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- A marvelously quirky and distinctive 4' 3" character actress, with a larger-than-life presence on film and TV, Zelda Rubinstein gave up a long and stable career in the medical field as a lab technician in order to strive for something more self-fulfilling as middle age settled in. At the age of 45, the feisty lady gave up the comfort of a stable paycheck and attempt an acting career, a daunting task for anyone but especially someone of her stature and type. Within a few years, she had beaten the odds and became a major movie celebrity thanks to one terrific showcase in a Steven Spielberg horror classic. In the process, she served as an inspiration to all the "little people" working in Hollywood who are forced to toil in cruel and demeaning stereotypes.
Zelda May Rubinstein was born on May 28, 1933 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Dolores and George Rubinstein, who were Polish Jewish immigrants. Zelda was the youngest of three children, and the only "little person" in the family. Her childhood and teenage years were decidedly difficult in terms of coping with her "interesting variation," which was caused by a pituitary gland deficiency. With no designs on acting at the time, she went the normal route of college and received a scholarship to study at the University of Pittsburgh. She earned her degree in bacteriology and worked for a number of years as a lab technician in blood banks. In 1978, Zelda, in a pursuit of something more creative in her life, abandoned her cushy but mundane job and threw herself completely into acting. She made her movie debut as one of the little people in the Chevy Chase slapstick comedy Under the Rainbow (1981). It all came together so quickly with her second film Poltergeist (1982) in the scene-stealing role of Tangina, the saucy, self-confident, prune-faced "house cleaner" with the whispery, doll-like voice who is brought in to rid a suburban home of demonic possession. Co-writer/producer Spielberg claims he designed the psychic role specifically for a "little person". The film became an instant summertime hit and Zelda created absolute magic and wonderment with the testy role, receiving some of the movie's best reviews. The character actress went on to appear in the two "Poltergeist" sequels. The "Poltergeist" movie projects were eventually dubbed "cursed" due to the untimely deaths of some of its performers, particularly two of the three children of film parents Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams. 22-year-old Dominique Dunne was slain in 1982 by a jealous ex-boyfriend only a few months after the first film's release, and angelic little Heather O'Rourke, age 12, died of an intestinal obstruction just months before Poltergeist III (1988) made it to the screen.
Although Zelda would not find a role quite up to the standards and popularity of Tangina, her subsequent career remained surprisingly active with a number of weird parts woven into both comedies and chillers -- often variations of her eccentric Tangina role. She played a mental patient in the Frances Farmer biopic Frances (1982), which showcased Jessica Lange in the Oscar-nominated title role; a squeaky-shoed organist in John Hughes sweet-sixteen comedy classic Sixteen Candles (1984) co-starring Brat Packers Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall; the demented mom in the gruesome, Spanish-made horror-thriller Anguish (1987) [aka Anguish], which has since reached cult status; a mentor witch in the comic fantasy Teen Witch (1989); a hermit in a National Lampoon-based slapstick Last Resort (1994); a betting clerk in the Sci-Fi adventure Timemaster (1995); an ill-fated nun in the thriller Little Witches (1996), and; a theatre director in the flick Critics and Other Freaks (1997).
Into the millennium, she made some odd, slapdash appearances in such minor fare as Maria & Jose (2000), Wishcraft (2002), Cages (2005), Angels with Angles (2005), Unbeatable Harold (2006) and Southland Tales (2006). In her last film, she furthered her horror icon status with a small cameo in the slim-budgeted indie Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) that also featured Robert Englund of "Freddy Krueger" fame. Zelda also found an "in" doing voiceovers, her doll-like tones ideal for cartoons and such, and in commercials promoting such items as Skittles candy. She enjoyed extended popularity on TV with a regular series role on the first couple of seasons of Picket Fences (1992). Her character later was killed off in a freakish accident (fell into a freezer!). In her last years she narrated, and "Exorcist" child star Linda Blair hosted, TV's Scariest Places on Earth (2000). The actress also appeared on stage in such productions as "Deathtrap" (as a psychic, of course), "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Suddenly, Last Summer," "The Slab Boys" and "Black Comedy". She also appeared as Yente in a production of "Fiddler on the Roof".
An outspoken social activist, Zelda was a staunch advocate for the rights of little people who formed the nonprofit Michael Dunn Memorial Repertory Theater Company in Los Angeles in 1985. The actress gained additional attention and respect, if not popularity (her career suffered for a time as a result), as an early and outspoken HIV/AIDS activist. As the poster mom for AIDS awareness, she valiantly appeared in a series of maternal newspaper/billboard advertisements imploring her gay son to practice safe sex. The series of ads ran from the mid-to-late 1980s. Zelda also participated in the first AIDS Project Los Angeles AIDS Walk and attended the 25th Anniversary Walk on October 12, 2009.
A couple of months before her death on January 27, 2010, Zelda suffered a heart attack. Complications set in (kidney and lung failure) and she passed away at age 76 on January 27, 2010, at Barlow Respiratory Hospital in Los Angeles, California. - Actress
- Soundtrack
Betty Lou Keim was born, in 1938, in Malden, Massachusetts. She made her debut as Peggy Allison in the television series, My Son Jeep (1953). She later appeared on The Philco Television Playhouse (1948) and The Alcoa Hour (1955). Two movie roles followed in 1956, those being These Wilder Years (1956) and Teenage Rebel (1956). Betty's best performance was in Some Came Running (1958). In this fine film, she played Dawn Hirsh, the pretty, out of control daughter of a small town jeweler and his wife, played by Arthur Kennedy and Leora Dana. After appearing in the TV series The Deputy (1959) as Fran McCord in 1959, Betty married Warren Berlinger in 1960 and left show business. They have four children.- Writer
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U.S. writer whose novel "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951) won critical acclaim and devoted admirers, especially among the post-World War II generation of college students. His entire corpus of published works consists of that one novel and 13 short stories, all originally written in the period 1948-59. Salinger was the son of a Jewish father and a mother who adopted Judaism, and, like Holden Caulfield, the hero of "The Catcher in the Rye", he grew up in New York City, attending public schools and a military academy. After brief periods at New York and Columbia universities, he devoted himself entirely to writing, and his stories began to appear in periodicals in 1940. After his return from service in the U.S. Army (1942-46), Salinger's name and writing style became increasingly associated with "The New Yorker" magazine, which published almost all of his later stories. Some of the best of these made use of his wartime experiences: "For Esmé - With Love and Squalor" (1950) describes a U.S. soldier's poignant encounter with two British children; "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948) concerns the suicide of the sensitive, despairing veteran Seymour Glass. Major critical and popular recognition came with the publication of "The Catcher in the Rye", whose central character, a sensitive, rebellious adolescent, relates in authentic teenage idiom his flight from the "phony" adult world, his search for innocence and truth, and his final collapse on a psychiatrist's couch. The humor and colorful language of "The Catcher in the Rye" place it in the tradition of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and the stories of Ring Lardner, but its hero, like most of Salinger's child characters, views his life with an added dimension of precocious self-consciousness. "Nine Stories" (1953), a selection of Salinger's best work, added to his reputation. The reclusive habits of Salinger,an obsessively private man especially over the last half-century of his life, made his personal life a matter of speculation among devotees, while his small literary output was a subject of controversy among critics. "Franny and Zooey" (1961) brought together two earlier New Yorker stories; both deal with the Glass family, as do the two stories in "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters"; and "Seymour: An Introduction" (1963).- Stunts
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Martin Grace was born on 12 September 1942 in Lisdowney, County Kilkenny, Ireland. He was an actor, known for Brazil (1985), Enemy Mine (1985) and Moonraker (1979). He was married to Anna. He died on 27 January 2010 in Spain.- Additional Crew
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Howard Zinn, the author of the best seller "A People's History of the United States", is a historian, political scientist and social activist well-known for his involvement in progressive causes. Zinn was born on August 24, 1922 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of immigrant Jewish parents. During the early years of World War Two, Zinn worked as a defense industry worker in the Brooklyn shipyards and became a labor union organizer. He subsequently served as a bombardier in U.S. Army Air Force's 490th Bomb Group, which conducted bombing missions in Europe. Zinn came to question the value of the strategic bombing of France and Germany, which caused millions of civilian casualties.
After the war, Zinn too his B.A. in history at New York University and received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation on Fiorello LaGuardia's career as a Congressman was published as "LaGuardia in Congress" by the Cornell University Press. Zinn's book concluded that LaGuardia's progressive political platform "was an astonishingly accurate preview of the New Deal."
In 1956, Zinn was appointed chairman of the department of history and social sciences at Spelman College, a woman's college in Atlanta, Georgia that served African American women. Zinn joined the faculty two years after the Supreme Court had outlawed segregation in education with its Brown v. Board of Education decision. The home of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Atlanta was one of the centers of the modern Civil Rights movement, and many of his students became involved in pushing for an end to segregation and for equality under the law for African Americans.
Zinn has recollected that he began to question the traditional interpretations of American history when he was required to teach his African American students from books which ignored the true experiences of black folk in America. He realized that the "official" histories of the United States during that Cold War period had little connection to the reality of life as lived by ordinary people in the United States. It opened his eyes to the gulf between the socially sanctioned histories and the reality of the experiences of ordinary American citizens, particularly those of color and dissidents.
Zinn said that while he at Spelman, he observed 30 violations of the rights of students under the First and Fourteenth amendment rights in protests in Atlanta. The police abridged the student protesters' freedoms of speech, of assembly and of equal protection under the laws. Zinn's intellectual and spiritual development would transform him into a radical and progressive historian, part of a new class of intellectuals who began to give voice to those who were not heard from in official historiographies.
Despite being a tenured professor, Zinn was dismissed in June 1963 after siding with students in their desire to challenge Spelman's traditional emphasis of turning out "young ladies". Many of the Spellman students were involved in civil rights protests, and Zinn, or course, was encouraging this venue of political expression. In 1964, he joined the political science faculty at Boston University, where he taught until 1988 and where he currently maintains an office as professor emeritus. B.U.'s political science department was dominated by progressives and leftists. It was during his first decade at B.U. that Zinn became known as a vocal critic of war, and of the Vietnam War in particular. Zinn had come to the conclusion that warfare was wrong, and that nonviolent resistance was the answer to aggression.
Zinn was involved in one of the seminal moments in the domestic opposition to the Vietnam War, the "Pentagon Papers" case, when Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the papers, entrusted a copy of them with Zinn. Zinn's publishing house, the Beacon Press, published what has come to be known as the Senator Gravel edition of "The Pentagon Papers", four volumes of Pentagon documents plus a fifth containing an analysis by Zinn and and Noam Chomsky. Zinn was called by the defense as an expert witness at Ellsberg's criminal trial for conspiracy and espionage in connection with the publication of the "Pentagon Papers" by the "The New York Times". Zinn testified that "...there was nothing in the papers of military significance that could be used to harm the defense of the United States" but that they were embarrassing to the United States government, which had blundered into Vietnam and had tried to cover up the hopelessness of the situation. The case against Ellsberg was dismissed it on the grounds that it had been prejudiced by the burglary of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office under the direction of the Richard Nixon administration.
As a historian, Zinn - dismayed by the point of view expressed in traditional history books - published his most famous work (and a watershed in American historiography), "A People's History of the United States", in 1980 to provide other perspectives on American history. The text depicts the struggles of Native Americans against the European and American conquests of their land, of slaves against slavery, of unionists and labor against capitalists, of women against patriarchy, of allegedly "free" African-Americans against racism and for civil rights, and of others who were disenfranchised and whose stories are not often told in mainstream histories. A classic of populist history, "A People's History" has been assigned reading both as a high school and college textbook. The most widely known example of critical pedagogy, "A People's History" sold its one millionth copy in 2003.
Howard Zinn currently resides in the Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts with his wife Roslyn. The couple have two children, Myla and Jeff, and five grandchildren. In addition to his histories, Zinn is a playwright: His first play, "Daughter of Venus", was produced in 1985, and his most famous play, "Emma", based on the life of anarchist Emma Goldman, has been staged five times since its initial production in 1986. His most recent play, "Marx in Soho" (1999), is still being performed in small theaters throughout the United States.- Writer
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- Producer
Barry E. Blitzer was born on 29 April 1929. He was a writer and producer, known for Get Smart (1965), The Phil Silvers Show (1955) and Land of the Lost (1974). He was married to Elsie. He died on 27 January 2010 in Santa Monica, California, USA.- Shirley Collie Nelson was born on 16 March 1931 in Chillicothe, Missouri. She was married to Willie Nelson, Lewis Jones, Biff Collie and Ed Melton. She died on 27 January 2010 in Springfield, Missouri, USA.
- Yûsuke Natsu was born on 30 October 1950 in Arao, Kumamoto, Japan. He was an actor, known for Space Ironmen Kyodain (1976), Truck Rascals (1975) and Stray Cat Rock: Beat '71 (1971). He died on 27 January 2010 in Japan.
- Director
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- Editor
Angio Zane was born on 17 August 1925 in Italy. Angio was a director and writer, known for Okay sceriffo (1964), La capinera del mulino (1956) and Brigliadoro (1962). Angio died on 27 January 2010 in Italy.- James Hollis was born on 29 August 1929. He died on 27 January 2010 in Graysville, Alabama, USA.
- Stanislaw Michalik was born on 16 May 1927 in Kraków, Malopolskie, Poland. He was an actor, known for Tylko umarly odpowie (1969), Raj na ziemi (1970) and Agent nr 1 (1972). He died on 27 January 2010 in Skolimów, Konstancin-Jeziorna, Mazowieckie, Poland.
- Art Department
- Set Decorator
Gerardo Porto was born in 1925 in A Coruña, A Coruña, Galicia, Spain. Gerardo was a set decorator, known for Vlissingen (1975), Martine (1975) and Pipo de Clown (1958). Gerardo died on 27 January 2010 in Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands.- Raimundo de Oliveira was born on 2 July 1907 in Caririaçu, Ceará, Brazil. Raimundo was a writer, known for Piranha de Véu E Grinalda (1982). Raimundo died on 27 January 2010 in Crato, Ceará, Brazil.
- Additional Crew
Lee Archer was born on 6 September 1919 in Yonkers, New York, USA. He is known for Red Tails (2012), In Their Own Words: The Tuskegee Airmen (2012) and Resurrecting Moton Field: The Birthplace of the Tuskegee Airmen (2009). He was married to Ina Archer. He died on 27 January 2010 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.- Alexandre Rivemale was born on 12 November 1918 in Nice, Alpes-Maritimes, France. He was a writer and actor, known for Spectacle d'un soir (1964), Armchair Theatre (1956) and Cinéma 16 (1975). He was married to Anne-Marie Muguet. He died on 27 January 2010 in Sens, Yonne, France.