1480 Lucrezia Borgia - Italian Renaissance noblewoman of the Borgia family. She was the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI
1857 Clarence Darrow - US defence attorney in many dramatic criminal trials and in the famous Scopes monkey trial
1882 Leopold Stokowski - British born US conductor with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He was the musical advisor for Disney's Fantasia in 1940
1921 Barbara Hale - Actress (The Oklahoman, Lorna Doone, The Defense Never Rests, Airport, The Giant Spider Invasion) And, of course, she played Della Street in the many incarnations of the Perry Mason show from its beginning in 1957. She is the mother of actor William Katt, who also appeared with his mother in the later Perry Mason stories
1924 Clarence (Gatemouth) Brown - US blues singer and musician (Mary is Fine, You Got Money, Pale Dry Boogie, Okie Dokie Stomp)
1930 Clive Revill - New Zealand born actor (The Sea Wolf, The Empire Strikes Back, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Dracula: Dead and Loving It) He also had a role in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
1934 James Drury - Actor (The Virginian, Pollyanna, Love Me Tender, Alias Smith and Jones,Forbidden Planet, The Tender Trap) He also played Eddy King in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Missing Melody
1937 Robert Hooks - Actor (A Woman Called Moses, Heat Wave, The Execution, Passenger 57)
1946 Hayley Mills - British actress (The Parent Trap, The Moon Spinners, That Darn Cat, Pollyanna) She is the daughter of Sir John Mills and the sister of Juliette Mills
1947 Dorothy Lyman - Actress (All My Children, Mama's Family, Camp Cucamonga: How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Ruby in Paradise)
1947 James Woods - Actor (The Onion Field, Holocaust, The Way We Were, Night Moves, Against All Odds, Casino, Contact, Ghosts of Mississippi, Nixon)
1947 Cindy Pickett - Actress (Call to Glory, St. Elsewhere, Ferris Beuller's Day Off, Hyperion Bay, Sleepwalkers)
1953 Rick Moranis - Canadian actor-comic (Second City TV, Strange Brew, Ghostbusters, Little Shop of Horrors, Spaceballs, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Parenthood, The Flintstones)
1956 Eric Roberts - Actor (King of the Gypsies, Runaway Train, The CocaCola Kid, Doctor Who: The Movie, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Less Than Perfect, Hunt to Kill, The Expendables, Heroes, The Dark Knight) He is the brother of Julia Roberts
1956 Melody Thomas Scott - Actress (The Young and the Restless, The Beguiled, The Fury, Piranha)
1961 Jane Leeves - British actress (Frasier, Murphy Brown, To Live and Die in L.A., The Benny Hill Show, Hot in Cleveland, The Resident)
1963 Eric McCormack – Canadian-born actor (Will & Grace, The Audrey Hepburn Story, A Will of Their Own, Lonesome Dove: The Series, Street Justice, Dead Like Me)
1963 Conan O'Brien - Talk show host and TV writer (Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Simpsons)
1967 Maria Bello – Actress (Coyote Ugly, The Jane Austen Book Club, Carjacked, The Company Men, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Flicka, A History of Violence, Secret Window, Payback, ER, NCIS)
1968 David Hewlett – British actor (Stargate: Atlantis, Traders, Splice, Brainstorm, The Boys of St. Vincent: 15 Years Later)
1971 David Tennant – Scottish actor (Broadchurch, Gracepoint, Single Father, Hamlet, The Chatterley Affair, Secret Smile, Casanova, Blackpool, He Knew He Was Right, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Fright Night, The Escape Artist) He played the tenth Doctor in the Doctor Who series
1976 Melissa Joan Hart - Actress (Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Clarissa Explains it All, Silencing Mary, Melissa & Joey, Whispers and Lies)
1984 America Ferrara – Actress (Ugly Betty, The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, Our Family Wedding, The Dry Land)
Died this Day
1689 Judge George Jeffreys - Britain's infamous "hanging judge", who, as Chief Justice of the King's Bench, tried many of King James II's critics. He was responsible for hanging vast numbers of people, and for having many others transported, whipped, or fined
1763 Marie-Josephte la Corriveau - Quebec woman who was hanged near the Plains of Abraham for murdering her husband Louis Dodier, who had apparently beat her. The corpse of the celebrated murderess was hung for a month in an iron cage at Lauzon by the Pointe-Levy for passers-by to see
1945 Ernie Pyle, age 44 - Famed US war correspondent, he was killed by Japanese machine-gunfire on the Pacific island of Ie Shima, off Okinawa. In 1942, after the US entered World War II, Pyle went overseas as a war correspondent and always wrote about the experiences of enlisted men rather than the battles they participated in. Pyle was extremely popular with the average GI, and US infantrymen braved enemy fire to recover his body. After his death, President Harry S. Truman spoke of how Pyle "told the story of the American fighting man as the American fighting men wanted it told." He was buried in his hometown of Dana, Indiana, next to other local soldiers who had fallen in battle. A monument exists to him on Ie Shima, describing him simply as "a buddy." Burgess Meredith portrayed him in the 1945 film The Story of GI Joe
1955 Albert Einstein, age 76 - German born Swiss physicist and mathematician who developed the Theory of Relativity. He died in his sleep in a hospital in Princeton, New Jersey. Einstein's revolutionary theories about time, space, and gravity profoundly influenced the course of modern science
2002 Thor Heyerdahl, age 87 – Norwegian explorer and anthropologist who led the Kon Tiki expedition in 1947. They sailed their balsa log craft, the Kon Tiki, from the western coast of South America to the islands east of Tahiti to demonstrate that people from the Americas could have colonised Polynesia. The 5,000 mile journey was covered in three and a half months
On this Day
1506 The foundation stone for the new St. Peter's Basilica was laid in the Vatican City
1775 Paul Revere and William Dawes began their famed ride from Charlestown to Lexington, Massachusetts, warning the colonists that the British were coming. Learning that British troops were leaving Boston to capture Patriot leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock in Lexington, and to confiscate the Patriot arsenal at Concord, Revere and Dawes set out to warn Adams and Hancock and to rouse the Patriot minutemen. Taking separate routes in case one of them were captured, Dawes left Boston by the Boston Neck peninsula and Revere crossed the Charles River to Charlestown by boat. As the two couriers make their way, Patriots in Charlestown waited for a signal from Boston informing them of the British troop movement. As previously agreed, one lantern would be hung in the steeple of Boston's Old North Church, the highest point in the city, if the British were marching out of the city by Boston Neck, and two if they were crossing the Charles River to Cambridge. Two lanterns were hung, and the armed Patriots set out for Lexington and Concord accordingly. Hundreds of other militiamen were awakened by Revere and Dawes, and after arming themselves, set out to oppose the British. Revere arrived in Lexington shortly before Dawes, but together they warned Adams and Hancock and then set out for Concord with Samuel Prescott. Early in the morning of April 19, a British patrol captured Revere, and Dawes lost his horse, forcing him to walk back to Lexington on foot. Prescott escaped and rode on to Concord to warn the Patriots there. After being roughly questioned for an hour or two, Revere was released when the patrol heard minutemen alarm guns being fired on their approach to Lexington. Around 5 AM, several hundred British troops under Major John Pitcairn arrived to the town to find a colonial militia under Captain John Parker waiting for them on Lexington's common green. Pitcairn ordered the Patriots to disperse, and after a moment's hesitation, the colonists began to drift off the green. Suddenly, the "shot heard around the world" was fired from an undetermined gun, and a cloud of musket smoke soon covered the green. When the brief Battle of Lexington ended, eight Patriots lay dead and ten others were wounded. Only one British soldier was injured, but the American Revolution had begun
1793 The first newspaper in Upper Canada, the Upper Canada Gazette, was published
1881 The Natural History Museum in London was opened
1906 At 5:13 AM, an 8.3 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco, California, flattening the city's unreinforced brick buildings and closely spaced wooden dwellings. The quake was powerful enough to be recorded thousands of miles away in Cape Town, South Africa, and shock waves from the quake were felt from Coos Bay, Oregon, to Los Angeles, and as far east as central Nevada. It affected a total area of about 375,000 square miles, approximately half of which was in the Pacific Ocean. Collapsed buildings, broken chimneys, and a shortage of water due to broken mains led to several large fires that soon coalesced into a deadly city-wide blaze that burned for days. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of trapped persons died when South-of-Market tenements collapsed as the ground liquefied beneath them. Most of those buildings immediately caught fire, and trapped victims could not be rescued. At 7 AM, US Army troops from Fort Mason reported to the Hall of Justice, and San Francisco Mayor E. E. Schmitz called for the enforcement of a dusk-to-dawn curfew and authorised the soldiers to shoot-to-kill anyone found looting. Meanwhile, in the face of significant aftershocks, firefighters and additional US troops fought desperately to control the spreading blaze, often dynamiting whole city blocks to create firewalls. On April 20, twenty thousand refugees trapped by the massive fire were evacuated from the foot of Van Ness Avenue onto the USS Chicago, in one of history's largest evacuations by sea to that date. By April 23, most fires were extinguished and authorities commenced the task of rebuilding the devastated metropolis. It was estimated that over three thousand people died as a result of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and the devastating fires that it inflicted upon the city. Enrico Caruso was in the city to sing Carmen with the Metropolitan Opera. He survived, but vowed never to return. The famous writer and San Francisco resident Jack London noted, "Surrender was complete." Despite the utter devastation, San Francisco quickly recovered from the great earthquake, and during the next four years, the city arose from its ashes
1921 Junior Achievement, created to encourage business skills in young people, was incorporated
1932 The Ford Model-B, last of the original four-cylinder cars, was introduced
1934 The first laundrette, or "washeteria", was opened in Fort Worth, Texas
1946 The League of Nations went out of business
1949 The Republic of Ireland Act came into force, and with it the establishment of Eire
1956 Actress Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco in a civil ceremony. A church wedding came the next day
1978 The U.S. Senate voted 68-to-32 to turn the Panama Canal over to Panamanian control on December 31, 1999
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