1522 St. Catherine - Italian Dominican mystic
1564 William Shakespeare - British poet, actor and playwright (Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Hamlet, MacBeth…) Although the plays of Shakespeare may be the most widely read works in the English language, little is known for certain about the playwright himself. Speculation about his lack of education has led some scholars to believe the plays were not written by Shakespeare, but by some other well-educated, aristocratic writer such as Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe. At age 18, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, and the couple had a daughter in 1583 and twins in 1585. Sometime later, Shakespeare set off for London to become an actor and by 1592 was well established in London's theatrical world as both a performer and a playwright. He became a member of the popular theatre group the Lord Chamberlain's Men, who later became the King's Men. The group built and operated the famous Globe Theatre in 1599. Shakespeare ultimately became a major shareholder in the troupe and earned enough money to buy a large house in Stratford in 1597, retiring there in 1610. Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon, England, and died there on his 52nd birthday in 1616
1621 Sir William Penn - British admiral and the father of Pennsylvania's founder
1791 James Buchanan - 15th President of the US from 1857 to 1861. He was born in Franklin County, Pennsylvania
1858 Max Planck - German Nobel Prize winner who developed the quantum theory
1897 Lester B. Pearson – The 14th Canadian Prime Minister, from 1963 to 1968. He was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1957 for his work in establishing the United Nations Emergency Force
1899 Dame Ngaio Marsh - New Zealand author who wrote the Detective Roderick Alleyn mystery books (Artists in Crime, Hand in Glove, Overture to Death) Some sources have her birth year as 1895
1928 Shirley Temple Black - Child actress (Heidi, The Little Colonel, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, The Little Princess) She has also had a diplomatic career in service to the US, as a delegate to the United Nations and chief of protocol
1930 Silvana Mangano - Actress (Dune, Barrabbas, Ulysses, Mambo)
1935 Ray Peterson - Singer (Tell Laura I Love Her, Corinna Corinna, The Wonder of You)
1936 Roy Orbison - Singer (Only the Lonely, Pretty Woman, Crying)
1939 David Birney - Actor (Oh, God! Book 2, St. Elsewhere, Bridget Loves Bernie)
1939 Lee Majors - Actor (The Six Million Dollar Man, Big Valley, The Bionic Woman, The Covergirl Murders, The Fall Guy)
1942 Sandra Dee - Actress (A Summer Place, Gidget, Tammy and the Doctor)
1942 Sheila Gish – British actress (Love in a Cold Climate, Mansfield Park, Highlander, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg) She played June in The Sweeney episode Jigsaw She also played Gwladys Probert in the Inspector Morse episode Twilight of the Gods
1943 Hervé Villechaize - Actor (Fantasy Island, The Man with the Golden Gun, Rumpelstiltskin, Two Moon Junction)
1946 Blair Brown - Actress (The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, The Whiteoaks of Jalna, The Paper Chase, Altered States, Space Cowboys, Benjamin Franklin, Fringe, The Astronaut’s Wife)
1949 Joyce DeWitt - Actress (Three's Company, With This Ring, Spring Fling)
1954 Michael Moore – Producer/director (Roger & Me, Canadian Bacon, Fahrenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine, TV Nation)
1955 Judy Davis - Australian born actress (A Passage to India, Naked Lunch, Barton Fink, The Ref, Dash and Lilly, The Starter Wife, The Reagans)
1957 Jan Hooks – Actress (Designing Women, Saturday Night Live, Batman Returns)
1960 Valerie Bertinelli - Actress (One Day at a Time, Ordinary Heroes, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp, Hot in Cleveland, Touched by an Angel, Café Americain, Sydney)
1961 George Lopez – Actor (Lopez Tonight, George Lopez, Valentine’s Day, The Spy Next Door, Mr. Troop Mom, Swing Vote)
1962 John Hannah – Scottish actor (Marple: 4.50 from Paddington, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Mummy, McCallum, The Final Cut, Four Weddings and a Funeral)
1967 Melina Kanakaredes – Actress (CSI: NY, Providence, The Long Kiss Goodnight, NYPD Blue, The Guiding Light)
1970 Scott Bairstow – Actor (Wolf Lake, Party of Five, Lonesome Dove: The Series, The Bone Snatcher, Android Apocalypse)
1977 Kal Penn – Actor (Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, House, Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, 24, Superman Returns)
Died this Day
1014 Brian Boru - High King of Ireland, assassinated by a group of retreating Norsemen shortly after his Irish forces decisively defeated the Vikings allied against him. Brian seized the throne of the southern Irish state of Dal Cais in 963, extended his power, and became the High King of Ireland in 1002. Unlike his predecessors, Brian resisted the rule of Ireland's Norse invaders. As his power increased, relations with the Norsemen on the Irish coast grew increasingly strained. In 1013, Sitric, king of the Dublin Norse, formed a coalition against Brian featuring Viking warriors from Ireland, the Hebrides, the Orkneys, and Iceland, as well as soldiers of Brian's native Irish enemies. On April 23, 1014, Good Friday, King Brian's forces fighting under his son, Murchad, met and annihilated the allies at the Battle of Clontarf, near Dublin. After the battle, a small group of Norsemen, flying from their defeat, stumbled on Brian's tent, overcame his bodyguards, and murdered the elderly king. The victory at Clontarf broke Norse power in Ireland forever
1616 Miguel de Cervantes, age 68 - Spanish poet and author (Don Quixote) He died in Madrid
1800 Sarah Lloyd, age 22 – Live in housekeeper who was executed for helping her boyfriend commit a burglary. She allowed her boyfriend to enter her employer's home outside London so that he could burglarise the house. When her role in the crime was revealed, she was sentenced to death. Her execution took place at St. Mary's Church in Bury St. Edmunds. She told the assembled crowd, “May my example be a warning to thousands.” The inscription on her tombstone in Suffolk recounts a “just but ignominious death” for falling prey to the “allurements of vice and the treacherous snares of seduction”
1850 William Wordsworth, age 80 - British Romantic poet (Intimations of Immortality, The Prelude, The Waggoner, Lyrical Ballads) He was the poet laureate of England from 1843 to 1850
1986 Otto Preminger, age 80 – Austrian-born director (Laura, Carmen Jones, Anatomy of a Murder, Exodus, The Moon Is Blue, The Man with the Golden Arm)
1998 James Earl Ray, age 70 - Ex-convict who confessed to assassinating the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and then insisted he was framed. He died at a Nashville hospital
2005 Sir John Mills, age 97 – British actor (Great Expectations, Ryan's Daughter, Hobson's Choice, The Big Sleep, King Rat ,War and Peace, Deadly Advice, Murder with Mirrors, Bean: The Movie) He was the father of actresses Juliet and Hayley Mills. He played Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes movie The Masks of Death
On this Day
1348 King Edward III of England established the Order of the Garter
1789 President-elect George Washington and his wife moved into the first executive mansion, the Franklin House, in New York
1827 Digging started on the Shubenacadie Canal, to connect Halifax, Nova Scotia, with the Bay of Fundy
1851 The Province of Canada Post Office issued the Three-Pence Beaver stamp. It was the first Canadian postage stamp, and only one example survives. Designed by civil engineer Sir Sandford Fleming (who also developed the concept of uniform time zones), the stamp pictured a beaver and the royal crown of England to pay tribute to both Canada and Britain. Issued by the United Province of Canada, now Ontario and Quebec, it was the world's first pictorial stamp depicting something other than a head of state or official mark
1859 Beating a rival publisher by a mere 20 minutes, William Byers distributed the first newspaper ever published in the frontier boomtown of Denver, Colorado. Byers had arrived in Denver, after having previously worked as surveyor in Oregon and Washington and having served as a territorial representative in Nebraska. When Byers heard in 1858 of the discovery of silver and gold in the Pike's Peak area of Colorado, he decided to move to the Colorado gold fields to establish a newspaper. Denver was becoming a centre for the Colorado mining industry, and Byers reasoned that it was the ideal location to begin publishing a newspaper. As was the case in many western frontier towns, competition was fierce among would-be journalists in Denver to publish the first newspaper. In Byers' case, his competitor was the Cherry Creek Pioneer. In honour of the rugged mountain range that rose up abruptly to the west of Denver, Byers named his new venture in frontier journalism The Rocky Mountain News. Byers remained the editor and publisher of the News until 1878, using the paper as a platform to promote the development of agriculture in the area as an alternative to relying solely on mining. Never trained as a professional journalist, Byers also unapologetically used the paper to express his own views. "My feelings," he once noted, "have been those of personal championship for a state in which I have felt a deep personal interest." He died in 1903, having witnessed and shaped Denver's transformation from a rugged frontier-mining town to a sophisticated business and financial centre of the Rocky Mountain West
1867 The Zoetrope was patented by William Lincoln of Providence, Rhode Island. The machine showed animated pictures by mounting a strip of drawings in a wheel. When viewing the drawings through a slit, the drawings appeared to move. Machines like the Zoetrope became standard fixtures in the entertainment arcades of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
1906 The Alberta Legislature set the provincial speed limit at 10 mph in the city and 20 mph in the country
1908 President Theodore Roosevelt signed an act creating the US Army Reserve
1928 In Ottawa, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the words “qualified persons” in Section 24 of the British North America Act did not apply to women, and that “by the Common Law of England, women were under a legal incapacity to hold public office” and therefore ineligible to sit in the Senate. The decision would eventually be appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council at Westminster, England
1940 About 200 people died in a dance-hall fire in Natchez, Mississippi
1968 The first decimal coins appeared in Britain. They were the five and ten pence pieces, which replaced the old one and two shilling coins
1985 The Coca-Cola company announced it was changing the secret formula for Coke. The public uproar resulted in two Cokes being sold, "new" Coke and Coca-Cola "Classic"
1992 A divorce was granted to Princess Anne and Mark Phillips. They had been married for 18 years but had been separated since August, 1989
2005 The first youtube video was posted by Jawed Karim, the site’s co-founder. It was an 18 second video taken at the San Diego Zoo, entitled “Me at the zoo”
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