25 Oct 2019
Television Permalink

David Hasselhoff

October 25, 2019

David Michael Hasselhoff, nicknamed “The Hoff,” is an American actor, singer, producer and businessman. He is best known for his lead roles as Michael Knight in the popular 1980s U.S. series Knight Rider and as L.A. County Lifeguard Mitch Buchannon in the series Baywatch. Hasselhoff also produced Baywatch for a number of seasons in the 1990s up until 2001, when the series ended with Baywatch Hawaii. Hasselhoff also crossed over to a music career during the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s. He was noted for his performance at the Berlin Wall in 1989; he enjoyed a short lived success as a singer primarily in German-speaking Europe. More recently, Hasselhoff has been involved with talent shows such as NBC’s America’s Got Talent from 2006-2009. Hasselhoff was the first celebrity eliminated from eleventh season of Dancing with the Stars, on September 21, 2010.

Hasselhoff portrayed Dr. William “Snapper” Foster, Jr. on the soap opera The Young and the Restless from 1975 to 1982. In 1979, he played the role of Simon in Starcrash. He launched his singing career with guest appearances on the first season of children’s program Kids Incorporated, performing ‘Do You Love Me.’ He guest starred on an episode of Diff’rent Strokes as himself in 1984.

Hasselhoff then starred in the science-fiction series Knight Rider from 1982 to 1986. He has described Knight Rider as more than a TV show: “It’s a phenomenon. It’s bigger than Baywatch ever was.” On the success of Knight Rider ? “It’s because it was about saving lives, not taking lives, and it was how one man really can make a difference. And we had a blast making it, and we made sure nobody died on the show; we made sure nobody ever drowned on Baywatch.”. He describes the acting he has done as “a little more difficult than if you had a regularly well-written script ? like, if I was going to be in, say, Reservoir Dogs, or The Godfather, or Dances with Wolves or Lawrence of Arabia or ER, I had to talk to a car.”

While his star rose, fell and rose again in the US, Hasselhoff’s popularity remained a little longer in Europe during the end of the 80s. Hasselhoff had two number-one hits in the German pop charts in 1989, the first of which very much resonated with the fall of the Berlin Wall at that time. In 1988, David trained with Patsy Swayze at Debby Reynolds Studio in North Hollywood, California for his Austrian segment of his Knight Rider tour.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

David Janssen

October 25, 2019

David Janssen was an American film and television actor who is best known for his starring role as Dr. Richard Kimble in the television series The Fugitive and as Harry Orwell on Harry O.

Janssen was born as David Harold Meyer in Naponee, Nebraska to Harold Edward Meyer, a banker and Berniece Graf. Following his parents’ divorce in 1935, his mother moved with five-year-old David to Los Angeles, California. She eventually married, to Eugene Janssen on September 29, 1940 in Los Angeles. Young David used his stepfather’s name after he entered show business as a child. He attended Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. His first film part was at the age of 13, and by the age of 25 he had appeared in twenty films and served two years as an enlisted man in the United States Army. During his Army days Janssen became friends with fellow enlistees, Martin Milner and Clint Eastwood.

Janssen appeared in many television series before he landed programs of his own. In 1956, he and Peter Breck appeared in John Bromfield’s syndicated series Sheriff of Cochise in the episode “The Turkey Farmers”. Later, he guest starred on NBC’s medical drama The Eleventh Hour in the role of Hal Kincaid in the 1962 episode “Make Me a Place”, with series co-stars Wendell Corey and Jack Ging. He joined Milner in a 1962 episode of Route 66 as the character Kamo in the episode “One Tiger to a Hill.”

Janssen starred in four television series of his own:

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

David L. Wolper

October 25, 2019

David Lloyd Wolper was an American television and film producer, responsible for shows such as Roots, The Thorn Birds, North & South, L.A. Confidential, and the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. He also produced numerous documentaries and documentary series like Biography, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Appointment with Destiny, This is Elvis, Four Days in November, Imagine: John Lennon, and others. He directed the 1959 documentary The Race for Space, which was nominated for an Academy Award. His 1971 film about the study of insects The Hellstrom Chronicle won an Academy Award.

For his work on television, he had received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The pre-1968 library is owned by Cube Entertainment, the post-1970 library is owned by Warner Bros.

25 Oct 2019
Radio, Television Permalink

David Milch

October 25, 2019

David S. Milch is an American writer and producer of television series. He has created several television shows, including NYPD Blue and Deadwood.

Milch graduated summa cum laude from Yale where he won the Tinker Prize in English and was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter, along with future U.S. president George W. Bush. He earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.

To avoid the draft during the Vietnam War, Milch enrolled in Yale Law School, but was expelled for shooting out a police car siren with a shotgun. Milch then worked as a writing teacher and lecturer in English literature at Yale. During his teaching career, he assisted Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks in the writing of several college textbooks on literature. Milch’s poetry and fiction have been published in The Atlantic Monthly and the Southern Review.

In 1982, Milch wrote a script for Hill Street Blues which became the episode “Trial by Fury”. This began his career in television. He worked five seasons on Hill Street Blues as executive story editor and then as executive producer. Milch earned two more Writers Guild Awards, a second Humanitas prize, and another Emmy while working on that show.

25 Oct 2019
Television Permalink

David Nelson

October 25, 2019

David Oswald Nelson is an American actor, director, producer, and son of bandleader/TV actor Ozzie Nelson and singer Harriet Hilliard and the older brother of late singer Ricky Nelson.

Born in New York City, David and Ricky, along with their parents, appeared on the long-running sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet in the 1950s and 1960s. During the run of the series, Nelson directed several episodes. After the series’ end, Nelson continued acting, directing and producing. Nelson’s last film appearance was in Cry-Baby .

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

David Niven

October 25, 2019

James David Graham Niven, known as David Niven, was a British actor and novelist, best known for his roles as Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days and Sir Charles Lytton, a.k.a. “the Phantom,” in The Pink Panther. He was awarded the 1958 Academy Award for Best Actor in Separate Tables.

David Niven was born in London, England. He was the son of William Edward Graham Niven and Henrietta Julia Degacher. He was named David for his birth on Saint David’s Day. Niven often claimed that he was born in Kirriemuir, in the county of Angus in 1909, but after his death, his birth certificate showed this was not true.

Henrietta was of French and British ancestry. She was born in Wales, the daughter of army officer William Degacher and Julia Caroline, daughter of Lieutenant General James Webber Smith. Her father, born William Hitchcock, had assumed his mother’s maiden name of Degacher in 1874.

William Niven, David Niven’s legal father, was of Scottish descent; his paternal grandfather, David Graham Niven, was from St. Martins, a village in Perthshire. William served in the Berkshire Yeomanry in the First World War and was killed during the Gallipoli Campaign on 21 August 1915. He was buried in Green Hill Cemetery, Turkey in the Special Memorial Section in Plot F. 10.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

David O. Selznick

October 25, 2019

David O. Selznick, born David Selznick, was an American film producer. He is best known for producing Gone with the Wind and Rebecca, both of which earned him an Oscar for Best Picture.

Selznick was born to a Jewish family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of silent movie distributor Lewis J. Selznick and Florence A. Selznick. Selznick added the “O” to his name later on a whim.

He studied at Columbia University and worked as an apprentice for his father until the elder’s bankruptcy in 1923. In 1926, Selznick moved to Hollywood, and with the help of his father’s connections, got a job as an assistant story editor at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He left MGM for Paramount Pictures in 1928, where he worked until 1931, when he joined RKO as Head of Production. His years at RKO were fruitful, and he worked on many films, including A Bill of Divorcement, What Price Hollywood?, Rockabye, Our Betters, and King Kong. While at RKO, he also gave George Cukor his directing break. In 1933 he returned to MGM to establish a second prestige production unit, parallel to that of Irving Thalberg, who was in poor health. His unit’s output included Dinner at Eight, David Copperfield, Anna Karenina and A Tale of Two Cities. Despite his successes at MGM, Paramount Pictures, and RKO Pictures, Selznick longed to be an independent producer with his own studio. In 1935 he realized that goal by forming Selznick International Pictures and distributing his films through United Artists. His successes continued with classics such as The Garden of Allah, The Prisoner of Zenda, A Star Is Born, Nothing Sacred, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Young in Heart, Made for Each Other, Intermezzo and Gone with the Wind, which remains one of the all-time highest grossing films. It also won seven additional Oscars and two special awards. Selznick also won the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award that same year.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

David Powell

October 25, 2019

David Powell was a Scottish born stage and later film actor of the silent era. In his twenties Powell appeared in stage companies of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Ellen Terry and Johnston Forbes-Robertson. In 1907 he appeared with Terry on Broadway in the first American presentation of Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. He later appeared with Forbes-Robertson in the United States and decided to stay in that country.

In 1912 Powell started his film career in one to three reel shorts. Possessed of dark good looks and shiny dark eyes, he was often cast opposite or in support of well-known star actresses of the time. Many of these actresses include Mary Pickford, Clara Kimball Young, Billie Burke, Hazel Dawn, Ann Murdock, Alice Brady, Edna Goodrich, Elsie Ferguson, Mae Murray, Mary Glynne and Ann Forrest amongst others. At the beginning of the 1920s he starred in several Paramount produced English films. Alfred Hitchcock was the title card writer for several of these films. As with other silent screen performers Powell has a lot of his filmography missing. Extant films that feature Powell are The Dawn of A Tomorrow, Less Than Dust, Idols of Clay, The Virtuous Liar, The Green Goddess, The Average Woman. Several of these however are in film vaults and foreign archives.

Powell died of pneumonia in April 1925 at the age of 42. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

25 Oct 2019
Recording, Television Permalink

David Carradine

October 25, 2019

David Carradine, born John Arthur Carradine, was an American character actor, best known for his role as Kwai Chang Caine in the 1970s television series, Kung Fu and its 1990s sequel series, ‘. He was a member of a productive acting dynasty that began with his father, John Carradine. His acting career, which included major and minor roles on stage, television and cinema, spanned over four decades. A prolific “B” movie actor, he appeared in more than 100 feature films and was nominated four times for a Golden Globe Award. The latest nomination was for his part in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

Film projects that featured Carradine continued to be released long after his death. These posthumous credits were from a variety of genres including horror, action, western, martial arts, drama, science fiction and documentary. In addition to his acting career, Carradine was also a musician and pursued a directing career. Influenced by his most popular acting role, he studied martial arts. The child of a frequently married actor, “Jack”, as Carradine was known in his youth, had an unstable childhood. This instability would continue throughout his life as he himself was married several times. He was also frequently arrested and prosecuted for a variety of offenses which often involved substance abuse. His death occurred in June 2009, under unusual circumstances.

He was born John Arthur Carradine”’ in Hollywood, California, the son of Ardanelle “Abigail” and noted American actor John Carradine. He was a brother of Bruce, half-brother of Keith, Christopher and Robert Carradine, and an uncle of Ever Carradine and Martha Plimpton. He was the great-grandson of Methodist evangelical author Beverly Carradine and the grandnephew of artist Will Foster.

“Jack” Carradine’s formative years were turbulent. Both of his parents repeatedly married. He was the product of his mother’s second marriage of three, and his father’s first of four. At the time his parents married each other, his mother already had a son, Bruce, by her first husband, whom John adopted. John Carradine planned a large family but, as his son explained in his autobiography, after his wife had a series of miscarriages, he discovered that she had had repeated illegal abortions without his knowledge. This rendered her unable to carry a baby to full term. It was with this backdrop of marital discord that at the age of 5, Jack almost succeeded in committing suicide by hanging. He said that the incident followed his discovery that he and Bruce had different biological fathers. He added that, “My father saved me, and then confiscated my comic book collection and burned it