Sigourney Weaver is an American actress best known for her role as Ellen Ripley in the Alien film series, a role for which she has received worldwide recognition. She is also known for her roles in the Ghostbusters films, Gorillas in the Mist, The Ice Storm, Working Girl, Holes, and Avatar.

Weaver is also a three-time Academy Award nominee for her performances in Aliens, Gorillas in the Mist, and Working Girl winning Golden Globe Awards in the latter two films. She has been called ‘The Sci-Fi Queen’ by many on account of her many science fiction and fantasy films.

Weaver was born in Manhattan, New York City, the daughter of Elizabeth Inglis, an English actress, and the NBC television executive and television pioneer Sylvester “Pat” Laflin Weaver. Her uncle, Doodles Weaver, was a comedian and actor. She began using the name “Sigourney Weaver” in 1963 after a minor character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby.

Weaver attended the Ethel Walker School, a prep school in Simsbury, Connecticut, where she was made fun of all the time for being a nerd and for her height. She also attended The Chapin School. Sigourney was reportedly 5? 10½? tall by the age of 14, but she only grew another inch during her teens to her adult height of 5? 11½?. Weaver graduated from Stanford University, with a bachelor of arts degree in English in 1972, but she had already begun her involvement in acting, by living in Stanford’s co-ed Beta Chi Community for the Performing Arts. Weaver earned her Master of Fine Arts degree at the Yale University School of Drama in 1974, where one of her appearances was in the chorus in a production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical version of The Frogs, and another was as one of a mob of Roman soldiers alongside Meryl Streep in another production. Weaver later acted in original plays by her friend and classmate Christopher Durang. She later appeared in an “Off Broadway” production of Durang’s comedy Beyond Therapy in 1981, which was directed by the up-and-coming director Jerry Zaks.

Signe Hasso was a Swedish-born American actress.

Born Signe Eleonora Cecilia Larsson in 1915, she was one of the youngest students ever accepted at the prestigious Royal Dramatic Theater at the age of 12.

In 1933 she married German film director/cameraman Harry Hasso. She made her first film in 1933 and, in 1940 she moved to the United States where she was signed to a contract by RKO Studios who promoted her as “the next Garbo”. She and Hasso divorced in 1941.

Her first role of note was as “Mademoiselle” in Heaven Can Wait. Her other roles during the 1940s included The Seventh Cross, Johnny Angel, The House on 92nd St., A Scandal in Paris and A Double Life .

Lester Alvin Burnett, better known as Smiley Burnette, was a popular American country music performer and a comedic actor in Western films, playing sidekick to Gene Autry and other B-movie cowboys, and on radio and TV. He was also a prolific singer-songwriter who could play as many as 100 musical instruments, some simultaneously. His career beginning in 1934 spanned four decades, including a regular role on CBS-TV's Petticoat Junction in the 1960s.

Lester A. Burnett was born in Summum, Illinois, on March 18, 1911. He grew up in Ravenwood, Missouri. He began singing as a child and learned to play a wide variety of instruments by ear; yet never learned to read or write music. In his teens he worked in vaudeville, and starting in 1929, at the state's first commercial radio station, WDZ-AM in Tuscola, Illinois.

Burnette came by his nickname while creating a character for a WDZ children's program. He was reading Mark Twain?s "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" at the time, which included a character named Jim Smiley. He named the radio character Mr. Smiley, but Burnette soon adopted the moniker as his own and dropped the salutation.

His break came in December 1933 when he was hired by Gene Autry to play accordion on National Barn Dance on Chicago's WLS-AM, where Autry was the major star. As sound films became popular, Hollywood sought musical talent for Western films; and in 1934, producer Nat Levine cast the duo in their film debut as part of a bluegrass band in Mascot Pictures' In Old Santa Fe, starring Ken Maynard. Burnette sang and played accordion and the film included two of his compositions.

See the Hollywood Walk of Fame Star Ceremony announcement
 

Award winning actor Sir Ben Kingsley was honored with the 2,410th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Leron Gubler, President and CEO of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, presided over the ceremony. Guests included Jerry Bruckheimer, Shohreh Aghdashloo, and Bruce Willis.

6931 Hollywood Boulevard on May 27, 2010.

BIOGRAPHY

After earning an Academy Award®, two Golden Globes and two BAFTA Awards for his riveting portrayal of Indian social leader Mahatma Gandhi, Sir Ben Kingsley continues to bring unequaled detail and nuance to each role. In 1984, Kingsley was awarded the Padma Sri by Indira Gandhi and the government of India. Kingsley went on to earn three additional Oscar nominations for Bugsy (1991), Sexy Beast (2000) and House of Sand and Fog (2003). His roles have been as diverse as his talents, from a sturdy vice president in Dave to the scheming Fagin in Oliver Twist. Since being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in the New Year's Eve Honors List 2001, Kingsley has continued to earn honors as a truly international star.

Kingsley stared in Jerry Bruckheimer's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a film from Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Films that hit U.S. theaters on May 28, 2010. Kingsley was recently seen starring in Martin Scorsese's 1950s drama Shutter Island, with Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo and Michelle Williams. He will next be working on another Scorsese film, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Also upcoming is the emotionally riveting Teen Patti.

He recently was the star of the sexually-charged Elegy opposite Penelope Cruz and directed by Isabel Coixet and for which he was nominated British Actor of the Year by the London Critics Circle Film Awards. He starred in two films at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival that give further perspective to his work: The Audience Award-winning and Grand Jury Prize- nominated The Wackness, in which he plays a drug-addled psychiatrist opposite Josh Peck, Famke Janssen, Olivia Thirlby and Mary-Kate Olsen; and the crime thriller Transsiberian, as a mysterious traveler opposite Woody Harrelson. He also starred in 50 Dead Men, a thriller set against the dangerous backdrop of 1980s Ireland, and the more lighthearted crime comedy War, Inc. opposite John Cusack.

Steeped in British theatre, Kingsley marked the beginning of his professional acting career with his acceptance by the Royal Shakespeare Company in l967. From roles in A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, Brutus in Julius Caesar and the title roles in Othello and Hamlet, among others, his more recent and diverse stage roles include those in The Country Wife, The Cherry Orchard, A Betrothal and Waiting for Godot.

Kingsley's film career began in l972 with the thriller Fear Is the Key, but his first major role came a decade later in the epic Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough. He followed this Oscar-winning performance with such early films as Betrayal, Turtle Diary, Harem, Pascali's Island, Without A Clue (as Dr. Watson to Michael Caine's Sherlock Holmes) and The Children opposite Kim Novak. During the '90s Kingsley distinguished himself through such roles as Mayer Lansky in Bugsy, Sneakers, Searching For Bobby Fischer and Dave. In 1994 he was nominated for a BAFTA Award for his memorable supporting role as Itzhak Stern in Steven Spielberg's seven-time Oscar winner Schindler's List.

During the past decade, Ben Kingsley has remained a coveted and ubiquitous talent. Beginning with such films as Rules of Engagement, What Planet Are You From? and an Oscar-nominated role as a brutal gangster in Sexy Beast. Among his films in the last several years are Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist, the crime drama Lucky Number Slevin, John Dahl's You Kill Me and the Roman empire saga The Last Legion.