Family : Childhood : Advantaged

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.

Marilyn McCoo (born September 30, 1943) is an American singer, actress, and television presenter, who is best known for being the lead female vocalist in the group the 5th Dimension as well as hosting the 1980s music television show Solid Gold.
Since 1969, McCoo has been married to singer Billy Davis Jr., the founder and a co-member of the 5th Dimension. She has a three-octave vocal range.

Alison Stewart Lurie (September 3, 1926 – December 3, 2020) was an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs. Although better known as a novelist, she wrote many non-fiction books and articles, particularly on children's literature and the semiotics of dress.

Carl XVI Gustaf (Carl Gustaf Folke Hubertus; born 30 April 1946) is King of Sweden.
Carl Gustaf was born during the reign of his great-grandfather, King Gustaf V. He is the youngest child and only son of Prince Gustaf Adolf, Duke of Västerbotten, and Princess Sibylla of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. His father died in January 1947 in an airplane crash in Denmark when Carl Gustaf was nine months old. Carl Gustaf became crown prince and heir apparent to the Swedish throne at the age of four when his grandfather, King Gustaf VI Adolf, ascended the throne in 1950.
Carl Gustaf ascended the throne upon his grandfather's death on 15 September 1973. Shortly after he became king, the new 1974 Instrument of Government took effect, formally stripping Carl Gustaf of his remaining executive power. As a result, he no longer performs many of the duties normally accorded to a head of state, such as the formal appointment of the prime minister, signing off on legislation, and being commander-in-chief of the nation's military. The new instrument explicitly limited the king to ceremonial functions and, among other things, to be regularly informed of affairs of state. As head of the House of Bernadotte, Carl Gustaf has also been able to make a number of decisions about the titles and positions of its members.
In June 1976, Carl Gustaf married Silvia Sommerlath. They have three children: Victoria, Carl Philip, and Madeleine. The King's heir apparent, after passage on 1 January 1980 of a new law establishing absolute primogeniture, is his eldest child, Crown Princess Victoria. Before the passage of that law, Victoria's younger brother, Carl Philip, was briefly the heir apparent, as of his birth in May 1979. Carl XVI Gustaf is the longest-reigning monarch in Swedish history, having surpassed King Magnus IV's reign of 44 years and 222 days on 26 April 2018.

Marjorie Merriweather Post (March 15, 1887 – September 12, 1973) was an American businesswoman, socialite, and philanthropist. She was the daughter of C. W. Post and the owner of General Foods Corporation. For much of Marjorie Post's life, she was known as the wealthiest woman in the United States.Post used much of her fortune to collect art, particularly Imperial-era Russian art, much of which is now on display at Hillwood, the museum which was her estate in Washington, D.C. She is also known for her mansion, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida.

Harry Robinson Hamlin (born October 30, 1951) is an American actor, author, and entrepreneur. He is best known for his roles as Perseus in the 1981 fantasy film Clash of the Titans, a role he reprised in 2007's Santa Monica Studio video game God of War II, and as Michael Kuzak in the legal drama series L.A. Law, for which he received three Golden Globe nominations. For his recurring role as Jim Cutler on the AMC drama series Mad Men, Hamlin received a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series.

Fergus Reid Buckley (July 14, 1930 – April 14, 2014) was an American writer, speaker, and educator. Buckley was the founder of The Buckley School of Public Speaking. Among his books is a history of his family, An American Family—The Buckleys (2008).

William Larimer "Larry" Mellon Jr. (1910–1989) was an American philanthropist and physician.
Mellon was born in Pittsburgh June 26, 1910, the son of financier William Larimer Mellon Sr. and a grandnephew of U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon. His family fortune derived from Gulf Oil, Westinghouse, BNY Mellon, Koppers, Alcoa and others.Mellon was married twice, the second time to dude ranch riding instructor and single mother Gwen Grant Mellon in 1946. He attended Princeton University for one year, worked for his family's company, Mellon Financial, and served in the OSS during World War II.
Mellon owned and operated a cattle ranch in Arizona until, at the age of 37, he read about, and then studied, Albert Schweitzer's medical missionary work in Gabon, and resolved, with Schweitzer's encouragement and guidance, to create a similar third-world hospital. He and Gwen Grant Mellon enrolled at Tulane University; he received his medical degree in 1954 at the age of 44, and she became qualified as a medical-laboratory technician. In 1956, the Mellons opened the Hôpital Albert Schweitzer Haiti in Deschapelles, Haiti.Mellon died in Deschapelles at the age of 79 from cancer and Parkinson's disease, on August 3, 1989.

Camilla Stoltenberg (born 5 February 1958) is a Norwegian physician and researcher. Since 13 August 2012, she has been Director-General of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. She is the sister of former Prime Minister of Norway and General Secretary of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg.