Myron Floren Biography

Floren shared an upper Midwestern farm background with bandleader Lawrence Welk. "I'm the happiest, the most relaxed when I'm up on stage," he told Michael Kuelker of the St.

Elizabeth Denison Forth Biography

Nicknamed Lisette, Forth was born Elizabeth Denison in Macomb County in the 1780s or 1790s—the records are unclear. She was born a slave to slave parents Peter and Hannah Denison.

Tetsuya Fujita Biography

Tetsuya Fujita was born on October 23, 1920, in Kitakyushu City on the southern island of Kyushu in Japan. His first name meaning "philosopher," Tetsuya was the eldest child of Tomojiro, a schoolteacher, and Yoshie (Kanesue) Fujita.

Serge Gainsbourg Biography

Gainsbourg was born at the HoĂ´tel Dieu hospital in Paris, along with his twin sister Liliane, on April 2, 1928. His birth name was Lucien Ginsburg.

Martha Gellhorn Biography

Martha Ellis Gellhorn was born in St. Louis on November 8, 1908.

Stan Getz Biography

Getz in his youth was an admirer of Lester Young, the great saxophonist whose singing melodic lines did much to emancipate the jazz soloist from the procession of chords that underpinned the tune. Coming of age during the evolution of the dense, difficult new music known as bebop, he forged a quieter but no less intense style of his own that commanded the admiration of legions of jazz fans for decades.

Carlos Ghosn Biography

Ghosn's accomplishments were all the more noteworthy because they came at deeply troubled companies—Renault in France and Nissan in Japan—that analysts had written off as also-rans and even evaluated as approaching bankruptcy. Ghosn did not just rescue these companies; he turned them into market leaders.

Sabiha Gökçen Biography

Gökçen was born on March 22, 1913, in Bursa, a city in the northwest of Turkey, and official accounts say she was the daughter of Mustafa İzzet Bey and Hayriye Hanim. Her life intersected with one of twentieth-century Europe's most important leaders in October of 1925, the year she turned 12.

Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich Biography

The book was successful partly because it was both accessible and philosophical. Originally written for young people, it featured Gombrich's clear, jargon-free writing.

Mal Goode Biography

Goode was born on February 13, 1908, in White Plains, Virginia, but his family moved to Homestead, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh when he was very young. He was the third of four boys and two girls: James, William, Mary, Allan, and Ruth.

Christine Granville Biography

Skarbek, in the words of Murray Davies of London's Mirror newspaper, "was the very first Bond girl," serving as the model for Vesper Lynd in the first of novelist Ian Fleming's James Bond books, Casino Royale. However, Skarbek's feats, which included scaring off a team of German captors by raising her arms to disclose a live grenade under each one, were real, not fictional.

Zaha Hadid Biography

Often named as the most prominent contemporary female architect, or singled out for notice because of her Iraqi Arab background, Hadid is significant beyond these accidents of birth for her intellectual toughness, her refusal to compromise on her ideas even when very few of them were being realized in concrete and steel. For many years, her designs filled the pages of architecture periodicals but were dismissed as impractical or as too radical, and Hadid even thought about giving up architecture after she suffered a major rejection in her adopted homeland of Britain in 1995.

Gunther Von Hagens Biography

Body Worlds showed dissected and opened-up human corpses, preserved with the plastination process and mounted in lifelike, sometimes humorous poses. The complex workings of the human body were displayed in a comprehensible way, even to visitors with little background in human anatomy.

Stephen Harper Biography

The future prime minister was born in Toronto, Ontario, on April 30, 1959. He grew up in a middle class family in the Toronto suburbs.

Laura S. Haviland Biography

Haviland was a resident of southeastern Michigan, where she operated a station on the Underground Railroad, the system of safe houses that conveyed fugitive slaves to Canada and freedom in the decades before the U.S. Civil War.

Eliza Haywood Biography

Her earliest works were immensely popular predecessors of the modern romance novel, but she also wrote satirical plays and novels whose themes foreshadowed a later generation of English literary lionesses, among them Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. "Haywood's gifts as a storyteller held the attention of her audience," declared Jerry C.

Phoebe Apperson Hearst Biography

Hearst was born Phoebe Apperson on December 3, 1842, in Franklin County, Missouri, to Randolph Walker Apperson and Drucilla (Whitmire) Apperson. They were relatively affluent farmers, and Hearst's childhood was a happy one.

HĂ©loĂŻse Biography

HĂ©loĂŻse's exact birth date and family background are details that have been lost to time. Most scholars place the year of her birth around 1098.

Myra Hess Biography

Hess was born on February 25, 1890, in Hampstead in North West London. She was the youngest of four children.

William Hutt Biography

William Ian DeWitt Hutt, born in Toronto on May 2, 1920, spent his earliest years with an aunt in Hamilton, Ontario; his mother was in poor health. At age four or five he demanded a part in the Christmas pageant at Christ Church, where his aunt was a member.

Elizabeth Inchbald Biography

Inchbald was born Elizabeth Simpson on October 15, 1753, in a small village called Standingfield near Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, located near the eastern coast of England.

Steve Irwin Biography

Irwin was born on February 22, 1962 in Essendon, near Melbourne, Australia. His father, Bob, was a plumber and his mother, Lyn, a nurse, but both were naturalists by avocation.

B. K. S. Iyengar Biography

Yoga, an integrated system of physical and spiritual exercises, had a history that dated back thousands of years in India and was intertwined with the development of the Hindu religion. Yet even there it remained something of a specialized interest when Iyengar began his long career.

Jane Jacobs Biography

In the book Jacobs launched a broadside against the concepts of urban renewal that were fashionable at the time. The seeming disorder and unpredictability of cities, she argued, were actually signs of their vitality, and the brave new world of high-rises envisioned by planners would strangle the buzzing street life that fostered community ties and drew newcomers with its energy.

Victor Jara Biography

Victor Lidio Jara MartĂ­nez was born on September 23, 1932. His parents were farm workers with minimal resources who lived on a plantation near the Chilean town of Lonquen.

Luis Jiménez Biography

Jiménez worked in the industrial, unabashedly commercial medium of fiberglass, and he drew on such commonplace art traditions as Mexican wall calendar prints, cowboy imagery, and "lowrider" truck decoration. Yet his work reflected a detailed knowledge of Mexican and European artistic traditions.

Antonio Carlos Jobim Biography

Jobim's place in the annals of popular music was secured by a single hit song, "The Girl from Ipanema" (1964), which he co-wrote with lyricist VinĂ­cius de Moraes. His creative contributions to jazz, however, went much deeper; many of his songs became jazz standards, and, in the words of Richard S.

William Jones Biography

Jones was born in London, England, on September 28, 1746, the son of William and Mary Nix Jones. His father was a mathematician who was a friend of Sir Isaac Newton.

Andrea Jung Biography

Jung was born in 1959 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her family moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, when she was only two years old.

Joseph Kabila Biography

Kabila was born around June 4, 1971, in Ankoro—a small town on the banks of the Congo River—in North Katanga, in the Congo, although his birth year has been given as anywhere from 1968 to 1972, and there has been some debate as to the location. There are also some reports that instead he was born December 4, 1971, at Hewa Bora, Kabila's father's guerrilla headquarters in the Fizi territory of South-Kivu.