Born this Day

1572 Ben Johnson – British poet, playwright (Every Man in His Humour, Volpone)
1864 Richard Strauss – German Romantic composer (Also Sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote, Salome, Der Rosenkavalier, Don Juan)
1880 Jeannette Pickering Rankin - The first woman ever elected to Congress, born on a ranch near Missoula, Montana Territory. Rankin was a social worker in the states of Montana and Washington before joining the women's suffrage movement in 1910, and in 1914 was instrumental in the passage of suffrage legislation in Montana. Two years later, she successfully ran for Congress in Montana on a progressive Republican platform calling for total women's suffrage, legislation protecting children, and US neutrality in the European war. Following her election as a representative, Rankin's entrance into Congress was delayed for a month as congressmen discussed whether a woman should be admitted into the House of Representatives
1910 Jacques-Yves Cousteau - French naval officer and oceanographer and commander of the Calypso, which travelled extensively to investigate the ocean. He was the co-inventor of the Aqua-Lung diving apparatus. He also devised a process for underwater television, and was therefore able to produce popular and educational films (The Living Sea, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau)
1919 Richard Todd – Dublin born actor (The Hasty Heart, The Longest Day, The Big Sleep, House of the Long Shadows, Never Let Go, The Story of Robin Hood, The Virgin Queen, The Dam Busters)
1925 William Styron – US author (Sophie's Choice, Lie Down in Darkness, The Long March, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness)
1933 Gene Wilder - Actor (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Producers, The Woman in Red, The Silver Streak, Bonnie and Clyde, The Electric Company, The Frisco Kid, Stir Crazy, Murder in a Small Town, The Lady in Question) He wrote, directed, and played Sigerson Holmes in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother
1936 Chad Everett - Actor (Medical Centre, The Dakotas, The Singing Nun, Jigsaw Murders, Airplane 2: The Sequel)
1939 Wilma Burgess - Country singer (Baby, Misty Blue, Don't Touch Me, Tear Time)
1939 Sir Jackie Stewart – Scottish race car driver. He is a three times British Formula One world racing car champion
1940 Joe Dee – Singer with the group Joey Dee and The Starliters (Peppermint Twist, Shout, Hot Pastrami with Mashed Potatoes)
1945 Adrienne Barbeau - Actress (Swamp Thing, Maude, Cannonball Run, Silk Degrees, Double-Crossed, Two Evil Eyes)
1949 Frank Beard - Rock musician with ZZ Top (Legs, Sharp Dressed Man, Gimme All Your Lovin', TV Dinners, Rough Boy)
1953 Peter Bergman - Actor (The Young and the Restless, All My Children) He was born in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
1959 Hugh Laurie – British actor (Jeeves and Wooster, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Blackadder, House MD, The Night Manager, Carnivale, Stuart Little, The Man in the Iron Mask, Spice World, The Borrowers, 101 Dalmatians, Sense and Sensibility) and author (The Gun Seller)
1961 Caroline Quentin – British actress (Jonathan Creek, Kiss Me Kate, Life Begins, Blue Murder, Men Behaving Badly)
1969 Peter Dinklage – Actor (Game of Thrones, Death at a Funeral, Underdog, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Elf, The Station Agent)
1977 Shane Meier – Canadian actor (Intelligence, Unforgiven, The Matthew Shepard Story, Call of the Wild, Needful Things, Mom P.I., My Life as a Babysitter)
1978 Joshua Jackson - Canadian actor (Fringe, Dawson’s Creek, Bobby, Cruel Intentions, Robin of Locksley)
1986 Shia LeBoeuf – Actor (Transformers, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Disturbia, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I Robot, Even Stevens)


Died this Day

1847 Sir John Franklin, age 61 – British Rear Admiral and Arctic explorer who perished of cold and starvation while trying to find the North West Passage. Upon Franklin’s death, command of the ship went to Francis Crozier, with James Fitzjames second-in-Command. Fourteen others were already dead. In 1852, five years after Franklin’s death in the Arctic, he was promoted to Rear-Admiral, as news of his fate had not yet reached Britain. In 1859, Francis Leopold McClintock would find two notes confirming that Franklin died June 11, 1847. In 1984 the bodies of two members of the expedition were found perfectly preserved in their icy graves
1979 John Wayne - US actor known as The Duke and famous for his roles in western movies (True Grit, The Alamo, The Shootist, Hondo, Rio Bravo, Red River, Sands of Iwo Jima, Rooster Cogburn, The Green Berets) He died of cancer just over two weeks after his 72nd birthday
1985 Karen Ann Quinlan, age 31 - The comatose patient whose case prompted an historic right-to-die court decision. Ten years earlier, a car accident left her in a coma and her parents requested that she be taken off life support systems. She died in a nursing home in Morris Plains, NJ
1999 DeForest Kelley, age 79 - Actor of Star Trek fame, died in Woodland Hills, California. He was also in the Perry Mason episode, The Case of the Unwelcome Bride
2003 David Brinkley – TV journalist (The Huntley-Brinkley Report, NBC Nightly News) He died a month before his 83rd birthday


On this Day

1509 King Henry VIII of England married Catherine of Aragón, the first of six wives he would have in his lifetime. When Catherine failed to produce a male heir, Henry divorced her against the will of the Roman Catholic Church, thus precipitating the Protestant Reformation in England. Henry went on to have five more wives, two of whom (Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard) he executed for alleged adultery after he grew tired of them. His only surviving child by Catherine of Aragón, Mary, ascended to the throne upon the death of her half-brother, Edward VI, in 1553. In 1558, Mary was succeeded by her half-sister, Elizabeth, the only surviving child of Henry VIII by Anne Boleyn. She was crowned Queen Elizabeth I
1534 At Brest Harbour, Newfoundland, Jacques Cartier and his crew celebrated the first recorded Catholic mass in North America
1638 The first earthquake recorded in Canada was felt in Trois-Rivières, Québec. Tremors continued for six months, from Gaspé to Montreal, but no casualties were reported
1759 In Quebec, Royal Highland Regiment soldiers were issued two quarts of spruce beer daily
1770 Captain James Cook, commander of the British ship Endeavour, discovered the Great Barrier Reef off Australia by running onto it
1776 The Continental Congress formed a committee to draft a Declaration of Independence from Britain
1917 The Conscription Act was introduced in the Canadian House of Commons. The election that followed passage of the bill was one of the most divisive in Canadian history. Québec looked on conscription as an attempt to anglicise French-Canadians and throw them into an English war. Sir Robert Borden's coalition government was returned and given the mandate to put conscription into effect
1919 Sir Barton won the Belmont Stakes, becoming horse racing's first Triple Crown winner
1922 The first transatlantic radio fax of a photograph was sent from Rome to Maine. The 7 inch by 9-1/2 inch photograph, of Pope Pius XI, took forty minutes to transmit and was published in the New York World the same day it was sent
1931 Canadian Parliament voted to proclaim Remembrance Day as a general holiday. It was to fall on November 11th each year
1940 Princess Juliana of the Netherlands arrived in Canada to seek refuge during the Second World War, and settled in Ottawa
1944 Five days after the D-Day landing, the five Allied landing groups, made up of some 330,000 troops, linked up in Normandy to form a single solid front across north-western France. On June 6th, after a year of meticulous planning conducted in secrecy, the largest combined sea, air, and land military operation in history began on the French coast at Normandy. Fifteen minutes after midnight, the first of 23,000 US, British, and Canadian paratroopers and glider troops plunged into the darkness over Normandy. During the next five days, Allied forces in Normandy moved steadily forward in all sectors against fierce German resistance. On June 11, the five landing groups met up, and Operation Overlord, the code name for the Allied invasion of north-western Europe, proceeded as planned
1962 John and Clarence Anglin and Frank Lee Morris made an attempt to escape from Alcatraz federal prison. The three men were never seen again, and although some believe that their escape was the only successful getaway from what was known as The Rock, it is generally believed that they drowned in the chilly 54-degree water. Four days after their escape, a bag containing photos that belonged to Clarence Anglin was found in San Francisco Bay. The three prisoners began their daring escape by using kitchen utensils to chip away at the cement near ventilation holes in their cells. They then made fake grills out of cardboard and painted them to match the originals, which were located in a small area where they could get outside without being seen. The inmates made dummy heads from soap and concrete and placed them in their beds so that the guards would not notice them missing. Scraps of hair from the barbershop made the fake heads look more realistic. Once outside, the three climbed over a 15-foot fence and made their way out to the choppy waters surrounding the island prison with life preservers made out of raincoats. The book, Escape From Alcatraz, by J. Campbell Bruce, and the ensuing movie, dramatised the incident