his consent, for publicity purposes, although Howard also recounted how he had parachuted into Nazi occupied Norway and fought in the Allied invasion of Sicily. Howard moved back to the theatre in The Recruiting Officer (1943), where he met the actress Helen Cherry; they married in 1944 and had no children. Howard had certain notoriety as a hell raiser, based on his drinking capacity. Under the influence of alcohol he could embark on celebrated exploits, one of which led to his arrest in Vienna, for impersonating an officer. Despite his drinking, however, he always remained reliable and professional, never allowing alcohol to affect his work. He was also unfaithful to Cherry on a serial basis. A short part in one of the best British war films, The Way Ahead (1944), provided a springboard into cinema. This was followed by The Way to the Stars (1945), which led to the role for which Howard became best known, the doctor in the 1945 film Brief Encounter, in which his co-star was Celia Johnson. Directed by David Lean, the film won an award at the Cannes Film Festival and considerable critical acclaim for Howard. Next came two successful Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat thrillers, I See a Dark Stranger (1945) and Green for Danger (1946), followed by They Made me a Fugitive (1947), in which the roots of British realism in cinema can be traced. In 1947 he was invited by Laurence Olivier to play Petruchio in an Old Vic production of The Taming of the Shrew. Despite The Times declaring ‘We can remember no better Petruchio’[3] the opportunity of working again with David Lean, in The Passionate Friends (1948), drew Howard back to film and, although he had a solid reputation as a theatre actor, his dislike of long runs, and the attractions of travel afforded by film, made him concentrate on cinema from this point. Howard's film reputation was secured in The Third Man (1949). He played the character type with which he became most associated, the slightly dry, slightly crusty but capable British military officer. He also starred in The Key, (1958; based on a Jan de Hartog novel), for which he received the best actor award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and Sons and Lovers, (1960), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. Another notable film was The Heart of the Matter (1953), another Graham Greene story, in which he produced probably his best screen performance. A character actor, many times appearing in war and period pieces, Howard later appeared in such films as Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), Father Goose (1964), Morituri (1965), Von Ryan's Express (1965), Battle of Britain (1969), Ryan's Daughter (1970), Superman (1978), and Gandhi (1982). The Dawning (1988) was his final film. One of his strangest films, and one he took great delight in, was Vivian Stanshall's 1980 Sir Henry at Rawlinson End in which he played the title role. In television Howard began to find more substantial roles. In 1962 he played Lovborg in Hedda Gabler with Ingrid Bergman, and in 1963 won an Emmy award as Disraeli in The Invincible Mr Disraeli. In the 1970s he was acclaimed for his playing of an abbot in Catholics (1973) and in 1975 he received an Emmy nomination for his role as Abbé Faria in a television version of The Count of Monte Cristo. The decade ended with him reunited with Celia Johnson, giving a moving performance in the nostalgic Staying on (1980), written by Paul Scott. The 1980s saw a resurgence of Howard as a film actor. The exhilarating role of a Cheyenne Indian in Windwalker (1980) revitalized his acting. He continued with cameo roles, including Judge Broomfield in Gandhi (1982). His final films were White Mischief and The Old Jest, both released in 1988. Howard did not abandon the theatre altogether in 1947, returning to the stage on occasion, most notably as Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard (1954) and the captain in The Father (1964). His last appearance on the British stage was in Waltz of the Toreadors in 1974. Throughout his film career Howard insisted that all of his contracts held a clause excusing him from work whenever a cricket Test Match was being played. He died died on 7 January 1988, from a combination of bronchitis, influenza and jaundice, in Arkley, Barnet at the age of 74, survived by his widow Helen.

Tony Benn

Anthony "Tony" Neil Wedgwood Benn, formerly 2nd Viscount Stansgate, is a British socialist politician.

He was instrumental in the creation of the Peerage Act 1963. During the 1970s and 1980s, he was the prominent figure on the left of the Labour Party.

In the 1970s Harold Wilson government, he initially served as Secretary of State for Industry before being transferred to Secretary of State for Energy. When Wilson retired in 1976, Benn retained his post under the new Prime Minister, James Callaghan.

After John Parker, he is Labour's longest serving member of parliament. He is known as one of the few UK politicians to have become more left-wing after holding ministerial office. He also has become ever more interested in the grass-roots politics of demonstrations and meetings, and ever less in parliamentary activities. He has been a vegetarian since the 1970s.


In 1990, Benn was diagnosed with chronic lymphatic leukemia and given three or four years to live; at this time, he kept the news of his leukemia from everyone except his immediate family. Benn said: "When you're in parliament, you can't describe your medical condition. People immediately start wondering what your majority is and when there will be a by-election. They're very brutal." This was revealed in 2002 with the release of his 1990–2001 diaries.

Benn suffered a stroke in 2012, and spent much of the following year in hospital. He was reported to be "seriously ill" in hospital in February 2014. Benn died at home on 14 March 2014, surrounded by his family, less than a month shy of his 89th birthday.

Benn's funeral took place on 27 March 2014 at St Margaret's Church, Westminster.

Rod Hull

Rodney Stephen Hull, better known as Rod Hull, was a popular entertainer on British television in the 1970s and 1980s. He rarely appeared without Emu, a mute, highly aggressive arm-length puppet of such a bird. He died after falling from the roof of his house, whilst trying to adjust the TV aerial in order to get a better picture for a football match he was keen to see.

Trevor Baylis

Trevor G. Baylis is an English inventor. He is best known for inventing a wind-up radio. Rather than using batteries or external electrical source, the radio is powered by the user winding a crank for several seconds. This stores energy in a spring which then drives an electrical generator to operate the radio receiver. He invented it in response to the need to communicate information about AIDS to the people of Africa.

In October 1997, Baylis was awarded the Order of the British Empire by the Princess Royal at Buckingham Palace. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate by Leeds Metropolitan University in June 2005. He now runs Trevor Baylis Brands plc, a company dedicated to helping inventors to develop and protect their ideas and to find a route to market.

Trevor Baylis grew up in Southall, Middlesex, and attended North Primary School. His first job was in a Soil Mechanics Laboratory in Southall where a day-release arrangement enabled him to study mechanical and structural engineering at a local technical college.

A keen swimmer, he swam for Great Britain at the age of 15; he narrowly failed to qualify for the 1956 Summer Olympics. When he was 20 he started his National Service as a physical training instructor and swam for the Army and Imperial Services during this time. When he left the army he took a job with Purley Pools, the company which made the first free-standing swimming pools. Initially he worked in a sales role but later in research and development. His swimming skills enabled him to demonstrate the pools and drew the crowds at shows, and this led to forming his own aquatic display company as professional swimmer, stunt performer and entertainer, performing high dives into a glass-sided tank. With money earned from performing as an underwater escape artiste in the Berlin Circus he set up Shotline Steel Swimming Pools, a company which supplies modular swimming pools to schools in the UK.

Baylis's work as a stunt man made him feel kinship with disabled people through friends whose injuries had ended their performing careers. In 1985 this involvement led him to invent and develop a range of products for the disabled called Orange Aids.

In 1989 he saw a TV program about the spread of AIDS in Africa and how a way to halt the spread of the disease would be by education and information using radio broadcasts. Before the program had finished he had adjourned to his workshop and assembled the first prototype of his most well-known invention, the wind-up radio. The original prototype included a small transistor radio, an electric motor from a toy car, and the clockwork mechanism from a music box. He patented the idea and then tried to get it into production, but was met with rejection from everyone he approached.

The turning point came when his prototype was featured on the BBC TV program Tomorrow's World. With money from investors he formed a company Freeplay and in 1996 the Freeplay radio was awarded the BBC Design Award for Best Product and Best Design. In the same year Baylis met Queen Elizabeth II and Nelson Mandela at a state banquet, and also traveled to Africa with the Dutch Television Service to produce a documentary about his life. He was awarded the 1996 World Vision Award for Development Initiative that year.

1997 saw the production in South Africa of the new generation Freeplay radio, a smaller lighter model designed for the Western consumer market with a running time of up to an hour on twenty seconds of winding. This radio has since been updated to include a solar panel so that it runs in sunshine without winding.

Numerous tours, interviews and television appearances have followed, and Baylis has been awarded many honours including the OBE in 1997, and eleven honorary degrees from UK universities (1998 to 2005). In 1999 he received the coveted Pipe Smoker of the Year Award for his invention of the Freeplay radio from the British Pipe smokers' Council, which honors famous pipe smokers. He continues to invent, and in 2001 he completed a 100 mile walk across the Namib Desert demonstrating his electric Shoes and raising money for the Mines Advisory Group. The "electric shoes" use piezoelectric contacts in the heels to charge a small battery that can be used to operate a radio transceiver or cellular telephone.

Following his own experience of the difficulties faced by inventors, Baylis set up the Trevor Baylis Foundation to "promote the activity of Invention by encouraging and supporting Inventors and Engineers". This led to the formation of the company Trevor Baylis Brands PLC which provides inventors with professional partnership and services to enable them to establish the originality of their ideas, to patent or otherwise protect them, and to get their products to market. Their primary goal is to secure license agreements for inventors, but they also consider starting up new companies around good ideas. The company is based in Richmond, London.

He died on 5 March 2018, at the age of 80.

Joss Ackland

Sidney Edmond Jocelyn Ackland, known as Joss Ackland, is an English actor who has appeared in more than 130 films in his career. He has appeared extensively on television, notably as C. S. Lewis in Shadowlands (1985).

Ackland was born in North Kensington, London, the son of Ruth Izod and Sydney Norman Ackland. He was trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

Ackland joined the Old Vic, appearing alongside such luminaries as Paul Scofield and Tom Courtenay. Ackland's career advanced with parts in The Sicilian, Lethal Weapon 2 and White Mischief. He has since kept busy with work and features in Passion of Mind with Demi Moore and the 2-part TV miniseries Hogfather based on Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel of the same name.

Ackland appears in the Pet Shop Boys' 1987 film It Couldn't Happen Here, and in the video for their cover version of the song Always on My Mind, which was taken from the film. Several years later, he claimed in an interview with the Radio Times that he appeared with the band purely as his grandchildren liked their music.

Ackland, in an 2001 interview with the BBC, admitting to being forced to make "awful films" due to being a workaholic, mentioning by name Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey and the Pet Shop Boys music video, while lambasting former co-star Demi Moore as "not very bright or talented".

In 2007 Ackland narrated and provided the voice for the Robert Garofalo biography /film and documentary on notorious Occultist Aliester Crowley, titled In Search Of the Great Beast 666 that was

Frank Muir

Frank Herbert Muir was an English comedy writer, radio and television personality, and raconteur.

Born and brought up in his grandmother's pub, The Derby Arms in Ramsgate, Kent, he spent part of his childhood in the E10 district of London. In later years, whenever his dignified speech patterns caused listeners to assume that he had received a public-school education, Muir would demur: "I was educated in E10, not Eton." In fact, he was educated at the Chatham House Grammar School, in Ramsgate, Kent, in South-East England, whose former pupils included Edward Heath, leader of the British Conservative Party from 1965 to 1975 and British Prime Minister from 1970-74.

Frank Muir joined the Royal Air Force during World War II and became a photographic technician, being posted to Iceland. While there he became involved with the forces radio station.

Upon his return to civilian life, he began to write scripts for Jimmy Edwards. When Edwards teamed up with Dick Bentley on BBC Radio, Muir formed a partnership with Denis Norden, Bentley's writer, which was to last for most of his career. The vehicle created for the two men, Take It From Here, was written by Muir and Norden from 1948 until 1959; a last series in 1960 used other writers. For TIFH, as it became known, they created "The Glums", a deliberately awful family, which was the show's most popular segment.

Muir and Norden continued to write for Edwards when he began to work for BBC television with the school comedy series Whack-O, and in the anthology series Faces of Jim. With Norden, in 1962, he was responsible for the television adaptation of Henry Cecil's comic novel Brothers in Law, which starred Richard Briers in an early role.

The pair was also invited to appear on the newly formed humorous literary radio quiz My Word! A feature of the show was the final round, in which Muir and Norden would each tell a highly contrived and often convoluted story inspired by a well-known phrase provided by the quizmaster and ending in a terrible pun on the phrase in question.

Frank Muir was also a contestant on the My Word spinoff My Music. As a television personality, Muir's unofficial trademark was a crisply knotted pink bowtie.

He was well known to television audiences as a team captain on the long-running BBC2 series Call My Bluff and did voice-overs for advertisements, notably Cadbury's Fruit & Nut chocolate, Batchelor's Savoury Rice and a coffee advert in which he coined the phrase "impending doom", and the Unigate milk Humphreys. In 1954 he founded the amateur dramatic society "Thorpe Players". He was a writer and presenter on many shows, including the 1960s satire programmes That Was The Week That Was and The Frost Report.

In the 1960s Muir was Assistant Head of Light Entertainment at the BBC and in 1969 joined London Weekend Television as Head of Entertainment. His magnum opus, The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose, was published in 1990. In 1992, for Channel 4, he was host of TV Heaven, a season of evenings dedicated to television programmes from individual past years.

One of his significant writings was the 1976 The Frank Muir Book: An irreverent companion to social history, which is a fascinating collection of anecdotes and quotations collected as "Music", "Education", "Literature", "Theatre", "Art" and "Food and Drink". For example, "Show me the man who has enjoyed his schooldays and I will show you a bully and a bore" Robert Morley. Or, "Education, n, That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding." Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary.

Muir died on January 2, 1998 at the age of 77.

Manny Shinwell

Emanuel Shinwell, Baron Shinwell was born in Spitalfields, London, but moved with his Polish-Jewish family to Glasgow, Scotland. He was a trade union official and Labour politician and was one of the leading figures of Red Clydeside.

Shinwell's father had a small clothing shop and his mother was a cook. He educated himself in a public library and at the Kelvin Grove art gallery. He enjoyed sport, particularly boxing and he was the trainer of a local football team. He began his working life as a machinist in a clothing workshop. In 1903 he became active in the Amalgamated Union of Clothing Operatives, and joined the Glasgow Trades Council in 1906 as a delegate of that union.

In May 1911, he was seconded to help organize the seamen of Glasgow at the request of J. Havelock Wilson of the National Sailors' and Firemen's Union (NSFU). He played a prominent role in the six-week Glasgow seamen's strike which began on 14 June and which was part of a nation-wide strike movement. He subsequently became the secretary of the Glasgow branch of the NSFU. In August 1912, he participated in a revolt against the union, which resulted in the Glasgow branch becoming part of the Southampton-based British Seafarers' Union (BSU). He was the local secretary of the BSU until it became part of the Amalgamated Marine Workers' Union (AMWU) in 1922, after which he served as National Organizer of the new organization.

In 1919, he gained national notoriety through his involvement in the Glasgow 40 Hours' Movement. This movement culminated in clashes between police and protesters in Glasgow's George Square. He was afterwards tried for incitement to riot and was sentenced to five months' imprisonment.

An Independent Labour Party (ILP) member, he was elected as Member of Parliament for Linlithgowshire at the 1922 general election. He lost his seat in 1924, but was re-elected for Linlithgowshire at a by-election in 1928. In 1929 Ramsay MacDonald appointed him Financial Secretary to the War Office: Cowling says that MacDonald believed he had rescued Shinwell's ministerial career when no minister would take him. From 1930 Shinwell served as Secretary for Mines, an office he had previously held in 1924. He became a critic of Ramsay MacDonald's National Government, and in 1931 he again lost his seat. He returned to the Commons in 1935 for Seaham, County Durham, where after he campaigned vigorously, along with left-wingers such as Aneurin Bevan for the United Kingdom to support the Popular Front government in Spain against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In May 1940 he refused a position in Winston Churchill's Coalition Government in the Ministry of Food. He became chairman of the Labour Party in 1942.

He served in Clement Attlee's government after the Labour victory in 1945. As Minister of Fuel and Power, he presided over the nationalization of the mining industry. His decision to mine the grounds of Wentworth Woodhouse, home of the former mine owners, the Earls Fitzwilliam, was severely criticized, including by the miners themselves, and was perceived as an act of revenge. In 1947, Britain experienced a severe coal shortage. He was widely criticized for his failure to avert this crisis. Shortly afterwards he took up the position of Secretary of State for War which he held until 1950. His seat became Easington in 1950, at which point he became Minister of Defense. Towards the end of his Commons career, he served as Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party 1964-67.

Shinwell was made Baron Shinwell, of Easington in the County of Durham in 1970 and died in 1986, having become the longest-lived British politician on 1 January that year.

Jack Hargreaves

Jack Hargreaves was an author and television presenter in the UK. His enduring interest was to comment without nostalgia or sentimentality on accelerating distortions in relations between the city and the countryside.

He also conceived and appeared on How! - a live children’s programme about how things worked, shown from 1966 on Southern Television and networked on ITV until the demise of Southern in 1981, but he is probably best known as the gentle-voiced presenter of the weekly magazine programme Out of Town, first broadcast in 1963, following the success of his 1959 television debut with the B&W series Gone Fishing. His country TV programmes continued in the 1980s with Country Boy and Old Country. Other programmes he created for local viewers were Farm Progress and another live afternoon series House Party.

Most of his viewers were probably unaware that he was a player in the setting up of ITV, and a member of Southern's board of directors. From early in his life he acquired a sophisticated grasp of city life. He made his reputation in the heart of London, on whose outskirts he was born. Yet for the last 30 years of his life, Hargreaves, while employed by the National Farmers' Union, serving on the Nugent Committee and throughout his later career as a TV personality, sought - in entertaining ways - to question and rebut metropolitan assumptions about the character and function of the countryside.

Hargreaves, in his youth, was placed by his mother with old family friends at Burston Hill Farm north of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire where he was profoundly influenced by the farmer Victor Pargeter. Over half a century later, Hargreaves would acknowledge Pargeter as part of a composite of father, grandfathers, uncles and old farming friends in the formative character of 'The Old Man' at the start of his book Out of Town (1987). Hargreaves was to live at a variety of addresses in central London between Soho, Chelsea and Hampstead.

In the late 40s he was moving between a London home and a caravan in a field on the bank of the River Kennet at Midgham, then a cottage in Bagnor in Berkshire by the Winterbourne running into the River Lambourn, then at Lower Pennington and Walhampton near Lymington as well as at Minstead and East Boldre in The New Forest, and, he spent his final years at Raven Cottage, near Belchalwell in Dorset which he - an inveterate commuter to and from the places from where he worked - was wont to bless for being 'just out of range of London'.

He died on March 15,1994 at the Winterbourne Hospital in Dorchester, and was cremated at Salisbury, his ashes spread on Bulbarrow Hill above Raven Cottage.

Warren Mitchell

Warren Mitchell is an English actor.

Mitchell was born Warren Misel in Stoke Newington, London. He is of Russian Jewish descent, but typically describes himself as an atheist in interviews. He was interested in acting from an early age, and attended the Gladys Gordon's Academy of Dramatic Arts in Walthamstow from the age of seven. He did well at school and read physical chemistry at University College, Oxford for six months. There he met his contemporary Richard Burton, and together they joined the RAF in 1944. He completed his navigator training in Canada just as the war ended.

Richard Burton's description of the acting profession had convinced him that it would be better than completing his physics degree and so Mitchell attended RADA for two years, performing in the evening with the Unity Theatre. After a short stint as a DJ on Radio Luxembourg, in 1951, Mitchell became a versatile professional actor with straight and comedy roles on stage, radio, film and television. His first broadcast was as a regular on the radio show Educating Archie, and this led to appearances on Hancock's Half Hour. By the late fifties, he regularly appeared on television: as Sean Connery's trainer in boxing drama Requiem for a Heavyweight (1957), with Charlie Drake in the sitcom Drake's Progress (BBC, 1957) and a title role in Three 'Tough' Guys (ITV, 1957), in which he played a bungling criminal. He also appeared in many ITC drama series, for ITV: William Tell, The Four Just Men, Sir Francis Drake, The Avengers, Danger Man and as a recurrent guest in The Saint.

His cinema début came in 1956, when he played the part of a sailor aboard a British warship in Powell and Pressburger's The Battle of the River Plate, a role in which he is hard to spot and which went uncredited. He then appeared in 1957 in Guy Hamilton's Manuela, and he began a career of minor roles as sinister foreign agents, assisted by his premature baldness and facility with eastern European accents. He appeared in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (José Quintero, 1961), and Help! (Richard Lester, 1965) and played leads in All The Way Up (James MacTaggart, 1970), The Chain (Jack Gold, 1984), The Dunera Boys (Ben Lewin, 1985) and Foreign Body (Ronald Neame, 1986).

In 1965, he was cast as Alf Garnett in a play for the BBC Comedy Playhouse series, broadcast on 22 July 1965. This was the pilot edition of the long running series Till Death Us Do Part with Gretchen Franklin, Una Stubbs and Anthony Booth. The part of Mum played by Gretchen Franklin was taken by Dandy Nichols when the programme was commissioned as a series. Mitchell may be best known for his role as the bigoted cockney West Ham United F.C. supporter, Alf Garnett, but ironically, his real life persona is quite the opposite, being a left-winger, Jewish, and a staunch supporter of Tottenham Hotspur F.C.. The show ran from 1966 to 1975, in seven series, making a total of 53 30-minute episodes.

He has a long and distinguished career on stage and television. Other small screen roles include performances in The Sweeney (Thames Television for ITV, 1978), Lovejoy (BBC), Waking the Dead (BBC), Kavanagh QC (Carlton Television for ITV), The Merchant of Venice (BBC, 1980) and Gormenghast.

On stage he received extensive critical acclaim for his performances in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Harold Pinter's The Caretaker at the National Theatre; and Pinter's The Homecoming and Miller's The Price in the West End, also appearing in Visiting Mr. Green in 2007 and 2008.

Warren was voted TV Actor of the Year in 1965, for his portrayal of Alf Garnett, in Til Death Do Us Part'. For his 2003 performance in The Price, he was awarded the 2004 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Performance in a Supporting Role, and also nominated for a London Evening Standard Award for Best Actor. In 1982, he received an Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, for the film, Norman Loves Rose.

Mitchell is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.

For over twenty years, Mitchell has suffered pain from nerve damage, caused by a virus, and is a supporter of the Neuropathy Trust.

Mitchell died in Highgate, London, on November 14, 2015 after a long illness, two months before his 90th birthday.

Rupert Davies

Rupert Davies was a British actor. He remains best known for playing the title role in the BBC's 1960s television adaptation of the Maigret novels written by Georges Simenon. The TV-Title in Germany: Kommissar Maigret.

Davies was born in Liverpool. After serving in the British Merchant Navy, during the Second World War he served as a second lieutenant observer with the Fleet Air Arm. Having been shot down over the Dutch coast, Davies was taken prisoner in 1942 and interned in the famous Stalag Luft III POW camp. He made three attempts to escape. All failed. It was during his captivity that he began to take part in theatre performances, entertaining his fellow prisoners.

After the war Davies became a staple of British television appearing in numerous plays and series, including Quatermass II, Ivanhoe, Emergency Ward 10, Danger Man and The Champions. He also provided the voice of "Professor Ian McClaine" in the Gerry Anderson series Joe 90.

In 1964 he became the first person to be awarded Pipe Smoker of the Year.

Davies also played supporting roles in many films, appearing briefly as George Smiley in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965). He also appeared in several horror films in the late 1960s, including Witchfinder General (1968) and Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), as well as such international blockbusters as Waterloo (1970) and Zeppelin (1971).

He died of cancer in London in 1976, leaving a wife and two sons, and is buried at Pistyll Cemetery Nefyn in North Wales.

Russ Abbot

Russ Abbot is an English musician, comedian, and actor.

He was the fifth of six sons born to Donald Roberts, who was English, and Elizabeth Laing, who was Scottish.

As a drummer Abbot founded the Black Abbots, who signed their first recording contract in 1977. Later on he appeared as a comedian, winning five times the award as Funniest Man On Television.

From 1980, Abbot released some albums as a solo artist, and played successfully in several TV series.

The Russ Abbot Show showed his talents as an all round entertainer and attracted millions of viewers. This show was very popular amongst younger viewers, prompting two annuals to be published in 1982 and 1983. The annuals featured comic strips based on popular characters plus some publicity photos of Abbot in a variety of guises, including, most famously, his James Bond satire featuring characters named Basildon Bond and Miss Funnyfanny, based on the fictional MI6 spy duo James Bond and Miss Moneypenny.

After many years, Abbot bought the performing rights to his hit Atmosphere, and refuses to allow it to be played on radio as he considers it to be a dire representation of his talents; however, many consider this to be a classic novelty hit.

Abbot's theatre roles include Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady starring Amy Nuttall and the narrator in The Rocky Horror Show. In 2004 he played the part of "Grandpa Potts" in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the London Palladium and also as Fagin in Oliver! From July 2007 he took over the role of Roger De Bris in the UK tour of Mel Brook's The Producers. During December 2007 and January 2008, Abbot appeared as the Tin Man in the stage production of the Wizard of Oz at the Mayflower in Southampton.

In 2008, the BBC announced that Abbot would be joining the cast of Last of the Summer Wine for the show's 29th series.

Van Gordon Sauter

Van Gordon Sauter is former president of CBS News and Fox News. He spent more than 30 years in communications, working in print and broadcast journalism. From 1968-1986 he worked in a variety of jobs at CBS, where he was president of CBS News from 1982-1983 and Executive Vice President of News from 1983-1986. Sauter was also Vice President and General Manager of the CBS station in Los Angeles, KNXT from 1977-1980.

Sauter spent two years as president and general manager of KVIE-TV (PBS) in Sacramento from 1995-1998. There he created California Heartland, a statewide weekly syndicated program about agriculture.

He is a graduate of Ohio State University and has been a reporter for The Chicago Daily News, the Detroit Free Press and the New Bedford (Mass.) Standard-Times.

Walter Cronkite

Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr. was a retired American broadcast journalist, best known as anchorman for The CBS Evening News for 19 years (1962–81). During the heyday of CBS News in the 1970s and 1980s he was often cited in viewer opinion polls as "the most trusted man in America," because of his professional experience and kindly demeanor.

He died on July 17, 2009 at the age of 92.

Robert Fulghum

Robert Fulghum is an American author, primarily of short essays.

He has worked as a Unitarian Universalist minister at the Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship in Bellingham, Washington from 1960-64, and the Edmonds Unitarian Universalist Church in Edmonds, Washington amongst other communities well into the 1980s.

During this same period he taught drawing, painting, and philosophy at the Lakeside School in Seattle. Fulghum is an accomplished painter and sculptor. He sings, and plays the guitar and mando-cello. He was a founding member of the authors' collective rock-and-roll band, "Rock Bottom Remainders". Previous to his professional careers, he also worked as a ditch-digger, newspaper carrier, ranch hand, salesman for IBM, and singing cowboy. He grew up in Waco, Texas.

He came to prominence in the US when his first collection, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1986), stayed on the New York Times bestseller lists for nearly two years.

Throughout this collection, subtitled "Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things," Fulghum expounds his down-home philosophy of seeing the world through the eyes of a child.

His prose style is very simple and direct, and finds life-affirming maxims in such mundane matters as zoos, leaf-raking and dusting.

His other collections include:

It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It
Uh-Oh
Maybe (Maybe Not)
From Beginning to End -- The Rituals of Our Lives
True Love
Words I Wish I Wrote
"What On Earth Have I Done"

Fulghum has performed in two television adaptations of his work for PBS, and is a Grammy nominee for the spoken word award. He has been a speaker at numerous colleges, conventions, and public events across the United States and Europe. He has been a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist.

There are currently more than 16 million copies of his books in print, published in 27 languages in 103 countries.

He has written one novel in three volumes, the first, titled Third Wish, was continued in Third Wish II, The Rest of the Story, Almost and completed with the third volume, "Third Wish, Granted". The novel was recently published in Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian. Negotiations are under way for further publication in Europe in Spanish, Italian, and German. English-language publication is being negotiated.

Eventually his books of essays were transformed into two stage productions. The first shares the same title as his first book, and was conceived and adapted by Ernest Zulia, with music and lyrics by David Caldwell. The play is based on all eight books, and is an optional musical. The second is entitled "Uh-Oh, Here Comes Christmas". To date there have been more than 1,000 national and international productions of these plays.

Robert Fulghum has four children and nine grandchildren. He lives in Seattle, Washington; Moab, Utah, and on the Greek island of Crete.

Milorad Pavić

Milorad Pavić is a noted Serbian poet, prose writer, translator, and literary historian.

Pavić has written five novels that have been translated into English: Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel, Landscape Painted With Tea, Inner Side of the Wind, Last Love in Constantinople and Unique Item as well as many short stories not translated to English. His uncle, Nikola Pavić, wrote in the kajkavian dialect of Croatian.

Though Pavić's novels can be enjoyed by reading them cover-to-cover, among his stated goals are a desire to write novels with unusual forms, and to make the reader a more active participant than is usual. In an interview published in 1998, Pavić said,

"I have tried my best to eliminate or to destroy the beginning and the end of my novels. The Inner Side of the Wind, for example, has two beginnings. You start reading this book from the side you want. In Dictionary of the Khazars you can start with whatever story you want. lEON But writing it, you have to keep in mind that every entry has to be read before and after every other entry in the book. I managed to avoid, at least until now, the old way of reading, which means reading from the classical beginning to the classical end."

To achieve these ends, he has used a number of unconventional techniques in order to introduce nonlinearity into his works:

Dictionary of the Khazars takes the form of three cross-referenced encyclopaedias of the Khazar people
Landscape Painted With Tea mixes the forms of novel and crossword puzzle
Inner Side of the Wind — which tells the story of Hero and Leander — can be read back to front, each section telling one character's version of the story;
Last Love on Constantinople has chapters numbered after tarot cards; the reader is invited to use a tarot deck to determine the order the chapters are read
Unique Item has one hundred different endings and the reader can choose one.
Last Love In Constantinople and Dictionary of the Khazars both have male and female versions, which differ in only a few brief, critical passages.

As such, many of his works can be considered examples of ergodic literature.

He has also written one play. There are more than 80 translations of his writing, into many languages. Milorad Pavić was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by experts in Europe, the USA and Brazil.

In 1991 he was elected as a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Language and Literature.

Glenn Ford

Gwyllyn Samuel Newton "Glenn" Ford was an acclaimed Canadian-born American actor from Hollywood's Golden Era with a career that spanned seven decades. Ford was a versatile actor best known for playing either cowboys or ordinary men in unusual circumstances.

He was born at Jeffrey Hale Hospital in Quebec City, Quebec, to Anglo-Quebecer parents Hannah and Newton Ford, who was a railroad executive. Ford moved to Santa Monica, California with his family at the age of eight, and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939.

After Ford graduated from Santa Monica High School, he began working in small theatre groups. Ford later commented that his railroad executive father had no objection to his growing interest in acting, but told him, "It’s all right for you to try to act, if you learn something else first. Be able to take a car apart and put it together. Be able to build a house, every bit of it. Then you'll always have something." Ford heeded the advice and during the 1950s, when he was one of Hollywood's most popular actors, he regularly worked on plumbing, wiring and air conditioning at home. At times, he worked as a roofer and installer of plate-glass windows.

He acted in West Coast stage companies, before joining Columbia Pictures in 1939. His stage name came from his father's hometown of Glenford, Canada. His first major movie part was in the 1939 film Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence.

In 1942, Ford's film career was interrupted when he volunteered for duty in World War II with the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve on 13 December as a photographic specialist at the rank of Sergeant. He was assigned in March 1943 to active duty at the Marine Corps Base in San Diego. He was sent to Marine Corps Schools Detachment in Quantico, Virginia, that June, with orders as a motion-picture production technician. Sergeant Ford returned to the San Diego base in February 1944 and was assigned next to the radio section of the Public Relations Office, Headquarters Company, Base Headquarters Battalion. There he staged and broadcast the radio program Halls of Montezuma. Glenn Ford was honorably discharged from the Marines on 7 December 1944.

In 1958, he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and was commissioned as a lieutenant commander with a 1655 designator. During his annual training tours, he promoted the Navy through radio and television broadcasts, personal appearances, and documentary films. He was promoted to commander in 1963 and captain in 1968.

Ford went to Vietnam in 1967 for a month's tour of duty as a location scout for combat scenes in a training film entitled Global Marine. He traveled with a combat camera crew from the demilitarized zone south to the Mekong Delta. For his service in Vietnam, the Navy awarded him a Navy Commendation Medal. His World War II decorations are as follows: American Campaign Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, World War II Victory Medal, Rifle Marksman Badge, and the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve Medal. He retired from the Naval Reserve in the 1970s at the rank of captain.

Following military service, Ford's breakthrough role was in 1946, starring alongside Rita Hayworth in Gilda. He went on to be a leading man opposite her in a total of five films. While the movie is mostly remembered as the vehicle for Hayworth's "provocative rendition of a song called Put the Blame on Mame", The New York Times movie reviewer Bosley Crowther praised Ford's "stamina and poise in a thankless role" despite the movie's poor direction.

Ford's career flourished in the 1950s and into the 1960s, and continued into the early 1990s, with an increasing number of television roles. His major roles in thrillers, dramas and action films include A Stolen Life with Bette Davis, The Secret of Convict Lake with Gene Tierney, The Big Heat, Framed, Blackboard Jungle, Interrupted Melody with Eleanor Parker, Experiment in Terror with Lee Remick, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Ransom!, Superman and westerns such as The Fastest Gun Alive, 3:10 to Yuma and Cimarron. Ford's versatility also allowed him to star in a number of popular comedies, including The Teahouse of the August Moon, Don't Go Near the Water, The Gazebo, Cry For Happy, and The Courtship of Eddie's Father.

In 1971, Ford signed with CBS to star in his first television series, a half hour comedy/drama titled The Glenn Ford Show. However, CBS head Fred Silverman noticed that many of the featured films being shown at a Glenn Ford film festival were westerns. He suggested doing a western series instead, which resulted in the "modern day western" series, Cade's County. Ford played southwestern Sheriff Cade for one season (1971-1972) in a mix of western drama and police mystery. In The Family Holvak (1975-1976), Ford portrayed a depression era preacher in a family drama, reprising the same character he had played in the TV film The Greatest Gift. Julie Harris co-starred as his wife and Lance Kerwin as his son.

In 1978, Ford had a supporting role in Superman, as Clark Kent's adopted father, Jonathan Kent, a role that introduced Ford to a new generation of film audiences. Ford's final scene in the film begins with a direct reference to Blackboard Jungle - the earlier film's theme song "Rock Around the Clock" is heard on a car radio.

In 1991, Ford agreed to star in a cable network series, African Skies. However, prior to the start of the series, he developed blood clots in his legs which required a lengthy stay in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Eventually he recovered, but at one time his situation was so severe that he was listed in critical condition. Ford was forced to drop out of the series and was replaced by Robert Mitchum.

In the 2006 movie Superman Returns, there is a scene where Ma Kent (played by Eva Marie Saint) stands next to the living room mantel after Superman returns from his quest to find remnants of Krypton. On that mantel is a picture of Pa Kent. This "cameo" of sorts was Ford's last screen appearance.

Ford's first wife was actress and dancer Eleanor Powell (1943-1959), with whom he had his only child, Peter (born 1945). The couple appeared together on screen once, in a short subject produced in the 1950s entitled The Faith of Our Children. Ford subsequently married actress Kathryn Hays (1966-1969); Cynthia Hayward (1977-1984) and Jeanne Baus (1993-1994). All four marriages ended in divorce. Ford was not on good terms with his ex-wives. He also had a long-term relationship with actress Hope Lange, although they never married.

For the first half of his life, Glenn Ford supported the US Democratic Party - in the 1950s he supported Adlai Stevenson for President - and in later years became a supporter of the Republican Party, campaigning for his friend Ronald Reagan in the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections.

Ford suffered a series of minor strokes which left him in frail health in the years leading up to his death. He died in his Beverly Hills home on August 30, 2006 at the age of 90.

Erwin Shrodinger

Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger was an Austrian - Irish physicist who achieved fame for his contributions to quantum mechanics, especially the Schrödinger equation, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1933. In 1935, after extensive correspondence with personal friend Albert Einstein, he proposed the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.

In 1887 Schrödinger was born in Vienna, Austria to Rudolf Schrödinger and Georgine Emilia Brenda. His mother was half Austrian and half English; the English side of her family came from Leamington Spa. Schrödinger learned English and German almost at the same time due to the fact that both were spoken in the family household. His father was a Catholic and his mother was a Lutheran. In 1898 he attended the Akademisches Gymnasium. Between 1906 and 1910 Schrödinger studied in Vienna under Franz Serafin Exner (1849 - 1926) and Friedrich Hasenöhrl (1874 - 1915). He also conducted experimental work with Friedrich Kohlrausch. In 1911, Schrödinger became an assistant to Exner.

In 1914 Erwin Schrödinger achieved Habilitation. Between 1914 and 1918 he participated in war work as a commissioned officer in the Austrian fortress artillery. On April 6, 1920, Schrödinger married Annemarie Bertel. The same year, he became the assistant to Max Wien, in Jena, and in September 1920 he attained the position of an o. Prof., roughly equivalent to Reader or associate professor, in Stuttgart. In 1921, he became o. Prof., in Breslau.

In 1922, he attended the University of Zürich. In January 1926, Schrödinger published in the Annalen der Physik the paper "Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem" [tr. Quantisation as an Eigenvalue Problem] on wave mechanics and what is now known as the Schrödinger equation. In this paper he gave a "derivation" of the wave equation for time independent systems, and showed that it gave the correct energy eigenvalues for the hydrogen-like atom. This paper has been universally celebrated as one of the most important achievements of the twentieth century, and created a revolution in quantum mechanics, and indeed of all physics and chemistry. A second paper was submitted just four weeks later that solved the quantum harmonic oscillator, the rigid rotor and the diatomic molecule, and gives a new derivation of the Schrödinger equation. A third paper in May showed the equivalence of his approach to that of Heisenberg and gave the treatment of the Stark effect. A fourth paper in this most remarkable series showed how to treat problems in which the system changes with time, as in scattering problems. These papers were the central achievement of his career and were at once recognized as having great significance by the physics community.

In 1927, he succeeded Max Planck at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. In 1933, however, Schrödinger decided to leave Germany; he disliked the Nazis' anti-semitism. He became a Fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. Soon after he arrived, he received the Nobel Prize together with Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. His position at Oxford did not work out; his unconventional personal life was not met with acceptance. In 1934, Schrödinger lectured at Princeton University; he was offered a permanent position there, but did not accept it. Again, his wish to set up house with his wife and his mistress may have posed a problem. He had the prospect of a position at the University of Edinburgh but visa delays occurred, and in the end he took up a position at the University of Graz in Austria in 1936.

In the midst of these tenure issues in 1935, after extensive correspondence with personal friend Albert Einstein, he proposed the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.

In 1938, after Hitler occupied Austria, Schrödinger had problems because of his flight from Germany in 1933 and his known opposition to Nazism. He issued a statement recanting this opposition. However, this did not fully appease the new dispensation and the university dismissed him from his job for political unreliability. He suffered harassment and received instructions not to leave the country, but he and his wife fled to Italy. From there he went to visiting positions in Oxford and Ghent Universities.

In 1940 he received an invitation to help establish an Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin, Ireland. He became the Director of the School for Theoretical Physics and remained there for 17 years, during which time he became a naturalized Irish citizen. He wrote about 50 further publications on various topics, including his explorations of unified field theory.

In 1944, he wrote What is Life?, which contains a discussion of Negentropy and the concept of a complex molecule with the genetic code for living organisms. According to James D. Watson's memoir, DNA, The Secret of Life, Schrödinger's book gave Watson the inspiration to research the gene, which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix structure. Similarly, Francis Crick, in his autobiographical book What Mad Pursuit, described how he was influenced by Schrödinger's speculations about how genetic information might be stored in molecules. Schrödinger stayed in Dublin until retiring in 1955. During this time he remained committed to his particular passion; scandalous involvements with students occurred and he fathered two children by two different Irish women. He had a life-long interest in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism, which influenced his speculations at the close of What is Life? about the possibility that individual consciousness is only a manifestation of a unitary consciousness pervading the universe.

In 1956, he returned to Vienna. At an important lecture during the World Energy Conference he refused to speak on nuclear energy because of his skepticism about it and gave a philosophical lecture instead. During this period Schrödinger turned from mainstream quantum mechanics' definition of wave-particle duality and promoted the wave idea alone causing much controversy.

Schrödinger decided in 1933 that he could not live in a country in which persecution of Jews had become a national policy. Alexander Frederick Lindemann, the head of physics at Oxford University, visited Germany in the spring of 1933 to try to arrange positions in England for some young Jewish scientists from Germany. He spoke to Schrödinger about posts for one of his assistants and was surprised to discover that Schrödinger himself was interested in leaving Germany. Schrödinger asked for a colleague, Arthur March, to be offered a post as his assistant.

Many of the scientists who had left Germany spent the summer of 1933 in the Italian province of Bolzano. On 4 November 1933 Schrödinger, his wife and Hilde March arrived in Oxford. Schrödinger had been elected a fellow of Magdalen College. Soon after they arrived in Oxford, Schrödinger heard that, for his work on wave mechanics, he had been awarded the Nobel Prize.

In early 1934 Schrödinger was invited to lecture at Princeton University and while there he was made an offer of a permanent position. On his return to Oxford he negotiated about salary and pension conditions at Princeton but in the end he did not accept. It is thought that the fact that he wished to live at Princeton with Anny and Hilde both sharing the upbringing of his child was not found acceptable. The fact that Schrödinger openly had two wives, even if one of them was married to another man, was not well received in Oxford either.

Erwin Schrödinger's gravesiteOn January 4, 1961, Schrödinger died in Vienna of tuberculosis at the age of 73.