25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording Permalink

Clint Black

October 25, 2019

Clint Patrick Black is an American country music singer-songwriter, record producer, multi-instrumentalist and occasional actor. Signed to RCA Records in 1989, Black made his debut with his Killin’ Time album, which produced four straight Number One singles on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks charts. Although his momentum gradually slowed throughout the 1990s, Black consistently charted hit songs into the 2000s. He has amassed more than thirty singles on the U.S. Billboard country charts, in addition to releasing nine studio albums and several compilation albums. In 2003, Black founded his own record label, Equity Music Group. Black has also ventured into acting, having made a cameo appearance in the 1994 film Maverick, as well as a starring role in 1998’s Still Holding On: The Legend of Cadillac Jack.

Clint Black was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, one of four children born to G.A. and Ann Black. The family moved back to Texas, where G.A. Black had been raised, before Clint was one year old. He was raised in Katy, Texas. Music was always present in the house. Black taught himself to play harmonica before he was 13, and at 14 wrote his first song. His father remarked that it was at that age that the parents “first noticed that he had a great voice”. By fifteen, Black had learned to play guitar. As a teenager Black joined his elder brothers, Kevin and Bryan, in their small band. On Saturday afternoons, the family would host backyard barbecues and invite the neighborhood to listen to the boys sing. Some weekends would attract up to 70 people. Black eventually dropped out of high school to play with his brothers, before becoming a solo act.

Black was initially drawn to a variety of musical genres. According to his father, he chose to focus on country music in the early 1980s, after singers George Strait and Reba McEntire transformed the genre. For six years, Black supported himself as a construction worker, bait cutter, and fishing guide, while singing at various lounges as a solo singer and guitarist. At one of the gigs he met another guitarist, Hayden Nicholas. The two men connected musically and began a song writing partnership that would last decades. In the late 1980s, Black delivered a demo of their collaboration “Nobody’s Home” to record promoter Sammy Alfano. Within two days of that delivery, Black was invited to a meeting with Bill Ham, who managed ZZ Top.

Black soon signed with RCA Records, at that time considered one of the “most aggressive” labels in country music. His first album, Killin’ Time, was released in 1989. Each song on the album was penned at least in part by Black; four of them were attributed solely to him, while the rest were collaborations with Nicholas. In a departure from most other country albums, Black used his road band instead of session musicians to record Killin’ Time. The album was a critical and commercial success, reaching Number One on the Billboard Country Albums chart and certified platinum in 1990. The first single, “A Better Man”, reached number 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs in early June. This marked the first time in 14 years that a debut single by a male artist had peaked at the top of the chart. In total, five singles off of his debut album reached number 1, the first time any country artist had accomplished this feat. Black swept the Country Music Association’s awards in 1989, winning in six different categories, including the Horizon Award for best newcomer. At the end of the year, his singles, “A Better Man” and “Killin’ Time” place number 1 and number 2 on the year-end country singles charts. It had been 36 years since another artist had claimed both top spots in a single year. Looking back at the early stages of his career, Black recalled: “‘At one point, I knew I crossed this line out of obscurity and I felt like no matter what happened from that point on I would always be remembered for “Killin’ Time.” There was this kind of mixed feeling of remorse and excitement.'”

25 Oct 2019
Recording, Television Permalink

Clint Walker

October 25, 2019

In memory of actor and Walk of Famer Clint Walker,flowers were placed on his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Tuesday, May 22, 2018 at 4 p.m. The star in the category of Television is located at 1501 Vine Street.

“Clint, you will be missed! Rest in peace.” Ana Martinez, Producer of the Hollywood Walk of Fame signed the card on behalf of the Hollywood Historic Trust and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

The Hollywood Walk of Fame and the Hollywood Sign are registered trademarks of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. 

Norman Eugene "Clint" Walker is an American actor best known for his cowboy role as "Cheyenne Bodie" in the TV Western series, Cheyenne.

Walker was born in Hartford, Illinois; he was a twin, and is of one-quarter Cherokee descent. He left school to work at a factory and on a river boat, then joined the United States Merchant Marine at the age of seventeen in the last months of World War II. After leaving the Merchant Marine, he labored at odd jobs in Brownwood, Texas, Long Beach, California, and Las Vegas, where he worked as a doorman at the Sands Hotel. He also was employed as a sheet-metal worker and a nightclub bouncer.

In Los Angeles, he was hired by Cecil B. DeMille to appear in The Ten Commandments. A friend in the film industry helped get him a few bit parts that brought him to the attention of Warner Bros., which was developing a western style television series.

Walker's good looks and imposing physique, he stood 6 feet, 6

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording Permalink

Clive Davis

October 25, 2019

Clive Davis is an American record producer, executive and music industry executive. He has won multiple Grammy awards and is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a non-performer. From 1967-72 he was the President of Columbia Records, was the founder and president of Arista Records in the late 1970s through 2000 until founding J Records. From 2002 until April 2008, Davis was the Chairman and CEO of the RCA Music Group, Chairman and CEO of J Records, and Chairman and CEO of BMG North America. Currently Davis is the Chief Creative Officer of Sony Music Entertainment Worldwide. He currently plays a part in the careers of Alicia Keys, Kelly Clarkson, Harry Connick, Jr., Leona Lewis, Barry Manilow, and Whitney Houston.

Davis was born in Brooklyn, New York to a Jewish family, the son of Herman and Florence Davis. After spending four of his earliest years in England, Davis was raised in the middle-class neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. He received a full scholarship to New York University College of Arts and Science, where he graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa in 1953. He then received a full scholarship to Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Board of Student Advisers and graduated in 1956. He practiced law in a small firm in New York, then moved on to the firm of Rosenman, Colin, Kaye, Petschek, and Freund two years later, where partner Ralph Colin had CBS as client. Hired by a former colleague at the firm, Harvey Schein, Davis became assistant counsel of CBS subsidiary Columbia Records at the age of twenty-eight.

Davis became a protegé of CBS Records President Goddard Lieberson, and began to climb the ranks of Columbia/CBS. In 1967, he became president of Columbia Records and became interested in the newest generation of folk rock and rock and roll. One of his earliest pop signings was the British folk-rock musician Donovan, who enjoyed a string of successful hit singles and albums released in the USA on the Epic label.

In June 1967, at the urging of his friend and business associate Lou Adler, Davis attended the Monterey Pop Festival. He immediately signed Janis Joplin with Big Brother & the Holding Company, and Columbia went on to sign Laura Nyro, Jimmie Spheeris, Electric Flag, Santana, The Chambers Brothers, Bruce Springsteen, Andy Pratt, Chicago, Billy Joel, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Pink Floyd. The company, which had previously avoided rock music, doubled its market share in three years. One of the biggest recordings released during Davis’ tenure at Columbia was Lynn Anderson’s “Rose Garden”, in late 1970. It was Davis who insisted “Rose Garden” be the country singer’s next single release. The song reached number one in 16 countries around the world and remained the biggest selling album by a female country artist between 1971 and 1997.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Radio Permalink

Claire Windsor

October 25, 2019

Claire Windsor was a notable American film actress of the silent screen era.

Windsor was born Clara Viola Cronk in 1892 to George Edwin and Rosella R. Fearing Cronk in Marvin, Phillips County, Kansas of Scandinavian heritage. Her parents later moved to Cawker City, Kansas when she was a small child. She attended Washburn College in Topeka, Kansas from 1906 to 1907. An early marriage to a man named David Willis Bowes, took place on May 13, 1914 in Denver, Colorado, resulted in the birth of a son, David William Bowes, born on September 9, 1916, and the couple soon went their separate ways. Bowes officially filed for divorce on September 14, 1920. Claire moved to Seattle, Washington with her parents where she entered and won a beauty contest. On the advice of a friend, Claire moved to California in hopes of making a career as an actress in the new medium of motion pictures. Initially receiving only bit parts, she was soon spotted by Lois Weber, a highly regarded and influential director and producer of silent films for Paramount Pictures. Weber immediately signed Windsor to a contract. Windsor costarred with Louis Calhern in Weber’s The Blot. Claire Windsor’s film debut was in the 1920 release To Please One Woman which was only a modest success. To promote the nascent starlet, Paramount Pictures often paired Windsor with the newly divorced legendary actor Charlie Chaplin in publicity photographs, leading the tabloid press to give mention to the young actress in print. The publicity paid off; in 1922 the newly formed Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers began their annual WAMPAS Baby Stars awards and named Claire Windsor, along with Bessie Love, Lila Lee, Mary Philbin and Colleen Moore, as the year’s most promising starlets. That same year Claire signed a contract with Goldwyn Pictures Corporation.

In 1923, the former Ola Cronk officially began using the more matinee-friendly Claire Windsor as a moniker. Throughout the 1920s, Windsor established herself as highly regarded leading lady in film. As her career progressed, she was often typecast as the “upscale society girl”, often playing the part of a princess, or monied socialite. Critics lauded her elegant fashion sense, and Windsor became a noted trend-setter of 1920s fashion.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Clara Bow

October 25, 2019

Clara Gordon Bow was an American actress who rose to stardom in the silent film era of the 1920s. Her acting artistry and high spirits made her the premier flapper and the film It made her world famous as the “It Girl”. Bow came to personify the “roaring twenties” and is described as its leading sex symbol.

Bow was a third child; the first two, also daughters, born in 1903 and 1904, died in infancy. Her mother, Sarah Bow, was told by a doctor not to become pregnant again for fear the next baby may die as well. Despite this, Bow was conceived in fall of 1904. According to Bow her mother became “almost mad with apprehension and fear.” The delivery proved to be as difficult as feared; “At first, they thought I was dead. I don’t suppose two people ever looked death in the face more clearly than my mother and I the morning I was born. We were both given up, but somehow we struggled back to life.” Bow was born 1905 in a tenement in Brooklyn slums, New York.

At sixteen, Sarah fell from a second-story window and suffered a severe head injury. Later she was diagnosed with “psychosis due to epilepsy”, which apart from the seizures can cause disordered thoughts, delusional ideas, paranoia and aggressive behavior.

From her earliest years, Bow learned how to care for her mother during seizures and how to deal with psychotic and hostile episodes. She said her mother could be “mean” to her, but “didn’t mean to.she couldn’t help it”. Still, Bow felt deprived of her childhood, stating “As a kid I took care of my mother, she didn’t take care of me”. Sarah worsened gradually, and when she realized her daughter was set for a movie career, she told her she “would be much better off dead”. One night in February 1922, Bow awoke with a butcher knife against her throat; when her mother hesitated, Bow fended her off and locked her up. In the morning, Sarah had no recollection of the episode and was later committed to a charity hospital.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Clara Kimball Young

October 25, 2019

Clara Kimball Young was an American film actress, who was highly regarded and publicly popular in the early silent film era.

Clarisa Kimball was born in Chicago; her parents Edward M. Kimball and Pauline Maddern were travelling stock actors. She made her stage debut at the age of three, and throughout her early childhood travelled with her parents and acted with their theater company. She attended St. Francis Xavier’s Academy in Chicago and then was afterwards hired into a stock company and resumed her stage career, travelling extensively through the United States and playing various small town theaters.

Early in her career she met and married a fellow stock company actor named James Young. After sending a photograph to the Vitagraph motion picture studios Clara Kimball Young, as she was then known, and her husband were both offered yearly contracts in 1912.

In the new medium of motion pictures, and without much screen competition, Clara Kimball Young’s star at Vitagraph rose quickly. Young was predominantly cast in one and two reel roles as the virtuous heroine. By 1913 she had become one of the most popular leading ladies at Vitagraph and placed at number seventeen in a public popularity poll. Unfortunately, many of Young’s films from her early period with Vitagraph are now lost.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Clarence Brown

October 25, 2019

Clarence Brown was an American film director.

Born in Clinton, Massachusetts, to a cotton manufacturer, Brown moved to the South when he was eleven. He attended Knoxville High School and the University of Tennessee, both in Knoxville, Tennessee, graduating from the university at the age of 19 with two degrees in engineering. An early fascination in automobiles led Brown to a job with the Stevens-Duryea Company, then to his own Brown Motor Car Company in Alabama. He later abandoned the car dealership after developing an interest in motion pictures around 1913. He was hired by the Peerless Studio at Fort Lee, New Jersey, and became an assistant to the great French-born director Maurice Tourneur.

After serving in World War I, Brown was given his first co-directing credit for 1920s The Great Redeemer. Later that year, he directed a major portion of The Last of the Mohicans after Tourneur was injured in a fall.

Brown moved to Universal in 1924, and then to MGM, where he stayed until the mid-1950s. At MGM he was one of the main directors of their female stars–he directed both Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo six times. Garbo referred to Brown as her favorite director.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Clark Gable

October 25, 2019

William Clark Gable was an American film actor, nicknamed “The King of Hollywood” in his heyday. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Gable seventh among the greatest male stars of all time.

Gable’s most famous role was Rhett Butler in the 1939 Civil War epic film Gone with the Wind, in which he starred with Vivien Leigh. His performance earned him his third nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor; he won for It Happened One Night and was also nominated for Mutiny on the Bounty. Later performances were in Run Silent, Run Deep, a submarine war film, and his final film, The Misfits, which paired Gable with Marilyn Monroe in her last screen appearance.

During his long film career, Gable appeared opposite some of the most popular actresses of the time. Joan Crawford, who was his favorite actress to work with, was partnered with Gable in eight films, Myrna Loy was with him seven times, and he was paired with Jean Harlow in six productions. He also starred with Lana Turner in four features, and with Norma Shearer in three. Gable was often named the top male star in the mid-30s, and was second only to the top box-office draw of all, Shirley Temple.

Gable was born in Cadiz, Ohio to William Henry “Bill” Gable, an oil-well driller, and Adeline, who was of German and Irish descent. He was mistakenly listed as a female on his birth certificate. His original last name was Goebel, but this was considered too German during World War I because of anti German sentiment. Birth registrations, school records and other documents contradict one another. “William” would have been in honor of his father. “Clark” was the maiden name of his maternal grandmother. In childhood he was almost always called “Clark”; some friends called him “Clarkie,” “Billy,” or “Gabe”.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Claude Rains

October 25, 2019

Claude Rains was an English stage and film actor whose career spanned 47 years; he later held American citizenship. He was known for many roles in Hollywood films, among them the title role in The Invisible Man, a corrupt senator in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and, perhaps his most notable performance, as Captain Renault in Casablanca. Rains was born William Claude Rains in Camberwell, London. He grew up, according to his daughter, with “a very serious cockney accent and a speech impediment”. His father was British stage actor Frederick Rains, and the young Rains made his stage debut at 11 in Nell of Old Drury.

His acting talents were recognised by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, founder of The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Tree paid for the elocution lessons Rains needed in order to succeed as an actor. Later, Rains taught at the institution, teaching John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier, among others.

Rains served in the First World War in the London Scottish Regiment, with fellow actors Basil Rathbone, Ronald Colman and Herbert Marshall. Rains was involved in a gas attack that left him nearly blind in one eye for the rest of his life. However, the war did aid his social advancement and, by its end, he had risen from the rank of Private to Captain.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Claudette Colbert

October 25, 2019

Claudette Colbert was a French-born American stage and film actress.

Born in Saint-Mandé, France and raised in New York City, Colbert began her career in Broadway productions during the 1920s, progressing to film with the advent of talking pictures. She established a successful film career with Paramount Pictures and later, as a freelance performer, became one of the highest paid entertainers in American cinema. Colbert was recognized as one of the leading female exponents of screwball comedy; she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her comedic performance in It Happened One Night, and also received Academy Award nominations for her dramatic roles in Private Worlds and Since You Went Away. Her film career began to decline in the 1950s, and she made her last film in 1961. Colbert continued to act in theater and, briefly, in television during her later years. After a career of more than 60 years’ duration, Colbert retired to her home in Barbados, where she died at the age of 92, following a series of strokes.

Colbert received theatre awards from the Sarah Siddons Society, a lifetime-achievement award at the Kennedy Center Honors, and, in 1999, the American Film Institute placed her at number twelve on their “AFI’s 100 Years. 100 Stars” list of the “50 Greatest American Screen Legends”.