1884 James Elroy Flecker – English poet and playwright (The Golden Journey to Samarkand, The Bridge of Fire, The King of Alsander, Hassan)
1885 Will Durant - Author (The Story of Philosophy, The Story of Civilisation)
1893 Raymond Loewy - US inventor, engineer and industrial designer. He was known as the Father of Streamlining, and emphasised the importance of graphic design in the most mundane of industrial projects. Born in Paris, he later moved to the US, where his design work included the Apollo and Skylab spacecrafts and Air Force One, as well as the US Post Office logo and Lucky Strike cigarette packs
1900 Natalie Schafer – Actress (Gilligan's Island, Forever Darling, The Time of Your Life) She played Mrs. Chelton in the 1954 Sherlock Holmes episode The Case of the Shy Ballerina
1905 Joel McCrea – Actor (Foreign Correspondent, Ride the High Country, The Oklahoman, Four Faces West, Buffalo Bill)
1911 Roy Rogers – Actor and cowboy, who was known as the King of the Cowboys and starred in over 85 westerns (The Roy Rogers Show, The Roy Rogers & Dale Evans Show) He was married to Dale Evans, and their signature tune was Happy Trails to You
1913 John McGiver - Actor (Midnight Cowboy, The Patty Duke Show, The Manchurian Candidate, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Jimmy Stewart Show)
1913 Vivien Leigh – Indian-born British actress (Gone with the Wind, A Streetcar Named Desire, Ship of Fools, Anna Karenina, Fire Over England)
1931 Ike Turner – US musician with Ike and Tina Turner and the Ikettes (It's Gonna Work Out Fine, Poor Fool, Tra La La La, I Idolise You, Proud Mary)
1933 Herb Edelman – Actor (The Golden Girls, St. Elsewhere, California Suite, The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park)
1937 Harris Yulin – Actor (Clear and Present Danger, 24, Cradle Will Rock, Bean, Scarface)
1940 Elke Sommer – German actress (A Shot in the Dark, The Prize, The Oscar, Prisoner of Zenda, Boy Did I Get A Wrong Number!, Jenny’s War)
1941 Art Garfunkel – US singer with the duo Simon and Garfunkel (Bridge Over Troubled Water, Mrs. Robinson, Scarborough Fair, The Sounds of Silence, Cecilia)
1943 Sam Shepard – Actor (Days of Heaven, The Pelican Brief, The Right Stuff, Steel Magnolias, Voyager) and playwright (Silent Tongue, Far North, Fool for Love, Zabriskie Point, Paris Texas)
1946 Gram Parsons - US singer and songwriter (She, How Much I've Lied, The New Soft Shoe, Grievous Angel, Hickory Wind, Las Vegas, In My Hour of Darkness)
1947 Peter Noone – Singer and musician with Herman's Hermits (Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter, I'm Henry VIII I Am)
1956 Eugene Lipinski – British actor (Human Cargo, Fringe, Da Vinci’s City Hall, The Lost Angel, Spenser: Small Vices, Harriet the Spy, Sophie's Choice, Smiley's People, Moonlighting, Intelligence) He played Abe Slaney in the Sherlock Holmes episode The Dancing Men
1958 Robert Patrick – Actor (Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Walk the Line, The Unit, The X-Files, Flags of Our Fathers, Wayne’s World, Die Hard 2)
1959 Bryan Adams - Canadian singer and songwriter (Cuts Like a Knife, Straight from the Heart, Summer of '69, Everything I Do) He is also a photographer, and one of his photos of Queen Elizabeth II is on the Canadian 49˘ stamp
1963 Tatum O’Neal – Actress (Paper Moon, Bad News Bears, Little Darlings)
1963 Andrea McArdle – Stage and screen actress and singer (Annie, Rainbow, Search for Tomorrow)
1964 Famke Janssen – Dutch actress (X-Men, Nip/Tuck, Hide and Seek, House on Haunted Hill, GoldenEye)
1970 Tamzin Outhwaite – British actress (EastEnders, Hotel Babylon, Paradox, The Fixer)
Died this Day
1960 Mack Sennett, age 80 – Canadian born silent movie director (Tillie's Punctured Romance, Mack Sennett Comedies, Kid's Auto Race, Mabel's Married Life, Cannonball, Dizzy Heights and Daring Hearts) He formed Keystone, which made slapstick comedies, and he created the Keystone Cops
1960 Johnny Horton – Country and rockabilly artist (Battle of New Orleans) He was killed in an auto accident in Milano, Texas. Ironically, he had just played his last show at the Skyliner in Austin, Texas, where, in 1953, country legend Hank Williams also played his last show, before dying in an automobile as he drove to his next performance. In another twist, Johnny Horton was married to Billie Jean Jones, the widow of Hank Williams. However, the deaths of the two country music pioneers were slightly different, as Horton had perished in an auto wreck, and Williams had died silently from a heart attack, in the back seat of his chauffeured Cadillac
1960 Ward Bond, age 57 – Actor (Wagon Train, Gone with the Wind, Drums Along the Mohawk, It's a Wonderful Life, The Maltese Falcon, Mister Roberts, Rio Bravo, Tall in the Saddle, The Time of Your Life)
1972 Reginald Owen, age 85 – British actor (Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Mary Poppins, National Velvet, Mrs. Miniver, A Christmas Carol) He was one of the few actors to portray both Dr. John H. Watson and Sherlock Holmes
1977 Guy Lombardo, age 75 – Canadian bandleader (Auld Lang Syne, Humoresque, Easter Parade, The Third Man Theme) He and his band, The Royal Canadians were a New Year’s Eve staple for years
1979 Al Capp, age 70 – US cartoonist who created Li’l Abner in 1934
1989 Vladimir Horowitz – Russian piano virtuoso with a huge repertoire. He died in New York, a month after his 85th birthday
On this Day
1605 In the early morning, King James I of England learned that a plot to explode the Parliament building had been uncovered, hours before he was scheduled to sit with the rest of the British government in a general parliamentary session. At about midnight the night before, Sir Thomas Knyvet, a justice of the peace, found Guy Fawkes lurking in a cellar of the Parliament building, and ordered the premises searched. Nearly two tons of gunpowder were found hidden within the cellar. The authorities determined that the suspect was a participant in an English Catholic conspiracy, largely organised by Robert Catesby, to annihilate England's entire Protestant government. During the next few months, English authorities killed or captured all of the conspirators, and put the survivors on trial. Guy Fawkes himself was sentenced, along with other chief conspirators, to be hanged, drawn, and quartered in London. However, moments before the start of his gruesome and bloody execution, Fawkes jumped from a ladder while climbing to the hanging platform, breaking his neck and dying instantly. In remembrance of the Gunpowder Plot, Guy Fawkes Day has been celebrated across Great Britain on the fifth of November since 1607. As dusk falls in the evening, villagers and city dwellers across Britain celebrate Fawkes’ failure to blow Parliament and James I to kingdom come. The setting off of fireworks and lighting of bonfires are preceded by children asking for “a penny for the Guy”, a grotesque effigy of Guy Fawkes which is burnt on a bonfire
1854 The combined British and French armies defeated the Russians at the Battle of Inkerman, during the Crimean War
1872 Suffragist Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 for attempting to vote in a presidential election
1895 George B. Selden of Rochester, NY, received the first US patent for his gasoline-powered automobile. He first conceived of his automobile when he was an infantryman in the US Civil War
1909 Woolworth’s first store in Britain opened in Liverpool
1911 The first bombs were dropped from airplanes. It took several years for military minds to think of the airplane as more than a sporting device, however, Italians proved that planes could be used for less sporting activities when they dropped bombs on an oasis in Libya. During World War I, aerial bombing evolved as a deadly form of warfare
1919 The world’s greatest screen lover, Rudolph Valentino, married actress Jean Acker, who locked him out on their wedding night. The marriage lasted less than six hours
1927 Britain’s first automatic traffic lights were installed at Princess Square road junction at Wolverhampton
1930 Sinclair Lewis became the first US citizen to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was given the honour "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters." Lewis, born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota established his literary reputation in the 1920s with a series of satirical novels about small-town life in the US (Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry)
1956 Colour television was first tried in England
1961 Cave explorers discovered a sack of bones in Brandy Cove, South Wales, which helped to solve a 42-year-old crime. A gold wedding band and a black comb with brown hair still attached to it were found nearby. These items, along with the bones that were pieced together to form a reconstructed skeleton, provided the missing piece of the puzzle needed to solve the mystery of the 1919 disappearance of Mamie Stuart. After Stuart, a chorus girl, married George Shotton in 1918, the couple settled in a remote seaside cottage in Swansea Bay. It was an unhappy marriage for Stuart, who confided to friends and family that Shotton's strange behaviour concerned her. In December 1919, the couple suddenly and mysteriously vanished. At roughly the same time, a guest at a local hotel left behind a trunk. Months later, when no one had claimed it, the trunk was opened to find Mamie Stuart's belongings inside. When the police tracked Shotton down, they discovered that he been married to another woman for years and had another remote home only a few miles away. Denying that he was involved in Stuart's disappearance, Shotton even tried to refute the fact that he had been married to her. When police could find no other clues linking Shotton to the murder, he was charged only with bigamy and sentenced to 18 months of hard labour. Forty-two years later, the necessary evidence needed to solve the mystery was finally discovered. After painstakingly reassembling and examining the bones, Welsh coroners found that the victim was a female measuring about 5 feet, 4 inches tall, and estimated her age at approximately 26 years old when she died, the same as Stuart at the time of her disappearance. Other witnesses identified scraps of clothing and the wedding band as belonging to Stuart. Additionally, an 83-year-old postman testified that he had seen Shotton struggling with a sack and heading off in the direction of Brandy Cove in 1919. Unfortunately, the discovery came too late for justice. Shotton died in 1958, three years before Mamie Stuart's bones and personal items were found
1994 George Foreman, 45, became boxing's oldest heavyweight champion by knocking out Michael Moorer in the 10th round of their WBA fight in Las Vegas
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