Howard Hawks

Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era.

Hawks was a director whose career included comedies, dramas, gangster films, science fiction, film noir, and westerns. His most popular films include Scarface (1932), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948), The Thing from Another World (1951), and Rio Bravo (1959).

In 1942, Hawks was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Sergeant York, and in 1975 he was awarded an Honorary Academy Award as "a master American filmmaker whose creative efforts hold a distinguished place in world cinema."

George Tobias

George Tobias was an American film and television actor. He had character parts in several major films of Hollywood's Golden Age, but today he is probably best known for his role as Abner Kravitz on the TV sitcom Bewitched.

Tobias was born to a Jewish family in New York, he began his acting career at the Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, California. He then spent several years in theater groups before moving on to Broadway and, eventually, Hollywood. In 1939, he signed with Warner Brothers and was cast in supporting roles, many times along with James Cagney, in such movies as Cagney's Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), as well as with Gary Cooper in Sergeant York (1941) and Irving Berlin, Ronald Reagan, and George Murphy in This Is The Army (1943).

From 1959 to 1961, Tobias played Penrose in eight episodes of the ABC television series, Adventures in Paradise, starring Gardner McKay. From 1964 to 1971, he played Abner Kravitz, the long-suffering neighbor on the ABC sitcom Bewitched. Tobias often appeared in an uncredited role as a courtroom spectator on the CBS program Perry Mason, and he played Sidney Falconer in the episode titled "The Case of the Antic Angel" (1964).

Tobias never married and retired from acting in 1977 after reprising his role as Abner Kravitz in a guest appearance on the Bewitched sequel Tabitha.

On February 27, 1980, Tobias died of bladder cancer at the age of 78 at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He is buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery, Glendale, Queens, New York City.

Raymond Forni

Raymond Forni was a French Socialist politician.

The son of an Italian immigrant from Piedmont, Forni was born in Belfort, in 1941. His father died when he was 11. At 17, he had to stop studying, and he started to work as an unskilled worker in Peugeot factories. He finally graduated from high school at 21 and started law studies in Strasbourg.

Member of the Socialist Party, his political career started in 1971 when he became municipal council. In 1973, he was elected as deputy of Territoire de Belfort département. He got reelected four times consecutively, until 2002.

He died in Paris on 5 January 2008, at the age of 66, of leukemia.

Leonard Woolf

Leonard Sidney Woolf was a British political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant, and husband of author Virginia Woolf.

Woolf was born in London, the third of ten children of Solomon Rees Sidney Woolf (known as Sidney Woolf), a barrister and Queen's Counsel, and Marie. His family was Jewish. After his father died in 1892 Woolf was sent to board at Arlington House School near Brighton, Sussex. From 1894 to 1899 he attended St Paul's School, and in 1899 he won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected to the Cambridge Apostles. Other members included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, G. E. Moore and E. M. Forster. Thoby Stephen, Virginia Stephen's brother, was friendly with the Apostles, though not a member himself. Woolf was awarded his BA in 1902, but stayed there for another year to study for the Civil Service examinations held then.

In October 1904 Woolf moved to Ceylon to become a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service, in Jaffna and later Kandy, and by August 1908 was named an assistant government agent in the Southern Province, where he administered the District of Hambantota. Woolf returned to England in May 1911 for a year's leave. Instead, however, he resigned in early 1912 and that same year married Virginia Stephen.

Leonard and Virginia Woolf lived at 17 The Green Richmond starting from October 1914. In early March 1915 the couple moved to nearby Hogarth House, Paradise Road. In 1919, the Woolfs purchased the Round House in Pipe Passage, Lewes. The same year they discovered Monk’s House in nearby Rodmell, which both she and Leonard favored because of its orchard and garden. She then bought Monk’s House and sold the Round House.

Together Leonard and Virginia Woolf became influential in the Bloomsbury Group, which also included various other former Apostles. In December 1917 Woolf became one of the co-founders of the 1917 Club, which met in Gerrard Street, Soho.

After marriage, Woolf turned his hand to writing and in 1913 published his first novel, The Village in the Jungle, which is based on his years in Sri Lanka. A series of books followed at roughly two-yearly intervals.

On the introduction of conscription in 1916, during the First World War, Woolf was rejected for military service on medical grounds, and turned to politics and sociology. He joined the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, and became a regular contributor to the New Statesman. In 1916 he wrote International Government, proposing an international agency to enforce world peace.

As his wife's mental health worsened, Woolf devoted much of his time to caring for her (he himself suffered from depression). In 1917 the Woolf’s bought a small hand-operated printing press and with it they founded the Hogarth Press. Their first project was a pamphlet, hand-printed and bound by themselves. Within ten years the Press had become a full-scale publishing house, issuing Virginia's novels, Leonard's tracts and, among other works, the first edition of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Woolf continued as the main director of the Press until his death. His wife suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, until her suicide by drowning in 1941. Later Leonard fell in love with a married artist, Trekkie Parsons.

In 1919 Woolf became editor of the International Review. He also edited the international section of the Contemporary Review from 1920 to 1922. He was literary editor of The Nation and Atheneum, generally referred to simply as The Nation, from 1923 to 1930), and joint founder and editor of The Political Quarterly from 1931 to 1959), and for a time he served as secretary of the Labour Party's advisory committees on international and colonial questions.

In 1960 Woolf revisited Sri Lanka and was surprised at the warmth of the welcome he received, and even the fact that he was still remembered. Woolf accepted an honorary doctorate from the then-new University of Sussex in 1964 and in 1965 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He declined the offer of Companion of Honour in the Queen's Birthday honours list in 1966.

Woolf died on 14 August 1969 from a stroke.

Dane Clark

Dane Clark was an American actor who was known for playing, as he labeled himself, "Joe Average."

Clark was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish immigrants - Samuel, a sporting goods store owner, and his wife, Rose. Clark's date of birth is a matter of dispute among different sources.

He graduated from Cornell University and earned a law degree at St. John's University School of Law in Queens, New York. During the Great Depression, he worked as a boxer, baseball player, construction worker, and model.

Modeling brought him in contact with people in the arts. He gradually perceived them to be snobbish, with their talk of the "theater", and "I decided to give it a try myself, just to show them anyone could do it." He progressed from small Broadway parts to larger ones, eventually taking over the role of George from Wallace Ford in the 1937 production of ‘Of Mice and Men.’ Clark's first film was The Pride of the Yankees (1942). He had an uncredited bit in The Glass Key (1942) at Paramount.

Clark got his big break when he was signed by Warner Bros. in 1943. He worked alongside some of his era's biggest stars, often in war movies such as Action in the North Atlantic (1943), his breakthrough part, opposite Humphrey Bogart. According to Clark, Bogart gave him his stage name.

He was third billed in Destination Tokyo (1943) beneath Cary Grant and John Garfield, and in The Very Thought of You (1944) with Dennis Morgan and Eleanor Parker. He had one of the leads in Hollywood Canteen (1944), playing an actual role while most Warner’s stars made cameo appearances as themselves. Clark had the lead in the 1944 short film I Won't Play with Janis Paige; it received the 1945 Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Two-Reel). Clark supported Morgan in God Is My Co-Pilot (1945) and Garfield in Pride of the Marines (1945).

Clark supported Bette Davis and Glenn Ford in A Stolen Life (1946) and was promoted to top billing for Her Kind of Man (1946), a crime film. He followed it with That Way with Women (1947), Deep Valley (1947), and Embraceable You (1948). Republic Pictures borrowed him to play the lead for Frank Borzage in Moonrise (1948). At Warner Bros., he was in Whiplash (1948). Clark went to United Artists for Without Honor (1948), then back to Warner Bros. for Backfire (1950) and Barricade (1950). He travelled to England to make Highly Dangerous (1950) and France for Gunman in the Streets (1951). Back at Columbia he was in Never Trust a Gambler (1951). He acted in the United Artists Western Fort Defiance (1951). He went back to Britain for The Gambler and the Lady (1953), Murder by Proxy (1954) and Five Days (1955), all for Hammer Films. In the US, he was in Go Man Go (1954) with the Harlem Globetrotters and Toughest Man Alive (1955).

During the 1950s, he became one of a small group of actors (excluding the original 'founding' members brought in at the Studio's inception) awarded life membership in The Actors Studio.

Clark played Peter Chambers in the short-lived radio show Crime and Peter Chambers, a half-hour show that aired from April 6 to September 7, 1954. Clark first appeared on television in the late 1940s, and after the mid-1950s worked much more in that medium than in feature films. In the 1954-1955 season, he co-starred as the character Richard Adams, with Gary Merrill in the role of Jason Tyler, in the NBC crime drama Justice, about attorneys of the Legal Aid Society of New York.

In 1959, he reprised Humphrey Bogart's role as Slate in Bold Venture, a short-lived television series. He also guest starred on several television shows, including Faye Emerson's Wonderful Town, Appointment with Adventure, CBS's Rawhide in the episode "Incident of the Night Visitor", and The Twilight Zone, in the episode "The Prime Mover". In 1970, he guest-starred in an episode of The Silent Force and had a role in The McMasters (1970). He also played Lieutenant Tragg in the short-lived revival of the Perry Mason television series in 1973, and appeared in the 1976 miniseries Once an Eagle.

Clark died on September 11, 1998, of lung cancer at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California.

Irving Kolodin

Irving Kolodin was an American music critic and music historian.

Irving Kolodin was born in New York City, New York. He wrote for the New York Sun from 1932 to 1950 and for the Saturday Review starting in 1947. He was best known for his popular Guide to Recorded Music. He also wrote program notes for the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera, and a 762-page "candid history" of the Met up to 1966. He was married to Irma (née Levy) Zeckendorf, former wife of real estate developer William Zeckendorf.