Curated playlist
1937 births
- Jack NicholsonJack Nicholson improvised a single line for a 1980 horror film, and it outlived almost everything else he ever filmed. "Here's Johnny!" was not in Stanley Kubrick's script for The Shining. Nicholson invented it on the spot, playing writer…
- Robert Lucas Jr.Robert Emerson Lucas Jr. was born on the 15th of September 1937 in Yakima, Washington, the eldest child of a family that ran an ice creamery. When that business collapsed during the Great Depression, the family moved to Seattle, and Lucas…
- Hunter S. ThompsonHunter S. Thompson once wrote a line he repeated for the rest of his life. "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." That sentence, equal parts confession and dare, fits the man…
- Jasper GriffinJasper Griffin coined a word that ended up in chemistry. That word, 'agostic', was later adopted by the organometallic chemist Malcolm Green to describe C-H-M interactions, a particular kind of chemical bond. Griffin was not a chemist. He…
- Oswyn MurrayOswyn Murray was born on the 26th of March 1937, and he has spent his scholarly life at Balliol College, Oxford, one of the oldest and most storied colleges in the English-speaking world. But it is not only his work on ancient Greece that…
- Ridley ScottRidley Scott was born on the 30th of November 1937 in South Shields, a port town on the northeast coast of England, to a father who would serve as a Colonel in the Royal Engineers and a mother who was a miner's daughter. His great-uncle…
- Jonathan HalesJonathan Hales was born on the 10th of May 1937, and the production memo that best captures his career came from a producer named Rick McCallum. "At that stage, Attack of the Clones felt like a 'virtual film' because we got the script only…
- Tom StoppardTom Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, on the 3rd of July 1937, and he died on the 29th of November 2025, at his home in Dorset, England. He was 88. King Charles, in his tribute, quoted a line from Stoppard's own…
- Richard GombrichRichard Francis Gombrich was born on the 17th of July 1937 into a family that bridged two distinct cultural spheres. His mother Ilse Gombrich worked as a classical pianist until her death in 2006 at age ninety-six. His father Sir Ernst…
- Roger ZelaznyRoger Zelazny spent his evenings writing science fiction while working a day job at the U.S. Social Security Administration. For seven years, from 1962 to 1969, he clocked in at government offices in Cleveland and Baltimore, then came home…
- Amos TverskyAmos Nathan Tversky was born on the 16th of March 1937 in Haifa, British Palestine, and by the time he died in 1996, he had helped overturn one of the most confident assumptions in modern economics: that human beings, when making…
- Richard MarquandRichard Marquand died on the 4th of September 1987, five days after a stroke felled him at his home in Penshurst. He was 49. His last film was still waiting to be released. To most people who knew his name, he was the director of Return of…
- Robert Holmes à CourtRobert Holmes à Court built Australia's first billion-dollar private fortune starting from virtually nothing, and he did it in less than two decades. By the time the stock markets of the world collapsed in October 1987, his diversified…
- Anatoly KhazanovAnatoly Mikhailovich Khazanov was born on the 13th of December 1937 in Moscow, into a world where official history was a controlled substance. The Soviet state had its own version of how civilizations rise and fall, and that version was…
- Valentina TereshkovaIt is I, Seagull. Everything is fine. I see the horizon. It's a sky blue with a dark strip. How beautiful the Earth is. Those words came from Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, a 26-year-old former textile worker, radioing down from orbit…
- Billy Dee WilliamsBilly Dee Williams was born William December Williams Jr. on the 6th of April 1937, in New York City, and by the time he was seven years old, he had already taken his first bow on a Broadway stage. That debut, in Kurt Weill and Ira…
- Eric ChristiansenEric Christiansen was born on the 15th of September 1937 and died on the 31st of October 2016. By the end of his life, he was a fellow emeritus of New College, Oxford University, remembered as a historian of the medieval world. Getting…