Articles with WorldCat Entities identifiers

Renee_Zellweger

Renée Kathleen Zellweger (; born April 25, 1969) is an American actress. The recipient of various accolades, including two Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards, she was one of the world's highest-paid actresses by 2007.
Born and raised in Texas, Zellweger studied English literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Initially aspiring for a career in journalism, she was drawn to acting following her brief work on stage while in college. Following minor roles in Dazed and Confused (1993) and Reality Bites (1994), her first starring role came with the slasher film The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1995). She rose to prominence with starring roles in the romantic comedy Jerry Maguire (1996), the drama One True Thing (1998), and the black comedy Nurse Betty (2000), winning a Golden Globe Award for the last of these.For portraying Bridget Jones in the romantic comedy Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) and Roxie Hart in the musical Chicago (2002), Zellweger gained consecutive nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing a loquacious farmer in the war film Cold Mountain (2003). She reprised her role as Jones in the sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), and, following a career downturn and hiatus, in Bridget Jones's Baby (2016). In 2019, Zellweger starred in her first major television role in the Netflix series What/If, and portrayed Judy Garland in the biopic Judy, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress. She has since starred as Pam Hupp in the NBC crime miniseries The Thing About Pam (2022).

Garry_Marshall

Garry Kent Marshall (November 13, 1934 – July 19, 2016) was an American screenwriter, film director, producer and actor. Marshall began his career in the 1960s as a writer for The Lucy Show and Dick Van Dyke Show until he developed the television adaptation of Neil Simon's play The Odd Couple. He rose to fame in the 1970s for creating four ABC sitcoms including Happy Days (1974–1984), Laverne & Shirley (1976–1983), Blansky's Beauties (1977), and Mork & Mindy (1978–1982).
Marshall went on to direct the numerous films including Young Doctors in Love (1982), The Flamingo Kid (1984), Nothing in Common (1986), Overboard (1987), Beaches (1988), Pretty Woman (1990), Frankie and Johnny (1991), Exit to Eden (1994), Dear God (1996), The Other Sister and Runaway Bride (Both in 1999), The Princess Diaries 1 and 2 (2001 and 2004), Raising Helen (2004), Georgia Rule (2007), Valentine's Day (2010), New Year's Eve (2011), and Mother's Day (2016). As an actor, he also appeared in many films including Soapdish (1991), A League of Their Own (1992), With Friends Like These... (1998), Orange County (2002), Keeping Up with the Steins (2006), Race to Witch Mountain (2009), and Life After Beth (2014), as well as voiced as Studio Executive in The Majestic (2001) and as Buck Cluck in Chicken Little (2005).

O.J._Simpson

Orenthal James Simpson (born July 9, 1947), commonly referred to as O. J. Simpson, is an American former football running back, actor, and broadcaster. He played in the National Football League (NFL) for 11 seasons, primarily with the Buffalo Bills, and is regarded as one of the greatest running backs of all time. Once a popular figure with the American public, Simpson's professional success was overshadowed by his trial and controversial acquittal for the murders of his former wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman.
Simpson played college football for the USC Trojans, where he won the Heisman Trophy as a senior, and was selected first overall by the Bills in the 1969 NFL/AFL draft. During his nine seasons with the Bills, Simpson received five consecutive Pro Bowl and first-team All-Pro selections from 1972 to 1976. He also led the league in rushing yards four times, in rushing touchdowns twice, and in points scored in 1975. In 1973, he became the first NFL player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season, earning him NFL Most Valuable Player (MVP), and is the only NFL player to do so in a 14-game regular season. Simpson holds the record for the single-season yards-per-game average at 143.1. After retiring with the San Francisco 49ers in 1979, Simpson pursued an acting and broadcasting career. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1983 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985.
In June 1994, Simpson was arrested and charged with the murders of Brown and Goldman. He was acquitted in a lengthy and internationally publicized trial, but found liable for the deaths three years later in a civil suit from the victims' families. To date, Simpson has paid little of the $33.5 million judgment (equivalent to $61 million in 2022).
In 2007, Simpson was arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada, and charged with armed robbery and kidnapping. In 2008, he was convicted and sentenced to 33 years' imprisonment, with a minimum of nine years without parole. He served his sentence at the Lovelock Correctional Center near Lovelock, Nevada. He was granted parole on July 20, 2017, which was the minimum sentence. He was released on October 1, 2017. In December 2021, Simpson was granted early release from his parole by the Nevada Division of Parole and Probation.

Vaclav_Havel

Václav Havel (Czech pronunciation: [ˈvaːtslav ˈɦavɛl] ; 5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright and dissident. Havel served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992, prior to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on 31 December, before he became the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He was the first democratically elected president of either country after the fall of communism. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays and memoirs.
His educational opportunities having been limited by his bourgeois background, when freedoms were limited by the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Havel first rose to prominence as a playwright. In works such as The Garden Party and The Memorandum, Havel used an absurdist style to criticize the Communist system. After participating in the Prague Spring and being blacklisted after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, he became more politically active and helped found several dissident initiatives, including Charter 77 and the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted. His political activities brought him under the surveillance of the StB secret police, and he spent multiple periods as a political prisoner, the longest of his imprisoned terms being nearly four years, between 1979 and 1983. In this period, Samuel Beckett wrote a play Catastrophe in Havel's Support. Havel wrote his short play Mistake in response to Beckett. Both plays were published by Index On Censorship in 1984. In 2022, Reza Shirmarz, an Iranian playwright, was asked by Index to write a play (Muzzled) in response to both playwright after a couple decades presenting the ongoing issue of censorship and self-censorship.[1]
Havel's Civic Forum party played a major role in the Velvet Revolution that toppled the Communist system in Czechoslovakia in 1989. He assumed the presidency shortly thereafter, and was re-elected in a landslide the following year and after Slovak independence in 1993. Havel was instrumental in dismantling the Warsaw Pact and enlargement of NATO membership eastward. Many of his stances and policies, such as his opposition to Slovak independence, condemnation of the treatment of Sudeten Germans and their mass expulsion from Czechoslovakia after World War II, as well as granting of general amnesty to all those imprisoned under the Communist era, were very controversial domestically. By the end of his presidency, he enjoyed greater popularity abroad than at home. Havel continued his life as a public intellectual after his presidency, launching several initiatives including the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, the VIZE 97 Foundation, and the Forum 2000 annual conference.
Havel's political philosophy was one of anti-consumerism, humanitarianism, environmentalism, civil activism, and direct democracy. He supported the Czech Green Party from 2004 until his death. He received numerous accolades during his lifetime, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Gandhi Peace Prize, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order of Canada, the Four Freedoms Award, the Ambassador of Conscience Award, and the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award. The 2012–2013 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour. He is considered by some to be one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century. The international airport in Prague was renamed Václav Havel Airport Prague in 2012.

Bertold_Brecht

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theatre") and the Verfremdungseffekt.
During the Nazi Germany period, Brecht fled his home country, first to Scandinavia, and during World War II to the United States, where he was surveilled by the FBI. After the war he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Returning to East Berlin after the war, he established the theatre company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and long-time collaborator, actress Helene Weigel.

Irene_Joliot-Curie

Irène Joliot-Curie (French: [iʁɛn ʒɔljo kyʁi] ; née Curie; 12 September 1897 – 17 March 1956) was a French chemist, physicist and politician, the elder daughter of Pierre Curie and Marie Skłodowska–Curie, and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Jointly with her husband, Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of induced radioactivity, making them the second-ever married couple (after her parents) to win the Nobel Prize, while adding to the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. This made the Curies the family with the most Nobel laureates to date. In addition to the following honours in the family: the first ever woman Nobel Prize laureate, the first ever person and, to this day, only woman double Nobel Prize laureate, the sole person to this day with two Nobel Prizes in different sciences, thanks to her mother.
Her mother Marie Skłodowska–Curie and herself also form the only mother–daughter pair to have won Nobel Prizes whilst Pierre and Irène Curie form the only father-daughter pair to have won Nobel Prizes by the same occasion, whilst there are 6 father-son pairs who have won Nobel Prizes by comparison.She was also one of the first three women to be a member of a French government, becoming undersecretary for Scientific Research under the Popular Front in 1936. Both children of the Joliot-Curies, Hélène and Pierre, are also prominent scientists.In 1945, she was one of the six commissioners of the new French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) created by de Gaulle and the Provisional Government of the French Republic. She died in Paris on 17 March 1956 from an acute leukemia linked to her exposure to polonium and X-rays.

Gisele_Bundchen

Gisele Caroline Bündchen (Brazilian Portuguese: [ʒiˈzɛli ˈbĩtʃẽ], German: [ˈbʏntçn̩], born 20 July 1980) is a Brazilian fashion model. Since 2001, she has been one of the highest-paid models in the world. In 2007, Bündchen was the 16th-richest woman in the entertainment industry and earned the top spot on Forbes top-earning models list in 2012. In 2014, she was listed as the 89th-most-powerful woman in the world by Forbes.Vogue credited Bündchen with ending the heroin chic era of modeling in 1999. Bündchen was a Victoria's Secret Angel from 1999 until 2006. She is credited with pioneering and popularizing the horse walk, a stomping movement created by a model lifting her knees high and kicking her feet to step. In 2007, Claudia Schiffer called Bündchen the only remaining supermodel. Bündchen has appeared on more than 1,200 magazine covers.Bündchen was nominated for Choice Movie Female Breakout Star and for Choice Movie Villain at the 2005 Teen Choice Awards for her supporting role in Taxi (2004). She had a supporting role in The Devil Wears Prada (2006) and was the executive producer of an educational environmental cartoon, Gisele & the Green Team, in 2010 to 2011. In 2016, she appeared in the Emmy Award-winning documentary series Years of Living Dangerously, in the episode "Fueling the Fire". Bündchen's charitable endeavors include Save the Children, Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. She has been a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Environment Program since 2009.

Rich_Brooks

Richard Llewellyn Brooks (born August 20, 1941) is a retired American football player and coach. He was the head coach at the University of Oregon from 1977 to 1994, the National Football League (NFL)'s St. Louis Rams from 1995 to 1996, and the University of Kentucky from 2003 to 2009.
Brooks' 1994 Oregon team won the Pac-10 title and played in the 1995 Rose Bowl. For his efforts that season, he won a number of national coaching awards. The University of Oregon named the field at Autzen Stadium Rich Brooks Field in honor of his 18 seasons as coach for the Ducks.

Richard_Willstatter

Richard Martin Willstätter FRS(For) HFRSE (German pronunciation: [ˈʁɪçaʁt ˈvɪlˌʃtɛtɐ] , 13 August 1872 – 3 August 1942) was a German organic chemist whose study of the structure of plant pigments, chlorophyll included, won him the 1915 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Willstätter invented paper chromatography following the initial description of the separation technique by Mikhail Tsvet.