Born this Day

1573 Inigo Jones - British architect, painter and designer of some of the finest buildings in London, including the Banqueting House, Whitehall. He also laid out Covent Garden
1606 Rembrandt van Rijn – Dutch painter, draftsman and etcher, born in Leiden, Netherlands. The prolific artist made over 300 etchings, 1,400 drawings and 600 paintings (The Night Watch, Man with a Magnifying Glass, Descent from the Cross)
1779 Clement Moore – US scholar and poet ('Twas the Night before Christmas)
1913 Hammond Innes – British author (Campbell’s Kingdom, The Mary Deare)
1913 Cowboy (Lloyd) Copas - Country singer (Alabam, Goodbye Kisses, Signed Sealed and Delivered) He was killed in the plane crash with singer, Patsy Cline
1919 Dame Iris Murdoch - British writer and philosopher (Under the Net, The Sea The Sea, A Severed Head, The Red and the Green) She began teaching at Oxford in 1948, where she met her future husband, John Bayley. The pair married in 1956. She won the Booker Prize in 1978, and numerous other awards during four decades of writing. In the mid-1990s she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and died in 1999. Not long after her death, Bayley published Elegy for Iris, a critically acclaimed memoir of their marriage and her decline, which was the inspiration for the movie, Iris
1925 Philip Carey - Actor (The Great Sioux Massacre, Philip Marlowe, Laredo, One Life to Live, Mister Roberts)
1927 Nan Clow Martin - Actress (Matters of the Heart, Goodbye Columbus, For Love of Ivy)
1931 Clive Cussler - Author (Raise the Titanic, Deep Six, Sahara, Cyclops)
1935 Alex Karras – Football player (Detroit Lions) and actor (Blazing Saddles, Against All Odds, Victor/Victoria, Webster)
1935 Ken Kercheval - Actor (Dallas, Search for Tomorrow, Calamity Jane) He played Harlan Richards in the Perry Mason TV movie The Case of the Grimacing Governor
1939 Patrick Wayne - Actor (Chill Factor, Young Guns, McClintock, Big Jake) His father was John Wayne
1944 Jan-Michael Vincent - Actor (Airwolf, The Winds of War, Hooper, The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, The Mechanic, Buffalo ’66, Born in East L.A.)
1946 Linda Ronstadt - Singer (Blue Bayou, You're No Good, When Will I Be Loved, It's So Easy, Hurt So Bad)
1951 Jesse Ventura – Professional wrestler, former governor of Minnesota and actor (Batman & Robin, Demolition Man, The Running Man, Predator)
1952 Celia Imrie – British actress (Bridget Jone’s Diary, Cranford, Kingdom, Nanny McPhee, Marple: 4.50 from Paddington, Calendar Girls, Gormenghast, Dinner Ladies, The Borrowers, The Canterville Ghost, Bergerac, Inspector Lewis: The Soul of Genius, Kingdom, After You’ve Gone)
1952 Terry O'Quinn – Actor (Lost, Millennium, Alias, Young Guns, The Stepfather, The X-Files Movie, The Rocketeer, Hawaii Five-0) He played Curt Mitchell in the Perry Mason movie The Case of the Desperate Deception
1961 Lolita Davidovich – Canadian actress (Blaze, Cobb, Intersection, Raising Cain)
1961 Forest Whitaker - Actor (Phenomenon, The Crying Game, A Rage in Harlem, Bloodsport, Good Morning Vietnam, Platoon, Stakeout, The Color of Money, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Panic Room, Phone Booth, Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior, The Shield, The Last King of Scotland)
1963 Brigitte Nielsen – Danish actress (Red Sonja, Rocky IV, Cobra, Beverly Hills Cop II)
1964 Melanie Thaw – British actress (Blue Dove, Trainer) Her mother is Sheila Hancock, and her adopted father was John Thaw
1972 Scott Foley – Actor (The Unit, Felicity, Scream 3, The Last Templar, Firestorm: Last Stand at Yellowstone, Grey’s Anatomy, True Blood, Scandal)
1973 Brian Austin Green – Actor (Beverly Hills 90210, Desperate Housewives, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Knots Landing, The Canterville Ghost)
1977 Lana Parilla – Actress (Once Upon a Time, Boomtown, Miami Medical, 24, Windfall)
1989 Tristan Wildes – Actor (90210, Red Tails, The Secret Life of Bees, The Wire)


Died this Day

1685 James Scott, Duke of Monmouth – Illegitimate son of King Charles II. He was beheaded in London for leading an unsuccessful rebellion against the new King James II
1883 Charles Sherwood Stratton, age 45 – US entertainer and circus performer who was known as General Tom Thumb. He was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and was a large baby, weighing a little over nine pounds. He developed normally for a while, reaching 15 pounds and two feet, one inch in length by five months of age, then his growth just stopped. By age five he had not grown an inch, but otherwise he was a completely normal child. His career as General Tom Thumb began at the age of five, when the showman P.T. Barnum gave him the title and arranged with the child's parents for his exhibition as a midget. Barnum advertised him as "General Tom Thumb, a dwarf of eleven years of age, just arrived from England." He weighed just 16 pounds, his height then was just over 2 feet. By the time Tom turned ten, he had already met such luminaries as President Polk, Queen Victoria, Isabella of Spain, and King Louis Philippe of France. He wed Mercy Lavinia Warren, also a dwarf, in a fashionable wedding in New York's Grace Church in 1863. Two thousand guests attended, and it was the most celebrated marriage of its time. In the course of their honeymoon, President Lincoln received them at the White House. Tom and Lavinia continued to entertain audiences in the US and abroad until their retirement in 1882. Tom Thumb's final height was three feet four inches
1904 Anton Chekhov, age 44 – Russian short story writer and playwright (The Party, The Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya)
1953 John Christie – Notorious British serial killer. Four months earlier, a new tenant at 10 Rillington Place in West London discovered the bodies of four women hidden behind the walls. The former tenant, Christie, was apprehended and confessed to the murders. Stories of the grisly discoveries at the soon-to-be infamous address filled the London tabloids for weeks and fuelled the call for Christie's quick execution
1997 Gianni Versace - Italian fashion designer, shot to death on the steps outside his Miami mansion


On this Day

1743 In Dublin, after twice being prepared for burial and then reviving, a Mrs. Kirkeen was nailed into her coffin on her husband's order
1806 Zebulon Pike, the US Army officer who in 1805 led an exploring party in search of the source of the Mississippi River, set off with a new expedition to explore the US Southwest. Pike was instructed to seek out headwaters of the Arkansas and Red rivers and to investigate Spanish settlements in New Mexico. Pike and his men left Missouri and travelled through the present-day states of Kansas and Nebraska before reaching Colorado, where he spotted the famous mountain later named in his honour. From there, they travelled down to New Mexico, where they were stopped by Spanish officials and charged with illegal entry into Spanish-held territory. His party was escorted to Santa Fe, then down to Chihuahua, back up through Texas, and finally to the border of the Louisiana Territory, where they were released. Soon after returning to the east, Pike was implicated in a plot with former Vice President Aaron Burr to seize territory in the Southwest for mysterious ends. However, after an investigation, Secretary of State James Madison fully exonerated him. The information he provided about the US territory in Kansas and Colorado was a great impetus for future US settlement, and his reports about the weakness of Spanish authority in the Southwest stirred talk of future US annexation
1857 The massacre of Cawnpore took place at an Indian frontier station where British troops, including women and children, were massacred. Their bodies were thrown in a well which has since become a memorial. Jonathan Small referred to the massacre at Cawnpore in the Sherlock Holmes story The Sign of the Four
1868 Louisa May Alcott completed her classic novel Little Women
1869 Hippolyte Mege Mouries patented margarine in Paris
1878 The first telephone exchange in the British Empire was opened in Canada, at Hamilton, Ontario. It was the ninth in the world
1882 The first official Salvation Army Corps in Canada was established
1904 The future Mad Trapper of Rat River, Johan Jonsen, left Norway with his family and headed for North America. His father settled the family on a barren 320-acre homestead in North Dakota. At an early age, Jonsen became a skilled outdoorsman and hunter, and by the time he was in his teens was bored with the backbreaking life of a high plains farmer. In 1915, at the age of 17, Jonsen committed his first robbery, seizing $2,800 from the Farmers' State Bank of Medicine Lake, Montana. Because he used a variety of aliases, it is difficult to know exactly how many crimes Jonsen committed, but they were apparently abundant. As he grew older, Jonsen began to retreat into the wilderness, increasingly becoming an antisocial hermit. By 1930, he was living in a cabin along the Rat River in an isolated far north-eastern section of the Canadian Yukon. There he tolerated no visitors and survived by trapping beaver. In late December 1931, an officer for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and three other men arrived at Jonsen's cabin with a search warrant to investigate the claims that he was pilfering from other trappers' lines. When the Mountie knocked, Jonsen replied by shooting through the door, wounding the officer in the chest. An ensuing 15-hour attack with gunfire and dynamite failed to force Jonsen's surrender. The following day, a blizzard swept in and Jonsen managed to sneak off obscured by the thick curtains of snow. A massive manhunt began that eventually involved scores of men aided by airplanes, dog teams, and skilled Indian guides. Jonsen managed to avoid capture for more than a month, when the posse found him and trapped him on the ice in the middle of a frozen river. Still Jonsen refused to surrender. He shot one of his pursuers before the posse killed him with a massive volley of bullets. Having survived 45 days travelling through some of the roughest country in the world with almost no food, the once robust Mad Trapper of Rat River was skin and bones. His corpse weighed less than 100 pounds
1916 The Boeing Company, originally known as Pacific Aero Products, was founded in Seattle by William Boeing
1920 British Columbia, Canada passed a bill stating that right-hand-side-of-the-road driving would take effect in 1922
1945 The Canadian government mailed its first family allowance payments. They were to be used for the maintenance, care, education and advancement of children
1965 The unmanned spacecraft Mariner 4 passed over Mars at an altitude of 6,000 feet and sent back to Earth the first close-up images of the red planet. Launched in November 1964, Mariner 4 carried a television camera and six other science instruments to study Mars and interplanetary space within the solar system. Reaching Mars on July 14, 1965, the spacecraft began sending back television images of the planet just after midnight on July 15. The pictures, nearly 22 in all, revealed a vast, barren wasteland of craters and rust-coloured sand, dismissing 19th-century suspicions that an advanced civilisation might exist on the planet. The canals that US astronomer Percival Lowell spied with his telescope in 1890 proved to be an optical illusion, but ancient natural waterways of some kind did seem to be evident in some regions of the planet. Once past Mars, Mariner 4 journeyed on to the far side of the sun before returning to the vicinity of Earth in 1967. Nearly out of power by then, communication with the spacecraft was terminated in December 1967
1972 Criminal Code of Canada changes provided life sentences for airplane hijacking and abolished whipping as a sentence
1986 Explorers from an oceanographic institute in Massachusetts reached the site of the wreck of the Titanic. They launched a robot camera that gave them a view of the once sumptuous interior