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Curated playlist

American women environmentalists

  • Michelle PfeifferMichelle Pfeiffer was born on the 29th of April 1958 in Santa Ana, California, and by the early 1990s she ranked among the best-paid actresses in the world. Her start was far less certain. After her first leading role, in the 1982 musical…
  • Hayden PanettiereHayden Panettiere was eleven months old when she first appeared on screen, in a 1990 advertisement for a Playskool toy train. That commercial was the start of a working life that now spans several decades. How does an infant in commercials…
  • Alicia SilverstoneAlicia Silverstone, the American actress, was legally emancipated at the age of 15 so that she could make her first film. The shooting schedule for The Crush required a certain number of working hours, and emancipation was the way she met…
  • Dolly PartonDolly Parton refused to give Elvis Presley half the publishing rights to "I Will Always Love You."
  • Terri IrwinTerri Irwin was reportedly hiking through Cradle Mountain in Tasmania with her two children on the morning of the 4th of September 2006. Her husband, the conservationist Steve Irwin, was killed that same morning. Today she is an American…
  • Carole KingCarole King wrote or co-wrote 118 songs that reached the Billboard Hot 100 during the second half of the 20th century. Another 61 of her songs reached the UK charts. From 1962 to 2005, no woman had more success as a songwriter on the UK…
  • Joan BaezJoan Baez was singing at a music festival called Bratislavská lýra in Communist Czechoslovakia in May 1989 when someone cut off her microphone. From the stage, she had just greeted members of Charter 77, a dissident human-rights group.…
  • Sigourney WeaverSigourney Weaver once said she felt like "a giant spider" as a girl. By the age of 11, she reportedly stood 180 cm tall. She also recalled never having "the confidence to ever think she could act". Weaver, born on the 8th of October 1949,…
  • Gillian AndersonGillian Anderson was arrested on her graduation night. She had broken into her own high school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, hoping to glue the locks of its doors shut. Her classmates had voted her "class clown," "most bizarre girl" and "most…
  • Emmy RossumEmmanuelle Grey Rossum was seven years old when she sang "Happy Birthday" in all 12 keys for a stranger. The stranger was Elena Doria, director of the Metropolitan Opera Children's Chorus, and the performance earned the girl a place in the…

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