July Celebrity Birthdays
A look at the famous and the fascinating on the day they were born
AARP Members Only Access, July 2022
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PHOTO BY: Andrew Eccles/ABC via Getty Images
July 31: Mark Cuban, 64
Born in Pittsburgh on July 31, 1958, Mark Cuban, 64, has been an entrepreneur from the age of 12, when he started selling garbage bags door-to-door to save up to buy new basketball shoes. He also worked as a box boy, laid carpet, sliced deli meat and, in college at Indiana University, even started giving dance lessons and hosting disco parties at the Bloomington National Guard Armory. After graduating, Cuban began working in software sales, eventually forming his own consulting business, MicroSolutions, which he later sold to CompuServe for $6 million. By 1999, he and his business partner Todd Wagner were selling his next enterprise, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo! for nearly $6 billion. Cuban went from internet entrepreneur to a major player in the world of professional sports when he bought the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks for $280 million. At the time, the Mavs were one of the worst teams in the league, and that price tag was the highest ever paid for an NBA franchise. “I have been called an idiot many times,” he told The New York Times after the purchase. But Cuban would have the last laugh: The Mavericks made the playoffs in 2001, made it to the NBA Finals in 2006 and finally won the championship in 2011. He became something of a media personality, and he channeled his disco roots into an appearance on Dancing With the Stars in 2007. In 2011, Cuban made his first guest appearance on the reality series Shark Tank, eventually becoming a regular panelist in the third season. He’s invested in a wide assortment of companies, including Twist It Up, which makes a hair-twisting comb; Life Lift Systems, a maker of above-ground storm shelters; and The Living Christmas Company, which rents live, potted Christmas trees for the holiday season. In recent years, Cuban has appeared in films and TV shows such as Entourage and Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!, in which he played the president. This year, he embarked on a decidedly more serious project when he launched a game-changing online pharmacy called the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, which sells more than 100 generic medications, often for a fraction of what they normally cost. “As an entrepreneur, anytime I see an industry that’s been run the same way for decades, if not generations, and it’s been obfuscated to the point where there’s no transparency, and you have associations trying to protect that opaqueness, to me that’s an opportunity,” he told PBS News Weekend. “And that’s exactly what we saw with the prescription drug industry.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Sthanlee B. Mirador/Sipa USA via AP Images
July 30: Lisa Kudrow, 59
Though she later came to master ditzy characters, Lisa Kudrow, 59, started her career thinking she would become a scientist. Born in Encino, California, on July 30, 1963, Kudrow went to Vassar College, where she majored in biology, and after college, she returned home to work with her father, a physician who specialized in headaches. After hanging out with Jon Lovitz, one of her brother’s childhood friends, Kudrow decided to pursue acting, and she joined The Groundlings and met Conan O’Brien at an improv class. She auditioned for Saturday Night Live and didn’t make the cut, but she soon landed a recurring role on Mad About You as the flighty waitress Ursula, and was later cast as Roz on Frasier, before the role was rewritten for Peri Gilpin. Kudrow’s big break came in 1994, when she joined a little show called Friends as the folk-singing Phoebe Buffay. In his original review of the sitcom, Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker called Kudrow “a cross between Goldie Hawn and Teri Garr with, I dunno, substance.” She quickly emerged as a fan favorite, picking up a best supporting actress Emmy in 1998. During the show’s 10-season run, Kudrow began landing roles in such films as Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion and The Opposite of Sex, for which she won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for best supporting actress. In 2005, Kudrow returned to television with the HBO cult comedy The Comeback, about a veteran sitcom actress who’s trying to revitalize her career by starring in a reality show. It was a blistering entertainment industry satire filled with moments of cringe comedy, and despite earning Kudrow an Emmy nod, the show was canceled after one season. But Kudrow had the last laugh: HBO revived The Comeback for another season in 2014, and she earned a second Emmy nomination for her role as Valerie Cherish. Behind the camera, Kudrow also executive-produced the hit genealogy-themed docuseries Who Do You Think You Are?, on which she helps celebrities uncover their family roots — and, in an emotional episode, learned about her family’s connection to the Holocaust. Kudrow also developed the improvised series Web Therapy, an online sitcom that was later picked up by Showtime and whose guests included the likes of Meryl Streep, Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Lily Tomlin. Following a two-season turn as the imprisoned wife of General Mark Naird (Steve Carell) on Space Force and another Emmy nomination for Friends: The Reunion, Kudrow appeared in the new Disney+ musical comedy Better Nate Than Never, about a 13-year-old who travels from Pittsburgh to New York City to audition for a Broadway show and meets his long-lost aunt (played by Kudrow) along the way. Meeting her film nephew, Kudrow told Screen Rant, “ends up having a lot of impact for her, just being around him, this kid that’s like ‘Remember you were optimistic? Remember when everything was exciting and wonderful?’ And that’s important. We have to remember to keep some of that.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Sthanlee B. Mirador/Sipa USA via AP Images
July 29: Wil Wheaton, 50
Born July 29, 1972, in Burbank, California, Star Trek’s Wil Wheaton, 50, got his acting start early, when he appeared in a Jell-O commercial at the age of 7. He got his big break playing Gordie Lachance in the nostalgic 1986 drama Stand by Me, which is based on a Stephen King novella and tells the tale of four friends who journey into the wilderness to find the body of a missing boy. “Wheaton makes Gordie’s ‘sensitivity’ tangible, but not effete,” wrote Sheila Benson in the Los Angeles Times. “He’s a gem.” The following year, Wheaton joined the Starfleet as boy genius Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and while the character was polarizing among Trekkies, Crusher had a big fan in series creator Gene Roddenberry. “I identify probably more so with Wesley because he is me at 17,” Roddenberry said of Wheaton’s character. “He is the things I dreamed of being and doing.” After leaving the show in 1994, Wheaton went on to appear in films like Disney’s Flubber before later returning to the role of Crusher in the 2002 film Star Trek: Nemesis. One of his most notable roles in recent years was, well, Wil Wheaton! Beginning in 2009, he appeared on The Big Bang Theory as a fictionalized version of himself who’s in an ongoing feud with Sheldon Cooper. This spring, he made a cameo as Wesley Crusher in the season finale of the streaming spin-off Star Trek: Picard, and fans are excited to see if he’ll show up in a bigger way in the upcoming third season. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Sipa via AP Images
July 28: Santiago Calatrava, 71
Born July 28, 1951, near Valencia, Spain, Santiago Calatrava, 71, is one of the most sought-after “starchitects” working today, best known for his skeletal movable bridges and buildings. After receiving a Ph.D. in technical science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, he established his own firm in the city. One of his first major projects was the Alamillo Bridge and Cartuja Viaduct, which was built for the Expo ’92 World Fair in Seville. In his New York Times review of a 1993 Calatrava exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Herbert Muschamp wrote of the bridge that “one expects to see angels bending near the earth to touch Mr. Calatrava’s harp of steel.” In addition to his dramatic bridges and train stations, some of Calatrava’s most impressive works include his 2001 addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum, which features signature wings that act as a movable sunscreen; the Olympic Sports Complex in Athens, Greece, which was designed for the 2004 Games; and the Turning Torso, a residential tower in Malmö, Sweden, that was inspired by human movement. He also helped transform his hometown of Valencia with the City of Arts and Sciences, a collection of cultural institutions, including an opera house, a science museum and a planetarium, built in a dry riverbed between the Old City and the coast. His most famous work for many Americans might be the Oculus, a new transportation hub that opened in Lower Manhattan in 2016 near the site of the September 11 attacks. With its soaring white wings, the space has become something of a symbol of rebirth in the neighborhood, and Calatrava told Architectural Digest, “A new building should deliver a feeling of hope. And I have to say, it was not difficult. In the 14 years it took to create this building and the 14 years I lived in New York, day by day following the work and the site, it was an extraordinary time. I was just learning from New York to do something extraordinary.” Last year, he designed the Qatar and United Arab Emirates pavilions at Expo 2020 in Dubai, and his firm is hard at work on more than a dozen projects around the globe, including the O’Hare Global Terminal in Chicago, the Sharq Crossing bridge in Doha, and the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in New York, which will replace a historic structure destroyed on 9/11. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP
July 27: Maya Rudolph, 50
Maya Rudolph, 50, is a performer deep in her bones. She was born on July 27, 1972, in Gainesville, Florida, to music producer Richard Rudolph and soul singer Minnie Riperton, who’s best known for her hit song “Lovin’ You.” “I don't think it's any mystery that I saw my mother on a stage and thought that was normal,” Rudolph told NPR. “Not just that, but she was commanding in performance, and I just thought she looked so beautiful and in her element.” In college, while studying photography at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Rudolph cycled through a series of bands, eventually forming her own Prince cover band called Princess. After graduation, she began performing with the popular Los Angeles comedy troupe The Groundlings before getting her big break when she joined the cast of Saturday Night Live. Rudolph became one of the show’s most versatile performers, with a killer set of pipes, a knack for creating memorable original characters, and an enormous repertoire of impersonations, including Beyoncé, Oprah, Donatella Versace and Maya Angelou. Following leading roles in such films as Idiocracy and Away We Go, Rudolph continued to collaborate with former SNL cast members. She starred opposite Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids and later teamed up with Fred Armisen in the afterlife dramedy series Forever. On NBC’s The Good Place, she guest-starred as the all-knowing Judge — basically a stand-in for God — picking up three consecutive Emmy nominations in the process. In 2020, she was nominated three times for Emmys in the same year, picking up her first two wins: outstanding voiceover performance for her role as Connie the Hormone Monstress on the raunchy coming-of-age animated Netflix sitcom Big Mouth, and outstanding guest actress in a comedy for channeling Senator Kamala Harris on SNL. Then she went and did the unthinkable when she picked up the same two awards the following year! This summer, Rudolph stars in her newest comedy, the Apple TV+ series Loot, about the ex-wife of a tech titan who gets $87 billion in their divorce settlement and decides to refocus on her charitable foundation. “When you’re given this position with this amount of money, do you choose it for good?” she told The Wrap. “And what [do] those possibilities look like and what [do] those choices look like? I thought that was really exciting because of the time that we’re living in. There is good, but there is so much wrong, and there’s so much to fix. That was an exciting opportunity to examine.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Karwai Tang/WireImage/Getty Images
July 26: Sandra Bullock, 58
Born July 26, 1964, in Arlington, Virginia, Sandra Bullock, 58, is the daughter of a German opera singer and an American voice teacher, and she made her stage debut at the age of 5 in an opera in Nuremberg, Germany. After appearing regularly in the children’s choirs of various productions, Bullock moved to New York in the ’80s and studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, a conservatory whose alumni include James Caan, Allison Janney, Robert Duvall and Gregory Peck. Following an early turn as the lead in the sitcom adaptation of Working Girl and such films as Demolition Man and Love Potion No. 9, Bullock’s big breakout came with Speed, the 1994 action thriller. Hollywood Reporter critic David Hunter wrote, “Bullock, whose character is allowed to realistically react to the danger and carnage, should win many more fans with her assured, confident performance.” During the ’90s, she brought her girl-next-door charm to all manner of Hollywood genres, from romantic comedies (While You Were Sleeping) to legal thrillers (A Time to Kill) to fantasies (Practical Magic). She began to show her dramatic range in 2000 with the rehab drama 28 Days and later appeared in Crash, which won an Oscar for best picture. While comedies like Miss Congeniality and Two Weeks Notice would remain her bread and butter, she earned critical raves in 2009 for her lead role in The Blind Side, in which she played Leigh Anne Tuohy, a real woman who took in a homeless teenager named Michael Oher who went on to become an all-American college football player and an NFL star. Bullock, who picked up her first Oscar for the performance, displayed her trademark self-deprecating wit during her acceptance speech when she joked, “Did I really earn this or did I just wear you all down?” In 2013, after her wildly successful police comedy The Heat with Melissa McCarthy, she showed off her acting chops in Gravity, in which she starred as Dr. Ryan Stone, a first-time astronaut trying to make it back to Earth safely after a disaster in space. “For long stretches, [director Alfonso] Cuarón trusts Bullock to give us a one-woman show, and she delivers,” RogerEbert.com critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote of her Oscar-nominated role. “Her work here constitutes one of the greatest physical performances I’ve seen, and she’s framed in ways that make each moment resonate. The way she twists and turns and swims through zero gravity is a master class in how to suggest interior states with gestures.” Bullock has been selective with recent roles, appearing in Ocean’s Eight, Bird Box and last year’s prison release drama The Unforgivable. This year, she came back to her rom-com roots with The Lost City, in which she starred as a reclusive romance novelist who gets kidnapped by an eccentric billionaire. Next month, Bullock returns as the assassin handler Maria Beetle in the raucous Japan-set action comedy Bullet Train. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jamie McCarthy/WireImage via Getty Images
July 25: Iman, 67
Supermodel Iman, 67, quite literally changed the face of the high-fashion world in the 1970s. Born in Somalia on July 25, 1955, Iman — who described herself as “a very nerdy child” — was studying political science at the University of Nairobi when she was discovered by photographer Peter Beard. Although she went on to become a household name, at first she was largely ignored by the Western media, even when Beard, trying to get her modeling gigs, came up with elaborate lies about her backstory, telling the press that she was descended from African royalty or that she was a goat herder or that he found her in the jungle. She soon signed with Wilhelmina Models and moved to New York, where she began appearing in Vogue and walking the runway for Calvin Klein, Halston and Yves Saint Laurent, who later called her his “dream woman.” Robin Givhan wrote in The Washington Post, “Iman was dubbed an exotic beauty. She says that her looks are typical Somali, but to the Western eye, they were unusual, mysterious. She broadened the definition of beauty. She made earthiness sensual. She helped to transform fashion into entertainment and models into personalities.” During her rise in the fashion world, she appeared in such films as Out of Africa and No Way Out, and in 1992 she married rock star David Bowie, with whom she maintained a famously loving relationship until his death in 2016. The ’90s was also when Iman founded her namesake cosmetics brand, which featured hard-to-find colors for non-white skin tones. As she explained, “When you work in the industry, your looks are your currency. If you don’t have a good appearance, you won’t be booked again — and no one will blame the beauty team or the photographer.” Following a run as host of Project Runway Canada and The Fashion Show, Iman won the 2010 Fashion Icon Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and she thanked her parents “for giving me a neck longer than any girl in the go-see world.” Last year, Iman launched her first fragrance, Love Memoir, which takes its aromatic notes from her relationship with Bowie: vetiver, the scent he wore every day; bergamot and blackberry, as a nod to the Italian countryside where they got married; and a hint of rose, in tribute to Bowie’s British background. “I don’t cheat on my fragrances,” she explained to French Vogue. “Scent is such an emotional thing, so when it came to making my first one, it had to be right.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: NDZ/STAR MAX/IPx via AP
July 24: Kristin Chenoweth, 54
Born in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, on July 24, 1968, Broadway and TV star Kristin Chenoweth, 54, was a triple (quadruple? quintuple?) threat from a very early age: She sang gospel as a child, acted in school plays and danced ballet, got a bachelor’s in musical theater and a master’s in opera performance, and was even the runner-up for Miss Oklahoma in 1991! A pint-sized powerhouse, Chenoweth made her Broadway debut with the 1997 musical Steel Pier, then won a Tony in 1999 for playing Sally in You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown. Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times that Chenoweth was “giving one of those break-out performances that sends careers skyward.” Indeed, NBC tried to harness her considerable charm for the 2001 sitcom Kristin, on which she starred as an Oklahoma-born entertainer looking to make her big break in the Big Apple, but the series was quickly canceled. She’d have much more luck with her next project, as Glinda the Good Witch in the megahit musical Wicked, for which she earned her second Tony nomination. Back on the small screen, she appeared as Deputy Press Secretary Annabeth Schott on The West Wing before stepping into the role of waitress Olive Snook on the whimsical dramedy Pushing Daisies, for which she earned a best supporting actress Emmy. Broadway, of course, always remained a second home for Chenoweth, who came back to the Great White Way for such productions as The Apple Tree, Promises, Promises and On the Twentieth Century. Last year, she brought her considerable comedic prowess to the Apple TV+ musical comedy Schmigadoon!, a parody of and homage to classic musicals in which she played against type as the villainous town grump, Mildred Layton. (Check it out for her showstopping, Music Man–inspired number “Tribulation,” which was amazingly shot in one take!) Next up, Chenoweth is set to make a cameo as one of the very few non-queer performers, alongside Debra Messing, in Billy Eichner’s groundbreaking gay rom-com, Bros, which premieres in September. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
July 23: Woody Harrelson, 61
An award-winning actor on the big and small screens, Woody Harrelson, 61, came out of the gate running when he was cast in his first major role, as the good-natured bartender Woody Boyd on Cheers, a part that earned him a Primetime Emmy for best supporting actor in 1989. Born July 23, 1961, in Texas, Harrelson was soon starring in films like White Men Can’t Jump and Indecent Proposal before going full psychopath in Oliver Stone’s controversy-courting Natural Born Killers. He would earn the best reviews of his career in 1996, when he starred as the titular pornographer in The People vs. Larry Flynt, which earned him his first Oscar nomination. He told interviewers at the time, “We’re both poor white trash hedonists who made good in the world — or made bad in the world.” Harrelson’s star power only increased as he became a fixture in ensemble films (The Thin Red Line, No Country for Old Men) and bolstered indie dramas, like 2009’s The Messenger, for which he received a second Oscar nod for playing career soldier Captain Tony Stone. Back on the small screen, Harrelson displayed some of the most subtly masterful acting of his career in HBO’s True Detective, and he played yet another haunted law enforcement officer in 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, for which he received his third Oscar nod. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Harrelson starred in the viciously funny satire Triangle of Sadness about a cruise for the super-rich that sinks and leaves the survivors — including Harrelson’s Marx-quoting sea captain — stranded on an island. The film earned an eight-minute standing ovation and the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize. Harrelson, who is getting early Oscar buzz, quipped to Deadline about any similarities between him and his character: “The character is Marxist. I’m not a Marxist. I’m an anarchist, so in that sense we differ.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
July 22: John Leguizamo, 62
Blessed with a Tasmanian Devil–like energy and a fierce (and verbose) intelligence, John Leguizamo, 62, was born in Bogotá, Colombia, on July 22, 1960. As a child, he moved with his family to Queens, where Leguizamo’s high school classmates voted him “most talkative,” a trait that would serve him well in his early days as a standup comedian. At the start of the ’90s, Leguizamo began developing his gripping and hilarious style of one-man show with productions like Mambo Mouth, and his career on screen began taking off as well: He appeared as Luigi in Super Mario Bros. and Benny Blanco from the Bronx in Carlito’s Way before being cast in Fox’s one-season Latino variety show, House of Buggin’. Soon he earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role as the drag queen Chi-Chi in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, and he later collaborated with maximalist director Baz Luhrmann on Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge!, in which he played the artist Toulouse-Lautrec. In 1998, he finally brought his live-theater act to Broadway with Freak, which he described as a “semi-demi-quasi-pseudo autobiography.” New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote, “When Mr. Leguizamo turns into his grandmother or his younger self imitating the Devil or the strapping Irish rowdy who beat him up as a teenager, it seems less an act of impersonation than an instance of possession. There’s a whole city of people inside this young man’s slender frame. And there is indeed something supernatural — or freakish, to use Mr. Leguizamo’s own term — about the intensity of focus and energy with which each takes the stage.” The show would earn him Tony nominations for best actor and best play, and the televised version would land him an Emmy. Younger generations may know Leguizamo for his continued voice work as Sid the Sloth in the Ice Age animated franchise. His most recent Broadway (and then touring and filmed-for-Netflix) one-man show, Latin History for Morons, was inspired by teaching his own son about the many contributions Latinos have made to American history over the centuries and the various ways those truths have been repressed and covered up. The show finally earned him a Special Tony. Leguizamo’s roles have only grown more critically acclaimed in recent years, with Emmy nominations in 2018 for Waco and in 2019 for When They See Us, though arguably the performance that garnered the most attention was as the mysterious Bruno — the guy “we don’t talk about” — in Disney’s Colombia-set Encanto. “The fact that it was an all-Latinx Disney movie,” he said during the premiere. “Disney’s 60th movie is all Latinx. I mean, I never thought I’d see this in my lifetime. We’re the oldest ethnic group in America, the largest ethnic group in America, and we’re virtually absent everywhere. But not tonight. Not tonight.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Gabe Ginsberg/FilmMagic via Getty Images
July 21: Brandi Chastain, 54
One of America’s most famous soccer players of all time, Brandi Chastain, 54, was born in San Jose on July 21, 1968, and started playing soccer at the age of 8. Chastain started her winning record early, picking up three state championships with her high school team before being named Soccer America’s Freshman of the Year upon entering college. At the 1996 Summer Olympics, women’s soccer was played for the first time, and Chastain and her teammates led the United States to a gold medal; the championship game attracted 76,489 spectators, which was the largest crowd to ever watch a women’s sporting event! Next up, in what would be the defining image of her career, she scored the winning penalty kick in the final game of the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup. What happened next took even Chastain by surprise: She stripped off her jersey and celebrated in her sports bra. “I whipped off that shirt, and I kind of whipped it around in the air over my head and dropped to my knees as a ‘Yes!’ moment that we had done what we set out to do,” she later told the BBC. “I had no idea that would be my reaction — it was truly genuine and it was insane and it was a relief and it was joy and it was gratitude all wrapped into one.” The iconic image would go on to grace the covers of Newsweek, Time and Sports Illustrated, but her winning didn’t end there. She followed up the World Cup victory with a silver medal at the 2000 Olympic Games and a gold in 2004, which was the same year she released her book, It’s Not About the Bra: How to Play Hard, Play Fair and Put the Fun Back Into Youth Sports. In 2005, she cofounded a nonprofit called the Bay Area Women’s Sports Initiative, which helped inspire girls in underserved communities by bringing college athletes to their playgrounds. She was named to the U.S. Women’s National Team’s All-Time Best XI in 2013 and inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame in 2017. Last year, she lent her years of expertise in the sport to a new documentary called Big-Time Soccer: The Remarkable Rise & Fall of the NASL, about the original North American Soccer League of the 1970s. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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July 20: Sandra Oh, 51
Born to Korean immigrant parents in a suburb of Ottawa on July 20, 1971, Sandra Oh, 51, got her start in Canadian TV and film before moving to Los Angeles in 1996 to star as Rita Wu, the assistant of a sports agent, on the HBO comedy Arli$$. Oh soon began picking up supporting roles in The Princess Diaries, Under the Tuscan Sun and, most notably, Sideways, which was directed by her then-husband, Alexander Payne. In 2005, Oh would be cast on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy in a career-redefining role as the hypercompetitive and extremely intelligent surgeon Cristina Yang, a part she’d go on to play for 10 seasons. Throughout the series, she’d earn five Emmy nominations and win both a Golden Globe Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards. In 2018, Oh struck TV gold once again with Killing Eve, a cat-and-mouse thriller in which she played British intelligence agent Eve Polastri opposite Jodie Comer’s ruthless but charming assassin, Villanelle. The series earned her a second Golden Globe win, and she became the first Asian actress to be nominated for an Emmy for best lead actress in a drama. “Koreans are ambitious, man,” she told Vanity Fair about her success with the role. “It means a lot to my parents that I do the work that I do and it has the visibility.” Killing Eve came to an end this spring, but Oh has been keeping busy with a number of different projects, including a trio of Asian-themed animated films (Over the Moon, Raya and the Last Dragon and Turning Red) and the Netflix miniseries The Chair, on which she played the first woman of a color to become the chair of the English department at a prestigious university. This spring, she starred in the supernatural horror film Umma, about a woman who’s haunted by the ghost of her mother. “I feel super emotionally toned because Killing Eve is like diving down into the ocean, and The Chair was just like flying and became instinctive,” Oh told The Cut. “And personally, I feel in great creative shape and grateful to work on projects that are challenging the unbelievable pressure of being a modern woman.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP
July 19: Benedict Cumberbatch, 46
Born to two actor parents in London on July 19, 1976, Benedict Cumberbatch, 46, got his start acting at an early age, even appearing as Titania, the queen of the fairies, in a student production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Before starting college, he took a year off to teach English to Tibetan Buddhist monks in India. Upon earning a master’s degree in classical acting from the prestigious London Academy of Music and Drama, Cumberbatch stormed the London theater scene, and he was soon earning a 2005 BAFTA nomination for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in a BBC biopic. He made a splash internationally with his breakout role in the modernized Sherlock, for which he’d win his first Emmy in 2014. And following roles in films like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and War Horse, as well as a celebrated turn on the London stage in Frankenstein (in which he and Jonny Lee Miller swapped the roles of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster nightly), Cumberbatch received an Oscar nomination for his role as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. “What has made Mr. Cumberbatch so effective as Sherlock Holmes and Julian Assange — and what makes his Alan Turing one of the year’s finest pieces of screen acting — is his curious ability to suggest cold detachment and acute sensitivity at the same time,” A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times. “If he did not exist, 21st-century popular culture would have to invent him: a sentient robot, an empathetic space alien, a warm-blooded salamander with crazy sex appeal.” In 2016, he played the reviled King Richard III in the Shakespearean miniseries The Hollow Crown, later learning that he was distantly related to the controversial monarch. That year, he also joined a film franchise that, in many ways, is even more powerful than the British monarchy, when he starred in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Doctor Strange. His character, a brilliant neurosurgeon who now protects Earth against mystical threats, has popped up in many MCU films, and this year’s sequel, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, is currently the second-highest-grossing film of 2022, with a domestic gross of more than $410 million. This year, he also celebrated his second Oscar nomination for his role as the menacing and charismatic rancher Phil Burbank in The Power of the Dog. Next up, Cumberbatch is set to lighten things up considerably when he stars in the Wes Anderson adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, as the titular Henry, who can see through objects and predict the future. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Casey Flanigan/imageSPACE/Sipa USA via AP Images
July 18: Vin Diesel, 55
Best known as the tough guy of the Fast and Furious film franchise, Vin Diesel, 55, was born Mark Sinclair in Alameda County, California, on July 18, 1967. He got into acting after a scene that could have appeared in one of his later films: At the age of 7, he and his friends were breaking into a theater to vandalize it, when a woman stopped them and offered them cash and a script if they’d attend acting classes there instead. As a teen, he began acting in theatrical productions, and he moonlighted as a club bouncer, where he earned his eventual stage name, Vin Diesel. In 1995, Diesel wrote, directed, produced and starred in the short film Multi-Facial, about an actor who can play any ethnicity; it went on to screen at the Cannes Film Festival. Two years later, he self-funded and starred in his first feature, Strays, which was accepted into the 1997 Sundance Film Festival. It wasn’t long before Hollywood began taking notice, and after appearing in Saving Private Ryan and voicing the titular behemoth in The Iron Giant, Diesel got his first starring gig in the 2000 sci-fi film Pitch Black, in which he played the escaped criminal Richard Riddick. But it was his role as street racer Dominic Toretto in 2001’s The Fast and the Furious that would prove truly life-changing; he’s appeared in nearly all the films of the franchise, which has gone on to gross $6.6 billion worldwide. Diesel has taken the explosion-heavy action films very seriously, especially when it comes to the ethnically diverse cast. He recently told Men’s Health, “When you have a unique perspective of creating a franchise that spans generations, you realize, OK, we all have to be as brilliant as possible. We have to reach as high as we can. Because it may be more important than just a movie. More important than two hours of escapism. There may be something more at play.” In 2014, Diesel added another multibillion-dollar franchise to his résumé when he began appearing as the voice of Groot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, first in Guardians of the Galaxy and then in an ever-expanding list of MCU films. Diesel is set to return to the role in this winter’s holiday special and next year’s Guardians of the Galaxy 3, but it’s not the only one of his franchises that’s alive and well: He’s also filming Fast X, xXx 4 (in which he’ll appear again as extreme-sports athlete Xander Cage) and another installment in the Riddick series! —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Imaginechina via AP Images
July 17: Wong Kar-Wai, 64
Born in Shanghai on July 17, 1958, acclaimed director Wong Kar-Wai, 64, emigrated to Hong Kong with his family in 1963, and that unique territory of East-meets-West cultures would go on to shape many of his films. After early work as a screenwriter, Wong’s first movies as director included 1988’s As Tears Go By, about a gangster who falls for his beautiful cousin, and 1990’s Days of Being Wild, which is set in the 1960s Hong Kong of his childhood and follows a man who’s seeking the identity of his birth mother. Wong would achieve his greatest international acclaim to date with 1994’s French New Wave–inspired Chungking Express, twin tales of unrequited love featuring two policemen. According to Roger Ebert’s review, Quentin Tarantino once introduced a screening of the film by saying he “just started crying” while watching it on video — not because it’s sad, per se, but because “I’m just so happy to love a movie this much.” Following the highly stylized Fallen Angels in 1995, Wong won the best director trophy at Cannes in 1997 for his Buenos Aires–shot Happy Together. The year 2000 saw the release of what’s widely considered his masterpiece, In the Mood for Love, which stars Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung as two neighbors who strike up a bond when they find out their spouses are having an affair with each other. BBC Culture later ranked the film number nine on its list of the 100 greatest foreign-language films of all time and number two among the best films of the 21st century. Wong followed it up with a 2004 sequel called 2046, in which Leung’s character, Chow Mo-Wan, engages in a string of affairs while writing a science fiction novel. His next work was a true departure in every sense of the word. My Blueberry Nights (2007) was set in the United States and starred singer Norah Jones as a lonely young woman who goes on a road trip across America. Wong’s most recent feature-length directorial effort was 2013’s The Grandmaster, a biography of the martial arts master Yip Man (Leung), who trained Bruce Lee. Next up, Wong is set to debut his new television series Blossoms Shanghai, which is set in 1990s Shanghai and follows a self-made millionaire (Hu Ge) who becomes entangled with four women who represent adventure, honor, love and innocence. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
July 16: Will Ferrell, 55
If you met Will Ferrell, 55, as a child, you’d never guess that he’d grow up to be one of America’s most side-splitting comedians. He was studious and shy, and he focused his attention on football, even setting a school record for field goals. After going to college for sports journalism and interning with the NBC sports department, Ferrell — who was born in Irvine, California, on July 16, 1967 — began taking acting classes in Los Angeles, and he soon joined the Groundlings comedy troupe. In 1995, he burst onto the national stage as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, and over the span of seven seasons, he became one of the show’s most indelible figures of the modern era. He was equally adept at original creations (like the “more cowbell” guy) and celebrity impressions, including Harry Caray, Alex Trebek and especially President George W. Bush. He would go on to revisit W. in his 2009 Broadway debut, You’re Welcome America: A Final Night With George W. Bush. In its ranking of the greatest SNL cast members of all time, Rolling Stone placed him 12th, writing, “Ferrell’s SNL strategy was basically the opposite of Chevy Chase’s: Stick around for years, make your mark as a team player, make everyone around you funnier, and (this is the really weird part) get a hundred times funnier after you leave.” During his years on SNL, Ferrell began branching out with film roles, including the Austin Powers franchise, Zoolander, and the Watergate comedy Dick, in which he played Bob Woodward. Following the fraternity-themed Old School, Ferrell played against type in the lovably sweet-natured holiday film Elf, in which he starred as Buddy, a man who had been raised at the North Pole as an elf. Soon Ferrell was dominating the comedy scene with his patented man-child act in films like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy; Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby; Blades of Glory; and Step Brothers. His less expected roles, in The Producers and the dramedy Stranger Than Fiction, caught the attention of critics, and both performances earned him Golden Globe nominations. Ferrell has also worked behind the scenes as a producer, picking up three Emmys in the process, most recently for his work on HBO’s Succession and ABC’s Live in Front of a Studio Audience special. Following his appearance as an aspiring Icelandic musician in Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, Ferrell starred in Apple TV+’s based-on-a-true-story miniseries The Shrink Next Door, about a man named Marty Markowitz whose life is completely taken over by a controlling psychiatrist (Paul Rudd). Next up, he’s set to appear as the Ghost of Christmas Present in a modern musical retelling of A Christmas Carol called Spirited, which is expected to premiere on Apple TV+ this holiday season. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: NDZ/STAR MAX/IPx via AP
July 15: Forest Whitaker, 61
Born in Texas on July 15, 1961, Forest Whitaker, 61, seemed poised to become a football star, earning an athletic scholarship to college, but he soon transferred to USC to study acting and music, even training as an operatic tenor. He couldn’t escape his hulking athletic frame, however, and at 21, he made his film debut as a football player in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, then played a wrestler in Vision Quest. Following supporting roles in The Color of Money, Platoon and Good Morning, Vietnam, Whitaker took center stage in Bird, Clint Eastwood’s 1988 Charlie Parker biopic, winning best actor at the Cannes Film Festival. New Yorker critic Pauline Kael called his performance “a jazz version of Willy Loman.” The ’90s brought celebrated turns in The Crying Game, Phenomenon and Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, in which he played a Mafia hitman who lives by the code of the samurai. During that decade, he also began to flex his muscles as a director, including for such films as Waiting to Exhale and Hope Floats. He would finally get another meaty leading role in The Last King of Scotland, in which he played Idi Amin, the brutal Ugandan dictator. He cleaned up at that year’s awards ceremonies, earning wins at the Oscars, the BAFTAs, the SAG Awards, the Golden Globes and many more. “[When] I first started acting, it was because of my desire to connect to everyone, to that thing inside each of us, that light that I believe exists in all of us,” he said during his Academy Awards acceptance speech. “Because acting for me is about believing in that connection, and it’s a connection so strong, it’s a connection so deep that we feel it, and through our combined belief we can create a new reality.” He would earn awards attention once again for the 2013 historical drama Lee Daniels’ The Butler, in which he played White House butler Cecil Gaines. In 2016, he made his Broadway debut in the revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie before joining two fantasy franchises: as Rebel fighter Saw Gerrera in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and as Zuri in Black Panther. You can currently catch Whitaker in the Epix drama Godfather of Harlem, a prequel to the 2007 film American Gangster, in which he stars as the real-life 1960s gangster Bumpy Johnson. The Emmy-winning series was recently renewed for a third season. The criminally minded Bumpy couldn’t be more different from his portrayer. In fact, Whitaker is the founder of the Whitaker Peace & Development Initiative, a decade-old NGO that promotes peace, reconciliation and conflict resolution among youth leaders in countries including South Sudan, Uganda, Mexico and South Africa. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
July 14: Angélique Kidjo, 62
One of the most influential African singers in popular music history, Angélique Kidjo, 62, was born in the West African nation of Dahomey (now Benin) on July 14, 1960, and from an early age, she was no stranger to the arts. Her mother was a theater director, and Kidjo began performing with her troupe when she was 6, before joining her brothers’ band. In the 1980s, she moved to Paris, where she studied jazz, and by 1988, she had released her first album, Pretty. Over the decades-long span of her career, Kidjo has drawn musically on countless genres from throughout Africa and the Black diaspora, including jazz, gospel, funk, R&B, Cameroonian makossa, Zairean rumba, samba, salsa, hip-hop, Caribbean zouk and the traditional sounds of her native Benin. Her albums have run the gamut from her breakout 1991 international hit Logozo, on which she sang about such topics as homelessness and the environment; to 2007’s Djin Djin, which included collaborations with Peter Gabriel, Carlos Santana and Josh Groban; to 2019’s Celia, an ode to Cuban songstress Celia Cruz. Shortly before performing at the delayed Opening Ceremony of the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo — held in July 2021 — Kidjo released her latest album, Mother Nature, which includes guest appearances by the likes of Yemi Alade and Burna Boy. The album earned Kidjo her fifth Grammy, this time for best global music album, and she also appeared on the Time magazine list of the 100 most influential people. Alicia Keys wrote of the music legend, “Her ability to blend cultures, creating a soulful sound that is out of this world, makes working with her and listening to her so special. It doesn’t matter where you are — you hear her, and you become alive. She electrifies people.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: FOX via Getty Images
July 13: Ken Jeong, 53
Born in Detroit on July 13, 1969, to South Korean parents, Ken Jeong, 53, followed a path that any immigrant mom would be proud of: He graduated from Duke, got a medical degree at the University of North Carolina, and went on to a residency in internal medicine in New Orleans. After moving to Los Angeles, he worked as a doctor for seven years at Kaiser Permanente, but he moonlighted at comedy clubs like the Improv and the Laugh Factory before being named “the funniest doctor in America” on The View. “During the day, I was a doctor,” he told NPR. “At night, you know, I was a comic. And it was really just to let off some steam. … Most doctors have golf as a hobby. Mine was doing comedy.” He eventually quit his day job after landing a role as a doctor in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up. In 2009, he played very much against type in his breakout role as the scene-stealing gangster Mr. Chow in the Hangover trilogy, and the shocking scene where he pops out of a trunk fully naked earned him an MTV Movie + TV Award for “best WTF moment.” In 2009, he starred in the college-set NBC ensemble sitcom Community as Spanish teacher-turned-student Ben Chang, and he later got his own ABC medical comedy, Dr. Ken, on which he played a frustrated HMO physician. The two-season series was only the third sitcom ever to star an Asian American family. Following his role in the National Board of Review–winning ensemble Crazy Rich Asians, Jeong emerged as one of Fox’s go-to reality competition personalities, first as a judge on The Masked Singer and then as the host of I Can See Your Voice, in which a panel of celebrities has to predict which contestants are great singers and which are tone deaf just by looking at them. Earlier this year, he joined Mike Myers in the Netflix comedy miniseries The Pentaverate, in which he stars as a billionaire casino mogul named Skip Cho. He said of the experience of filming with the SNL legend, “It was just pure joy.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Scott Kirkland/Sipa via AP Images
July 12: Loni Love, 51
Funnywoman Loni Love, 51, who was born in Detroit on July 14, 1971, didn’t always have plans to be a stand-up comedian. In fact, before she turned to entertainment, Love worked on the General Motors assembly line, putting doors on 1993 Oldsmobile Cutlasses, and later became an electrical engineer. During her eight years at Xerox, she began to pursue stand-up comedy on the side, and when it came time for layoffs, she made the bold decision to sacrifice her own job to save someone else’s. By now a regular at the Laugh Factory, she went on to become a finalist on Star Search in 2003, and her profile as a nationally recognized comedian began to rise. Soon Love was appearing as a talking head on VH1’s I Love the… series and as a panelist on Chelsea Handler’s show, Chelsea Lately. More roles followed, including a beloved turn as the lunch lady on the Nickelodeon series Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide. In 2013, she got her highest-profile gig to date with the premiere of the daytime chat show The Real, which earned her an Emmy in 2018 for outstanding entertainment talk show host. In addition to co-hosting the GRACIE Award–winning radio show Café Mocha, Love has released two books: 2013’s Love Him or Leave Him, but Don’t Get Stuck With the Tab: Hilarious Advice for Real Women and 2020’s I Tried to Change So You Don’t Have To: True Life Lessons. When Marie Claire asked her why she had decided to write a memoir, she responded: “It was time. I’m old as hell. I need to tell people where I’ve been. Let them know that having humble beginnings doesn’t mean you can’t make something of yourself.” This June, after eight seasons, The Real was canceled, and during the emotional farewell episode, Love said, “We hope our example with what we have done can continue. Don’t let this end. Get another show like this together with fabulous women.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Marilla Sicilia/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images
July 11: Jhumpa Lahiri, 55
Beloved for her novels detailing the Indian immigrant experience, writer Jhumpa Lahiri, 55, was born to Bengali parents in London on July 11, 1967, and the family moved to Rhode Island when she was still a child. After earning multiple degrees at Boston University, including a doctorate in Renaissance studies, Lahiri began teaching at BU and at the Rhode Island School of Design, and she was soon publishing short stories in such magazines as The New Yorker and Harvard Review. In 1999, she took the literary world by storm with Interpreter of Maladies, a short story collection set partially on the East Coast and partially in her parents’ native Calcutta that touched on such topics as arranged marriage and assimilation. It went on to win the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. She followed up the collection with her first novel, 2003’s The Namesake, which was adapted into a film by Mira Nair that earned the AARP Movies for Grownups Award for best intergenerational film. Lahiri didn’t publish her next novel, The Lowland, until a decade later, but this tale of two Bengali brothers was another critical success, picking up nominations for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Lahiri the National Humanities Medal for, as the White House citation said, “enlarging the human story” and “[illuminating] the Indian-American experience in beautifully wrought narratives of estrangement and belonging.” Never one to rest on her laurels, Lahiri took on a big challenge and published a book written entirely in Italian, In Altre Parole, or In Other Words, in which she details her efforts to learn, speak and write in the language. She followed that up with her debut Italian-language novel, 2018’s Dove Mi Trovo. Last year, she translated the work into English, with the title Whereabout, and she told The New York Times, “Translation, to me, is metamorphosis. It is a kind of radical recreation of the work, because you are recreating the language to allow that work to be reborn.” The process was so transformative for Lahiri, in fact, that it inspired her latest book, a collection of essays called Translating Myself and Others, which came out this spring. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Marilla Sicilia/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images
July 10: Sofía Vergara, 50
Born in Barranquilla, Colombia, on July 10, 1972, Sofía Vergara, 50, went to school for dentistry before she was discovered by a photographer on the beach. Soon, she was appearing in commercials and starring in a Mexican telenovela. By the mid-1990s, Vergara moved to the United States, where she found work on Univision in a Spanish-language travel series and a variety show, and she quickly emerged as a scene-stealer in English projects like Soul Plane and Madea Goes to Jail. Her once-in-a-lifetime break would come in 2009, when she was cast as the feisty and fiercely loyal Gloria Delgado-Pritchett in the ABC sitcom Modern Family. For her role, she earned four Emmy nominations and 11 Screen Actors Guild Award nods, including four wins for best ensemble in a comedy. Eight years running, Forbes named Vergara the highest-paid actress on television, not only for her sitcom work but also her many, many endorsement deals and side businesses, including Latin World Entertainment, her talent management agency and production company; Raze, a Latin digital media company; and EBY, an indie underwear brand that donates 10 percent of its net sales to a foundation that helps women in poverty through microfinancing loans. In 2020, Vergara brought her prodigious charm to America’s Got Talent on which she serves as a judge, but she’s playing very against type for her next role: She’ll star as the Colombian cocaine queenpin Griselda Blanco in an upcoming Netflix miniseries by Narcos showrunner Eric Newman. “[Griselda] has been a passion project of mine for many years!” she wrote in an Instagram caption about the project. “So happy for being able to be a part of creating all of these job opportunities for Latino actors and for me to finally be able to work alongside an incredible Latin American cast and director! To bring this story to life is a dream come true!” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP
July 9: Tom Hanks, 66
More than just a beloved and award-winning actor, Tom Hanks, 66, has often been ranked one of the most trusted men in America. Born in California on July 9, 1956, Hanks got his acting start at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Ohio, before breaking out with the sitcom Bosom Buddies, in which he starred as an ad exec who dresses as a woman in order to rent an affordable apartment in an all-female building. After a guest stint on Happy Days, Ron Howard cast Hanks as the lead in his 1984 mermaid rom-com Splash, and by 1988, he was earning his first Oscar nod for Big, in which he played a teenage boy who wakes up in the body of an adult. Throughout the ’90s, Hanks proved both a commercial and critical darling, and he did so across nearly every genre: sports flicks (A League of Their Own), romantic comedies (Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail), adventure epics (Apollo 13), musicals (That Thing You Do!), and animated comedies (Toy Story). He won back-to-back best actor Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, and his 1998 role in Saving Private Ryan kicked off a fascination with World War II that led to him producing the Emmy-winning miniseries Band of Brothers and The Pacific. He’d pick up yet another Oscar nomination for 2000’s Cast Away, in which he had the unenviable task of acting opposite a blood-smeared volleyball, before appearing in hit films like Catch Me If You Can and the critically panned blockbuster Robert Langdon series. In 2013, Hanks made his Broadway debut in Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy, and he earned a Tony nomination for playing the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Mike McAlary. In fact, for more than a decade, Hanks has been finding his most compelling roles by channeling real-life figures, both famous and less well-known: Texas congressman Charlie Wilson in Charlie Wilson’s War; cargo ship Captain Richard Phillips in Captain Phillips; Walt Disney in Saving Mr. Banks; Cold War-era lawyer James B. Donovan in Bridge of Spies; heroic pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger in Sully; newspaper editor Ben Bradlee in The Post; and even Mr. Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, for which he picked up his sixth Oscar nomination. As the pandemic raged, Hanks remained a calming presence, appearing in a trio of streaming films — Greyhound, News of the World and Finch — and he’s heading back to the multiplex in a big way as talent manager Colonel Tom Parker in Baz Luhrmann’s glitzy biopic Elvis. Next up, he’ll take on a decidedly less realistic role when he tackles Geppetto in Disney’s live-action Pinocchio remake, out this September. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP
July 8: Anjelica Huston, 71
A true child of Hollywood, Anjelica Huston, 71, was born in Los Angeles on July 8, 1951 to two-time Oscar-winning director John Huston and ballerina Enrica Soma, and she spent much of her early years in a secluded estate in the Irish countryside. Huston made her acting debut in her father’s 1969 period romance A Walk with Love and Death, which was critically panned, and she left behind acting for a bit to become a model in New York City. Following her performance as a lion tamer in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Huston had her big breakthrough role with 1985’s Mafia satire Prizzi’s Honor, with Pauline Kael writing in The New Yorker, “As Anjelica Huston plays her, the raven-haired Maerose is a Borgia princess, a high-fashion Vampira who moves like a swooping bird and talks in a honking Brooklynese that comes out of the corner of her twisted mouth.” She would go on to win best supporting actress, making her a third-generation Oscar winner after her father and her grandfather, actor Walter Huston. She would earn two more Academy Award nominations for 1989’s Enemies: A Love Story and 1990’s The Grifters, but some of her most celebrated performances came, unexpectedly, in children’s films, as the Grand High Witch in the cinematic adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches and as Morticia in The Addams Family and The Addams Family Values, both of which earned her Golden Globe nods. In 2001, she starred as Etheline Tenenbaum, the matriarch of an eccentric New York City clan, in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, sparking a fruitful collaboration that would see her returning to work with the director in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited and, most recently, last year’s The French Dispatch, which she narrated. On the small screen, she made a splash as Broadway producer Eileen Rand on the NBC musical drama Smash, and she also released two acclaimed autobiographies, A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London and New York and Watch Me: A Memoir. In 2020, she starred in the inspiring (but little-seen) World War II drama Waiting for Anya, based on a novel by War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, about a young shepherd and a reclusive widow who help smuggle Jewish children across the border from Southern France to Spain. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: gotpap/STAR MAX/IPx 2021 via AP
July 7: Ringo Starr, 82
One of the most famous drummers of the 20th century, Ringo Starr, 82, was born in Liverpool on July 7, 1940, and his childhood bouts with illness were what ultimately led him to music: After being diagnosed with tuberculosis, he was admitted to a sanatorium, where the health care workers tried to cheer up the patients by having them form a band. A young Starr — born Richard Starkey — would bang on the cabinets by his bed with a wooden mallet, and the rest is history. He soon joined skiffle bands, including one called Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and it was during a gig with them in Hamburg that he first crossed paths with the Beatles; by 1962, he was replacing Pete Best and officially becoming a member of the Fab Four. During his eight years with the band, Starr occasionally took lead vocals, on tracks like “Act Naturally,” “With a Little Help from My Friends” and “Yellow Submarine,” and he has two sole writing credits on “Don’t Pass Me By” and “Octopus’s Garden.” Following the breakup of the Beatles, Starr began releasing solo albums, and he racked up two number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Photograph” and “You’re Sixteen.” But his interests extended beyond just music: On the small screen, he narrated the children’s show Thomas & Friends and earned a Daytime Emmy nomination for playing Mr. Conductor on Shining Time Station. Since 1989, he has played and toured with the All-Starr Band, which included such members as Levon Helm, Joe Walsh, Billy Preston and Dr. John. Starr has since been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, once as a Beatle in 1988 and once as a solo artist in 2015. And in 2018, he was knighted by Prince William, joking to the assembled press that they’d need to start calling him “Sir Ringo.” Last September, the nine-time Grammy winner released his newest EP Change the World, on which he collaborated with Linda Perry, Trombone Shorty, Joe Walsh and members of Toto. “What a blessing it’s been during this year to have a studio here at home and be able to collaborate with so many great musicians, some I’ve worked with before and some new friends,” he said in a statement. Beginning in September, he’s hitting the road once again with his All-Starr Band. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Starshooter/MediaPunch /IPX via AP
July 6: Sylvester Stallone, 76
Born in Hell’s Kitchen on July 6, 1946, Sylvester Stallone, 76, had a troubled childhood, living in boarding care as an infant and later getting expelled repeatedly from school. After studying at the University of Miami, he headed back to his hometown as an aspiring actor, but his earliest gigs included appearing in the adult film The Party at Kitty and Stud’s — and cleaning the lions’ cages at the Central Park Zoo! Small roles followed, but if Stallone wanted to make it in the big leagues, he had to chart his own path, and he wrote a screenplay about an underdog boxer that would prove to be a life changer. Rocky went on to become the highest-grossing film of 1976 and won three Oscars, including best picture, with Stallone himself earning two nods for best actor and best screenplay. The film would cement Stallone’s status as an A-lister and launch a decades-long series of sequels that’s still going strong, and in 1982, he kicked off another successful franchise when he starred as ex–Green Beret John Rambo in the action flick First Blood. Throughout the ’90s, Stallone filled his résumé with action thrillers like Cliffhanger, Demolition Man and Judge Dredd, though he took brief forays into other genres, like the comedy Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, in which he costarred with Golden Girl Estelle Getty. The 2000s, meanwhile, saw him getting nostalgic, as he returned to some of his most famous roles with 2006’s Rocky Balboa and 2008’s Rambo, and in 2010, he teamed up with some of the biggest action stars of past and present (Bruce Willis! Jason Statham! Jet Li!) for The Expendables, which he also cowrote and directed. He would go on to earn some of the best reviews of his career — and a best supporting actor Oscar nod — for 2015’s Creed, in which Rocky Balboa acts as mentor for Adonis Johnson, the son of his former rival Apollo Creed. He won a Golden Globe Award for the film, and he concluded his tearful acceptance speech by saying, “Most of all, I wanna thank my imaginary friend, Rocky Balboa, for being the best friend I ever had.” Never one to slow down, Stallone has an impressively packed slate ahead: This August, he’ll star in the superhero flick Samaritan, followed by two big-budget sequels (The Expendables 4 and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) and the Paramount+ original series Tulsa King, which follows Stallone as a New York Mafia capo who moves to Oklahoma after being released from prison and exiled by his boss. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Lev Radin/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images
July 5: Edie Falco, 59
Few television actresses can move as smoothly between drama and comedy as Edie Falco, 59, who was born in Brooklyn on July 5, 1963 and grew up in the working-class Long Island suburbs. After starting her acting career in the indie films of director Hal Hartley, Falco first began appearing on TV, in recurring roles on Homicide: Life on the Street and Law & Order, and in 1997, she got her big break when she was cast as corrections officer Diane Whittlesey on the HBO prison drama Oz. Her life would change forever in 1999 when she started her six-season run as mob wife Carmela on The Sopranos, a drama that’s frequently called one of the greatest TV achievements of all time. For her efforts, Falco won three lead actress Emmy Awards. As she became one of the most in-demand television actresses of the decade, Falco kept one foot in the world of New York City theater, appearing on Broadway four times and earning a Tony nomination for her role in the 2011 revival of The House of Blue Leaves. In 2009, she took center stage on the pitch-black Showtime dramedy Nurse Jackie, as the titular nurse battling addiction problems, and when she picked up her fourth Emmy, she became the first actress to be rewarded for lead roles in both a drama and a comedy. She would go on to appear in Louis C.K.’s Eugene O’Neill-inspired miniseries Horace and Pete; Law & Order True Crime as Leslie Abramson, the defense attorney who represented the Menendez brothers; and the CBS drama Tommy as the first female chief of police in Los Angeles. Last year, she played against type as Hillary Clinton in Ryan Murphy’s limited series Impeachment: American Crime Story, about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, in what TV Line called “a seismically great performance.” “I think she’s carved an admirable path through her life,” Falco told Vanity Fair. “I wanted to make sure she’s treated with respect … not that I did it right, but I wanted to be at the helm of taking care of this woman who was a national treasure and is pretty spectacular in the world.” This December, Falco is trading in D.C. for the alien world of Pandora, as she’s set to play Gen. Frances Ardmore in the much-anticipated sequel Avatar: The Way of Water. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SiriusXM
July 4: Andrew Zimmern, 61
Born July 4, 1961 in New York City, Andrew Zimmern, 61, took a long and circuitous route to becoming one of America’s most beloved and celebrated food personalities. After graduating from Vassar College, he moved to the Big Apple to cook for respected chefs like Anne Rosenzweig and Thomas Keller, but his life began to spiral as he dealt with addiction issues. He became homeless for 11 months, squatting in a building in Lower Manhattan, before flying to Minneapolis to enter rehab; it was there that he became sober and eventually worked his way up from dishwasher to executive chef at Café Un Deux Trois. Soon, he parlayed his love of food into a slew of gigs that included a magazine column, a local news segment and a radio show. In 2006, Zimmern released his breakthrough Travel Channel show Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, in which he chowed down on such dishes as bamboo rat in Thailand, cow urine in India and fermented sheep’s head in the Faroe Islands. For his efforts, he has won four James Beard Foundation Awards and later a 2020 Daytime Emmy for outstanding travel and adventure program for his follow-up show The Zimmern List, in which he travels around the United States sampling foods that skew more delicious than bizarre. During the last presidential election cycle, he debuted his MSNBC series What’s Eating America, in which he explored social and political issues — such as immigration, addiction and health care — through the lens of food. And last year, the Magnolia Network and Discovery+ started airing his Family Dinner, in which he breaks bread with everyday Americans to learn about the cultural and regional influences impacting what we eat. In 2021, the U.N. World Food Programme also announced Zimmern as a Goodwill Ambassador. “I am so grateful to the World Food Programme for asking me to help in their global effort to fight hunger and food waste,” he said. “We have it within our power to reverse the ravages of our own ignorance, inefficiency and selfishness.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures
July 3: Tom Cruise, 60
Known for his clean-cut good looks and toothy grin, Tom Cruise, 60, has been a Hollywood A-lister for more than 40 years, beginning with his early roles in such films as Taps and The Outsiders. Born in Syracuse, New York, on July 3, 1962, Cruise proved to be a major box-office draw throughout the 1980s, in films like Top Gun, The Color of Money, Rain Man and Born on the Fourth of July. His role in the latter as a Vietnam vet turned antiwar activist landed him his first Oscar nomination. His star would only continue to rise in the ’90s, as he appeared in blockbusters and critical darlings such as A Few Good Men, The Firm and Interview With the Vampire, and he nabbed two more Academy Award nominations for his roles in Jerry Maguire and Magnolia. Outside of film, Cruise has courted controversy as an outspoken member of the Church of Scientology, often finding himself at odds with other celebrities, and his marriages to (and divorces from) Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes kept him firmly entrenched as a tabloid fixture. Many people will never forget, for instance, when he jumped on Oprah’s couch in 2005. While he has taken on some unexpectedly goofy roles in recent years, including the studio executive Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder and rock god Stacee Jaxx in Rock of Ages, Cruise has widely embraced his status as a later-in-life action hero in films like War of the Worlds, American Made, Jack Reacher and especially the Mission: Impossible franchise, in which he famously performs his own highly dangerous stunts: scaling the world’s tallest skyscraper, leaping between rooftops and even dangling outside an airplane at 1,000 feet. This year, Cruise felt the need for speed once again when he returned to one of his most famous roles in Top Gun: Maverick, which is currently the top-grossing film of 2022 and is earning early Oscar buzz. The New York Times writer Nicole Sperling summed up his enduring movie-star appeal as follows: “He’s the last remaining global star who still only makes movies for movie theaters. He hasn’t ventured into streaming. He hasn’t signed up for a limited series. He hasn’t started his own tequila brand.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP
July 2: Larry David, 75
Born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 2, 1947, Larry David, 75, worked as a bra wholesaler, a private chauffeur, a cab driver and a paralegal before finally breaking into the world of comedy as a writer on Fridays and then Saturday Night Live for a season. In 1988, he teamed up with Jerry Seinfeld to create one of the groundbreaking sitcoms in American television history, a “show about nothing” in which David’s zany and often misanthropic antics inspired the character of George Costanza. Over the course of the show’s run, he wrote such classic episodes as “The Contest,” which earned him an Emmy and was ranked number 1 on TV Guide’s 2009 list of the 100 greatest episodes of all time. Beginning in the year 2000, David kicked off a decades-long run on his own improvisational HBO sitcom, Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which he unabashedly ramped up the unlikability of his characters. The show would go on to earn 47 Emmy nominations, including six nods for David’s lead performance. In 2009, he starred in the Woody Allen film Whatever Works as — what else? — a misanthropic divorcé, and he later wrote and starred in the HBO movie Clear History about a disgraced marketing executive who lost out on becoming a billionaire. He parlayed his sardonic tone into a Broadway play, 2015’s Fish in the Dark, which broke box office records when it took in $13.5 million in advance ticket sales. That same year, SNL came calling when Vermont senator (and Larry David look-alike) Bernie Sanders entered the presidential race, and the comedian was called upon to impersonate the progressive politician. David and Sanders later found out on PBS’ Finding Your Roots that they’re distant cousins, and despite being a fan of the politician, David told Stephen Colbert that he couldn’t handle a Sanders presidency: “If he wins, do you know what that’s going to do to my life? Do you have any idea? I mean, it will be great for the country, great for the country. Terrible for me.” Of course, there’s a character David might never tire of playing: himself. To prove it, he’s already confirmed that Curb Your Enthusiasm will be returning for a 12th season. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Bruce Glikas/WireImage via Getty Images
July 1: Pamela Anderson, 55
Blonde bombshell Pamela Anderson, 55, was born on July 1, 1967, in British Columbia, and she rose to prominence in the late 1980s as a Playboy cover star after being discovered at a Canadian football game and modeling for Labatt’s beer. In 1991, she made her acting debut as Lisa, the Tool Time Girl, on Home Improvement, but it would be her role as C.J. Parker, the slow-motion-running lifeguard on Baywatch, that would cement her status as a world-famous actress. After leaving behind her red swimsuit in 1997, Anderson would go on to star on the campy syndicated series V.I.P. as Valley Irons, a hotdog stand employee who accidentally saves a celebrity and parlays her newfound fame into creating a bodyguard agency. Her acting roles in the ’90s, however, were often overshadowed by tabloid appearances — most notably when a sex tape of Anderson and her then-husband, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, was leaked to the public. The longtime animal rights activist has always had fun with her image, and later TV shows included the Stan Lee–produced animated series Stripperella, about a superhero who moonlights as a stripper, and Fox sitcom Stacked, on which she worked at a small bookstore. Earlier this year, Lily James transformed into Anderson for a Hulu miniseries about the sex tape scandal called Pam & Tommy; Anderson was not involved with the project, and sources say that she felt “violated” by the production, which reopened old wounds. This April, she made her Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in the long-running musical Chicago, and she told Good Morning America, “I just feel like this is really a moment for me to shine for once. I’m doing this for myself, which is rare.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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