Curated playlist
1932 births
- Little RichardIn October 1947, a fourteen-year-old boy was singing Sister Rosetta Tharpe's songs to himself before her performance at the Macon City Auditorium. Tharpe overheard him, invited him onstage to open her show, and paid him afterward. That…
- Elizabeth TaylorElizabeth Taylor was born on the 27th of February 1932 in Hampstead Garden Suburb, northwest London, in a family home called Heathwood. She died on the 23rd of March 2011 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Between those two…
- Walter CunninghamWalter Cunningham sat in the lunar module pilot seat on the 11th of October 1968, aboard a spacecraft with no lunar module attached. Apollo 7 was the first crewed mission the Apollo program had ever flown. Its eleven days of system tests…
- Peter O'ToolePeter O'Toole holds a record no actor would wish for. He received eight Academy Award nominations for Best Actor across four decades, and never won a single competitive Oscar. When the Academy finally offered him an Honorary Award in 2002…
- Johnny CashJohnny Cash began his concerts the same way for decades, walking to the microphone and saying four words: "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash." The man who said them was born J. R. Cash on the 26th of February 1932, the son of poor cotton farmers in…
- François TruffautFrançois Truffaut was once called "The Gravedigger of French Cinema." In 1958, he was the only French critic not invited to the Cannes Film Festival. His reviews were brutal and unforgiving. A year later, the same Cannes festival handed…
- John WilliamsJohn Williams played two notes for Steven Spielberg, alternating, low and ominous, and Spielberg laughed because he thought it was a joke. The film was Jaws. Williams stood his ground. The simple idea won, and that two-note pattern became…
- David ScottDavid Randolph Scott was born on the 6th of June 1932 at Randolph Field, near San Antonio, Texas. His middle name came directly from that base, a fitting detail for a man whose identity would be shaped at every turn by the places and…
- Jaan PuhvelJaan Puhvel was born in Tallinn, Estonia, on the 24th of January 1932, into a country that would not stay his home for long. His father managed forests for the Estonian government. His mother's family name was Paern. Nothing about that…
- Andrei TarkovskyAndrei Tarkovsky was born on the 4th of April 1932 in the village of Zavrazhye, a small settlement in what is now the Kostroma Oblast of Russia. He would go on to direct just seven feature films in his lifetime. Yet Ingmar Bergman, one of…
- Alfred WordenAlfred Worden was, for three days in 1971, the most isolated human being who had ever lived. While his crewmates David Scott and James Irwin walked on the Moon, Worden orbited above them alone in the command module Endeavour, at times…
- John JakesJohn William Jakes sold his first short story in 1950, and by the time he died in Sarasota on the 11th of March 2023, he had put tens of millions of books into readers' hands. The Kent Family Chronicles alone sold 55 million copies. The…
- Alan BeanAlan LaVern Bean was born on the 15th of March, 1932, in Wheeler, Texas, a small town in the northeastern corner of the Texas Panhandle. He died on the 26th of May, 2018, at the age of 86. Between those two dates, he became only the fourth…
- Petula ClarkPetula Clark was performing for troops during the Blitz when she was still a child, her photo plastered on British Army tanks as a good-luck mascot. Born Sally Clark on the 15th of November 1932 in Ewell, Surrey, she would go on to sell an…
- Peter Blake (artist)Peter Blake was born in Dartford, Kent, on the 25th of June 1932, and he would go on to create one of the most recognised images of the twentieth century. The sleeve for the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band became…
- Lamar HuntLamar Hunt coined one of the most famous phrases in American sports almost by accident. In a letter dated the 25th of July 1966, to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, Hunt wrote that he had "kiddingly" been calling the proposed championship…
- Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)Stuart Hall arrived in Britain in 1951 on a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, one young man among the first large-scale emigration of West Indians to England. He came from Kingston, Jamaica, carrying the weight of a colonial education at the…
- Steve BinderSteve Binder was born on the 12th of December, 1932, and by the time most people his age were still figuring out their careers, he was already steering some of American television's most consequential moments from behind the camera. In his…
- Carl PerkinsCarl Lee Perkins grew up in the cotton fields of Tiptonville, Tennessee, dragging a homemade guitar fashioned from a cigar box and a broomstick. He was born on the 9th of April, 1932, to sharecroppers so poor they could not buy a real…
- Julian SimonJulian Lincoln Simon stood at the podium on Earth Day 1970 in Urbana, Illinois, and told a crowd that population growth was not a disaster. It was, he said, a triumph for mankind. The room included Planned Parenthood president Alan Frank…
- Penelope GilliattPenelope Gilliatt was born on the 25th of March 1932 in London. Her parents were Cyril Conner and Marie Stephanie Douglass, both hailing from Newcastle upon Tyne. They divorced shortly after her birth. She grew up in Northumberland during…
- Richard LesterRichard Lester Liebman arrived at the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 15, already a graduate of a Quaker school in Philadelphia, studying clinical psychology rather than film. No one watching that prodigy walk across campus in the…