Alan Arkin (6/29)
In his brilliant eight-decade career, Arkin was memorably comedic (The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming), sarcastic (Catch-22), and quietly tragic (in the 1968 adaptation of Carson McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, where he plays a deaf man). Arkin starred opposite Rita Moreno in Popi (1969) and menaced Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark. He capped his career with an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as the unapologetically heroin-using grandpa in Little Miss Sunshine (pictured), and two consecutive Emmy nominations for the Netflix series The Kominsky Method with Michael Douglas.
Christine King Farris (6/29)
The eldest and last surviving sibling of Martin Luther King, Farris endured both her brother's 1968 assassination and that of their mother six years later. Like her mother and grandmother before her, she attended Spelman College in Atlanta, where she earned a bachelor's degree in economics in 1948. After earning two master's degrees in education, she taught at a public school before returning to Spelman as director of the Freshman Reading Program in 1958. Farris held a tenured professorship in education and was director of the Learning Resources Center for 48 years. Farris was, for many years, vice chair and treasurer of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change and was active for several years in the International Reading Association, and various church and civic organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She published a children's book, My Brother Martin, as well as the autobiography, Through It All: Reflections on My Life, My Family, and My Faith.
Frederic Forrest (6/23)
Forrest played the love interest to Bette Midler's Janis Joplinesque character in the 1979 film The Rose (pictured), earning him both an Oscar and Golden Globe for best supporting actor. In that same year, he starred as Jay “Chef” Hicks in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now. During the 1960s, he appeared in a number of countercultural Off-Broadway productions, including Viet Rock and Futz! One of his first film roles, When Legends Die, earned him a 1973 Golden Globe nomination for most promising newcomer. Midler tweeted, "He was a remarkable actor, and a brilliant human being, and I was lucky to have him in my life."
Diane Rowe (6/19)
Along with her twin sister Rosalind, the left-handed Rowe was an English table tennis champion. In 1955 they published a book The twins on table tennis. In 1966 Diane married German table tennis player Eberhard Schöler, and from that time on competed for West Germany. From 1951 to 1972 she won several medals in single, double, and team events in the Table Tennis European Championships, and in the World Table Tennis Championships, as well as 17 English Open titles. She retired from competition in 1973 and until 1997 worked as a table tennis coach.
Daniel Ellsberg (6/16)
While working as a Pentagon consultant at the RAND Corporation, Ellsberg began dating Patricia Marx, a reporter and antiwar activist who became his wife. In 1971, he smuggled out the Pentagon Papers — 7,000 pages of top-secret documents outlining the history of the Vietnam War, excerpts of which were published by Neil Sheehan in the New York Times. The leak ultimately helped to take down President Nixon, and turn public sentiment against the War in Vietnam. The Nixon administration went to extraordinary lengths to silence and punish Ellsberg, including breaking into his psychiatrist’s office (as depicted in the new HBO Max series "The White House Plumbers"). Ellsberg remained a leading critic of U.S. militarism and U.S. nuclear weapons policy, as well as a prominent advocate for other whistleblowers. Source. I met Ellsberg with journalist Robert Scheer circa 1995 at an event in Los Angeles; I was wearing a pot leaf button and Scheer asked, "Who's got the joint?" Seymour Hersh published a tribute to Ellsberg that spoke of them smoking Thai sticks together, prompting journalist Fred Gardner to ponder, "It would be interesting to know when and where Ellsberg started smoking the herb and to what extent the absurdity of prohibition accelerated his transition from hawk to dove. During the Vietnam war years there was a strong synergy between the two causes –ending the war and ending marijuana prohibition. Seeing the absurdity and futility of one opened your eyes to the absurdity and futility of the other." (Photo: Donal F. Holway, NYT)
Glenda Jackson (6/15)
Born into a working-class household where her father was a bricklayer and her mother a cleaning lady, Jackson became one of the few performers to achieve the American Triple Crown of Acting, winning two Academy Awards (for Women in Love and A Touch of Class), three Emmy Awards, and a Tony Award. She also won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Sunday Bloody Sunday. In 1980, she appeared in Robert Altman's ensemble comedy HealtH about a health food convention co-starring Carol Burnett, James Garner, and Lauren Bacall. Jackson ceased acting to take on a career in politics from 1992 to 2015, serving as a Labour Party MP and a junior transport minister. She returned to the stage at the end of 2016, playing the title role in William Shakespeare's King Lear at the Old Vic Theatre in London and on Broadway, where she appeared in Edward Albee's Three Tall Women in 2018 (pictured).
Robert Gottlieb (6/14)
Gottlieb—who had a long and illustrious career as an editor at Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker—edited novels by, among many others, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Antonia Fraser, Barbara Tuchman, Katharine Graham and Jessica Mitford. He authored a biography of Sarah Bernhardt and a book titled A Certain Style about the plastic handbags of which he was a major collector. Gottlieb's autobiography, Avid Reader: A Life, was published in September 2016. Source.
Treat Williams (6/12)
Williams starred in the lead role of Danny Zuko in the original Broadway run of Grease in 1972, and on film went from playing a hippie in Hair (1979) to a tough-guy narcotics detective bringing down corruption in Prince of the City (1981). "After years of cop reporting, Prince Of The City was the only film that made me believe anyone else knew the truth about the drug war," tweeted The Wire creator David Simon. In 1995, Williams said: "[My film career] was stopped by my lack of focus and use of cocaine. I wanted to party more than I wanted to focus on my work." But he came back and his performance as Michael Ovitz in HBO's The Late Shift opposite Kathy Bates earned him an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor. Williams was a farmer in his home state of Connecticut and died in a motorcycle accident at age 71. He had life, mother.
Astrud Gilberto (6/5)
Brazilian singer Gilberto accompanied her husband, bossa nova guitarist João Gilberto, to a recording session with saxophonist Stan Getz where her impromptu English language version of "Girl from Ipanema" turned the song into an international hit. After she and João divorced, she toured with Getz, who mistreated her and robbed her credit and royalties for the song, which has since become the second-most recorded song in popular music, just behind the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” Source.
Pat Robertson (6/8)
Conservative televangelist and politico Robertson had a lot of goofy ideas, but was right on when he had this to say on a Christmas Eve 2010 airing of "700 Club" in the course of discussing his prison ministry: "We're locking up people that take a couple of puffs of marijuana, and the next thing you know they've got ten years, but mandatory sentences, and these judges just say, they throw up their hands and say there's nothing we can do, it's mandatory sentences. We've gotta take a look at what we're considering crimes, and that's one of them. I mean, I'm not exactly for the use of drugs, don't get me wrong, but I just believe that criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot and that kind of thing, it's costing us a fortune and it's ruining young people." Two years later, he said on the “700 Club” that marijuana should be legalized and treated like alcohol because the government’s war on drugs had failed.
Françoise Gilot (6/6)
Gilot was drawn to art from an early age, tutored by her artist mother. Her father, however was an authoritarian who forced her to write with her right hand, though she was left-handed, and persuaded her to study science at the University of Paris, where she received her bachelor’s degree in 1938 at age 17. Gilot began studying painting privately and also began a 10-year relationship with Pablo Picasso, 40 years her senior, in 1943. Her memoir, “Life with Picasso,” was published in 1964 and became an international best seller, providing much of the material for the 1996 Merchant-Ivory movie, “Surviving Picasso." In 1970, she married Jonas Salk, the American medical researcher who developed the first safe polio vaccine, and lived part of the time in California, becoming chairwoman of the fine arts department at the University of Southern California, a post she held until 1983. With her work in more than a dozen museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, her paintings have fetched as much as $1.3 million. She died at age 101, survived by her children Claude Picasso, the director of Picasso Administration, and Paloma Picasso, the fashion and jewelry designer best known for her perfumes. Source.
Cynthia Weil (6/1)
Lyricist Weil and her husband Barry Mann co-wrote a string of seminal songs, starting with "On Broadway" for the Drifters and “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’” and “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration” for the Righteous Brothers, followed by “We Gotta Get Out of this Place” for the Animals and the cautionary "Kicks," a hit for Paul Revere and the Raiders (above). For Dusty Springfield she penned, “Just a Little Lovin’ (Early in the Mornin’” and Dolly Parton had a hit with the Weil-Mann song “Here You Come Again.” In 1980, the Pointer Sisters hit with “He’s So Shy,” which Weil wrote with Tom Snow. These and many other of Weil's songs sold an estimated 200 million records.
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