Born this Day

1754 Pierre Charles L'Enfant – Architect, engineer and Revolutionary War officer. He designed the plan for the city of Washington DC
1886 John McCurdy – Canadian aviation pioneer who made Canada's first controlled powered flight, and the first in the British Empire, on the Silver Dart from the ice of Baddeck Bay, Nova Scotia
1892 Jack Leonard Warner - Movie mogul, born in London, Ontario. He was one of Hollywood's famed Warner brothers, and with his brothers Harry, Albert and Sam, founded Warner Brothers Pictures in 1923
1900 Helen Morgan – Singer and actress (Frankie and Johnny, Show Boat, Applause)
1905 Myrna Loy - Actress (Thin Man movies, Airport, Topaz, Midnight Lace, The Best Years of Our Lives) She was born in Raidersburg, near Helena, Montana, and was the daughter of a cattleman. After her father’s death in 1918, her family moved to Los Angeles, where at age 18, she danced in a chorus line at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Starting in 1925, she played bit parts and was frequently cast as a mysterious vamp. Her career took a comic turn in 1934 when she was cast as Nora Charles in The Thin Man. Loy continued to make film appearances into her 70s
1912 Ann Dvorak - Actress (A Life of Her Own, Abilene Town, Scarface)
1914 Beatrice Straight - Actress (Network, Poltergeist, Bloodline, Endless Love)
1915 Gary Merrill - Actor (The Seekers, Twelve O'Clock High, All About Eve, The Great Impostor)
1919 Nehemiah Persoff – Jerusalem-born actor (The Greatest Story Ever Told, Some Like it Hot, Yentl, Twins, Ziegfeld: The Man and his Women, Voyage of the Damned, Francis Gary Powers: The True Story of the U-2 Spy Incident, The Missles of October, Mrs. Polifax – Spy)
1924 James Baldwin - US essayist, novelist and playwright (Go Tell It on the Mountain, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, Giovanni’s Room, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Amen Corner, Going to Meet the Man)
1924 Carroll O'Connor - Actor (All in the Family, In the Heat of the Night, Cleopatra, The Devil's Brigade, In Harm's Way, Kelly's Heroes, Marlowe)
1932 Peter O'Toole – Irish stage and screen actor (Lawrence of Arabia, Becket, A Lion in Winter, The Last Emperor, Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Tudors, Troy)
1933 Tom Bell – British actor (Prime Suspect, The Krays, Long Time Dead, No Bananas, Prospero’s Books, Wish You Were Here, Reilly: Ace of Spies)
1935 Hank Cochran - Songwriter (A Little Bitty Tear, Funny Way of Laughing, Make the World Go Away, I Fall to Pieces)
1937 Garth Hudson – Keyboardist with the group The Band (Up on Cripple Creek, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down)
1939 Wes Craven – Director (Scream, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Swamp Thing)
1941 Doris Kenner - Singer with The Shirelles (Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Soldier Boy, I Met Him on a Sunday, Tonight's the Night, Dedicated to the One I Love, Mama Said)
1943 Kathy Lennon - Singer with her family group The Lennon Sisters (The Lawrence Welk Show)
1943 Max Wright - Actor (ALF, Buffalo Bill, Misfits of Science, The Norm Show, A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
1945 Joanna Cassidy - Actress (Blade Runner, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Package, Buffalo Bill, Body of Proof, Six Feed Under)
1950 Kathryn Harrold - Actress (The Hunter, MacGruder and Loud, Raw Deal, I’ll Fly Away, Chicago Hope)
1951 Andrew Gold - Singer (Lonely Boy, Thank You for Being a Friend) He is the son of composer Ernest Gold
1953 Butch Patrick – Actor (The Munsters, Scary Movie, The Real McCoys, Lidsville)
1959 Victoria Jackson – Actress/comedienne (Saturday Night Live, UHF, I Love You to Death) She was in the Perry Mason movie The Case of the Jealous Jokester
1962 Cynthia Stevenson – Actress (Men in Trees, Hope & Gloria, Dead Like Me, Agent Cody Banks, Oh Baby, Bob)
1964 Mary-Louise Parker – Actress (Angels in America, Bullets Over Broadway, The Client, Fried Green Tomatoes, The West Wing, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Red Dragon)
1976 Sam Worthington – British actor (Avatar, Terminator Salvation, Texas Killing Fields, Clash of the Titans, Bootmen)
1977 Edward Furlong – Actor (Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Green Hornet, Darfur, Jimmy and Judy, Animal Factory)


Died this Day

1100 King William II – Son of William the Conqueror. He was killed by an arrow fired while out hunting in the New Forest. Although thought to be an accident, it was speculated that it could have been intentional on orders of the King’s younger brother, Henry I, who seized the throne upon receiving the news of his brother’s death
1788 Thomas Gainsborough, age 61 – British painter (The Blue Boy, The Watering Place) He was a founder of the English School of portrait and landscape painting
1799 Jacques Etienne Montgolfier, age 54 – French balloonist and paper manufacturer, who with his brother Joseph, made the first successful flight in a hot-air balloon. He died while travelling by road from Lyons to his home in Annonay
1876 James Butler (Wild Bill) Hickok, age 39 – US Marshall, frontiersman, army scout, gambler and legendary marksman who was known as the “fastest gun in the West”. Hickok first gained notoriety as a gunfighter in 1861 when he coolly shot three men who were trying to kill him. A highly sensationalised account of the gunfight appeared six years later in the popular periodical Harper's New Monthly Magazine, sparking Hickok's rise to national fame. After accidentally killing his deputy during an 1871 shootout in Abilene, Texas, Hickok never fought another gun battle. For the next several years he lived off his famous reputation, appearing as himself in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show, and occasionally, working as guide for wealthy hunters. His renowned eyesight began to fail, and for a time he was reduced to wandering the West trying to make a living as a gambler. Several times he was arrested for vagrancy. In the spring of 1876, Hickok arrived in the Black Hills mining town of Deadwood, South Dakota, where he became a regular at the poker tables of the No. 10 Saloon. On that day, Hickok was playing cards with his back to the saloon door. At 4:15 in the afternoon, a young gunslinger named Jack McCall walked into the saloon, approached Hickok from behind, and shot him in the back of the head. Hickok died immediately. McCall tried to shoot others in the crowd, but amazingly, all of the remaining cartridges in his pistol were duds. McCall was later tried, convicted, and hanged. Hickok, the most famous gunfighter in the history of the West, died with his Smith & Wesson revolver in his holster, never having seen his murderer. According to legend, Hickok held a pair of black aces and black eights when he died, a combination that has since been known as the Dead Man's Hand
1877 Sir James Douglas - Canadian fur trader and statesman who was known as The Father of British Columbia. He was born in Demerara, British Guyana to a Scottish merchant and a “free coloured woman.” Douglas joined the North West Company in Montréal as an apprentice in 1819, just before the merger with the Hudson's Bay Company. In 1826 he went to Fort St James in the New Caledonia district with Chief factor William Connolly, and in 1828 married Connolly’s part-Indian daughter Amelia. He advanced in his career and was appointed Chief Trader of the Hudson’s Bay Company, then Chief Factor. When the 49th Parallel became the US boundary in 1846, he set up Fort Langley on the lower Fraser River. In 1858, when the BC gold rush started, the British set up the new colony of British Columbia, and made Douglas Governor on condition he sever his Hudson’s Bay Company ties. He died in Victoria, BC, two weeks before his 74th birthday
1921 Enrico Caruso, age 48 – Italian tenor. He died from peritonitis. Fifty-thousand attended his funeral in Naples
1922 Alexander Graham Bell, age 75 – Scottish born speech therapist, audiologist, teacher of the deaf and inventor. Bell is considered one of the most important inventors of the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1870, he left Scotland and settled in Brantford, Ontario, where he worked as a speech therapist. He invented, and developed, the telephone from 1874-76, patented it and promoted its commercial development in the US. Bell died at his Beinn Bhreagh home on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia
1923 Warren G. Harding, age 58 – 29th US President, he died of a stroke, in a hotel in San Francisco. It was speculated the stroke was brought on by worry over political scandals which were about to explode on the national stage. Conscious of his own limitations, Harding promised to appoint a cabinet representing the "best minds" in the US. Unfortunately he chose several intelligent men who possessed little sense of public responsibility and rumours spread in Washington of corruption in the departments of the Interior and Justice and in the Veterans Bureau. He was succeeded by President Coolidge, who spent most of his first term responding to public outrage over the Teapot Dome oil-leasing scandals, the revelations of fraudulent transactions in the Veterans Bureau and Justice Department, and the reports of his predecessor's multiple extramarital affairs
1936 Louis Blériot - French inventor who was the first man to fly an airplane across the English Channel, in 1909. He died a month after his 64th birthday
1976 Fritz Lang, age 85 – Vienna born Hollywood director (Metropolis)
1998 Shari Lewis, age 65 – Ventriloquist who created Lamb Chop. She died in Los Angeles


On this Day

1610 Dutch navigator Henry Hudson entered the inland sea now known as Hudson Bay. He thought he had found the Pacific Ocean
1858 The separate Crown Colony of British Columbia was formed by the British government, with Sir James Douglas as Governor. It included the mainland, which had been named New Caledonia by Simon Fraser, and the Queen Charlotte Islands
1862 Victoria, British Columbia became a city
1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was published, but it was soon withdrawn because of bad printing. Only 21 copies of the first edition survive, making it one of the rarest 19th-century books
1869 George Eliot began work on her masterpiece Middlemarch. The novel was published in eight parts from 1871 to 1872, and was her greatest work. It presented a sweeping survey of all social classes in a rural town, drawing psychological insights that set the stage for the modern novel
1875 The Belgravia Roller Skating Rink opened in London, the first in Britain
1939 From his home in Long Island, New York, German-born physicist Albert Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging "watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action" on the part of the US in atomic research. Einstein, a lifelong pacifist, feared that Nazi Germany had begun work on an atomic bomb
1943 In the early hours of the morning, a Navy patrol torpedo boat, PT-109, commanded by Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, sank after being sheared in two by a Japanese destroyer off the Solomon Islands. The destruction was so massive that other US PT boats in the area assumed the entire crew was dead. Two crewmen were killed, but 11 survived. After five hours of clinging to debris from the boat, the crew made it to a coral island. Kennedy decided to swim out to sea again, hoping to flag down a passing US boat, but none came. The sailors subsisted on coconuts for nearly a week before being rescued by the US Navy. Kennedy was ultimately awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, for gallantry in action
1955 To Catch a Thief, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, debuted
1964 The Pentagon reported the first of two attacks on US destroyers by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin