Curated category
Commandeurs of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
- Bob DylanBob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on the 24th of May, 1941, at St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. His Hebrew name was Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham.
- David BowieDavid Bowie was born David Robert Jones on the 8th of January 1947 in Brixton, London, and he died two days after releasing his final album, on the 10th of…
- T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot wrote the opening of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when he was twenty-two years old. The lines compared an evening sky to "a patient…
- Quentin TarantinoQuentin Tarantino was born on the 27th of March 1963, in Knoxville, Tennessee, to a mother who let him watch R-rated films as a child and a father he never…
- Stanley KubrickStanley Kubrick was born on the 26th of July 1928 in the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, and he died on the 7th of March 1999, just a few days after hosting…
- Meryl StreepMeryl Streep walked into a casting meeting with Dino De Laurentiis in 1976, hoping to audition for his King Kong remake.
- Michael CaineMaurice Joseph Micklewhite was born on the 14th of March 1933 at St Olave's Hospital in Rotherhithe, a working-class district of London, the son of a fish…
- 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.
- Audrey HepburnAudrey Hepburn stood on a train platform in occupied Arnhem as a young girl, watching a boy in an oversized coat board a train bound for a concentration camp.
- Mikhail GorbachevMikhail Gorbachev was born on the 2nd of March 1931 in Privolnoye, a village in the North Caucasus, into a peasant family so poor his parents had married as…
- Ringo StarrRingo Starr was born on the 7th of July 1940 at 9 Madryn Street in Dingle, one of the oldest and poorest inner-city districts in Liverpool.
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy…
- Eldar RyazanovEldar Ryazanov was born on the 18th of November 1927, in Samara, to a diplomat father and a Jewish mother, in a country that would spend the next several…
- Dmitri ShostakovichDmitri Shostakovich stood backstage at the Leningrad opera house on the 26th of January 1936, white as a sheet, waiting to take his bow.
- Edison DenisovEdison Vasilievich Denisov was born in Tomsk, Siberia on the 6th of April 1929. He initially studied mathematics before making a decisive turn toward…