1602 Jules, Cardinal Mazarin - Italian-born French cardinal and statesman
1901 George Tobias – Actor (Bewitched, The Glass Bottom Boat, Hudson’s Bay, Marjorie Morningstar, The Glenn Miller Story, This is the Army, Sergeant York, Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Man Who Knew Too Much) He played Sidney Falconer in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Antic Angel
1903 Ken Murray - Actor (Son of Flubber, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Marshall's Daughter)
1903 Irving Stone - US author (Lust for Life, Love is Eternal, The Agony and the Ecstasy)
1910 William Hanna – Animator and TV producer who was half of the Hanna-Barbera team (The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Huckleberry Hound, Magilla Gorilla, Wally Gator, Pixie & Dixie, Scooby-Doo, Quick Draw McGraw)
1911 Terry-Thomas – British actor (It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, Don't Raise the Bridge Lower the River, Munster Go Home, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Carleton-Brown of the F.O., The Last Remake of Beau Geste) He played Dr. Mortimer in the 1978 parody of The Hound of the Baskervilles
1912 Woody Guthrie - Folk singer and songwriter (This Land is Your Land, Hard Travelin', Union Maid, So Long It's Been Good to Know Ya) He was the father of folk singer Arlo Guthrie
1912 Northrop Frye – Canadian educator and literary scholar (Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, Fables of Identity, The Stubborn Structure, The Critical Path)
1913 Gerald R. Ford – The 38th President of the US, and one of four left-handed Presidents. The others were James A. Garfield, Harry S Truman and Bill Clinton
1918 Ingmar Bergman – Swedish director (Through a Glass Darkly, Wild Strawberries, Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander)
1918 Arthur Laurents - Playwright (Home of the Brave, Summertime, Gypsy, The Turning Point, The Way We Were, Anastasia)
1918 Jay Forrester - Inventor of computer memory. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he later became a professor and researcher. In 1945, he founded MIT's Digital Computer Laboratory and helped build an early digital computer called the Whirlwind I. His work at the lab made him realise that existing information storage techniques were slow and unreliable. In 1949, he developed a way to use a magnetic cell to store information. The random-access magnetic core memory became a central feature of most digital computers
1923 Dale Robertson - Actor (The Last Ride of the Dalton Gang, Melvin Purvis: G-Man, Kansas City Massacre, Son of Sinbad, Tales of Wells Fargo, J.J. Starbuck, Death Valley Days)
1928 Nancy Olson - Actress (Sunset Boulevard, The Absent-Minded Professor, Son of Flubber, Snowball Express, Big Jim McLain, So Big)
1930 Polly Bergen - Actress (The Winds of War, Cry-Baby, Escape from Fort Bravo, Cape Fear, Move Over Darling, Desperate Housewives, Paradise Texas) She was also in the Perry Mason movie The Case of the Skin-Deep Scandal
1931 Sir Robert Stephens – British stage and screen actor (Travels With My Aunt, The Browning Version, Cleopatra, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Duellist, Empire of the Sun, War and Remembrance, Bonfire of the Vanities, Chaplin) He played Sir Wilfred Mulryne in the Inspector Morse episode The Settling of the Sun. He also played Sherlock in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.
1932 Del Reeves - Singer (Slow Hand, Be Quiet Mind, The Girl on the Billboard, Looking at the World through a Windshield)
1932 Rosie (Roosevelt) Grier – Football player and actor (Sophisticated Gents, The Big Push, The Seekers, Daniel Boone, Make Room for Granddaddy, The Thing With Two Heads)
1946 Vincent Pastore – Actor (The Sopranos, Dough Boys, Mail Order Bride, Serving Sara, Mickey Blue Eyes, Gotti, The Ref)
1952 Jerry Houser - Actor (A Very Brady Christmas, Slap Shot, Class of '44, Summer of '42)
1960 Jane Lynch – Actress (Glee, Julie & Julia, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, The 40 Year Old Virgin)
1961 Jackie Earle Haley – Actor (Human Target, Shutter Island, Breaking Away, The Bad News Bears, Dark Shadows, Winged Creatures, All the King’s Men)
1966 Matthew Fox – Actor (Lost, Party of Five, If I Die Before I Wake, Vantage Point, Smokin’ Aces, We Are Marshall)
1979 Scott Porter – Actor (Friday Night Lights, Hart of Dixie, The Good Wife, Caprica, Dear John, Speed Race, Prom Night)
1987 Sara Canning – Canadian actress (Vampire Diaries, Taken in Broad Daylight, The Hunt for the I-5 Killer, Black Field)


Died this Day

1881 Billy the Kid – Infamous US outlaw also known as William H. Bonney, and Henry McCarty. He was shot to death by Sheriff Pat Garrett at the Maxwell Ranch in New Mexico. Garrett had been tracking the Kid for three months after the gunslinger had escaped from prison only days before his scheduled execution for murdering Sheriff William Bady of Lincoln County, New Mexico. Garrett surprised Billy in a darkened room not far from Lincoln and shot him dead
1896 Jerry Potts – Métis scout and interpreter who helped Canada’s North West Mounted Police secure the loyalty of native people in Alberta and Saskatchewan and assisted in convincing the Blackfoot to remain neutral during North West Rebellion of 1885. He died of tuberculosis at Fort MacLeod, Alberta
1907 Sir William Henry Perkin, age 69 – British chemist who, in 1856 discovered the mauve dye which made possible the aniline dye industry
1959 Grock (Karl Adrien Wettach) – Famous Swiss clown


On this Day

1789 Parisian revolutionaries and mutinous troops stormed and dismantled the Bastille, a royal fortress that had come to symbolise the tyranny of the Bourbon monarchs. This dramatic action signalled the beginning of the French Revolution, a decade of political turmoil and terror in which King Louis XVI was overthrown and tens of thousands of people, including the king and his wife Marie Antoinette, were executed. The Bastille was originally constructed in 1370 as a bastide, or fortification, to protect the walled city of Paris from English attack. Its name, bastide, was later corrupted to Bastille, and was first used as a state prison in the 17th century. Standing 100 feet tall and surrounded by a moat more than 80 feet wide, the Bastille was an imposing structure in the Parisian landscape. The capture of the Bastille symbolised the end of the old regime, and provided the French revolutionary cause with an irresistible momentum. Joined by four-fifths of the French army, the revolutionaries seized control of Paris and then the French countryside, forcing King Louis XVI to accept a constitutional government. In 1792, the monarchy was abolished and Louis and his wife Marie-Antoinette were sent to the guillotine for treason in 1793. By order of the new revolutionary government, the Bastille was torn down. On February 6, 1790, the last stone of the hated prison-fortress was presented to the National Assembly. Today, July 14, Bastille Day, is celebrated as a national holiday in France
1798 Congress passed the Sedition Act, making it a federal crime to publish false, scandalous or malicious writing about the US government
1867 Alfred Nobel demonstrated dynamite for the first time at a quarry in Redhill, Surrey
1902 The famous bell tower of Venice, the Campanile of St Mark’s Cathedral, suddenly collapsed during a safety inspection
1915 Sir Robert Borden became the first Canadian Prime Minister to attend a British cabinet meeting. He was the first Canadian Prime Minister to be invited and first Prime Minister from the Dominions to attend
1933 The Nazi party was decreed the only legal party in Germany. The proclamation paved the way for the establishment of Adolf Hitler's totalitarian dictatorship that ruled until 1945. Hitler enforced the party's policies of nationalism and anti-semitism through his brown-shirted storm troopers, his elite S-S guard and the Gestapo, his secret police
1938 British director Alfred Hitchcock signed a contract with David O. Selznick to direct movies in Hollywood. Hitchcock had already established a reputation as one of England's foremost directors
1966 Eight student nurses were murdered at their group residence in Chicago by Richard Speck, who was sentenced to eight consecutive terms of 50 to 150 years in prison
1976 Canada’s House of Commons abolished the death penalty by a free vote of 132 to 124