Curated category
AFI Life Achievement Award recipients
- Alfred HitchcockAlfred Hitchcock was born on the 13th of August 1899 above a greengrocer's shop at 517 High Road in Leytonstone, Essex. By the time he died in 1980, his…
- Martin ScorseseMartin Scorsese had asthma as a boy and could not play sports or join in games with the other children. So his parents and his older brother took him to the…
- Al PacinoAl Pacino was born Alfredo James Pacino on the 25th of April 1940, in East Harlem, Manhattan, to Sicilian Italian-American parents.
- Orson WellesOrson Welles was born on the 6th of May 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and died on the 10th of October 1985. In between those dates, he directed what is…
- Steven SpielbergSteven Spielberg was born on the 18th of December 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and by the time he was twelve years old, he had already staged and filmed a…
- George LucasGeorge Lucas was nearly killed before he ever made a film. On the 12th of June 1962, a few days before his high school graduation in Modesto, California…
- James StewartJames Stewart gave away his only competitive Academy Award. He won Best Actor for the 1940 romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story, then handed the statuette…
- Meryl StreepMeryl Streep walked into a casting meeting with Dino De Laurentiis in 1976, hoping to audition for his King Kong remake.
- Kirk DouglasKirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch on the 9th of December 1916, the only son among seven children in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in Amsterdam…
- Elizabeth TaylorElizabeth Taylor was born on the 27th of February 1932 in Hampstead Garden Suburb, northwest London, in a family home called Heathwood.
- Harrison FordHarrison Ford was born on the 13th of July, 1942, at the Swedish Covenant Hospital in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago.
- 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…
- Clint EastwoodClinton Eastwood Jr. entered the world at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco on the 31st of May, 1930, weighing 11 pounds 6 ounces.
- Bette DavisBette Davis died on the 6th of October, 1989, at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, too weak to make the journey home after her cancer…
- Michael DouglasMichael Kirk Douglas was born on the 25th of September, 1944, into a household already saturated with Hollywood ambition.
- Tom HanksTom Hanks lost 35 pounds for a single role. He thinned his hair, learned to walk differently, and prepared to play a dying man on screen.
- William WylerWilliam Wyler walked away from the set of Ben-Hur in 1959 having just overseen a chariot race that took six months to film.
- 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.
- David LeanDavid Lean spent fourteen years in silence after one of the most brutal critical encounters in cinema history. At a lunch in the Algonquin Hotel in New York…