Lee De Forest was an American inventor with over 180 patents to his credit. De Forest invented the Audion, a vacuum tube that takes relatively weak electrical signals and amplifies them. De Forest is one of the fathers of the “electronic age”, as the Audion helped to usher in the widespread use of electronics. He is also credited with one of the principal inventions which brought sound to motion pictures.

He was involved in several patent lawsuits and he spent a substantial part of his income from his inventions on the legal bills. He had four marriages and 25 companies, he was defrauded by business partners, and he was once indicted for mail fraud, but was later acquitted.

He typically signed his name “Lee de Forest.”

He was a charter member of the Institute of Radio Engineers, one of the two predecessors of the IEEE .

Lee Strasberg was an American actor, director and acting teacher. He cofounded, with directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as “America’s first true theatrical collective”. In 1951, he became director of the non-profit Actors Studio, in New York City, considered “the nation’s most prestigious acting school”. In 1969, Strasberg founded the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York City and in Hollywood to teach the work he pioneered.

He is considered the “father of method acting in America,” according to author Mel Gussow, and from the 1920s until his death in 1982 “he revolutionized the art of acting by having a profound influence on performance in American theater and movies”. From his base in New York, he trained several generations of theatre and film’s most illustrious talents, including Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and director Elia Kazan.

Former student Elia Kazan directed James Dean in East of Eden, for which Kazan and Dean were nominated for Academy Awards. As a student, Dean wrote that Actors Studio was “the greatest school of the theater the best thing that can happen to an actor”. Playwright Tennessee Williams, writer of A Streetcar Named Desire, said of Strasberg’s actors, “They act from the inside out. They communicate emotions they really feel. They give you a sense of life.” Directors like Sidney Lumet, a former student, have intentionally used actors skilled in Strasberg’s “Method”.

Kazan, in his autobiography, wrote, “He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home. e was the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theatre together, and made them ‘permanent.'” Today, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel lead this nonprofit studio dedicated to the development of actors, playwrights, and directors.

William Lee Tracy was an American actor. Tracy was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He studied electrical engineering at Union College, and then he served as a 2nd lieutenant in World War I. In the early 1920s he decided to work as an actor. He became a Broadway star by way of his starring role in the original 1924 production of George Kelly’s play The Show-Off.

He arrived in Hollywood in 1929, where he played the role of newspapermen in quite a number of pictures. He played reporter Hildy Johnson in the original 1928 stage production of The Front Page and a Walter Winchell-type gossip columnist in 1932’s Blessed Event. Tracy starred as the columnist in Advice to the Lovelorn, very loosely based on the novel Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West.

He played The Buzzard, the criminal who leads Liliom into a fatal robbery, in the 1930 film version of Liliom. He also played Lupe Velez’s frenetic manager in Gregory LaCava’s

The Half-Naked Truth in 1932, and the following year portrayed John Barrymore’s agent in Dinner at Eight, directed by George Cukor.

Leeza Kim Gibbons is an American talk show host. Gibbons is the host of her own radio show, Hollywood Confidential, part of the United Stations radio syndication company.

Gibbons was born in Hartsville, South Carolina, and grew up in Irmo, South Carolina, a suburb of Columbia. She graduated from Irmo High School. She is daughter of Jean and Carlos Gibbons, who was a former state superintendent of education as well as antique shop owner. She has a brother, Carlos, Jr., and a sister, Cammy. Gibbons graduated from the University of South Carolina’s school of journalism and mass communication. She is a member of the Delta Delta Delta sorority.

Her past television credits include co-hosting local segments of PM Magazine for WFAA-TV Channel 8 in Dallas-Fort Worth during the early 1980s, hosting Entertainment Tonight and Extra, as well as hosting Leeza, her own NBC/syndicated talk show, which ran from January 1994 to September 2000. In the 1990s, she was the co-host of John and Leeza, a talk show with former co-host of Entertainment Tonight, John Tesh. After one season, Tesh was dropped from the show, and Gibbons hosted solo for the remainder of the series. She has also guest starred on several shows, including The Geena Davis Show, The Simple Life, The Simpsons, Home Improvement, and Just Shoot Me. She played a television reporter in the Robocop films and had a small role as a reporter in Soapdish. She also hosted a series that explores true stories of survival in Lifetime’s What Should You Do?

In 1988, she was also the host of the Telethon show on New Zealand’s TVNZ network, which she hosted alongside Christopher Quinten, whom she later married. In addition to her television and radio career, Gibbons has received the Congressional Horizon Award for her work on children’s issues.