February Celebrity Birthdays
A look at the famous and the fascinating on the day they were born
AARP Members Only Access, February 2022
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PHOTO BY: Photo by Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic/Getty Images
Feb. 28: Actress Bernadette Peters, 74
With her mane of ringlet curls, Kewpie-doll face and a singing voice that’s full of character and depth, Bernadette Peters, 74, was tailor-made for the stage: In any role, her personality reaches the rafters. Born in Queens, New York, on Feb. 28, 1948, Peters made her stage debut at the age of 10 in a 1959 revival of Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella. Over the next six decades, she’s lent her peculiar and infectious screwball charm to musicals written by seemingly every great composer of the 20th century: She won two Tonys as best actress in a musical for her work in shows by Andrew Lloyd Webber (Song and Dance in 1986 ) and Irving Berlin (Annie Get Your Gun in 1999), but she’ll always be best known for her collaborations with the late, great Stephen Sondheim. Peters originated the roles of Dot/Marie in Sunday in the Park With George and the Witch in Into the Woods, and later appeared in revivals of Follies, Gypsy and A Little Night Music. Most recently, she replaced Bette Midler in the blockbuster revival of Hello, Dolly! Kelly Connolly of Entertainment Weekly wrote of her performance, “For Peters, as for Midler, to sing about being back where she belongs is to invite the whole room in on her story. She is glamorous and brassy and quintessentially New York; she descends a staircase like she invented stairs.” Her Old Hollywood charisma has served her well on screen, too, in films like The Jerk, Silent Movie and Pennies From Heaven, for which she won a Golden Globe. And following small-screen turns in TV shows like Smash and Mozart in the Jungle, she earned her third Emmy nomination last year for her guest-starring role on the NBC musical comedy Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist. Unsurprisingly, the episode in question afforded her the chance to sing and dance, this time through a fantastic rendition of Sia’s “Cheap Thrills”! —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: ALBERTO CRISTOFARI/CONTRASTO/Redux
Feb. 27: Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader, 88
Though he might be remembered by younger generations as “that guy who kept running for president,” Ralph Nader, 88, has left his mark on everything from the cars we drive to the water we drink to the workplaces where we spend our days. Born Feb. 27, 1934, to Lebanese immigrant parents, the Harvard Law School graduate had dreams of becoming a defender of justice, and he first rose to prominence with his 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, in which he criticized the safety records of car manufacturers. He struck a nerve, with General Motors later admitting to hiring private detectives to trail him, and his work directly led to the implementation of new safety standards. Soon, he was leading a group of legal activists and volunteer law students dubbed Nader’s Raiders, who researched hot-button issues like nuclear energy, meat processing, pollution and international trade, and his activism spurred the creation of such organizations and legislation as the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Act, the Freedom of Information Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In 1996, his achievements landed him on The Atlantic’s list of the 100 most influential figures in American history — one of only three people who were still alive, along with Bill Gates and James Watson. Less successful were his four bids for the presidency, in 1996 and 2000 on the Green Party ticket, in 2004 as the Reform Party candidate and in 2008 as an independent. His 2.8 million votes in the 2000 election are often blamed with costing Al Gore the presidency, though the 2006 documentary An Unreasonable Man was created in part to restore his reputation and defend his legacy. Nader’s later years have been a time of creative experimentation and passion projects: He’s written a novel called Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!, hosted a weekly radio show since 2014 and even founded the American Museum of Tort Law in Connecticut. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for BET
Feb. 26: Singer Erykah Badu, 51
Erica Abi Wright was born in Dallas on Feb. 26, 1971, and you might know her better by her stage name, Erykah Badu: She took the “kah” from an Egyptian word meaning “inner self,” while “badu” comes from her favorite jazz scat syllables. In 1997, she released her blockbuster debut album, Baduizm, which NPR recently named the 12th-greatest album ever by a female artist, and it went on to win two Grammys for best R&B album and best female R&B vocal performance for “On & On.” Dubbed the Queen of Neo-Soul, Badu earned near-constant comparisons to Billie Holiday thanks to her sultry and jazzy vocals, and her second album, Mama’s Gun, spawned the single “Bag Lady,” her first to crack the Billboard Hot 100’s top 10. Outside of her music, Badu has appeared in a smattering of films, including Blues Brothers 2000, The Cider House Rules and, most recently, 2019’s What Men Want, as an eccentric psychic who gives Ali (Taraji P. Henson) a tea that allows her to hear men’s inner thoughts. Upon the film’s release, she told The New York Times that comedy was (shockingly!) her first love, and when asked if she had interest in recording new music, Badu replied, “I’m very interested, I just don’t have anything to say. As a songwriter, you have to kind of have something to say, something to record, something to ignite a conversation. I don’t have anything right now. I guess I’m uploading information. After that, we’ll see.” Her music has been influential in surprising ways: If you’ve ever heard someone say “stay woke,” which means being aware of important facts and issues, especially related to racial and social justice, Merriam-Webster traces the phrase’s widespread usage to Badu’s song “Master Teacher.” After a brief pandemic hiatus, she’s back out on the road this year, starting tonight with a show in her hometown of Dallas and continuing with gigs in, among others, Los Angeles, Jacksonville, Florida, and Lewes, in the south of England. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Feb. 25: Actor Sean Astin, 51
Sean Astin has built a career out of playing lovable guys audiences can’t help but root for. Born on Feb. 25, 1971, Astin made his screen debut at the age of 9 in the after-school special Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom opposite his real-life mother, Patty Duke. He followed up iconic roles in The Goonies and Toy Soldiers with his celebrated turn as the ultimate underdog, Notre Dame football player Daniel E. “Rudy” Ruettiger, in 1993’s Rudy, and AFI included the film at No. 54 on its list of the most inspiring movies of all time. In 2001, Astin started his career-redefining role as Frodo’s kind and loyal best hobbit friend, Samwise Gamgee, in the Lord of the Rings franchise. “Astin is the soul of the movie in a performance — true in every detail — that deserves Oscar attention,” wrote Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers in his review of The Return of the King. Astin built such a family on the set of the Tolkien trilogy that he and his fellow castmates got matching tattoos of the number 9 written in Elvish Tengwar script, and he later released a memoir called There and Back Again: An Actor’s Tale about his time filming in New Zealand. In recent years, Astin has found success on TV, playing the loving boyfriend of Winona Ryder’s Joyce Byers on Netflix’s Stranger Things, which borrowed heavily from the gang-of-misfits template set by The Goonies, and then as an unsuspecting dad being conned by a young grifter in 2019’s No Good Nick. Next up, he’s joining Season 2 of HBO’s Perry Mason as Sunny Gryce, a supermarket owner who becomes one of Mason’s new clients. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Agencja Fotograficzna Caro/Alamy
Feb. 24: Philosopher Judith Butler, 66
Few thinkers have had as significant an impact on the ways we talk about gender and sexuality as the philosopher Judith Butler, 66. Born in Cleveland on Feb. 24, 1956, Butler — who identifies as nonbinary and use both “she” and “they” pronouns — made a huge splash with the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, which discussed the idea of gender as a social construct that’s performative in nature. The book is considered one of the first major works of queer theory, and it continues to spark debate and conversation more than 30 years after its publication. Butler, now a professor of comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, has turned a critical eye on subjects such as post-9/11 America (2004’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence), Judaism and Zionism (2013’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism) and, most recently, the ethics of nonviolence (2020’s The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind). “Judith Butler holds a peculiar place in contemporary Western culture,” writes Masha Gessen in The New Yorker. “Like very few men and perhaps no other women, Butler is an international celebrity academic. This means that many more people know her name than have read her work — and most of them have an opinion about Butler and her ideas.” All that might change with the release of their next book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, the author’s first to be aimed at a wider, nonacademic audience. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic/Getty Images
Feb. 23: Actress Niecy Nash, 52
Though she had steadily been getting roles since 1995, it wasn’t until 2003 that actress Niecy Nash, 52, had a one-two punch of career success: That year, she kicked off nine seasons as the host of the Style Network’s Clean House, for which she later won a Daytime Emmy, and she stepped into her sidesplitting role as Deputy Raineesha Williams on Comedy Central’s Cops parody Reno 911! It’s a cult hit so beloved by fans that Nash — who was born on Feb. 23, 1970 — returned to the role of Raineesha for a 2007 film, a 2020 reboot on Quibi and a 2021 sequel called Reno 911!: The Hunt for QAnon, released in December on Paramount+. The broad and raucous tone of the show offered little indication of Nash’s immense range as an actress, and she later earned two Emmy nominations for her surprisingly moving performance as nurse Didi Ortley in the HBO comedy Getting On, set in the geriatric extended care wing of a hospital. In 2017, she finally got her big star turn with TNT’s Claws, as a nail salon owner turned drug queenpin. The pitch-black dramedy finished up its acclaimed four-season run this month, with its usual blend of jaw-dropping twists, outrageous costumes and swamp-noir vibes. In recent years, she’s also shown a more serious side, playing a trio of real women: civil rights activist Richie Jean Jackson in Selma, cowboy-hat-wearing feminist leader Flo Kennedy in Mrs. America and Delores Wise, the mother of one of the wrongfully accused Central Park Five, in When They See Us, for which she received a third Emmy nod. Next, she’s set to collaborate with her Scream Queens producer, Ryan Murphy, on the new Netflix limited series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. She’ll play Glenda Cleveland, a neighbor of the serial killer’s who heroically tried to call the police and the FBI to warn about Dahmer’s behavior — and who was sadly ignored. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Charles Sykes/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
Feb. 22: Comedic Actress Rachel Dratch, 56
Few recent Saturday Night Live characters have had as major an impact on the American public as Debbie Downer, the woman who finds the opposite of a silver lining in every situation. We all know a Debbie ourselves — or we are one! You can thank the genius comedic timing of longtime cast member Rachel Dratch, 56, who over the span of her seven seasons on SNL memorably channeled everyone from rowdy Boston teen Denise to a Jacuzzi-dwelling “love-ah.” Born in Massachusetts on Feb. 22, 1966, Dratch graduated from Dartmouth before embarking on her improv comedy career in Chicago. While there, she teamed up with another young upstart named Tina Fey, and the duo performed together in a two-person sketch show and eventually both ended up on SNL. When Fey left the sketch giant to create 30 Rock, Dratch costarred in its unaired pilot as Jenna Moroney. The part was rewritten for Jane Krakowski, but Dratch remained an integral part of the show, turning up often in memorably wacky bit parts, including Barbara Walters, a cat wrangler, an Eastern European cleaning lady and a fuzzy blue monster that Liz Lemon hallucinates. In 2012, she recounted the recasting drama and her surprise pregnancy at the age of 44 in the hilarious memoir Girl Walks Into a Bar…: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle. Along the way, she’s worked steadily on Shameless, Bob’s Burgers, King of Queens and more, but she always finds her way back to collaborating with her fellow SNL alumnae. In 2019, she starred alongside Ana Gasteyer, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey and SNL writers Paula Pell and Emily Spivey in Netflix’s Wine Country, which was based on a real trip the crew took to Sonoma for Dratch’s 50th birthday. And in December, she and Gasteyer teamed back up to write and star in Comedy Central’s A Clüsterfünke Christmas, a parody of Hallmark Channel holiday movies. “We make each other laugh a lot in real life,” Dratch told Paste magazine. “This felt like an extension of that. It was all the fun that we have together plus the gnashing of teeth.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Time
Feb. 21: Astronaut Mark Kelly, 58
Soldier, pilot, astronaut, senator — Mark Kelly has lived many lives in his 58 years. Born Feb. 21, 1964, in New Jersey, Kelly flew 39 combat missions as a naval pilot during the Persian Gulf War. In 1996, he and his identical twin, Scott, both began training with NASA, and by 2001, Mark was heading to space on the Endeavour to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. Over the span of a decade, Kelly flew on four shuttle missions, logging a total of 54 days in space and traveling more than 22 million miles, before retiring in fall 2011. Earlier that year, Kelly’s life was forever changed when his wife, U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona, was shot in an assassination attempt in Tucson. She miraculously survived and was even able to watch him launch on his final mission. The attack gave the couple a renewed sense of purpose, and in 2013, following the Sandy Hook shooting, they founded Americans for Responsible Solutions, a nonprofit gun control advocacy group later renamed Giffords. In 2019, Kelly announced that he was running for an open U.S. Senate seat, and his victory in 2020 proved a watershed moment for Arizona politics: It was the first time the Grand Canyon State had two Democratic senators in almost 70 years. Kelly also became the fourth former astronaut to be elected to Congress, following John Glenn, Jack Swigert and Jack Schmitt. “When I was at NASA, we would train for two years for a space shuttle mission,” he told his supporters. “From being in the space shuttle simulator and flying and training, two years of focusing on the details. Two years before we were on the launchpad ready to go. And then the work started. Now the work starts.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for EJAF
Feb. 20: Heiress Patty Hearst, 68
Life changed forever for Patty Hearst, 68, on the night of Feb. 4, 1974, when members of the leftist radical group the Symbionese Liberation Army broke into her Berkeley apartment and kidnapped her at the age of 19. Born on Feb. 20, 1954, the granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst entered a bizarre world of brainwashing, and she was soon being referred to as Tania and aiding her captors in armed robberies and extortion. One of the most famous images of the decade showed Hearst wearing a beret, carrying a machine gun and posing in front of the SLA’s multiheaded snake flag. Hearst was apprehended by the FBI in September 1975, convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to seven years, though questions remain to this day about whether she was a coerced victim or a willing criminal. Ultimately, after she served 22 months, President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence, and President Bill Clinton later granted her a full pardon. In the years since her kidnapping, Hearst published the 1981 memoir Every Secret Thing and later appeared in five John Waters films, including Cry-Baby and Serial Mom. Hearst and Waters have been friends for decades, and in a conversation with Town & Country magazine in 2020, the director described her style as follows: “You were a good girl gone a little rebel, then gone wrongly accused and back to the manor born with a little weariness and a tinge of troubled glamour.” More recently, she’s shown up at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, where her shih tzu Rocket won the toy group in 2015 and her French bulldogs Tuggy and Rubi won best of breed and best of opposite sex in 2017. In 2019, her time with the SLA loosely inspired the movie American Woman, which was told from the point of view of the former radical assigned to take care of a Hearst-like kidnapping victim. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic/Getty Images
Feb. 19: Writer Amy Tan, 70
Travel has a magical way of making people see clearly, and it was a fateful trip to China with her immigrant mother that made Amy Tan, 70, give up a successful career as a freelance business writer to pursue a life in literature. Born in Oakland, California, on Feb. 19, 1952, Tan burst onto the scene with her 1989 debut novel, The Joy Luck Club, which tells the interlocking stories of four Chinese-born mothers and their four Chinese American daughters, as they eat dim sum and play mah-jongg in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The novel was adapted into a beloved 1993 film, the first major Hollywood movie since 1961’s Flower Drum Song to tell a contemporary Asian story (no kung fu!) with a majority Asian American cast (no yellowface!). “The Joy Luck Club is like a flowering of talent that has been waiting so long to be celebrated,” wrote Roger Ebert in his four-star review. “It is also one of the most touching and moving of the year’s films.” Since the early 1990s, Tan has published five more New York Times best-selling novels, plus memoirs, short stories and children’s books. Outside of writing, Tan has served as “lead rhythm dominatrix,” second tambourine and backup singer in the literary supergroup the Rock Bottom Remainders, alongside other writers like Dave Barry and Stephen King. Over the years, many of her works have been adapted for different media: Her children’s book Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat became a PBS Kids animated series, and she later wrote the libretto for the 2008 opera The Bonesetter’s Daughter, based on her best-selling 2001 novel of the same name. Last year, the documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir premiered at Sundance, before airing on PBS’ American Masters and then streaming on Netflix. “I am not the subject matter of mothers and daughters or Chinese culture,” she says in the film. “I am a writer compelled by a subconscious neediness to know, which is a perpetual state of uncertainty, and a tether to the past.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Andrew Toth/FilmMagic/Getty Images
Feb. 18: Artist Yoko Ono, 89
Has anyone in 20th-century pop culture been more unfairly maligned than Yoko Ono, 89? Born Feb. 18, 1933, in Tokyo, the avant-garde multi-hyphenate — singer, songwriter, performance artist, filmmaker — is known to the American public as “the woman who broke up the Beatles.” After she and John Lennon met at one of her exhibitions in London, the pair began collaborating on experimental music, including the album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, which featured their nude bodies on the cover. Following their wedding in 1969, they staged weeklong “bed-ins” to promote world peace, and she soon embarked on her avant-garde rock career with the Plastic Ono Band. While most of her output was not your typical Top 40 fare, she and Lennon picked up the 1981 Grammy for album of the year for Double Fantasy, which was released three weeks before his murder. In recent years, her reputation has been analyzed endlessly, and many people viewed Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary The Beatles: Get Back as proof that she didn’t break up the Beatles. Jackson told 60 Minutes, “She never has opinions about the stuff they’re doing. She never says, ‘Oh, I think the previous take was better than that one.’ She’s a very benign presence, and she doesn’t interfere in the slightest.” To mark her birthday today, indie singer-songwriter Ben Gibbard is releasing a new podcast and a tribute album called Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono, which features covers by the likes of David Byrne, Yo La Tengo and Sharon Van Etten. The project “was born out of both love and frustration,” said Gibbard, who continues, “As an advocate, the tallest hurdle to clear has always been the public’s ignorance as to the breadth of Yoko’s work.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images
Feb. 17: Basketball Legend Michael Jordan, 59
When ESPN put together its list of the 100 greatest North American athletes of the 20th century, Michael Jordan, 59, came out on top, besting even Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali. Born Feb. 17, 1963, Jordan first gained national attention playing for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and as a freshman, he made the game-winning basket in the national championship game. In 1984, he was drafted by the Chicago Bulls and helped lead the U.S. basketball team to gold at the Los Angeles Olympics — a feat he’d famously repeat in 1992 with the “Dream Team.” Over the course of his 15 seasons in the NBA, his record was unimpeachable: He was rookie of the year, a five-time MVP, a six-time national champion, the second player to score 3,000 points in a season, a 10-time league scoring champion (the most of any player ever), a Hall of Famer, a back-to-back slam dunk contest winner and the player with the highest points per game average (30.12) in NBA history. It’s no wonder he earned the royal title His Airness. Off the court, he became a crossover pop culture sensation, starring alongside the Looney Tunes in 1996’s Space Jam and lending his name and likeness to Nike’s Air Jordan line. In 2010, Jordan became the first former NBA player to own a team, when he took over majority control of the Charlotte Hornets, then called the Bobcats. If by some chance you’d forgotten about Jordan’s greatness, the Emmy-winning 2020 ESPN Films/Netflix documentary The Last Dance was here to remind you, and it even featured appearances by Bill Clinton and longtime Bulls superfan Barack Obama. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Clive Brunskill/Getty Images for Laver Cup
Feb. 16: Tennis Legend John McEnroe, 63
One of the most dominant tennis greats of the 1970s and ’80s, John McEnroe, 63, racked up more tournament wins than any other male player in the Open Era, with 77 singles victories and 78 in doubles. Born Feb. 16, 1959, McEnroe first started turning heads in the tennis world when, as an 18-year-old amateur in 1977, he became the youngest player to ever make it to the Wimbledon semifinals. The next year, after he won the U.S. collegiate title, he dropped out of Stanford and turned pro, and between 1977 and 1992, he would go on to win an impressive 17 total Grand Slam tournaments in doubles, singles and mixed play. But more than his impressive win record, McEnroe became known for his mercurial on-court persona. His epic outbursts took many forms — screaming at line judges and umpires, smashing racquets, cursing, hitting balls into the stands — and he was no stranger to fines and suspensions. His antics reportedly inspired Tom Hulce’s performance as a young Mozart in Amadeus, and fellow hothead Shia LaBeouf played the tennis great in the 2017 Swedish biopic Borg vs. McEnroe. His great sense of humor about himself has led McEnroe to frequent cameos in TV and film, including 30 Rock, Saturday Night Live and Curb Your Enthusiasm, but he’s currently starring in his biggest role to date, and it’s an unlikely one: He’s the narrator in Mindy Kaling’s Netflix sitcom Never Have I Ever, a coming-of-age story about an Indian American teenager that returned for its second season last July. “I was hopeful that people would look at this and go, ‘Whoa, why the hell is John McEnroe doing this?’” he told Variety. “And by the end, [they would think], ‘Hey, Mindy made a good choice.’ That actually worked out in a bizarre way.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Robby Klein/Contour by Getty Images
Feb. 15: Catoonist Matt Groening, 68
Besides Walt Disney, perhaps no other single person has changed the way Americans think about the art of animation more than Matt Groening, 68. Born Feb. 15, 1954, in Portland, Oregon, Groening moved to L.A. after graduation and due to his abysmal experience living there created the comic strip Life in Hell, which he sent to friends back home and began selling for $2 at Licorice Pizza, the record store where he worked. The comic, which featured Binky the bunny, later ran in alt weeklies nationwide. The strip caught the attention of TV producer James L. Brooks, who asked Groening to adapt the characters into a series of animated shorts for The Tracey Ullman Show, but he instead developed the Simpsons family, a clan of yellow-skinned Everypeople who would change his life forever. In 1989, the upstart Fox network spun The Simpsons off into their own show, and their plainspokenness rankled a few viewers in those early years — Barbara Bush, for instance, called the show “the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.” Since then, The Simpsons has cemented its status as one of the most important shows in television history, earning 35 prime-time Emmys and two Peabody Awards over the course of its 717 episodes and counting. It later spawned a Golden Globe–nominated movie, and in 2018, it surpassed Gunsmoke to become the longest-running prime-time scripted series ever. After The Simpsons, Groening launched the critically acclaimed follow-up Futurama, about a pizza delivery boy who accidentally gets cryogenically frozen in 1999 and emerges in the year 2999 into a city populated by robots, mutants, aliens and lobster-clawed doctors. Since 2018, Groening has turned his attention to the world of fantasy with Netflix’s Disenchantment, about a hard-partying princess and her best friends, a demon and an elf named Elfo. He told Esquire that episodes include references to everything from Buster Keaton to the Indian filmmaker S.S. Rajamouli: “I’m getting very obscure now. But this stuff just makes me so happy.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Brad Barket/Getty Images for The New Yorker
Feb. 14: Journalist Terry Gross, 71
Over the span of 47 years and counting, Terry Gross, 71, has turned out some of the most intimate and probing interviews ever heard on radio as part of her NPR program Fresh Air. Born Feb. 14, 1951, in Brooklyn, New York, Gross has been the host of Fresh Air since 1975, when it was a public radio show in the Philadelphia area. NPR began distributing Fresh Air with Gross nationally in 1985, and two years later it became the daily one-hour national show we all know today. Over the decades, her list of interviewees has represented a who’s who of cultural icons and thought leaders, including President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton and thousands more; in fact, by 2015, Gross had amassed a collection of 13,000 interviews. She’s been celebrated with a Peabody Award and a National Humanities Medal, all while maintaining a disarmingly low-key persona and a gentle sense of humor. The San Francisco Examiner described her style as “a remarkable blend of empathy and warmth, genuine curiosity and sharp intelligence,” and while her interviews have gone well 99 percent of the time, there have been exceptions: Nancy Reagan bristled at Gross’ questions about the AIDS crisis, and a few guests, such as Adam Driver, Bill O’Reilly and Lou Reed, have ended their chats early. Fresh Air is still going strong, but starting in 2020, Gross took on a decidedly unexpected role, voicing a lime-green dinosaur named Pam in the HBO Max cartoon The Fungies! —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Gary Gershoff/Getty Images
Feb. 13: TV Host Jerry Springer, 78
It might be hard to believe that a man whose TV show feels — for better or worse — so all-American actually started his life elsewhere, but Jerry Springer, 78, was born on Feb. 13, 1944, in London. After emigrating to the States with his family at age 5, Springer took a circuitous route to the world of tabloid television. He received a law degree from Northwestern before working on the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, and from 1977 to ’78, he was the mayor of Cincinnati. By the 1980s, he began working as a reporter and then an anchor for a local news station, picking up 10 local Emmys along the way. The popularity of his commentaries on current events eventually led to the 1991 debut of The Jerry Springer Show, which evolved (or devolved?) from a show about politics to one about the outrageous and the obscene, with guests often exchanging profanities, brawling and throwing chairs. Just how over the top was the show? In 2001, it was turned into an award-winning British musical called Jerry Springer: The Opera, which featured Jesus Christ, more than 8,000 profanities and a troupe of tap-dancing KKK members. Springer closed the curtain on his namesake series in 2018 after more than 4,000 episodes and debuted his syndicated courtroom show, Judge Jerry, the following year. And if you want to hear Springer get back to his political roots, since 2015 he’s hosted the weekly Jerry Springer Podcast out of a coffee shop in Kentucky — though COVID-19 has temporarily moved the recordings to (what else?) Zoom. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Matthew Lloyd/Contour by Getty Images
Feb. 12: Writer Judy Blume, 84
It’s hard to think of a 20th-century writer who has had as truly lasting an impact on readers’ lives as Judy Blume, 84. Her novels for children and young adults are manuals on how to live, and Blume — who was born on Feb. 12, 1938, in Elizabeth, New Jersey — often wrote honestly and bluntly about such topics as puberty, religion, menstruation, birth control and premarital sex. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her writing, including the landmark Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, has often appeared on lists of banned and challenged books. Time magazine included Margaret on its list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923, with critic Lev Grossman writing, “You could almost hear the collective generational sigh of relief in 1970 when Blume published this groundbreaking, taboo-trampling young adult novel: finally, a book that talks frankly about sex without being prim or prurient, and about religion without scolding or condescending.” In addition to books written for children, like Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Superfudge, Blume, officially designated a Living Legend by the Library of Congress, has published four novels for adults. Her latest, 2015’s In the Unlikely Event, follows a 15-year-old girl in Blume’s hometown of Elizabeth as she and her family deal with three plane crashes that really happened over the span of 58 days in 1951 and 1952. Her 29 books have been translated into 32 languages and have sold more than 90 million copies worldwide. Blume now lives in Key West, Florida, where she and her husband cofounded the nonprofit bookshop Books & Books. Her stories are set to reach a whole new generation when Rachel McAdams and Kathy Bates star in an upcoming film adaptation of Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP Photo
Feb. 11: Actress Jennifer Aniston, 53
How many actresses can say they truly transformed the zeitgeist? That was the power of 1990s Jennifer Aniston, now 53, and her role as Rachel Green on Friends. She changed the way we dressed, the way we spoke and the way we cut our hair — the shoulder-length “Rachel” was everywhere. Born Feb. 11, 1969, to actor parents, Aniston attended New York’s High School of Performing Arts (the school from Fame) before taking on thankless roles in films like the low-budget horror comedy Leprechaun. But all that changed when she teamed up with five BFFs on one of the biggest sitcoms of the 1990s, a role that earned her an Emmy, a Golden Globe and a SAG Award. While it sometimes seemed as though her relationships got more attention in the press than her post-Friends acting gigs, she has turned out a steady stream of blockbuster hits, such as Marley & Me, Horrible Bosses and We’re the Millers. But it was often the smaller indie projects that reminded us of what a great actress Aniston can be, such as 2006’s Friends With Money and 2014’s Cake, in which she plays a woman dealing with chronic pain after a horrific accident. And then TV lightning struck when Aniston was cast on Apple TV+’s The Morning Show as a popular morning anchor whose world comes crashing down when her onscreen partner is accused of sexual misconduct. Even critics who didn’t love the show praised her performance. “Aniston carries the most weight with her long-trademarked casual star quality,” wrote Ben Travers on IndieWire. “Her effortless luminosity — of an everywoman who couldn’t help but become a big f---king deal — fits the role so perfectly, she could’ve coasted on it, but there’s an engaging conviction to her performance, as well; a ferocity that’s always simmering and sometimes explodes.” Her peers in the Screen Actors Guild named her best actress in a drama series in 2020. The Morning Show, which recently finished its second season, wasn’t the only time Aniston graced our screens during the pandemic. She and her fellow Friends castmates reunited for an HBO Max special that saw them revisiting the set and taking a nostalgic walk down memory lane, earning four Emmy nominations in the process. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Amy Sussman/Getty Images
Feb. 10: Actress Laura Dern, 55
A true child of Hollywood, Laura Dern, 55, was born on Feb. 10, 1967, to acclaimed actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, and she started appearing in her mother’s movies in uncredited roles at age 6. Her quirky energy meshed well with the off-kilter artistic vision of frequent collaborator David Lynch, who directed her in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, and she earned her first Oscar nomination for 1991’s Great Depression–set Rambling Rose. Dern briefly flirted with blockbuster superstardom as Dr. Ellie Sattler in Jurassic Park — hello, action figures and Halloween costumes! — but she instead continued to pursue more challenging roles. In fact, her Emmy-nominated turn as the love interest for Ellen Morgan (played by Ellen DeGeneres) on the culture-shifting 1997 coming-out episode of DeGeneres’ TV show reportedly cost Dern roles for years. After appearances in October Sky and Lynch’s experimental Inland Empire, Dern picked up a Golden Globe for playing Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris in HBO’s Recount. But it was another HBO project that would make critics sit up. On the unfortunately short-lived comedy Enlightened, she played Amy Jellicoe, a corporate executive-turned-whistleblower, in what Vox critic Emily VanDerWerff called “perhaps the best TV performance of the decade.” It kicked off a period that many pop culture pundits dubbed “the Dern-aissance,” a multiyear comeback story. She got an Oscar nod for Wild; won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for Big Little Lies; reteamed with Lynch for Twin Peaks: The Return; went to space as a vice admiral in Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi and to 19th-century Massachusetts as Marmee March in Little Women; and finally nabbed her first Academy Award, for Marriage Story. Phew! This year she’ll appear in the closely guarded Jurassic World Dominion, her first role in a Jurassic Park film since 2001. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Walter McBride/WireImage/Getty Images
Feb. 9: Writer Alice Walker, 78
Born the eighth child of a family of Georgia sharecroppers on Feb. 9, 1944, Alice Walker, 78, came a long way before she became the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 1983. As a girl, her mother allowed her to write stories in lieu of doing chores, and it paid off with a scholarship to Spelman College. After transferring and graduating from Sarah Lawrence, she moved to Mississippi to join the civil rights movement. Walker soon began releasing books of poetry, short stories and novels, including 1976’s Meridian, a coming-of-age story set against the turbulent 1960s in the American South. But she would reach her cultural peak in 1982 with her next novel, The Color Purple, which went on to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. But more than that, the story made its way into the wider culture, and even nonreaders came to know and love Celie and Nettie and Sofia and Shug through Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation, which was nominated for 11 Oscars, and the Tony-winning Broadway musical. (A film version of the musical is in the works for 2023.) Walker’s most recent works have included the 2021 children’s picture book Sweet People Are Everywhere, which former Reading Rainbow host LeVar Burton said “offers us all an invaluable opportunity to see ourselves in others.” This spring she’ll release Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965–2000, which promises to shine a light on her interracial marriage in 1960s Mississippi, her miscarriage, her activism and her literary triumphs. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Leon Bennett/FilmMagic/Getty Images
Feb. 8: Actress Mary Steenburgen, 69
With her trademark Arkansas twang and mile-wide smile, Mary Steenburgen, 69, has been a reliably delightful screen presence since Jack Nicholson discovered her in the reception area of Paramount’s New York offices and cast her in his 1978 film Goin’ South. Born Feb. 8, 1953, Steenburgen was an almost instant Hollywood success, earning an Oscar for her third film role ever, as the go-go dancer Lynda in 1980’s Melvin and Howard. Following acclaimed turns in Ragtime and Cross Creek, Steenburgen has welcomed a new generation of fans with more recent roles as Will Ferrell’s stepmother in Elf and mother in Step Brothers. Still, like many actresses over 50, she has found some of her most interesting roles on TV, including the post-apocalyptic sitcom The Last Man on Earth and Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which she played a fictionalized version of herself opposite husband Ted Danson (they get divorced on the show, but they’re very much together in real life). For two seasons, she starred as Maggie on Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, NBC’s dramedy about a girl who — after an earthquake strikes while she’s in an MRI machine — hears others’ thoughts in the form of elaborate musical numbers. In real life, Steenburgen had her own odd musical origin story. After waking up from minor arm surgery, a flip in her brain had switched on. “The best way I can describe it is that it just felt like my brain was only music, and that everything anybody said to me became musical,” she told IndieWire. “All of my thoughts became musical. Every street sign became musical. I couldn’t get my mind into any other mode.” She used her newfound superpower to co-write the climactic song “Glasgow (No Place Like Home)” for the indie drama Wild Rose and even picked up the 2020 Critics’ Choice Award for best song. Following Zoey’s cancellation, Steenburgen got to return to the singing and dancing role of Maggie one last time in the follow-up film Zoey’s Extraordinary Christmas, which debuted on the Roku Channel in December. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Will Heath/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
Feb. 7: Comedian Chris Rock, 57
Although Chris Rock is widely considered one of the funniest men in America, his career got off to a, well, rocky start. After three seasons on Saturday Night Live, the comedian, 57, was fired when he bristled at playing stereotypical roles and expressed interest in appearing on In Living Color. He made the leap to the Black-led upstart, though the show was canceled only a month after he arrived. But unbound from the strictures of the sketch-comedy format, Rock — who was born on Feb. 7, 1965 — was able to truly shine in his series of Emmy-winning stand-up specials and his HBO talk show, The Chris Rock Show. His gasp-inducing bits on everything from racism and adultery to the powers of Robitussin have landed the two-time Oscar host and three-time Grammy winner on many lists of the greatest stand-up comedians of all time. Rolling Stone ranked him fifth on its list, writing, “Onstage, Chris Rock comes across like a boxer, a preacher and a poet all in one. When he paces the stage, whipping the mic cable and grinning maniacally, audiences now know what’s coming: This is a comic who knows how to punch premises for rhythm as much as substance, and drop punch lines that provoke unconventional thinking.” Never afraid to mine his own life for material, he created the sitcom Everybody Hates Chris about his Brooklyn upbringing and then continued to take big creative swings. In addition to blockbuster comedies like Grown Ups and Madagascar, he appeared on Broadway in the play The Motherf---ker With the Hat and later wrote, directed and starred in 2014’s Top Five. Playing against type, he starred as a 1950s mob boss on Fargo and as a detective in last year’s Spiral, the latest film in the Saw horror franchise. Next up, he’s set to appear as NAACP leader Roy Wilkins in the biopic Rustin, the first narrative feature from Higher Ground, Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Nicholas Hunt/Contour by Getty Images
Feb. 6: Actress Kathy Najimy, 65
One of the most beloved character actors of her generation, Kathy Najimy, 65, burst onto the scene in the mid-’80s with her two-woman play, The Further Adventures of Kathy and Mo in 1986, which was followed by The Kathy & Mo Show: Parallel Lives in 1989, which she wrote and starred in alongside Mo Gaffney. In a review of The Kathy & Mo Show: Parallel Lives, The New York Times called them “playful post-feminist satirists,” and Najimy parlayed that early success into a series of scene-stealing supporting roles in the ’90s, including Sister Mary Patrick in Sister Act and its sequel as well as the witch Mary Sanderson in Hocus Pocus. Born in San Diego on Feb. 6, 1957, Najimy began two of her most prominent TV roles in 1997, starring opposite Kirstie Alley on Veronica’s Closet and voicing Peggy Hill on Fox’s King of the Hill for an eventual 13 seasons. Throughout her career, Najimy has been an activist for women’s causes, AIDS awareness, animal welfare and especially LGBTQ rights, picking up such honors as the PETA Humanitarian of the Year Award and Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year. (Ms. cofounder Gloria Steinem officiated her 1998 wedding to musician Dan Finnerty.) After television roles on The Big C, Unforgettable, Veep and Younger, Najimy appeared in last year’s groundbreaking gay holiday rom-com Single All the Way on Netflix. “It was a gay love story, and it wasn’t about all the people who hated them or the people who thought that their religion said that you shouldn’t be how you were made,” she told Out.com, adding, “It’s just simply about love and dating and comedy.” This year, she’s reteaming with Bette Midler and Sarah Jessica Parker for the Disney+ sequel to Hocus Pocus, which has been spending the past few years transforming from a box-office flop to a treasured Halloween cult classic. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Mike McGregor/Contour RA by Getty Images
Feb. 5: Actress Laura Linney, 58
The theater is in Laura Linney’s blood: The 58-year-old actress was born in New York City on Feb. 5, 1964, the daughter of playwright Romulus Linney, and she went on to hone her craft at Juilliard and the Arts Theatre School of Moscow. She made her Broadway debut in Six Degrees of Separation in 1990, before starring in such classic dramas as The Seagull, Hedda Gabler and The Crucible, which earned her the first of five Tony nominations for best actress. Throughout her career, Linney has proven equally adept at film and TV projects, though she has consistently avoided blockbuster franchises in favor of roles with real complexity and dramatic heft, leading The New York Times to call her “a sort of Everywoman’s Meryl Streep.” On the big screen, she has always been an indie darling, earning Oscar nominations for her roles in You Can Count on Me, Kinsey and The Savages, though many cinema lovers will remember her best for her chilling turn as a Lady Macbeth type in Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River. To truly get a sense of her range, look no further than the four very different small-screen roles that earned her a quartet of Primetime Emmy wins: as a depressed woman who battles addiction in the film Wild Iris, as Dr. Crane’s final love interest on Frasier, as First Lady Abigail Adams on HBO’s John Adams miniseries and as a suburban high school teacher dealing with cancer in The Big C: Hereafter. Since 2017, Linney has taken on perhaps her biggest role to date on the Netflix hit Ozark, which recently premiered the first half of its fourth and final season last month (the rest is expected to return later this year). As Wendy Byrde, the wife of a money launderer, she has taken a series of dark twists and turns that might shock the character we grew to know at the start of Season 1. “The thing that’s always the most exciting for me is being surprised when you’re working,” she told EW. “If you’re not really surprised at least once a day on a set while you’re working, then something’s wrong.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Gary Miller/Getty Images
Feb. 4: Country Singer Clint Black, 60
With his black cowboy hat and country twang, it might be hard to imagine that Clint Black, 60, was born on the Jersey Shore on Feb. 4, 1962 — but don’t worry, he and his family moved back to Texas when he was still an infant. After picking up the guitar in his teens and playing unglamorous gigs on the Texas nightclub circuit for almost a decade, he experienced what from the outside might have looked like overnight success: His 1989 debut album Killin’ Time went triple platinum and spawned a number of hit singles, including “Nobody’s Home” and “Walkin’ Away.” With a traditional sound that draws on western swing, two-step and even Cajun influences, Black has sold more than 20 million records and earned a Grammy and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, not to mention a slew of country music awards. In 2020, he and his wife, Lisa Hartman Black, appeared together on the fourth season of The Masked Singer as the show’s first duet costume, the Snow Owls. “It was fun in all the ways you would imagine,” he told People, “but I wish I’d had an air conditioner in there. It was like hot yoga without the yoga.” The couple is currently performing together on their “Mostly Hits & The Mrs.” tour, and the setlist includes his 2020 single “America (Still in Love with You),” which he envisioned as a love letter to the country in a time of disunity. “And even when we fight, just a little or a lot,” he sings in the chorus, “When it comes to friends, you’re the best one that I’ve got / And I’m still in love with you, America.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Bruce Glikas/WireImage/Getty Images
Feb. 3: Actor Nathan Lane, 66
There’s something almost vaudevillian about the talents of Nathan Lane, 66, who has a seemingly bottomless bag of acting tricks. He can sing, he can dance, he can delight as the clown, but he can also play deadly serious when he has to. On the Broadway stage, Lane — who was born Feb. 3, 1956, in Jersey City, New Jersey — has played every kind of role imaginable in his nearly 25 plays and musicals (and counting): Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, Max Bialystock in The Producers and Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, but also Estragon in Waiting for Godot and the ruthless lawyer Roy Cohn in Angels in America. Along the way, he has picked up six Tony nominations, including three wins. His most recent Broadway appearance in 2019 was perhaps his wildest yet, in the raucous Taylor Mac comedy Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus. The concept: After the events of Shakespeare’s goriest play, Lane plays a clown who has been enlisted to clean up the blood-soaked streets in a show that New York Times critic Jesse Green called “a defiant and beautiful mess.” Lane has always brought a sense of outsized theatricality to his onscreen roles as well, whether he’s starring as a talking meerkat in The Lion King or the star of a South Beach drag show/great father in The Birdcage. Last year, he played Teddy Dimas, a wealthy deli-chain owner, on Hulu’s hit Upper West Side–set comedy Only Murders in the Building, and next up, he’s set to recur on another show that’s very immersed in the Big Apple. On HBO’s recently premiered The Gilded Age, he recurs as Ward McAllister, a real-life arbiter of taste in 19th-century New York, who decided which families could be accepted into high society. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Nathan Congleton/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
Feb. 2: Celebrity Chef Ina Garten, 74
Before she became one of the most revered members of the Food Network family, Ina Garten, 74, started on a very career different path: Under the Ford and Carter administrations, she worked in the White House on the nuclear energy budget! But food had always been a passion for the culinary fairy godmother, who was born Feb. 2, 1948, in Brooklyn, New York, and in 1978, she gave up her D.C. job to buy a 400-square-foot specialty food store in the Hamptons called Barefoot Contessa. After selling the store to employees, she released her first book, The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, in 1999 and soon launched her own cooking show on the Food Network, turning her overnight into something of a Martha Stewart 2.0. Garten invited viewers into her home, where she could often be seen cooking perfectly roast chicken for Jeffrey, her husband of more than five decades and the dean emeritus of the Yale School of Management. Known for her easy-going nature and her love of quality ingredients, Garten dispenses bon mots like “how easy is that?” and “store-bought is fine,” which have made their way onto mugs, T-shirts and Christmas ornaments. Over the years, Garten and her show have picked up four Daytime Emmys, including wins in 2021 for outstanding culinary host and series. And during the pandemic, her relaxed approach to cooking became something of a balm for frazzled Americans, perhaps best represented by a spring 2020 Instagram post in which she made a pitcher-sized Cosmopolitan and then sipped it out of an enormous novelty martini glass. Viewed more than 3 million times, the tutorial came with a caption we could all get behind: “It’s always cocktail hour in a crisis!” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Olivier Vigerie/Contour by Getty Images
Feb. 1: Actor Michael C. Hall, 51
We’re sure Michael C. Hall, 51, is a lovely person, but his two most notable TV roles are, well, a bit morbid! Born on Feb. 1, 1971, in Raleigh, North Carolina, Hall first gained national attention as the mortician and funeral director David Fisher on HBO’s ensemble drama Six Feet Under. For his next starring role in Dexter, his character was less concerned with fixing up corpses than he was with making new ones: Dexter Morgan was a charismatic serial killer who spent his days solving crimes as a blood spatter analyst for the Miami police department and his nights hunting down and murdering the guilty. Critic Tad Friend wrote of his performance in The New Yorker, “Michael C. Hall ... is entirely convincing as a sociopath: his suet-lipped smile lingers a moment too long, and his movements and conversation are so robotic you half expect to see bionic relays glowing beneath his skin.” (Hall later won a Golden Globe in 2010.) Throughout his career, the NYU alum has kept one foot in the world of New York City theater, starring on Broadway as Billy Flynn in Chicago, the Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret and Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and he originated the role of Thomas Newton, “the man who fell to Earth,” in the avant-garde David Bowie musical Lazarus off Broadway. Hall is also the lead singer of the synth-pop trio Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum, who released an album last year. But his biggest role of 2021 was also his most familiar: After a controversial (and unpopular) series finale in 2013, Hall reunited with the Dexter creative team for the 10-episode follow-up miniseries Dexter: New Blood. “A part of both the hesitation and the appetite surrounding going back was orbiting the fact that audiences loved the show but were very dissatisfied with the way it ended,” Hall told GQ. “I didn’t want to return just because we could, I wanted to return because we discovered a story that felt like it was worth telling.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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