Showing posts with label actor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label actor. Show all posts

February 11 - National Inventors' Day

Posted on February 11, 2021

This is an update of my post published on February 11, 2010:

This is the birthday of Thomas Edison, who had more than one thousand patents and who remains one of America's most honored inventors. Because of his birthday, the U.S. celebrates all inventors today!


This is not Thomas Edison!

Instead, this is one of the most unexpected inventors in U.S. history, to me at least: glamorous actor Hedy Lamarr.


Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, Hedy Lamarr had an interesting life. She studied ballet and piano as a child, and acted in German films as a teenager. She married a man who turned out to be controlling and who didn't like her to be in movies. Her husband manufactured arms (weapons), and Lamarr, who was intelligent and gifted in math, learned a lot about military technology from attending meetings with him. She became angry when she realized that her husband was consorting with Nazis (both she and her husband were Jewish), so in 1937 she disguised herself as one of her maids and ran off to Paris.

Lamarr went from Paris to London to Hollywood. There MGM heads changed her name and cast her in 18 films.

So...where does the title “inventor” come in?

Hedy Lamarr, as you recall, learned a lot about military technology. Well, during World War II, Lamarr and German immigrant and composer George Antheil came up with an idea for a secret communication system based on frequency hopping. Their invention, which they patented, used a piano roll from a player piano to change between 88 frequencies; it would make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.


There was a lag in the military development of the idea, but eventually it was used during a blockade of Cuba. In the 1990s, Lamarr got an award for her idea plus payment (in stock) for the rights to develop the idea, which became “modern spread-spectrum communication technology.”

In other words, Hedy Lamarr invented something that is used today in many cordless and wireless telephones.

Check out these inventions.
Explore the Lemelson - MIT website about inventions.



Also on this date:

Posted by at 1 comment:
Labels: , , , , ,

January 16 - Happy Birthday, Debbie Allen

 Posted on January 16, 2021



Actor. Dancer. Choreographer. Dance academy founder, and dance teacher. Former member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Director. Producer. Writer. Singer/songwriter.

Debbie Allen achieved a whole lot - and won many awards - even though she faced racial discrimination. She was denied admittance by several dance academies and university programs and was told that her body wasn't "right" for ballet dance.



At one point, Allen decided to concentrate on academics, and she ended up earning a B.A. from Howard University in classical Greek literature as well as speech and theater. But luckily for the rest of us, she persisted with her love of dance!

There are too many highlights of Allen's career to list them all, but I will mention a few:


Debbie Allen was an actor and choreographer in the 1980 movie Fame and the 1980s TV show based on the movie. I include this because she won a lot of awards during that show AND because I really enjoyed this musical-drama series about a performance arts high school.

Allen taught choreography to singer/dancer Paula Abdul.

Allen not only encourages young dancers on TV shows like So You Think You Can Dance, where she served as a judge, but she also in her Los Angeles-based dance academy, where she teaches and mentors young dancers.



I had no idea Allen directed so many TV and film projects! She has been the director on hundreds of episodes of dozens of shows!

Allen's mom Vivian Allen was a Pulitzer-prize nominee artist and poet; her sister Phylicia Rashad is a prize-winning actor most famous for her role as Clair Huxtable; her husband is former NBA All-Star and Championship basketball player Norm Nixon. Lots of talent everywhere in that family!










Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

October 8 - Happy Birthday, Sigourney Weaver

Posted October 8, 2020

There are some actors who are just famous-famous, not necessarily for one role or one kind of film, but just - well, movie stars! Other actors are clearly associated with a single role or maybe with a certain kind of movie.


Even though Sigourney Weaver has been in LOTS of different kinds of movies and lots of different kinds of roles, she is often associated with sci fi and adventure, and she is even thought of as a bit of a pioneer - because so many people assumed those genres to be the special province of men!



The 1979 movie Alien was Weaver's big breakout into fame. There have been other Alien movies, and Weaver was also featured in multiple Ghostbuster movies, in Galaxy Quest, and in Avatar. It hasn't been all sci fi all the time: Weaver played the scientist who lived with gorillas, Dian Fossey, and she became the honorary chairwoman of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

And she played the "bad guy" in Holes and the First Lady in Dave  (these two are definitely my favorite Weaver flicks!).

 



Did you know...?

Sigourney Weaver, who was born on this date in 1949, was named Susan Alexandra Weaver. She took the name Signourney from a character in The Great Gatsby. 

Weaver was 5 foot 10 and a half inches (178 cm) by the time she was 14! Her adult height is just a smidge under 6 feet tall.

At age 18, Weaver volunteered on a kibbutz in Israel for several months. She attended some really amazing universities: Sarah Lawerence, Stanford (earning her BA), and Yale (earning her Master's of Fine Art in the esteemed School of Drama). 

Weaver was the first person to win two acting Golden Globes in the same year. 


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)