25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording Permalink

Sharon Stone

October 25, 2019

Sharon Yvonne Stone is an American actress, film producer, and former fashion model. She achieved international recognition for her role in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama for her performance in Casino.

Stone was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania. The second of four children, she is the daughter of Dorothy, an accountant and homemaker, and Joseph Stone, a tool and die manufacturer. Stone graduated in 1975 from Saegertown High School in Saegertown, Pennsylvania, graduating early in an accelerated study program in conjunction with Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. After graduating from high school, she briefly attended Edinboro.

As a teenager, she worked at a fast food restaurant.

Stone won the title of Miss Crawford County in Meadville. One of the pageant judges said she should quit school and move to New York City to become a fashion model. When her mother heard this, she agreed, and, in 1977 Stone left Meadville, moving in with an aunt in New Jersey. Within four days of her arrival in New Jersey, she was signed by Ford Modeling Agency in New York.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording Permalink

Sarah Vaughan

October 25, 2019

Sarah Lois Vaughan was an American jazz singer, described by Scott Yanow as having "one of the most wondrous voices of the 20th century". She had a contralto vocal range.

Nicknamed "Sailor", "Sassy" and "The Divine One", Sarah Vaughan was a Grammy Award winner. The National Endowment for the Arts bestowed upon her its "highest honor in jazz", the NEA Jazz Masters Award, in 1989.

Sarah Vaughan's father, Asbury "Jake" Vaughan, was a carpenter by trade and played guitar and piano. Her mother, Ada Vaughan, was a laundress and sang in the church choir. Jake and Ada Vaughan migrated to Newark from Virginia during the First World War. Sarah was their only natural child, although in the 1960s they adopted Donna, the child of a woman who traveled on the road with Sarah Vaughan.

The Vaughans lived in a house on Brunswick Street, in Newark, New Jersey, for Sarah's entire childhood. Jake Vaughan was deeply religious and the family was very active in the New Mount Zion Baptist Church on 186 Thomas Street. Sarah began piano lessons at the age of seven, sang in the church choir and occasionally played piano for rehearsals and services.

25 Oct 2019
Recording, Television Permalink

Sean Diddy Combs

October 25, 2019

Sean "Diddy" Combs was honored with the 2,362nd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Leron Gubler, President and CEO of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, presided over the event. Guests included Jamie Foxx and Antonio "L.A." Reid.

6801 Hollywood Boulevard on May 2, 2008.

Beginning with his acting debut in the film "Made," Combs went on to receive critical acclaim for his supporting role in "Monster's Ball" opposite Halle Berry and made a successful Broadway debut starring in the lead role of Walter Lee in the classic Lorraine Hansberry tale, A Raisin in the Sun. Recently, Combs starred and executive-produced a television adaptation of the critically acclaimed movie adaptation of the of the Tony® award-winning Broadway revival which aired on ABC. A Raisin in the Sun will debut on DVD May 13, from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Additionally, he has also appeared in the highly anticipated prequel "Carlito's Way: The Beginning" directed by Brian De Palma. Adding to his roster of television ventures, Combs joined the HBO family in June 2005 with the series "P. Diddy Presents the Bad Boys of Comedy" which features the hottest up-and-coming urban comedians performing in front of a live audience.

Sean Combs, the CEO and founder of Bad Boy Worldwide Entertainment and Sean Combs Enterprises, is multifaceted entertainment powerhouse. Sean "Diddy" Combs was recently declared "One of the Most Influential Businessmen in the World" by Time Magazine and CNN. Combs oversees one of the world's preeminent urban entertainment companies, encompassing a broad range of businesses including recording, music publishing, artist management, television and film production, recording facility, apparel and restaurants.

Music has always been at the heart of his career. He is a recognized producer, solo artist and performer, who has produced chart-topping hit songs for music superstars including Aretha Franklin, Sting, Jennifer Lopez, Mary J. Blige, Janet Jackson and the Notorious B.I.G. Combs, has also released four multi-platinum albums and won his third Grammy Award for the #1 song "Shake Ya Tailfeather" from the Bad Boys II soundtrack, which he executive produced. In 2006, Combs released Press Play, his hugely anticipated follow up album which debuted at the top of the charts awarding him the number one album in the country.

Combs' success in music quickly transitioned into the small screen. Combs and MTV have always had a special relationship beginning with his famous videos and show stopping VMA performances. In June 2003 he teamed up with MTV to find the next big hip hop group with Making the Band 2 which aired for three seasons. Making the Band 3 premiered in Spring, 2005 and Combs brought a new installment of the hit show recently with the 4th installment. Making The Band 4, in search of an all girls group premiered in Jan 2008. This time around platinum recording artists, and winners of Making The Band 3, Danity Kane join the guys in the same house to begin working on their respective albums.

Not only has Combs made an indelible mark on the worlds of entertainment, he continues to break new ground in the fashion industry. Since the inception of his label, Sean John Clothing, Combs has been praised for his innovative and sexy approach to fashion. His efforts were recognized in 2004 when he was awarded the prestigious "Perry Ellis Menswear Designer of the Year Award" from the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA). Additionally, Combs launched his first fragrance, "Unforgivable" in 2006 with cosmetics giant Estee Lauder which quickly became the number one selling fragrance across America followed by "Unforgivable Woman" in 2007.

In 2007 Combs– who indirectly helped put high end liquor on the map through mentions in hip hop songs and product placements in music videos– took on the official job with Ciroc Vodka when he announced a groundbreaking, strategic alliance with the liquor company, managing all branding, marketing, advertising and public relations initiatives for Ciroc Vodka.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Sessue Hayakawa

October 25, 2019

Sessue Hayakawa was a Japanese and American Issei actor who starred in American, Japanese, French, German, and British films. Hayakawa was the first and one of the few Asian actors to find stardom in the United States as well as Europe. Between the mid-1910s and the late 1920s, he was as well known as actors Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. He was one of the highest paid stars of his time; making $5,000 a week in 1915, and $2 million a year via his own production company during the 1920s. He starred in over 80 movies and has two films in the U.S. National Film Registry. His international stardom transitioned both silent films and talkies.

Of his English-language films, Hayakawa is probably best known for his role as Colonel Saito in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, for which he received a nomination for Academy Award Best Supporting Actor in 1957. In addition to his film acting career, Hayakawa was a theatre actor, film and theatre producer, film director, screenwriter, novelist, martial artist, and an ordained Zen master.

Hayakawa was born Kintaro Hayakawa in Nanaura Village, of Chikura Town, of Minamibos? City, in Chiba Prefecture, Japan on June 10, 1889, the second eldest son of the provincial governor.

From early on Hayakawa was groomed for a career as a naval officer. However at the age of 17, he took a schoolmate's dare to swim to the bottom of a lagoon and ruptured his eardrum. He had been studying at the Naval Academy in Etajima but his record of perfect health was now shattered and he failed the navy's rigorous physical. His formerly proud father was now ashamed and embarrassed of his son. Their relationship became strained.

25 Oct 2019
Television Permalink

Sharon Gless

October 25, 2019

Sharon Marguerite Gless is an American character actress of stage, film and television, who is best known for her roles as Maggie Philbin on Switch, as Sgt. Christine Cagney in the police procedural drama series Cagney & Lacey and as Debbie Novotny in the Showtime cable television series Queer as Folk. She is an Emmy Award winner currently playing Madeline Westen on Burn Notice. She played Jane Juska in A Round-Heeled Woman, a stage adaptation by Jane Prowse, the first production of which ran in San Francisco in early 2010.

A fifth-generation Californian, Sharon Gless was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Marjorie McCarthy and sportswear manufacturing executive, Dennis J. Gless. Her maternal grandfather was Neil McCarthy, a prominent Los Angeles attorney for Howard Hughes who also had a large clientele of major film studio executives and actors. Wanting to become an actress, she sought her grandfather’s advice and he told her: “It’s a filthy business. You stay out of it” but a few years later when she spoke to him again about acting he encouraged her, and gave her money for acting class. She worked as a secretary for the advertising agencies Grey Advertising and Young & Rubicam, and then for the independent movie production companies Sassafras Films and General Film Corporation. After deciding to switch to acting, Gless took classes and in 1974 signed a 10-year contract with Universal Studios. She has described herself as the last of the studio contract players ? a salaried, Old Hollywood apprentice system which Universal was the last to employ?.

At the beginning of her career, Gless appeared in numerous television series and TV movies, such as Revenge of the Stepford Wives, Faraday and Company with Dan Daily and James Naughton and Emergency! She played some smaller parts in Marcus Welby, M.D., until being offered the role of Kathleen Faverty, a part she played from 1974 to 1976. All of this was in-between receiving a variety of guest-starring roles on television, while offering the part of the classy young secretary, Maggie Philbin, opposite Eddie Albert and Robert Wagner on the CBS private detective/con artist series Switch, which was her first long-running TV series in her long career. Despite being a newcomer on the show, she got along very well with both Albert and Wagner, both on- and off-screen. When that show was canceled after the third season, she thanked both Albert and Wagner for giving her a jump start to her career.

While under contract with Universal, she co-starred with John Schuck in the 1979 television sitcom, Turnabout, which failed to be a ratings blockbuster.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television 1 Comment Permalink

Samuel Z. Arkoff

October 25, 2019 1 Comment

Samuel Zachary Arkoff was  honored with Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

View the event invitation

View the Samuel Arkoff Walk of Fame press release

Samuel Zachary Arkoff  was an American producer of B movies. Born in Fort Dodge, Iowa to a Russian Jewish family, Arkoff first studied to be a lawyer. Along with business partner James H. Nicholson and producer-director Roger Corman, he produced eighteen films. In the 1950s, he and Nicholson founded the American Releasing Corporation, which later became known as American International Pictures and produced over 125 films before the company’s demise in the 1980s. These films were mostly low-budget, with production completed in a few days, though nearly all of them became profitable.

Arkoff is also credited with starting a few genres, such as the Beach Party and outlaw biker movies, and his company played a substantial part in bringing the horror film genre to a novel level with successes such as Blacula, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and The Thing with Two Heads. American International Pictures movies starred many established actors in principal or cameo roles, such as Boris Karloff, Elsa Lanchester and Vincent Price, as well as up-and-comers who later became household names, including Don Johnson, Nick Nolte, Diane Ladd, and most notably Jack Nicholson. A number of actors shunned or overlooked by most of Hollywood during the 1960s and 1970s, such as Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper, also found work in one or more of Arkoff’s productions. Arkoff’s most financially successful film was the 1979 adaptation of Jay Anson’s book The Amityville Horror.

Not long after American International Pictures went out of business, Arkoff founded Arkoff International Pictures.

Arkoff began his career in Hollywood as a producer of The Hank McCune Show, a seminal sitcom produced in 1951. He innovated the TV laugh track rather than go to the expense of a studio audience.

In 2000, Arkoff was featured alongside former collaborators including Roger Corman, Dick Miller and Peter Bogdanovich in the documentary SCHLOCK! The Secret History of American Movies, a film about the rise and fall of American exploitation cinema.

Arkoff died in 2001, within weeks of his wife’s own death.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording Permalink

Sammy Cahn

October 25, 2019

Sammy Cahn was an American lyricist, songwriter and musician. He is best known for his romantic lyrics to films and Broadway songs, as well as stand-alone songs premiered by recording companies in the Greater Los Angeles Area. He and his collaborators began a series of hit recordings with Frank Sinatra during the singer's tenure at Capitol Records, but also enjoyed hits with Dean Martin, Doris Day and many others. He played the piano and violin. He won the Academy Award four times for his songs, including the popular song "Three Coins in the Fountain".

Cahn was born as Samuel Cohen in the Lower East Side of New York City, the only son of Abraham and Elka Riss Cohen, who were Jewish immigrants from Galicia, Poland. His sisters, Sadye, Pearl, Florence, and Evelyn, all studied the piano. His mother did not approve, for she thought the piano was a woman's instrument, so he took violin lessons. After three lessons and his bar mitzvah, he joined a small dixieland band called Pals of Harmony, who would tour the Catskill Mountains in the summer and do private parties. This new dream of Cahn's destroyed the hope that his parents had for him to be a professional man.

Some of the side jobs he had were violinist in a theater-pit orchestra, worked at a meat-packing plant, served as a movie-house usher, tinsmith, freight-elevator operator, restaurant cashier, and porter at a bindery. At age 16, he was watching vaudeville, which he had been a fan since the age of 10, and he witnessed Jack Osterman sing one of his songs. After this, he wrote his first lyric "Like Niagara Falls, I'm Falling for You." Years later he would say "I think a sense of vaudeville is very strong in anything I do, anything I write. They even call it 'a vaudeville finish,' and it comes through in many of my songs. Just sing the end of 'All the Way' or 'Three Coins in the Fountain'–'Make it mine, make it mine, MAKE IT MINE!' If you let people know they should applaud, they will applaud."

Much of Cahn's early work was written in partnership with Saul Chaplin. They first met when Cahn invited Chaplin to audition for him at the Henry Street Settlement. Cahn said "I'd learned a few chords on the piano, maybe two, so I'd already tried to write a song. Something I called 'Shake Your Head from Side to Side.'" Billed simply as "Cahn and Chaplin", they composed witty special material for Warner Brothers' musical short subjects, filmed at Warners' Vitaphone studio in Brooklyn, New York.

25 Oct 2019
Radio, Recording Permalink

Sammy Davis, Jr.

October 25, 2019

Samuel George “Sammy” Davis, Jr. was an American entertainer.

Primarily a dancer and singer, Davis was a childhood vaudevillian, and became known for his performances on Broadway and in Las Vegas, as a recording artist, television and film star, and the only black member of Frank Sinatra’s “Rat Pack”.

At the age of three Davis began his career in vaudeville with his father and “uncle” as the Will Mastin Trio, toured nationally, and after military service, returned to the trio. Davis became an overnight sensation following a nightclub performance at Ciro’s after the 1951 Academy Awards, with the trio, became a recording artist, and made his first film performances as an adult later that decade. Losing his left eye in a car accident in 1954, he converted to Judaism and appeared in the first Rat Pack movie, Ocean’s Eleven, in 1960. After a starring role on Broadway in 1956’s Mr Wonderful, Davis returned to the stage in 1964’s Golden Boy, and in 1966 had his own TV variety show, The Sammy Davis Jr. Show. Davis’s career slowed in the late sixties, but he had a hit record with “The Candy Man”, in 1972, and became a star in Las Vegas.

As an African-American, Davis was the victim of racism throughout his life, and was a large financial supporter of civil rights causes. Davis had a complex relationship with the black community, and attracted criticism after physically embracing Richard Nixon in 1970. One day on a golf course with Jack Benny, he was asked what his handicap was. “Handicap?” he asked. “Talk about handicap ? I’m a one-eyed Negro Jew.” This was to become a signature comment, recounted in his autobiography, and in countless articles.

25 Oct 2019
Radio, Recording, Television Permalink

Sammy Kaye

October 25, 2019

Sammy Kaye, born Samuel Zarnocay, Jr., was an American bandleader and songwriter, whose tag line, “Swing and sway with Sammy Kaye”, became one of the most famous of the Big Band Era.

Kaye, born in Lakewood, Ohio, graduated from Rocky River High School in Rocky River, Ohio in 1927. At Ohio University in Athens, Ohio he was a member of Theta Chi Fraternity. Kaye could play the saxophone and the clarinet, but he never featured himself as a soloist on either one.

A leader of one of the so-called “Sweet” bands of the Big Band Era, he made a large number of records for Vocalion Records, RCA Victor, Columbia Records, Bell Records, and the American Decca record label. He was also a hit on radio. Kaye was known for an audience participation gimmick called “So You Want To Lead A Band?” where audience members would be called onto stage in an attempt to conduct the orchestra, with the possibility of winning batons. Kaye was also known for his use of “singing of song titles”, which was emulated by Kay Kyser and Blue Barron.

Shortly after the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941, Sammy Kaye wrote the music and Don Reid wrote the words to “Remember Pearl Harbor”. His NBC Radio show was interrupted by the announcement of the attack. On December 17, 1942, Decca Records recorded the song, with Sammy Kaye’s Swing and Sway Band and The Glee Club.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Sam Wood

October 25, 2019

Samuel Grosvenor Wood was an American film director, and producer, who was best known for directing such Hollywood hits as A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and The Pride of the Yankees. He was also involved in a few acting and writing projects.

Wood began his career as an actor, and worked for Cecil B. De Mille as an assistant in 1915. A solo director by 1919, Wood worked throughout the 1920s directing some of Paramount Pictures’s biggest stars, among them Gloria Swanson and Wallace Reid. He joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1927, working with Marion Davies, Clark Gable, Marie Dressler, and Jimmy Durante. In the 1940s, Wood directed Ginger Rogers through her Oscar-winning performance in Kitty Foyle. At one point, he served as president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.

Wood was married to Clara L. Roush from 1908 to his death in 1949. One of Wood’s daughters was film and television actress K. T. Stevens who started her career in one of her father’s films, Peck’s Bad Boy, credited as ‘Baby Gloria Wood’. His oldest daughter was also an actress, Jeane Wood.