1727 Thomas Gainsborough - British artist (The Blue Boy, The Watering Place) He was a founder of the English School of portrait and landscape painting
1847 Sir Frederick Borden - Canadian statesman who helped create the Canadian navy
1903 Billie Dove - Actress (All the Brothers were Valiant, The Black Pirate)
1921 Richard Deacon - Actor (The Dick Van Dyke Show, B.J. and the Bear, Leave It to Beaver, Carousel, Francis in the Haunted House, The Patsy, Bad Manners, Blackbeard's Ghost, The Birds)
1926 Eric Morecambe - British comedian who was one half of the Morecambe and Wise comedy duo
1933 Siân Phillips - Welsh actress (I Claudius, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Tinker Tailor Solder Spy, Smiley's People, The Age of Innocence, The Scold's Bridle, Lewis: Wild Justice, Poirot: Mrs. McGuinty’s Dead) For many years, she was married to Peter O'Toole
1936 Bobby Darin - Singer (Mack the Knife, Splish Splash, Dream Lover, You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby, Things, If I Were a Carpenter) and actor (Captain Newman MD, If a Man Answers, Come September, Hell Is for Heroes)
1944 George Lucas - Director (THX-1138, Star Wars, American Graffiti) producer (Indiana Jones, Labyrinth, Willow, Howard the Duck)
1945 Francesca Annis - British actress (Lillie, Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime, Dune, Dalziel and Pascoe: An Autumn Shroud, Reckless, Wives and Daughters, Cranford, Marple: At Bertram’s Hotel)
1945 Derek Leckenby - Guitarist with the group Herman's Hermits (Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter, I'm Henry VIII I Am)
1952 Robert Zemeckis - Film director (Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Contact, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future, Romancing the Stone)
1952 David Byrne - Singer with the group Talking Heads (Love Goes to Building on Fire, Burning Down the House, Once in a Lifetime)
1953 Tom Cochrane – Canadian singer and musician (Life is a Highway, Boy Inside the Man, I Wonder, Stonecutter’s Arms, Lunatic Fringe)
1961 Tim Roth – British actor (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Planet of the Apes, Rob Roy, Heart of Darkness, The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover, Murder with Mirrors, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead)
1969 Cate Blanchett - Australian actress (The Lord of the Rings, The Aviator, The Shipping News, Oscar and Lucinda, Elizabeth, An Ideal Husband, The Talented Mr. Ripley)
1971 Sofia Coppola – Actress (The Godfather: Part III, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, Peggy Sue Got Married, The Cotton Club) and director (Lost in Translation) She is the daughter of director Francis Ford Coppola and the cousin of Nicolas Cage
1972 Gabriel Mann – Actor (Revenge, Mad Men, The Bourne Identity, The Life of David Gale, Cherry Falls)
1976 Martine McCutcheon – British actress (EastEnders, Love Actually, Echo Beach, Marple: At Bertram’s Hotel, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang)
1983 Amber Tamblyn – Actress (127 Hours, Joan of Arcadia, The Ring, General Hospital, House, Main Street, House MD, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Two and a Half Men) She is the daughter of actor Russ Tamblyn
Died this Day
1643 Louis XIII - King of France. Upon his death, his four year old son became King Louis XIV
1925 Sir Henry Rider Haggard - British author (King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quartermaine, Cleopatra)
1987 Rita Hayworth, age 68 – Actress (You'll Never Get Rich, You Were Never Lovelier) She died in New York
1998 Frank Sinatra, age 82 – Legendary singer known as the Chairman of the Board (My Way, Three Coins in the Fountain, Chicago) and actor (The Manchurian Candidate, The Seven Ups, From Here to Eternity, Guys and Dolls, The Tender Trap, Von Ryan’s Express)
2003 Robert Stack, age 84 - Actor (The Untouchables, Written on the Wind, Strike Force, Airplane!, Unsolved Mysteries, The Name of the Game) He also played Jordan White in the Perry Mason movie The Case of the Sinister Spirit
2003 Dame Wendy Hiller, age 90 – British actress (Separate Tables, A Man for All Seasons, Pygmalion, The Elephant Man, David Copperfield, Murder on the Orient Express)
On this Day
1742 Explorers François and Louis-Joseph de La Vérendrye reached the Mandan villages on the Missouri River, then travelled southwesterly through the Badlands of North Dakota
1767 The British government imposed a tax on importing tea into the colonies, which would lead to the Boston Tea Party and the start of the US War of Independence
1787 Delegates began gathering in Philadelphia for a convention to draw up the US Constitution
1796 Edward Jenner, a British doctor from Glousestershire, administered the world's first vaccination for smallpox, a disease that had killed millions of people over the centuries. Jenner took fluid from a cowpox blister which had formed on the hand of a young woman, Sarah Nelmes, who had been infected by her master's cows. He then scratched it into the skin of James Phipps, an eight-year-old boy. A single blister rose up on the spot, but James later demonstrated immunity to smallpox, even when he came into close contact with children suffering from the disease. While still a medical student, Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had contracted a disease called cowpox, which caused blistering on cow's udders, did not catch smallpox. Unlike smallpox, which caused severe skin eruptions and dangerous fevers in humans, cowpox led to few ill symptoms in these women. Doctors all over Europe soon adopted Jenner's innovative technique, leading to a drastic decline in new sufferers of the devastating disease. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, scientists developed new vaccines to fight smallpox
1804 The Lewis and Clark Expedition left St. Louis, Missouri, on a mission to explore the Northwest from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, one year after the US doubled its territory with the Louisiana Purchase. Even before the US government concluded purchase negotiations with France, US President Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis, his private secretary, and William Clark, an Army captain, to lead an expedition into what is now the US Northwest. The Corps of Discovery, comprising twenty-eight men and one woman, a Native American named Sacajawea, left St. Louis for the continental interior. The expedition travelled up the Missouri River in six canoes and two longboats, and wintered in Dakota before crossing into Montana where they first saw the Rocky Mountains. On the other side of the Continental Divide, they were met by Sacajawea's tribe, the Shoshone Indians, who sold them horses for their journey down through the Bitterroot Mountains. After passing through the dangerous rapids of the Clearwater and Snake rivers in canoes, the explorers reached the calm of the Columbia River, which led them to the sea. In November of 1805, the expedition reached the Pacific Ocean. After pausing there for winter, the explorers began their long journey back to St. Louis, arriving in September of 1806, returning after two-and-a-half years, and bringing back a wealth of information about the largely unexplored region, as well as valuable US claims to Oregon Territory
1842 The first edition of the London Illustrated News was published
1847 The HMS Driver arrived back at Spithead, England, the first steamship to circumnavigate the world
1853 New York dairyman Gail Borden applied for a patent for the process of making condensed milk
1856 The trial of William Palmer, British doctor and poisoner, began at London's Old Bailey. Palmer's victims were poisoned with strychnine and included creditors, at least four of his 14 illegitimate children, his mother-in-law, his wife who had brought him a large dowry, and other relations. Palmer was found guilty and executed in his native Staffordshire. In the story, The Speckled Band, Sherlock Holmes tells Dr. Watson about Palmer, "When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge. Palmer and Pritchard were among the heads of their profession"
1878 Petroleum jelly received its Vaseline trademark
1904 The Third Olympiad of the modern era, and the first Olympic Games to be held in the US, opened in St. Louis, Missouri. The 1904 games were actually initially awarded to Chicago, Illinois, but were later given to St. Louis to be staged in connection with the St. Louis World Exposition
1946 In Ottawa, Ontario, the House of Commons passed the Canadian Citizenship Act. It was the first nationality statute in Canada to define its people as Canadians. Canadian citizenship was to be distinct and primary over being a British subject
1948 The independent state of Israel was proclaimed as British rule in Palestine came to an end
1948 Atlantic Records was founded by Ahmet Ertegun, son of the Turkish Ambassador to the US. He nurtured many famous artists from Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, to rock stars Led Zeppelin and Mick Jagger
1965 The field at Runnymede, England, the site of the signing of the Magna Carta, was dedicated by the Queen as a memorial to the late US President John F. Kennedy
1973 Skylab, the US's first space station, was successfully launched into an orbit around the earth. Eleven days later, US astronauts Charles Conrad, Joseph Kerwin, and Paul Weitz rendezvoused with Skylab, repairing a jammed solar panel and conducting scientific experiments during their twenty-eight-day stay on the space station. The first manned Skylab mission came two years after the Soviet Union launched Salynut 1, the world's first space station, into orbit around the earth. However, unlike the ill-fated Salynut, which was plagued with problems, the US space station was a great success, safely housing three separate three-man crews for extended periods of time and exceeding pre-mission plans for scientific study. Five years after the last Skylab mission, the space station's orbit began to deteriorate faster than expected, owing to unexpectedly high sunspot activity, and in July of 1979, the parts of the space station that did not burn up in the atmosphere came crashing down on Australia and into the Indian Ocean. No one was injured
1984 Jeanne Sauvé was sworn in as Canada's first female governor-general
1988 After a 30-year break-up, entertainers Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis appeared on the same stage for a charity event in New York
1989 Leading British theatre and film stars began a vigil at the site of the freshly excavated Rose Theatre on London's south bank, the only remains of an Elizabethan theatre where it is believed that Shakespeare performed
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