April 7th
Actors:
- Bill Bellamy is 55 (“Any Given Sunday,” “The Brothers,” “Fastlane,” “Hot in Cleveland”)
- Jackie Chan is 66 (“Enter the Dragon,” “Shanghai Noon,” “The Karate Kid,” “Rush Hour”)
- Russell Crowe is 56 (“L.A. Confidential,” “Gladiator,” “A Beautiful Mind,” “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” “Cinderella Man,” “American Gangster,” “Robin Hood,” “Les Misérables,” “Man of Steel,” “Noah”) (FAST FACT: He won the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in “Gladiator”)
- Ed Speleers is 32 (“Eragon,” “Downton Abbey”)
- The late James Garner(1928 – 2014)…he would have been 92(“Atlantis: The Lost Empire,” “The Rockford Files,” “Murphy’s Romance,” “The Notebook”)
- The late Wayne Rogers(1933 – 2015)…he would have been 87(“Combat!,” “Gunsmoke,” “Have Gun Will Travel,” “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.,” “The Fugitive,” “Cool Hand Luke,” “M.A.S.H.,” “Ghosts of Mississippi”)
Musicians:
- Bobby Bare is 85
- Janis Ian is 69
- Blue’s Duncan James is 42
- John Oates is 72
- The late Billie Holiday(1915 – 1959)(FAST FACTS: Born Eleanora Fagan, she’s also a GRAMMY Award Hall of Fame inductee.)
- The late Ravi Shankar(1920 – 2012)…he would been 100
- The late Cal Smith(1932 – 2013) …he would have been 88
Plus:
- Former California Governor Jerry Brown is 82 (FAST FACT: There was a 28 year gap between his second and third term as Governor and though, when he was first elected Governor in 1975 he was one of the youngest Governors in the state's history, by the time he was re-elected in 2011 he had become the state's oldest Governor ever.)
- Movie director/producer Francis Ford Coppola is 81 (“The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Assassination Tango”)
- Wrestler (and Jennifer Hudson’s baby daddy) David Otunga is 40
- The late TV personality Sir David Frost(1939 – 2013)…he would have been 81
- The late entrepreneur Will Keith Kellogg(1860 – 1951)(He founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Co. – later the W.K. Kellogg Company – to manufacture cereals. In case you were curious, cornflakes were the first cereal to be developed – and that was courtesy of his brother, John Harvey Kellogg)
- The late director Alan Pakula(1928 – 1998)…he would have been 92(“Sophie’s Choice,” “The Pelican Brief”) (FAST FACT: Pakula died on November 19, 1998 in a freak car accident on the Long Island Expressway in Melville, New York. He was 70 years old. A driver in front of him struck a metal pipe, which went through Pakula's windshield, struck him in the head, and caused him to swerve off the road and into a fence. He was killed instantly.)
- The late famed journalist Walter Winchell(1897 – 1972)(FAST FACT: He was one of the first columnists in America to comment on Hitler and the Nazi party. Also a radio gossip commentator, he supported Senator Joseph McCarthy and was infamous for attempting to destroy the careers of people both private and public whom he disliked.)
- The late poet William Wordsworth(1770 – 1850)(His works, which include "To the Cuckoo," "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," "Tintern Abbey” and “The Excursion,” helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature.)