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- A curvaceous and comely lead and second lead actress of the 1950s and 1960s, Dianne Foster was born Olga Helen Laruska on October 31, 1928 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Of Ukrainian parentage, she began her stage career performing in high school plays and in local community theater productions. Her school drama teacher saw extreme promise in her and encouraged her to continue her studies. Dianne then enrolled at the University of Alberta and majored in drama.
She eventually found work in Toronto as a model and as both a radio and stage actress. Encouraged again by her high school teacher, she saved up enough money to go to England for further training and to find work. She won a stage role in the play "The Hollow" starring Jeanne De Casalis that later toured. Following a radio job with Orson Welles, he offered her the part of Cassio's whore in a West End production of "Othello" while Laurence Olivier was holding court at the St James Theater. Welles and Peter Finch starred as Othello and Iago, respectively, with Olivier in the director's seat.
After establishing herself as a bad girl second lead in such "B" level British films as The Quiet Woman (1951), in which she played a scheming ex-girlfriend of Derek Bond and The Big Frame (1952) as a temptress opposite Mark Stevens, Dianne was encouraged to come to Hollywood in the early 1950's. Her first role in Hollywood was as a British character in a TV episode of "Four Star Playhouse" opposite David Niven. As a result of her fine performance, Harry Cohn placed her under a Columbia Pictures contract even though she had not yet secured an agent. Most of her subsequent films were standard adventures in which she provided a pleasant diversion from the rugged action going on around her. She was, on occasion, cast in more substantial roles.
Dianne made a sturdy US cinematic debut in the film noir favorite Bad for Each Other (1953) as a dedicated nurse and love interest to Dr. Tom Owen Charlton Heston. It was Lizabeth Scott who played the bad girl here. Dianne would make a strong stand in westerns notably opposite Dana Andrews in Three Hours to Kill (1954), Glenn Ford and Edward G. Robinson in The Violent Men (1955) and James Stewart and Audie Murphy in Night Passage (1957). She was also quite good, if not better, as Richard Conte's wife in The Brothers Rico (1957) as they struggle together to distance him from his mob ties. Dianne returned to England, where she appeared in Uncle Willie's Bicycle Shop (1953), as a snooty American heiress out to impress Robert Urquhart, and, briefly, in Gideon of Scotland Yard (1958) as Ronald Howard's wife who threatens Jack Hawkins' title character. Her last two films of the 1950s were opposite Alan Ladd in The Deep Six (1958) and Spencer Tracy in The Last Hurrah (1958).
In the 1960s Dianne moved into episodic TV with guest parts in dramas (Perry Mason (1957), Route 66 (1960), Peter Gunn (1958), Ben Casey (1961), Hawaiian Eye (1959), The Detectives (1959), Honey West (1965)), comedies (Petticoat Junction (1963), My Three Sons (1960), "Green Acres") and, of course, westerns (Bonanza (1959), The Deputy (1959), "Have Gun--Will Travel", Laramie (1959), Wagon Train (1957), Gunsmoke (1955), The Big Valley (1965)). She appeared in only two more films before retiring in 1967 -- co-starring with David Janssen in King of the Roaring 20's: The Story of Arnold Rothstein (1961) and with Dean Martin and Elizabeth Montgomery in the light comedy Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed? (1963).
Married twice, Dianne had one child from her first marriage and twins from her second. She retired in order to focus on marriage and family, as well as painting.
She lived in the Los Angeles area for the remainder of her life, dying on July 27, 2019, at the age of 90. - Actress
- Soundtrack
Sarah Vaughan was born March 27, 1924 in Newark, NJ, and died April 3, 1990, in Los Angeles of lung cancer. Her parents were Asbury, a carpenter, and Ada, a laundress. She began studying music when she was seven, taking eight years of piano lessons and two years of organ. As a child she sang in the choir at the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Newark and played piano and organ in high school productions at Arts High School. She entered an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater in New York's Harlem area, singing "Body and Soul", and won the $10 prize and a week's engagement at the Apollo. From 1944 to 1945, she sang with Billy Eckstine and in 1947 she married her manager, trumpeter George Treadwell. Her later husbands included pro football player Clyde Atkins and trumpeter Waymon Reed. She received many awards, including an Emmy in 1981 for a tribute to George Gershwin and a Grammy in 1983.- Vin Scully was born on 29 November 1927 in Bronx, New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for For Love of the Game (1999), Secret in Their Eyes (2015) and Fireball 500 (1966). He was married to Sandra Jean Hunt and Joan Louise Crawford. He died on 2 August 2022 in Hidden Hills, California, USA.
- Composer
- Music Department
- Sound Department
One of six children of the legendary composer Jerry Goldsmith, and the oldest son, Joel Goldsmith's own career in film scoring began in 1978, when he collaborated with Richard Band on the score for Laserblast (1978). Joel Goldsmith next worked as sound mixer for another Band project, The Day Time Ended (1979) before receiving his first solo scoring assignment, Olivia (1983), for cult German director Ulli Lommel. The stylish synthesizer score Goldsmith provided was succeeded by dozens more for film and TV, including The Man with Two Brains (1983) and Man's Best Friend (1993). His electronic expertise came in handy when he co-produced father Jerry's first all-electronic score, Runaway (1984), and helped in the same capacity for Jerry's theme from Hoosiers (1986). Joel also scored episodes of the TV series H.E.L.P. (1990), for which Jerry wrote the original theme; and Joel composed some 20 minutes of additional music (with credit) for his father's 1996 assignment Star Trek: First Contact (1996).
Joel Goldsmith composed his first symphonic score, for Roland Emmerich's Moon 44 (1990), in 1990. Surprisingly, this sweeping score did not lead to more similar assignments; but, in recent years, Joel Goldsmith's profile has been boosted in recent years with assignments such as TV's Vampirella (1996) and the 1997 cult hit Kull the Conqueror (1997), another big, bold symphonic score which helped nab him the assignment Shadow of Doubt (1998). Most recently, he has been the chief composer for the TV shows Stargate SG-1 (1997) and Stargate: Atlantis (2004). While Joel's style is recognizably similar to his father's (he seems to have a particular love for Jerry's The Wind and the Lion (1975)), it is recognizably distinct, which observers of the film music scene believe can only continue to ripen.- Visual Effects
- Special Effects
- Actor
American special effects wizard and miniature model-making virtuoso. McCune partnered John Dykstra as head of Apogee Inc. between 1978 and 1992. He was chief model maker for Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) (in which he also had a small acting role as a Death Star gunner), the pilot for Battlestar Galactica (1978) and 80's classics Spaceballs (1987) and Ghostbusters II (1989). McCune created the iconic Millenium Falcon model, the X-Wing and Tie Fighter models, as well as bounty hunter Boba Fett's helmet. He is credited with putting the finishing touches to the famous droid R2 D2, originally designed by John Stears. For Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) he worked on the Klingon K'tinga Battlecruiser and the V'ger model. In 1992,taking over the lease and some of the remaining infrastructure from Apogee, he set up his own company, Grant McCune Design. In the capacity of miniature effects supervisor, he put his stamp on a number of seminal blockbusters, including Speed (1994), Batman Forever (1995) and Daylight (1996). McCune Design eventually folded in March 2016.
McCune held a degree in biology from California State University in Northridge and began his career as a laboratory technician. Much of his free time was spent creating models and dioramas. In 1978, he was selected by George Lucas to work on Star Wars, on the strength of his collaborative effort in creating the Great White Shark model for Jaws (1975). An expert photographer, McCune provided a brief insight into his work during a 2009 interview, stating: "The most important thing is what you see with your eye. Movies are a lot different from reality. This is because you've isolated the viewer's eye to a certain spot-you can't look anywhere else. If you're a photographer, you get the idea of what you need to do by analyzing what it is that needs to be set and where it is and how much detail it should have. All the best people who ever worked for me were first good with the eye".- Producer
- Writer
Frederick R. Ulrich was born in 1943 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. He was a producer and writer, known for Surviving Evil (2009), Bordertown (2007) and Love Ranch (2010). He was married to Kimila Williams . He died on 26 October 2021 in Hidden Hills, California, USA.