Strongheart

Strongheart was the screen name of Etzel von Oeringen, a German shepherd that became one of the earliest canine film stars. After being trained in Germany as a police dog, he was brought to the United States by husband and wife filmmakers Laurence Trimble and Jane Murfin, who had previously worked successfully with Jean, the Vitagraph Dog. He appeared in several movies, including a 1925 adaptation of White Fang. Some of these pictures were highly successful, and did much to encourage the popularity of the breed, but most have been lost.

A popular celebrity in his day, Strongheart paved the way for the much better remembered Rin Tin Tin. Strongheart and his mate, Lady Jule, had many offspring and their line survives to this day. In 1929, while being filmed for a movie, Strongheart accidentally made contact with a hot studio light and was burned. These burns caused a tumor to form and Strongheart died as a result of it.

In August of 1928, Etzel Von Oeringen, the canine who played Strongheart, was accused of murdering a young child by the name of Sofie Bedard. It reportedly “tried to eat her”. Strongheart’s name was later cleared and Sofie’s family was prosecuted for wrongly testifying in a court of law.

Sting

Sting, CBE is an English musician, singer-songwriter, activist, actor and philanthropist. Prior to starting his solo career, he was the principal songwriter, lead singer and bassist of the rock band The Police.

As a solo musician and member of The Police, Sting has received sixteen Grammy Awards for his work, receiving his first Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance in 1981, and receiving an Oscar nomination for best song. He is a member of both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Sting was born Gordon Matthew Sumner in Wallsend, England, near Newcastle upon Tyne, the eldest of four children born to Audrey, a hairdresser, and Ernest Matthew Sumner, a milkman and engineer. His parents had three more children: Philip, Angela and Anita. Young Gordon would often assist his father with the early-morning milk-delivery rounds and his “best friend” was an old Spanish guitar with five rusty strings which had been left behind by an uncle who had emigrated to Canada.

He attended St. Cuthbert’s High School in Newcastle upon Tyne. He would often sneak into nightclubs like the Club-A-Go-Go, where he would watch acts such as Cream and Jimi Hendrix, artists who would later influence his own music. After jobs as a bus conductor, a construction labourer, and a tax officer, he attended Northern Counties College of Education, from 1971 to 1974 and qualified as a teacher. He then worked as a schoolteacher at St. Paul’s Middle School in Cramlington for two years.

Stu Nahan

Stu Nahan was an American sportscaster best known for his television broadcasting career in Los Angeles from the 1950s through the 1990s. He is also remembered for his role as a boxing commentator in most of the Rocky films. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on May 25, 2007. Nahan had battled lymphoma, a form of cancer, since being diagnosed in January 2006.

A native of Los Angeles, Nahan moved at age 2 with his mother to Canada, where he grew up playing ice hockey.

A star goalie at McGill University in Montreal, he signed a contract with the Toronto Maple Leafs of the National Hockey League in 1946. He was assigned to the minor-league Los Angeles Monarchs, who through the early 1950s played at the Pan Pacific Auditorium.

Nahan originally began working on a children's television program, appearing as "Skipper Stu" in Sacramento in the 1950s. He also worked for KCRA in Sacramento as a sportscaster.

Stu Erwin

Stuart Erwin was an American actor. Erwin began acting in college in the 1920s, first appearing on the stage, then breaking into films in 1928 in Mother Knows Best. He was cast as amiable oafs in several films such as The Sophomore, The Big Broadcast, Hollywood Cavalcade, Our Town, International House and Viva Villa!. In 1934 he was cast as Joe Palooka in the film Palooka, and in 1935 he had a supporting role in After Office Hours. He co-starred in the Paramount Pictures all-star revue Paramount on Parade. In 1936, he was cast in Pigskin Parade, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Since it was the first year that the Best Supporting Actor/Actress existed, many errors occurred, including Erwin’s nomination. In Walt Disney’s Bambi, he did the voice of a tree squirrel.

In 1950, Erwin made the transition to television, where he starred in Trouble with Father, which was eventually retitled The Stu Erwin Show. He co-starred with his wife, actress June Collyer. He later appeared in the Disney films Son of Flubber and The Misadventures of Merlin Jones. He also appeared with Jack Palance in the ABC series The Greatest Show on Earth during the 1963-1964 television season.

Sue Carol

Sue Carol was an American actress and talent agent.

While at a social function in Los Angeles in 1927, a director offered her a part in a film. She took it and began playing minor parts. Carol's film career lasted from the late 1920s into the 1930s, and when it ended she became a talent agent; one of her clients was Alan Ladd to whom she was married from 1942 until his death in 1964.

Carol was born Evelyn Lederer in Chicago, Illinois to Caroline, a German Jewish immigrant, and Samuel Lederer, a Jewish immigrant from Austria. One of the WAMPAS Baby Stars, she performed in motion pictures from 1927 until 1937.

Among the movies in which she appeared are Fox Movietone Follies of 1929 and Girls Gone Wild. Her films were made in association with producer Cecil B. Demille and MGM.

Stuart Whitman

Stuart Maxwell Whitman is an American actor. Stuart Whitman is arguably best-known for playing Marshal Jim Crown in the western television series Cimarron Strip in 1967. Whitman also starred with John Wayne in the Western movie, The Comancheros, in 1961, and received top billing as the romantic lead in the extravagant aerial epic Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines in 1965.

Whitman was born in San Francisco, California, the eldest of two sons. His parents, Cecilia and Joseph Whitman, traveled frequently during his childhood, and as a result, he attended over twenty schools. He graduated from high school and spent three years in the Army Corps of Engineers. He became a boxer and was at one time a top light heavyweight contender. After leaving the army, he enrolled in Los Angeles City College and the Los Angeles Academy of Dramatic Art.

Whitman was a supporting actor in When Worlds Collide, All American, Brigadoon, Silver Lode, Ten North Frederick, These Thousand Hills, and The Sound and the Fury. His first leading man role is in Murder, Inc. in 1960. He was signed on as a contract star with 20th Century Fox.

In 1961, Whitman was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as a child molester in The Mark, a role many other better known actors turned down. He has since appeared in starring and supporting roles in many films, including Francis of Assisi, The Fiercest Heart, The Longest Day, The Comancheros, Convicts 4, The Day and the Hour, Signpost to Murder, Shock Treatment, Rio Conchos, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, Sands of the Kalahari, The City Beneath the Sea, An American Dream, The Last Escape, The Decks Ran Red starring Dorothy Dandridge on whose face Stuart planted Hollywood’s first interrracial kiss, The Invincible Six, Night of the Lepus, Shatter, Tony Saitta, Guyana: Crime of the Century, Treasure Seekers and The White Buffalo.

Susan Lucci

Susan Victoria Lucci is an American actress, best known for portraying Erica Kane on the daytime drama All My Children. Lucci has been called “Daytime’s Leading Lady” by TV Guide, with New York Times and Los Angeles Times citing her as the highest-paid actor in daytime television. Midway into her career, her salary had been reported as over $1 million a year.

Susan Lucci was born in Scarsdale, New York, to parents Jeanette and Victor Lucci. Her father is Italian, and her mother is Swedish. She attended Garden City High School in Garden City, New York, graduating in 1964. She then attended Marymount College at Fordham University, and graduated from Marymount in 1968.

Lucci is best known for playing Erica Kane on the ABC television soap opera All My Children, on which she has appeared since the show’s inception on January 5, 1970. She is the only original cast member remaining on the series.

Lucci was nominated for the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series Emmy for her work on All My Children almost every year since 1978. When Lucci did not win the award after several consecutive nominations, her image in the media began to be lampooned, as she became notoriously synonymous with never winning an Emmy. NBC’s Saturday Night Live exploited this by asking her to host an episode, where her monologue parodied the cast, crew, and even stagehands carrying Emmys of their own in her presence. In addition, she appeared in a 1989 television commercial for the sugar substitute “Sweet One,” intended to portray her as the opposite of her villainess character, yet throwing one of Erica Kane’s characteristic tantrums, shouting “11 years without an Emmy! What does a person have to do around here to get an Emmy?”

Stevie Wonder

Stevland Hardaway Judkins, name later changed to Stevland Hardaway Morris, known by his stage name Stevie Wonder, is an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer and activist. Blind from shortly after birth, Wonder signed with Motown Records’ Tamla label at the age of eleven, and continues to perform and record for Motown to this day.

Some of Wonder’s best known works include singles such as “Superstition”, “Sir Duke”, “I Wish” and “I Just Called to Say I Love You”. Well known albums also include Talking Book, Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. He has recorded more than thirty U.S. top ten hits and received twenty-two Grammy Awards, the most ever awarded to a male solo artist. Wonder is also noted for his work as an activist for political causes, including his 1980 campaign to make Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a holiday in the United States. In 2009, Wonder was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart’s fiftieth anniversary, with Wonder at number five.

Stevie Wonder was born in Saginaw, Michigan in 1950, being the third of six children to Calvin Judkins and Lula Mae Hardaway. Owing to his being born six weeks premature, the blood vessels at the back of his eyes had not yet reached the front and their aborted growth caused the retinas to detach. The medical term for this condition is retinopathy of prematurity, or ROP, and while it may have been exacerbated by the oxygen pumped into his incubator, this was not the primary cause of his blindness.

When Stevie Wonder was four, his mother left his father and moved herself and her children to Detroit. She changed her name back to Lula Hardaway and later changed her son’s surname to Morris, partly because of relatives. Morris has remained Stevie Wonder’s legal name ever since. He began playing instruments at an early age, including piano, harmonica, drums and bass. During childhood he was active in his church choir.

Steven Spielberg

Steven Allan Spielberg, is an American film director, screenwriter, film producer and video game designer. In a career spanning over forty years, Spielberg’s films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg’s early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an archetype of modern Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. In later years, his films began addressing such issues as the Holocaust, slavery, war and terrorism. He is considered one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. He is also one of the founders of DreamWorks.

Spielberg won the Academy Award for Best Director for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. Three of Spielberg’s films; Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Jurassic Park, achieved box office records, each becoming the highest-grossing film made at the time. To date, the unadjusted gross of all Spielberg-directed films exceeds $8.5

Stepin Fetchit

Stepin Fetchit was the stage name of American comedian and film actor Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry. Perry parlayed the Fetchit persona into a successful film career, eventually becoming a millionaire, the first black actor in history to do so. He was also the first black actor to receive a screen credit.

Perry’s typical film persona and stage name have long been controversial, and seen as synonymous with negative stereotypes of African-Americans. However, a newer interpretation of his film persona contends Perry was ultimately subversive of the status quo.

Little is certain about his background other than that he was born in Key West, Florida to West Indian immigrants. He was the second child of Joseph Perry, a cigar maker from Jamaica and his mother, Dora Monroe, a seamstress from Nassau. Both of his parents came to the United States in the 1890s where they married. By 1910, the family had moved north to Tampa, Florida. Another source says he was adopted when he was eleven years old and taken to live in Montgomery, Alabama. At age twelve, he ran away from home, joined a carnival, and earned his living for a few years as a singer and tap dancer.

Perry began entertaining in his teens as a comic character actor. His stage name was a contraction of “step and fetch it”, or perhaps, “step in fetch it.” According to his entry in Ephraim Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia, he borrowed his screen name from a racehorse that won him some money in his pre-Hollywood days.