October Celebrity Birthdays
A look at the famous and the fascinating on the day they were born
AARP Members Only Access, October 2022
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PHOTO BY: James Brickwood/Fairfax Media via Getty Images
Oct. 31: Peter Jackson, 61
Born in New Zealand on Oct. 31, 1961, director Peter Jackson, 61, received his first 8 mm camera at the age of 8, setting off a lifelong love affair with cinema. After making short films as a teenager, Jackson debuted his first feature, the 1987 horror-comedy Bad Taste, and despite being a bloody example of his “splatstick” genre, it went on to become an unexpected hit at the Cannes film festival. Next up, he’d direct the puppet film Meet the Feebles and the zombie flick Braindead, which many critics called the goriest film ever made. Jackson would go decidedly more highbrow with his 1994 drama Heavenly Creatures, which told the story of two girls who killed one of their mothers in 1950s New Zealand; it starred the then-unknown Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey and earned Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh an Oscar nomination for best screenplay. After the mockumentary Forgotten Silver and the ghost film The Frighteners, Jackson went on to direct one of the most epic productions in cinema history, when he tackled J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. By the time he reached the third movie in the trilogy, he had won three Oscars, including best director and best picture, and in his acceptance speech for the latter, he said, “This is just unbelievable. I'm so honored, touched and relieved that the Academy and the members of the Academy that have supported us have seen past the trolls and the wizards and the hobbits and are recognizing fantasy this year. Fantasy is an F-word that hopefully the five-second delay won’t do anything with.” Jackson kept things epic with his 2005 King Kong remake, a major box-office hit, before directing an adaptation of the Alice Sebold novel The Lovely Bones. But he couldn’t stay out of Middle-earth for long, and in 2012 he launched a prequel trilogy based on The Hobbit. In recent years, Jackson has turned his attention toward documentaries, including the astonishing They Shall Not Grow Old. Jackson used archival World War I footage, which he restored and colorized, adding sound effects and dubbed voices. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called it “a visually staggering thought experiment,” and continued, “The effect is electrifying. The soldiers are returned to an eerie, hyperreal kind of life in front of our eyes, like ghosts or figures summoned up in a seance. The faces are unforgettable.” Last year, Jackson focused on a decidedly less depressing subject with the Disney+ docuseries The Beatles: Get Back, which traced the Fab Four as they wrote and recorded Let It Be. It was such a smash hit, winning five Emmys, that Disney released the footage of the Beatles’ famous final rooftop concert in Imax theaters earlier this year. “You’re seeing the Beatles in a more intimate way than you ever thought you would in your lifetime,” Jackson told British GQ. “I think it’s a slightly magical thing.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Rodin Eckenroth/WireImage via Getty Images
Oct. 30: Henry Winkler, 77
Henry Winkler was born in Manhattan on Oct. 30, 1945, to German Jewish immigrants who had recently escaped the Nazis. As a child, Winkler struggled academically due to undiagnosed dyslexia, though he found happiness on the stage in school theater productions; he would eventually parlay that passion into a Master of Fine Arts degree from the impressive Yale School of Drama. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s to pursue acting, and after a few small gigs on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show, he landed the role of a lifetime on Happy Days when Garry Marshall cast him as 1950s greaser Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli — despite not being exactly right for the part. “He wanted a big, six-foot Italian,” Winkler joked to The Daily Beast. “They got a five-foot, six-and-a-half-inch Jew.” The character nonetheless became a culture-dominating smash, earning Winkler three Emmy nominations, and in 2004, TV Guide ranked the Fonz number 4 on its list of the 50 greatest television characters of all time. In the years that followed the end of Happy Days, Winkler stepped behind the scenes and worked as a director and producer on shows like MacGyver, and in 1982 he starred in the sex comedy Night Shift, directed by his Happy Days coworker Ron Howard. Following appearances in films including Scream and The Waterboy in the late 1990s, Winkler returned to the small screen with an Emmy-nominated guest turn on The Practice and a hilarious recurring role on Arrested Development as the incompetent defense attorney Barry Zuckerkorn. In 2018, Winkler landed the second role of a lifetime on HBO’s dark comedy Barry, in which he starred as the acting teacher Gene Cousineau opposite Bill Hader’s hit-man-turned-aspiring actor. He recently told Variety that the role is the most intense work he’s ever had in his career, but it’s clearly paying off: After more than four decades in the business, Winkler won his first Emmy in 2018, and he earned two more nominations for the second and third seasons of the show. “I’ve been in some pretty great things,” he recently told Den of Geek. “None of them touch this. The Fonz introduced me to the world. He was so much fun to play. The people are still my family. But man oh man, Barry is in a category by itself.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP/Shutterstock
Oct. 29: Winona Ryder, 51
Born in Minnesota to two authors on Oct. 29, 1971, Winona Ryder, 51, moved with her family to a Northern California commune when she was 7 years old, and at 10 she began taking acting classes at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. After making her screen debut in the 1986 film Lucas, Ryder starred as Lydia in Beetlejuice, and it would set a template for the dark cool-girl persona that would come to define her performances in films like the high school black comedy Heathers and her second collaboration with Tim Burton, Edward Scissorhands. Throughout the ’90s, Ryder had an uncanny ability to play ultra-modern roles (she’s the epitome of Gen X cool in Reality Bites) while also seeming utterly at home in period literary adaptations like Dracula, The Crucible, The Age of Innocence and Little Women — the latter two of which earned her Oscar nominations. In 1999, Ryder received some of the best reviews of her career for Girl, Interrupted, about writer Susanna Kaysen’s stay in a mental hospital in the 1960s. While her career was reaching new heights, Ryder became embroiled in a scandal in 2001, when she was caught shoplifting $5,500 worth of designer goods from the Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills; a media frenzy followed, and she was later convicted of two counts of grand theft and vandalism. Following a few smaller roles, she’d begin her big comeback with performances in Star Trek and especially Black Swan, in which she played an aging prima ballerina. Like many actresses of her generation, however, she’s found even more success on the small screen, most notably as concerned mother Joyce Byers in Netflix’s megahit sci-fi series Stranger Things and later as a member of a New Jersey Jewish family in the HBO alternative history miniseries The Plot Against America. For her next film, Ryder will channel the Gothic fun of her earlier Tim Burton roles for Disney’s new Haunted Mansion. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP Images
Oct. 28: Julia Roberts, 55
Known for her mile-wide smile and megawatt charisma, Julia Roberts, 55, was born in Smyrna, Georgia, on Oct. 28, 1967. While she initially flirted with the idea of becoming a veterinarian, she quickly pivoted to acting, and she moved to New York City after high school to live with her brother and sister, who had similar aspirations. It wasn’t long before Roberts was emerging as America’s sweetheart: Following a breakout role in Mystic Pizza in 1988, she earned her first Oscar nomination for Steel Magnolias. Just a year later, she’d receive yet another nod for playing the lovable prostitute Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman. Critic Roger Ebert summed up her appeal as follows: “Roberts does an interesting thing; she gives her character an irrepressibly bouncy sense of humor and then lets her spend the movie trying to repress it. Actresses who can do that and look great can have whatever they want in Hollywood.” As the 1990s took off, so too did Roberts’ career; she starred as everyone from Tinkerbell in Hook to Dr. Jekyll’s maid in Mary Reilly. But where she truly shined was in romantic comedies like My Best Friend’s Wedding, Notting Hill and Runaway Bride, which saw her reteaming with Pretty Woman costar Richard Gere. In 2001, Roberts earned raves (and a best actress Oscar) for her performance in Erin Brockovich, the true story of the legal assistant who helped take down a California power company for polluting a city’s water supply. She also became the first actress to earn $20 million per movie, placing her in line with male peers like Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson. Over the next decade, she appeared in films including the Ocean’s Eleven franchise, Closer and Charlie Wilson’s War, before earning a fourth Oscar nomination for her work in the Broadway adaptation August: Osage County and an Emmy nod for another work derived from the stage, the AIDS drama The Normal Heart. In recent years, Roberts moved to the small screen with Homecoming, about veterans transitioning back to civilian life, and this year’s Watergate-set miniseries Gaslit. She stars as Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon’s attorney general and the first person to blow the whistle on the unfolding political scandal. This month, Roberts stars opposite her Ocean’s Eleven costar George Clooney for the rom-com Ticket to Paradise, about a divorced couple who join forces and head to Bali to stop their daughter from getting married. “It somehow only made sense with George, just based on our chemistry,” Roberts told The New York Times. “We have a friendship that people are aware of, and we’re going into it as this divorced couple. Half of America probably thinks we are divorced, so we have that going for us.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Stephen Smith/SIPA USA via AP Images
Oct. 27: Fran Lebowitz, 72
Born in New Jersey on Oct. 27, 1950, humorist Fran Lebowitz, 72, has always cultivated an image as a bit of a curmudgeon — so much so that she was thrown out of her Episcopalian day school for “non-specific surliness.” Upon moving to New York, she took on a series of odd jobs, including driving taxis, cleaning apartments and selling belts and ads, before Andy Warhol hired her as a columnist for Interview magazine in 1972. Lebowitz became a larger-than-life cultural critic, with her trademark men’s jackets and tortoiseshell frames, and many at the time compared her to a latter-day Dorothy Parker. Following her move to Mademoiselle, she compiled her columns into two essay collections, 1978’s Metropolitan Life and 1981’s Social Studies. Following the success of those books, Lebowitz entered a decades-long period of writer’s block. During that time, she became a regular on late-night talk shows and even started acting as Judge Janice Goldberg on Law & Order. Martin Scorsese, who would later cast her in The Wolf of Wall Street, has been a devoted fan (and friend) for years, and he honored Lebowitz with a 2010 feature-length documentary called Public Speaking. Last year, he returned to his subject for the Netflix docuseries Pretend It’s a City, and as he described it to Deadline, “I admire her clarity and unequivocal stances. We need people to tell us: this is crazy, this is absurd, this is ironic, this is funny, this is tragic. Her voice cuts through the din of contemporary discourse.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Sipa USA via AP Images
Oct. 26: Keith Urban, 55
Born in New Zealand on Oct. 26, 1967, future country music superstar Keith Urban, 55, moved with his family to Australia when he was 2, and he developed an interest in music from a very early age: He received his first ukulele at 4, started playing guitar at 6 and became a regular in local clubs and pubs as a teenager. Known for his mix of rock and country sounds, Urban released his debut album in 1991, and he made the big move to Nashville the following year. He formed a band called the Ranch, and while their first album achieved some critical success, they disbanded when a medical condition kept him from singing. Urban instead began playing guitar on records for the Chicks and Garth Brooks, and by 1999, he released another self-titled album, which went platinum. He was named the top new male vocalist at the 2001 CMA Awards, kicking off a string of accomplishments that soon included CMA’s entertainer of the year and his first Grammy, in 2006, for best male country vocal performance. That year proved to be a game-changer for Urban as it also included his marriage to Nicole Kidman and his decision to enter rehab for drug and alcohol abuse. Urban released his biggest seller to date with 2009’s Defying Gravity, which debuted at number 1 on the Billboard 200 and spawned the chart-topping single “Sweet Thing.” In 2012, during a benefit concert at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, Urban was surprised by Vince Gill, who came onstage to invite him to join the Grand Ole Opry. “Oh, my God,” Urban said. “I don’t know what to say. Thank you so much to everybody at the Grand Ole Opry that made this possible.” The following year, he widened his crossover appeal when he joined the judging panel of American Idol. In 2020, he released his 11th studio album, The Speed of Now Part 1, and he’s finally back out on the road after about four years, including pandemic-related delays. “I’ve always tried to create an experience that results in a certain reaction from the audience and a certain engagement from them,” he recently told MusicRow. “That hasn’t changed for me. And the audience is as passionate, involved and engaged as ever.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Marilla Sicilia/Archivio Marilla Sicilia/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images
Oct. 25: Craig Robinson, 51
Born in Chicago on Oct. 25, 1971, actor Craig Robinson, 51, was studying music at Illinois State University when he realized that he might have a gift for comedy — especially popular among his classmates was his Richard Nixon impersonation. While still a student and a member of the Interdenominational Youth Choir, Robinson began honing his craft at Second City Theatre and Chicago Improv, and soon he was booking small gigs on shows like Friends and Curb Your Enthusiasm. His life would change forever in 2005 when he landed the role of warehouse foreman Darryl Philbin on The Office. Robinson emerged as a fan favorite (on a show full of fan favorites), and he parlayed that popularity into supporting and juicy guest roles on all kinds of television shows, including adult animated series (The Cleveland Show), raunchy sports sitcoms (Eastbound & Down) and twisty cyber thrillers (Mr. Robot). He even led his own network sitcom, Mr. Robinson, in which he played a middle school music teacher, though it sadly only lasted a few episodes. A frequent presence in big-screen comedies like Hot Tub Time Machine and This Is the End, Robinson would earn the best reviews of his career for a decidedly gentler movie, the 2016 coming-of-age dramedy Morris From America, in which he played the title teen’s widowed, soccer-coaching father. Critic Angelica Jade Bastién wrote that his performance “truly gets under your skin.” The role earned him nominations from the Film Independent Spirit and Gotham awards. Most recently, Robinson stole scenes as lovable criminal Doug Judy on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and he worked with that show’s creators on his new streaming sitcom, Killing It, in which he stars as an underdog who tries to achieve the American Dream and strike it rich by hunting invasive pythons for prize money. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Paul Morigi/Getty Images
Oct. 24: Kevin Kline, 75
Born in St. Louis on Oct. 24, 1947, Kevin Kline, 75, began honing his acting craft while a student at Juilliard in the early 1970s, and upon graduation he joined the Acting Company, an acclaimed troupe that toured with classic and modern plays. He paid the bills with a recurring role on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow, and made his Broadway debut in 1973. Kline starred in Chekhov and Shakespeare, musicals and dramas, and he won two Tonys in under a decade, for On the Twentieth Century and The Pirates of Penzance. “Mr. Kline is in a class by himself,” wrote Frank Rich in The New York Times. Kline made his film debut with 1982’s Sophie’s Choice, in which he played the tormented romantic Nathan, kicking off a string of well-reviewed performances in films including The Big Chill and Cry Freedom. It was his comedic performance as an ex-CIA agent in the comedy A Fish Called Wanda that would earn him the best reviews of his budding film career and a best supporting actor Oscar. Over the decades, he’s proven adept at mastering many genres, including comedies (Soapdish), political satires (Dave) and acclaimed dramas (The Ice Storm), though his Old Hollywood sensibilities have made him ripe for channeling historic entertainers: Kline played Douglas Fairbanks in Chaplin, Errol Flynn in The Last of Robin Hood and Cole Porter in De-Lovely. Back onstage, he played Falstaff and Cyrano de Bergerac on Broadway, and he earned his third Tony for a 2017 revival of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter. Since 2011, Kline has voiced the eccentric landlord Mr. Fischoeder on Bob’s Burgers, a role that earned him an Emmy nomination, and he’s been keeping very busy with his film performances as well. Last year, he played himself in the Billy Crystal comedy Here Today and starred in The Starling and The Good House, and he’s next set to appear in the period drama The Diary, written and directed by Jackie Chan. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP
Oct. 23: ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, 63
One of the unlikeliest music stars of the past half-century, Alfred Matthew Yankovic, 63, was born in the L.A. suburbs on Oct. 23, 1959, and he began playing accordion as a kid. After graduating as high school valedictorian, he went on to study architecture at California Polytechnic State University. While in college, Yankovic got a radio show and adopted the stage name Weird Al. He recorded his first major parody song, “My Bologna” — a spoof of “My Sharona” — in a bathroom with perfect acoustics, and it took off like wildfire. He began releasing comedy albums in 1983, and much to his surprise, they actually began to achieve commercial success and critical acclaim. In 1985, Yankovic earned his first of an eventual five Grammys, for best comedy recording, for the Michael Jackson parody “Eat It.” With hits including “Like a Surgeon,” “Amish Paradise” and “White & Nerdy,” Yankovic racked up a series of gold and platinum albums, and in 1989, he parlayed his musical fame into a feature film called UHF, a wacky comedy about an imaginative daydreamer who takes over a local TV station and fills it with bizarre programming. Amazingly, Yankovic has remained a fixture on the charts for decades, and in 2014, he nabbed his first number 1 album with Mandatory Fun — which also had the distinction of being the first comedy album since 1963 to top the Billboard 200 chart. “If you’d told me 30 years ago this would happen, I never would’ve believed it,” he tweeted. “If you’d told me 2 weeks ago, I never would’ve believed it.” Over the years, Yankovic has appeared on shows like The Goldbergs and 30 Rock, voiced himself on The Simpsons and become a New York Times best-selling author, with his 2011 children’s book When I Grow Up. But this year, he’s getting perhaps the biggest honor of his career: Daniel Radcliffe is starring as the world’s most famous parodist in a biopic called Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP
Oct. 22: Jeff Goldblum, 70
Known for his quirky sensibilities and unique speaking style, actor Jeff Goldblum, 70, was born in Pittsburgh on Oct. 22, 1952, and began honing his craft at the age of 17, when he moved to New York City to study with Sanford Meisner. Throughout the 1970s, he racked up a slew of small roles in prominent films like Nashville and Annie Hall. In 1986, he starred in David Cronenberg’s body horror flick The Fly as a scientist who transforms into the titular insect. Throughout his early career, he avoided the mainstream, and he recently told Rolling Stone that he credits Meisner for the confidence to be quirky. “[He] said, ‘You shouldn’t copy anybody. You should try to find your own voice. It may take you a long time to do that, and a lot of continual digging, but it’s worthwhile.’” By the mid-1990s, big directors came calling, and Goldblum was cast in two major franchises, as Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park and as David Levinson in Independence Day. In 1996, Goldblum earned his first — and, thus far, only — Oscar nomination for directing the short film Little Surprises, and soon he was stealing scenes in indie films like Igby Goes Down. Goldblum began a long-running collaboration with Wes Anderson with 2004’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, and he later became a part of the director’s sprawling ensembles in films like The Grand Budapest Hotel and Isle of Dogs. In 2017, he joined a different cinematic universe when he was cast as Grandmaster in Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok. A man of many talents, he and the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra released the 2018 album The Capitol Studios Sessions, which hit number 1 on the Billboard jazz albums and traditional jazz albums charts, and he tried on his hosting hat for the Disney+ docuseries The World According to Jeff Goldblum, which has earned him two Emmy nominations. Next up, Goldblum is set to star as Zeus in Netflix’s modern-day riff on Greek mythology, Kaos, a show on which the impish star is sure to feel right at home. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: TRACY NGUYEN/NYT/Redux
Oct. 21: ‘Judge Judy’ Judith Sheindlin, 80
Born in Brooklyn on Oct. 21, 1942, Judith Sheindlin, 80, had been breaking boundaries for decades before she ever earned the nickname “Judge Judy”: At American University’s Washington College of Law, she was the only woman in a class of 126 law students. She would go on to transfer and earn her degree at the New York School of Law, and she quickly became a corporate lawyer after passing the bar exam in 1965. In the early 1970s, she took a job as a prosecutor in the city’s family courts, where she worked on domestic violence and child abuse cases, and in 1982, thanks to her no-nonsense reputation, Mayor Ed Koch appointed her as a judge. Sheindlin’s star began to rise, and in 1993, she earned a glowing profile in the Los Angeles Times, in which she was described as “tart” and “tough-talking.” She was quoted as saying, “I can’t stand stupid, and I can’t stand slow.” After a similarly attention-grabbing appearance on 60 Minutes, she retired from family court in 1996 after hearing more than 20,000 cases. That year, her game-changing syndicated show Judge Judy hit the airwaves, and it would go on to become a ratings juggernaut that would run for 25 seasons and earn Sheindlin three Daytime Emmys and a Lifetime Achievement Award. She also earned a reported $47 million per season! “If you’re going to try to make a fool of the justice system by not following the rules … there is a consequence,” she said in an interview with the Television Academy. “I am your consequence.” Over the years, Sheindlin also wrote a number of best-selling books with delightfully evocative titles like Don’t Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It’s Raining and Beauty Fades, Dumb Is Forever. Last year, Sheindlin announced that she’d be retiring from Judge Judy and starting a new show on the streaming service IMDb TV called Judy Justice. It has a new name, but the series is very recognizable for fans of the original. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Arturo Holmes/WireImage/Getty Images
Oct. 20: John Krasinski, 43
Born in Newton, Massachusetts, on Oct. 20, 1979, John Krasinski had his first taste of acting fame in high school, when he appeared in a play written by his classmate, future The Office collaborator and costar B.J. Novak. Krasinski went on to study playwriting at Brown University and eventually broke into show business with a gig as an intern on Late Night With Conan O’Brien. Appearances in films like Kinsey followed before Krasinski got his first major role as nice guy Jim Halpert on the American remake of The Office; one of the most popular aspects of the sitcom classic was Jim’s chemistry with his coworker Pam (Jenna Fischer), and their will-they-won’t-they relationship remained a fan-favorite storyline for years. “Personally, I think it’s the best thing I’ll ever do in my career,” he recently said. “Everybody always says, ‘At the end of the day, what if you’re only known for Jim Halpert?’ I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? That would be the greatest thing ever.’” During his time on the show, Krasinski started branching out with performances in films like License to Wed and Leatherheads, and he also began taking on a more substantive role behind the camera: He directed and wrote the 2009 film adaptation of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, based on a collection of short stories by David Foster Wallace, and he cowrote and starred in the environmental film Promised Land with Matt Damon. In 2018, he had his biggest post-Office success to date when he wrote, directed and starred in the horror film A Quiet Place, opposite his wife, Emily Blunt. The film grossed about $340 million worldwide and spawned a sequel, with more on the way. That year, Krasinski — formerly known as a puppy-doggish office worker — unexpectedly stepped into the role of the titular CIA analyst in the Amazon Prime thriller series Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, which returns for its third season in December. The newly bulked-up Krasinski also recently voiced Clark Kent in this year’s DC League of Super-Pets, and he made his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut playing Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic with a cameo in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
Oct. 19: John Lithgow, 77
Born in Rochester, New York, on Oct. 19, 1945, actor John Lithgow, 77, had show business in his blood: His mother was an actress, and his father was a producer who ran Shakespeare festivals across the Midwest. He started his stage career as a child in some of his father’s productions, but he decided to focus on painting instead, studying graphic arts at Harvard before heading across the pond on a Fulbright scholarship. Upon returning to the States, he turned his attention to acting, and he won a Tony for his Broadway debut, The Changing Room, in which he costarred as a British rugby player. In the early 1980s, Lithgow kicked off his decades-long run as an awards magnet with back-to-back Oscar nominations for The World According to Garp and Terms of Endearment, and he received two more Tony nods for Requiem for a Heavyweight and M. Butterfly. In 1996, Lithgow would take on perhaps his most widely known role to date as Dr. Dick Solomon, an alien disguised as a college professor, in Third Rock From the Sun. While the show was bawdy and filled with slapstick humor, it emerged as a formidable critical success over the years, with Lithgow taking home a trio of Emmys for the role. The show came to an end in 2001 after six seasons, and the following year marked his grand return to Broadway after a nearly 14-year absence with a Tony-winning role in Sweet Smell of Success. Lithgow’s stage roots served him well, as he became a Broadway fixture, appearing in a whopping nine shows since 2002, including the musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the one-man show John Lithgow: Stories by Heart and, most recently, the comedy Hillary and Clinton, in which he played against type as the former president. He also showed off his immense range on the small screen with Emmy-winning performances as a serial killer on Dexter and Prime Minister Winston Churchill on The Crown. “At a certain point, I didn’t need to do any more [research] but it was just fascinating, I sort of became addicted to Churchill the way I’ve discovered many people are,” he told Entertainment Weekly of preparing for the role. “He’s just an unfathomably interesting man, full of so many idiosyncrasies and contradictions and a great deal of depth, but a man full of insecurities.” In 2020, he took another juicy TV role as the mentor of Perry Mason on HBO’s Great Depression–era detective series, followed this year by a turn as FBI Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Harold Harper, opposite Jeff Bridges’ on-the-run CIA operative Dan Chase, in FX’s cat-and-mouse spy drama The Old Man. “I’ve had these just wonderful job opportunities in the last five years,” he recently told AARP. “Things have been better since I turned 70 than they ever were before.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Ayami Yoshikawa/Yomiuri Shimbun via AP
Oct. 18: Wynton Marsalis, 61
There must be something in the water in New Orleans, where jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, 61, was born on Oct. 18, 1961: His father was an acclaimed pianist, and three of his brothers would go on to become jazz musicians. Marsalis received his first trumpet at the age of 6, and the rest was history. He was playing publicly by the following year, performing with the New Orleans Philharmonic at age 14 and studying at Juilliard by 17. A musical prodigy, Marsalis joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers while still a teenager and later began playing with Herbie Hancock. In 1983, he released his first album, and he quickly emerged as a Grammy darling: He became the first artist to win awards for both classical and jazz recordings in the same year, and he repeated the feat the following year. Over the decades, Marsalis earned nine Grammys out of a total of 32 nominations, and his other achievements would include two Emmy nominations, the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal. But perhaps his greatest honor would come in 1997 when his orchestral piece Blood on the Fields, about the tragedy of slavery, became the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music. The jury said of the piece, “It is important because of the brilliance of its jazz orchestral writing, the fervency of its musical spirit and the power with which it expresses the pain and promise of the black experience in America.” These days, Marsalis is the managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which he cofounded in 1987. Recently, he wrote and performed music for the biopic Bolden, about Buddy Bolden, who is widely considered one of the fathers of jazz. And last year, he released The Democracy! Suite, which he wrote and recorded live during the pandemic as a response to the political and social upheavals facing the nation. The album includes tracks with titles like “Ballot Box Bounce” and “Sloganize, Patronize, Realize, Revolutionize (Black Lives Matters),” and he said of the new music, “Jazz music is the perfect metaphor for democracy.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Erika Goldring/WireImage
Oct. 17: Wyclef Jean, 53
Haitian rapper and activist Wyclef Jean, 53, was born in the Port-au-Prince suburbs on Oct. 17, 1969, before moving to the United States at the age of 9 to join his parents. His minister father banned rap music in the house, but Jean went against his wishes and teamed up with Prakazrel “Pras” Michel and Lauryn Hill to form Tranzlator Crew, which later changed its name to the Fugees. In 1996, they released their critically adored sophomore album, The Score, of which rock critic Robert Christgau wrote, “It’s so beautiful and funny its courage could make you weep.” Buoyed by the success of hit single “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” which sampled the Roberta Flack classic, The Score picked up a pair of Grammys, including best rap album. After only two studio albums together, the trio disbanded, and Jean debuted his first solo outing, 1997’s Wyclef Jean Presents the Carnival Featuring Refugee All Stars. His next album, The Ecleftic: 2 Sides II a Book, was certified platinum. Jean also proved to be a force of nature behind the scenes: He produced the Carlos Santana song “Maria, Maria”; wrote Whitney Houston’s “My Love Is Your Love”; and cowrote and rapped on Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie.” In 2010, following his charity efforts after the Haitian earthquake, Jean decided to run for president in his home country, but the electoral council rejected his bid. He released his memoir Purpose: An Immigrant’s Story in 2012, and Baz Dreisinger wrote in The New York Times, “This escapade-filled memoir — short on revelations or scintillating tone, but brimming with droll yarns — delivers a narrative that often gets short shrift in hip-hop historiography: a diasporic one.” In recent years, he’s brought his talents to the world of podcasting, with his interview show Run That Back (featuring chats with the likes of Clive Davis and Steve Harvey), and television, where he writes the score for Showtime’s Chicago-set ensemble drama The Chi. Jean also spent the pandemic working on a scoring and music sourcing app called Sodo. “Sodo is also a magical river in Haiti,” he told Variety. “It’s a place where our culture, the idea of spirituality, the drums and the Africana and that spirit come together … I had long been inspired by Quincy Jones, and this was a field that I wanted to attack from the moment I hit 50. I wanted to attack it like never before and that kept me sane.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: John Lamparski/WireImage via Getty Images
Oct. 16: Tim Robbins, 64
Born in California on Oct. 16, 1958, actor and director Tim Robbins spent his formative years in New York’s Greenwich Village, where his father was a singer with the Highwaymen and his mother was an actress. After graduating from college, he cofounded the avant-garde theater group the Actors’ Gang, and soon he was picking up roles in decidedly more mainstream projects like St. Elsewhere, Top Gun and Bull Durham. Robbins had his big break as the star of Robert Altman’s 1992 dark satire The Player, in which he played a Hollywood executive who begins receiving death threats, and that year, he also stepped behind the camera as the writer, director and star of Bob Roberts, a mockumentary about a conservative folk singer running for the Senate. In 1994, Robbins would star as Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, a warmhearted prison drama that has been voted the best movie of all time by IMDb users. “When you’re in a film that is the most popular of all time,” he later told Entertainment Weekly, “you can scratch that one off the bucket list.” He returned to the world of prisons for his next project as the director of Dead Man Walking, which costarred his longtime partner, Susan Sarandon, and earned him an Oscar nomination. He directed the 1999 Depression-era musical Cradle Will Rock and appeared in films like High Fidelity and Antitrust, and in 2003, Robbins earned some of the best reviews of his career for the dark Clint Eastwood drama Mystic River. He would go on to win the Oscar for best supporting actor, and he used his acceptance speech to advocate for abuse victims: “In this movie I play a victim of abuse and violence, and if you are out there and are a person that has had that tragedy befall you, there is no shame and no weakness in seeking help and counseling. It is sometimes the strongest thing that you can do to stop the cycle of violence.” A man of many talents, he released an album in 2010, and he’s found recent success on the small screen in projects like the HBO political satire The Brink, in which he played the U.S. secretary of state. Next up, Robbins will star in the Apple TV+ series Wool, which is set in a dystopian future in a giant silo that extends hundreds of stories underground. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images
Oct. 15: Sarah, Duchess of York, 63
Before she became a member of the British royal family, Sarah Ferguson spent her formative years riding horses and attending boarding schools and secretarial college. She went on to try her hand at a number of careers, working at a PR firm, an art gallery and a publishing house. In 1985, she met Prince Andrew, Queen Elizabeth II’s second son, and the couple married in a lavish ceremony at Westminster Abbey the following year, with “Fergie” taking on the title of Duchess of York. She would go on to give birth to the princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, who are currently ninth and 11th in line to the British throne. Much like Princess Diana, Fergie faced media scrutiny for both her outspoken personality and her weight, and her marriage to the now-disgraced prince ended with a separation in 1992 and a divorce in 1996. After tabloids rudely called her “the Duchess of Pork,” she became the face of Weight Watchers in 1997, and she later pivoted to the world of entertainment, making a cameo on Friends, working as a producer on projects like The Young Victoria and appearing in the Oprah Winfrey Network docuseries Finding Sarah. Last year, she released her debut novel for adults, Her Heart for a Compass, which follows the exploits of her redheaded and freckled great-great-aunt, Lady Margaret Montagu Douglass Scott, who refuses to marry a man she hates and instead exiles herself to Ireland to help the poor. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Dominik Bindl/Getty Images
Oct. 14: Isaac Mizrahi, 61
Born in Brooklyn on Oct. 14, 1961 to a Syrian Jewish family, style icon Isaac Mizrahi, 61, was the son of a children’s clothing manufacturer, and he got his start in the world of fashion when he began sewing clothes for puppets as a child. He’d later become known for his charismatic personality, and he attended New York City’s High School of Performing Arts, even appearing in Fame, before turning his attention full time to fashion; he graduated from the prestigious Parsons School of Design in 1982. Mizrahi worked for the likes of Perry Ellis and Calvin Klein until he branched out on his own in 1987. He almost immediately started making a splash with his bold and quirky designs, winning the Council of Fashion Designers of America emerging talent award in 1988 and the womenswear design award just a year later. “Remember the name Isaac Mizrahi,” wrote Anne-Marie Schiro in The New York Times in 1988. “He is this year's hottest new designer. His first and only fashion show, in April, was so professionally executed, so tasteful and imaginative that it catapulted him into the big time.” She wrote that his clothes are “as sophisticated as they are youthful,” even going so far as to say that they evoked a young Audrey Hepburn — high praise! Throughout the ’90s, Mizrahi collaborated with some of the hottest modern dance choreographers on the New York City scene, and he was the subject of a 1995 documentary, Unzipped, which went on to win the Sundance Film Festival audience award. Mizrahi parlayed his outsized charm into a slew of endeavors beyond simply making clothes: He published a comic book series, produced a one-man show off-Broadway, designed costumes for major theatrical productions, and even hosted a talk show on Oxygen from 2001 to 2003. More recently, Mizrahi joined the judging panel of Project Runway: All-Stars for seven seasons, and in 2019, he released his memoir I.M., which Washington Post critic Karen Iris Tucker summed up as “warm, witty and conversational.” This year, Mizrahi returned to his cabaret residency at New York’s famed Café Carlyle, but if you can’t make it to the Big Apple, you can catch him in person around the country. “I had this old friend of mine come to see my show at the Carlyle, and this friend of mine said, ‘Oh, I didn't realize your show was so louche. It’s so risque,’ ” he told California’s The Almanac this spring. “And I said ‘Darling, do we know each other?’ The show is always slightly revealing and a little bit louche — it just is because I say what’s on my mind, and a lot of times my mind, you know, is in the gutter.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images
Oct. 13: Chris Carter, 66
Before he became known for creating one of the creepiest shows in television history, writer and producer Chris Carter, 66, had a sunny Southern California upbringing. Born in Bellflower, California, on Oct. 13, 1956, Carter studied journalism at California State University, Long Beach, and spent five years as an editor at Surfing magazine. During his tenure there, he began writing scripts, and he soon got a job writing for Disney. In 1993, Carter had his big breakthrough with the Fox detective drama The X-Files about two FBI agents, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who investigate paranormal mysteries. The series emerged as one of the biggest cult hits of the decade, and Carter racked up eight Emmy nominations, including for outstanding drama series. “I hope that we had an impact on the quality of television,” Carter later said in an interview with the Television Academy. “I hope that if people talk about a golden age of television in the ’90s that we were a part of it. I don't know what [The X-Files’] ultimate influence will be, but I just hope it plays forever.” The show originally ran for nine seasons, but it returned in 2016 for two rebooted seasons and yielded two spinoff films in 1998 and 2008. Beyond the tales of Mulder and Scully, Carter created other new shows, including Millennium, about a former FBI profiler who investigates conspiracies and the occult; Harsh Realm, about people trapped inside virtual reality; and The Lone Gunmen, a short-lived X-Files spinoff with a lighter comedic tone. While there have been reports that Carter could once again return to the world of The X-Files for an animated spinoff, which was first announced in 2020, the legacy of his original creation is very much intact: In fact, last month, Rolling Stone included The X-Files at number 51 on their ranking of the greatest television shows of all time. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
Oct. 12: Hugh Jackman, 54
Few Hollywood actors can straddle the line between genres as seamlessly as Hugh Jackman, 54, who was born in Sydney on Oct. 12, 1968, and got his start in acting at the age of 5 as King Arthur in a production of Camelot. Following a turn in the gritty Australian prison drama series Correlli, Jackman began nabbing coveted musical theater roles, including Curly in a London revival of Oklahoma! American audiences would be introduced to him with a very different performance, when he starred as the clawed mutant Wolverine in 2000’s X-Men, which would kick off not only a series of films but also mark the rebirth of the entire superhero genre that would come to dominate global cinema for the next two decades. Jackman would keep returning to the role for years, most notably in the acclaimed neo-Western Logan, which was the first superhero movie to be nominated for best screenplay at the Oscars. Over the years, Jackman has appeared in romantic comedies (Kate & Leopold and Someone Like You), period dramas (Australia and The Prestige) and action thrillers (Swordfish and Van Helsing), but he always found special success with musicals. In 2003, he made his Broadway debut in the biographical The Boy from Oz about the Australian songwriter Peter Allen, for which he won the Tony for best actor in a musical. “His limbs twirling like the blades of a windmill, Mr. Jackman channels the energy that was Allen with a rejuvenating life force all his own,” wrote Ben Brantley in The New York Times. “And you don't feel — as you so often do with such interpretations — that your memories of the prototype have been blurred. This is a performance that, against the odds, holds on to its integrity.” Jackman would earn his first Oscar nomination in 2013 for his role as the heroic convict Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, a part that won him a Golden Globe, and he struck musical gold once again when he starred as P.T. Barnum in The Greatest Showman. Jackman’s reputation as a song and dance man has made him a popular host at the Tony Awards (he won an Emmy for the gig) and the Oscars, and he has remained a Broadway staple over the years. This year, he returned to the Great White Way to star as one of the definitive roles in the American musical theater repertoire, Harold Hill, in a blockbuster revival of The Music Man, which set box office records. Next up, Jackman is earning Oscar buzz for his performance in the emotionally wrenching family drama The Son, which earned a 10-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for iHeartMedia
Oct. 11: Daryl Hall, 76
Born on Oct. 11, 1946, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, singer Daryl Hall, 76, will forever be known for his collaborations with bandmate John Oates, whom he met in 1967. They were both in different bands and set to play at a gig in West Philadelphia when a fight broke out between rival high-school fraternities, complete with chains and knives and guns; the concert was canceled, and they were shuffled on to an elevator, where Hall later recalled saying, “Oh, well, you didn’t get to go on either. How ya doin’? You go to Temple University, I go to Temple University. See you later, bye.” They eventually started making music together in 1971, and the rest was history! Over the years, their combination of pop, rock and soul was a formidable force on the airwaves, and they became the most successful duo in rock history. They had 16 singles reach the Top 10, including six that peaked at number 1: “Rich Girl,” “Kiss On My List,” “Private Eyes,” “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do),” “Maneater” and “Out of Touch.” From 1980, Hall also began releasing solo albums, yielding the top 10 single “Dreamtime,” and over the years he has racked up six Grammy nominations, though he’s yet to break through with a win. Since 2007, Hall has hosted the streaming music series Live from Daryl’s House, which has seen him performing alongside the likes of Smokey Robinson and Nick Lowe. While Hall & Oates have often been overlooked by some of the gatekeepers of the rock canon, they were finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. “I didn’t think it would happen as long as the people who were in power stayed in power,” he told Rolling Stone upon the announcement. “I’ve always been sort of on the other side of the fence with the old guard and the powers-that-be. So it was a bit of a surprise to me.” In his affectionate induction speech, Questlove said, “They crossed all the boundaries because that is what great music does. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in being a proud child of Philadelphia, a child of the ’70s, a child of the ’80s, a child of soul. Join me for one glorious night in making the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, the Hall & Oates of Fame.” This April, Hall released his retrospective album Before After, which compiles tracks from his five studio albums plus live performances and duets from his online series. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Scott Dudelson/Getty Images for Stagecoach
Oct. 10: Tanya Tucker, 64
Born Oct. 10, 1958, outlaw country legend Tanya Tucker, 64, got her first taste of fame when she appeared in the 1972 Robert Redford western Jeremiah Johnson. That same year, Tucker rose to country music stardom at the age of 13 when her cover of the song “Delta Dawn” hit the top 10 on the country charts. As Rolling Stone put it when they ranked her number 67 on their list of the greatest country stars of all time, “That gritty vocal timbre, coupled with the possibly-too-mature subject matter of her songs (like ‘Would You Lay With Me [in a Field of Stone]’), made the young Seminole, Texas, native a star and an archetype for the tough-talking, rebellious female performers who followed in her wake. She could rock out with ease … but was equally comfortable selling the drama of a good ballad.” Tucker came out of the gate running as an outlaw country icon, and she even dabbled in the rock genre with her 1978 album TNT. She struggled with substance abuse issues in the ’80s, but following a stint at the Betty Ford Clinic, she came back even stronger — to date, she has racked up 40 top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot Country charts. In 2020, her Grammy drought came to an end when she finally took home two trophies after 10 previous nominations, and they were good ones: best country song for “Bring My Flowers Now” and best country album for While I’m Livin’. This March, documentarian Kathlyn Horan debuted The Return of Tanya Tucker — Featuring Brandi Carlile at the SXSW Film Festival, and it’s set to hit theaters later this month. “I’ve been in a lot of music studios,” Horan told The Wrap. “And one of the most magical, mesmerizing things, musically and personally, is the intimacy we were allowed to capture. It was amazing. Tanya let us follow her everywhere. She said at some point, ‘Don’t do anything unless it’s on camera,’ which is a great thing for a documentarian to hear.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
Oct. 9: Jackson Browne, 74
Born in Germany on Oct. 9, 1948, to American parents, Jackson Browne, 74, grew up in Southern California, where he honed the laid-back sound that would become his trademark. He did a stint in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band before moving to New York City in the late 1960s, where he worked as a backing musician for Nico and Tim Buckley. As a songwriter, his tunes were performed by the likes of the Byrds and Linda Ronstadt, and he branched out in 1972 with his self-titled debut album, which yielded the top 10 single “Doctor My Eyes.” The ’70s brought a string of acclaimed albums, including 1974’s Late for the Sky, which later appeared on the Rolling Stone list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and 1977’s Running on Empty, which was buoyed by the success of its title track. He would have his biggest hit with “Somebody’s Baby” in 1982, and that decade would mark a turn to more political songwriting. Browne spoke out against U.S. foreign policy in Central America, advocated for arts education and cofounded the groups Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) and Nukefree.org. In 2004, Bruce Springsteen inducted Browne into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with a sweet speech about both his songwriting prowess and his good looks. “It’s true that Jackson wrote some of the most beautiful breakin’ up music, break your heart music of all … I think that what drew women to Jackson, besides the obvious, was that they finally felt they were listening to a guy who knew as much about love as they did. And what drew men to Jackson, besides the obvious, I guess, was that when they listened to him, they realized they knew more about love than they thought they did.” In 2021, Browne released Downhill from Everywhere, his first solo album since 2014, and it earned him his eighth Grammy nomination, for best Americana album, earlier this year. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Theo Wargo/WireImag via Getty Images
Oct. 8: Sigourney Weaver, 73
Susan Alexandra “Sigourney” Weaver, 73, was born in New York City on Oct. 8, 1949, to a showbiz family: Her mother was an actress and her father was the president of NBC. At 14, Weaver began calling herself “Sigourney” after a character from The Great Gatsby, and she was already a statuesque 5-foot-10 by the time she was a teenager. Weaver would go on to study at Stanford University, before enrolling in the prestigious Yale School of Drama, where she’d team up with playwrights like Christopher Durang, who would become a frequent collaborator. Following a slew of stage roles, Weaver had her first major breakthrough in 1979, when she starred as Ellen Ripley in Alien, a performance that later ranked eighth on AFI’s list of cinema’s greatest heroes. Her career soon began to skyrocket, as she appeared in films like The Year of Living Dangerously and the supernatural comedy Ghostbusters, before earning her first Tony nomination in 1985 for the David Rabe play Hurlyburly. Weaver reprised the role of Ripley in the 1986 sequel Aliens, earning her first Oscar nomination in the process. “[Of] all the film’s choices, the best was Weaver,” Sheila Benson wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “She’s its white-hot core, given fine, irascible dialogue to come blazing out of that patrician mouth, and the chance to look, for a moment, like a space-dusted Sleeping Beauty in her hyper-sleep casket.” She would add two more nominations to her résumé in 1989: one for lead actress for her role as primate researcher Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist and one for supporting actress for her comedic turn in Working Girl. While she lost both Oscars, the two performances earned her twin Golden Globes that year. During the ’90s, Weaver played Ripley twice more and turned in acclaimed performances in Dave, in which she played the first lady, and the sci-spoof Galaxy Quest. In 2009, Weaver proved her science-fiction bonafides once again when she starred as Dr. Grace Augustine in Avatar, helmed by her Aliens director James Cameron. She returns in this year’s much-anticipated sequel in a decidedly different part — the adopted Na’vi teenage daughter of Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saladaña) from the first film. Also premiering this year is Paul Schrader’s indie crime thriller Master Gardener, in which she costars as a dowager who lives in a grand old plantation house where the grounds are tended by a former white supremacist (played by Joel Edgerton). They’re just two of the four projects coming out in the next few months, a particularly robust stretch for an actress in her 70s. As she told Jane Pauley on CBS Sunday Morning, “I usually have something simmering. And so, it looks like I threw some magic beans out the window and they all suddenly went like that.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Sipa USA via Getty Images
Oct. 7: Simon Cowell, 63
Much like the contestants on the reality competition series he created, Simon Cowell, 63, worked his way up from rags to riches to become one of the most powerful figures in television today. Born in Brighton, East Sussex, England, on Oct. 7, 1959, Cowell left school at 16 and got a job in the mailroom at EMI Music Publishing. From there, he became a talent scout and a record producer, and he cofounded his own label, Fanfare Records, before being hired by BMG Records. Cowell began to emerge as an influential force in British pop music, and in 2001, he and Simon Fuller created the series Pop Idol, which was imported across the pond the following year as American Idol. His sarcastic put-downs and tough love became the stuff of legend, and Idol quickly ascended the ranks as the most-watched show on television, earning Cowell five Emmy nominations in the process. More than that, he truly became a kingmaker, with Idol launching the careers of such stars as Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood and Jennifer Hudson. Over the next few years, he kept developing new reality competition shows. The X Factor, which started in the United Kingdom in 2004 and welcomed an American spinoff in 2011, spawned such chart-topping pop acts as One Direction, Little Mix and Leona Lewis. He later expanded beyond just singing with Britain’s Got Talent and America’s Got Talent, on which he has served as a judge since 2016. In September, Cowell was the first guest on Jennifer Hudson’s new daytime talk show. “Why was the show [American Idol] so big in those days?” he asked the host, adding, “It would be because of people like you. It’s a combination of talent, determination and real personality. … I always knew how determined you were. You were funny and you took it with grace because you kind of got it. I always thought that about you.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: John Lamparski/WireImage/Getty Images
Oct. 6: Elisabeth Shue, 59
Born in Wilmington, Delaware, on Oct. 6, 1963, Elisabeth Shue, 59, was a bright student who enrolled in the prestigious all-female Wellesley College, and she was soon appearing in commercials as a teenager, for everything from Burger King to Hellman’s mayonnaise to De Beers diamonds. In 1984, she landed her first big role in The Karate Kid, as Daniel’s girlfriend, and she took the lead in 1987’s Adventures in Babysitting, an adventure comedy in which she has to make her way through the big city with a trio of kids over the course of one crazy night. Shue next appeared opposite some of the biggest stars of the decade in Cocktail and the Back to the Future sequels before landing a dream role as a prostitute named Sera in Leaving Las Vegas. Roger Ebert later wrote of her Oscar-nominated performance, “Shue before and since has been in mostly mainstream commercial movies; like Halle Berry with Monster’s Ball and Charlize Theron with Monster, she found a role that took her absolutely to the limit and went all the way, fearlessly.” In 2007, she and her actor brother, Andrew, collaborated on one of her most personal projects to date, the film Gracie, about a young female soccer star who competes with the boys and then loses her older brother in a car accident — loosely based on Elisabeth’s own experiences growing up. Shue played the mom and was a coproducer, and her husband, Davis Guggenheim, directed. She later joined the megahit TV series CSI and found future success on the small screen with the Amazon Prime superhero series The Boys and Netflix’s On the Verge, a comedy about a quartet of L.A. 40-somethings. Earlier this year, Shue appeared in the Showtime drama Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber as Bonnie Kalanick, the mother of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jacques BENAROCH/SIPA via Getty Images
Oct. 5: Kate Winslet, 47
One of the most acclaimed actresses of her generation, Kate Winslet, 47, was born in Reading, England, on Oct. 5, 1975. Following a few theater and television roles, she made her film debut in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, about a schoolgirl who helps her best friend murder her mother. The following year, she earned her first Oscar nomination, playing Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, and she became a regular in highbrow literary adaptations, including Jude and Hamlet. She quickly racked up a second Oscar nod for the epic disaster flick Titanic, an honor she shared with Gloria Stuart — the first time two actresses earned nominations in the same year for playing the same character. In the first decade of the 2000s, Winslet earned an impressive four more Academy Award nominations for a diverse array of roles: as real-life novelist Iris Murdoch in Iris; as a free spirit her ex-boyfriend will do anything to forget in the trippy Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; as a suburban woman in a loveless marriage in Little Children; and, finally, as a woman with a dark secret in postwar Germany in The Reader. The sixth time was the charm, and she finally took home the trophy, showing off her trademark charm in her acceptance speech: “I’d be lying if I haven’t made a version of this speech before. I think I was probably 8years old and staring into the bathroom mirror and this would’ve been a shampoo bottle. Well, it’s not a shampoo bottle now!” Not one to rest on her laurels, she continued garnering acclaim for film roles like Revolutionary Road and Steve Jobs, but Winslet also found success on the small screen. In fact, she added two Emmys to her shelf for the HBO limited series Mildred Pierce and last year’s Mare of Easttown, in which she played a detective in a small Pennsylvania town. For the role, she mastered a regional Delco (Pennsylvania's Delaware County) accent that sounded wild to ears not used to its intricacies. Winslet called it one of the hardest accents she ever had to learn, continuing, “In the top three for sure. It's one of only two dialects in my life that made me throw things — that and the dialogue that they made me do in the movie about Steve Jobs.” This December, Winslet teams back up with her Titanic director James Cameron for the much-anticipated sequel Avatar: The Way of Water, in which she’ll play Ronal, a pregnant, free-diving warrior. During filming, Winslet held her breath underwater for seven minutes and 14 seconds, handily beating the six-minute record set by Tom Cruise on Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation. “It was brilliant, and I was very proud of myself,” she told Entertainment Tonight, “and I’ll probably never be able to do it again.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Christian Siriano
Oct. 4: Susan Sarandon, 76
Born in New York City on Oct. 4, 1946, Susan Sarandon, 76, made her screen debut with 1970’s Joe, but she would first start to make a big splash in the industry with her turn as Janet in the campy cult musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In 1982, she nabbed her first Oscar nomination playing an oyster-bar waitress in Atlantic City, opposite Burt Lancaster, and the 1980s would see Sarandon’s star rise with roles in The Witches of Eastwick and Bull Durham. At the start of the ’90s, she appeared in one of her most memorable roles in the feminist classic Thelma & Louise, about two best friends who hit the road after an unexpected crime. “Sarandon and [Geena] Davis find in Callie Khouri’s script the materials for two plausible, convincing, lovable characters,” Roger Ebert wrote of their Oscar-nominated performances. “And as actors they work together like a high-wire team, walking across even the most hazardous scenes without putting a foot wrong.” Within the next four years, she’d earn two more best actress nominations, for Lorenzo’s Oil and The Client, before eventually picking up a win in 1996 for Dead Man Walking, in which she starred as a nun who befriends a convicted killer on death row. Following later roles in Stepmom, Igby Goes Down and Enchanted, in which she entered the pantheon of Disney villainesses, Sarandon has found late-career success on the small screen. She earned Emmy nominations for her roles in Bernard and Doris and the HBO Jack Kevorkian biopic You Don’t Know Jack, but she had her juiciest TV role to date in the Ryan Murphy limited series Feud, in which she starred as screen legend Bette Davis opposite Jessica Lange’s Joan Crawford. This September, she returned to television in a big network musical drama, Monarch, on which she plays a country-music matriarch named Dottie Cantrell Roman. Despite playing a Nashville legend, she recently admitted to reporters that she didn’t know much about country music: “I smoked a joint with Willie Nelson. That’s as deep as I go.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Sipa USA via Getty Images
Oct. 3: Gwen Stefani, 53
The quintessential Orange County, California, rocker, Gwen Stefani, 53, was born in Fullerton on Oct. 3, 1969, and got into the ska scene when she joined her brother’s band, No Doubt, as the second vocalist. When lead singer John Spence took his own life in 1987, Stefani stepped up as the frontwoman, and they were soon on the rise from a SoCal indie band to a major player in 1990s pop music. Much like Debbie Harry, she became a platinum-blonde force who seemed to be breaking into the boys’ club, though Stefani has joked, “I think I’ve been able to fool a lot of people, because I know I’m a dork. I’m a geek.” In 1995, No Doubt finally hit the mainstream with the album Tragic Kingdom, which topped the Billboard 200 chart and spawned such hit singles as “Don’t Speak” and “Just a Girl.” The band also earned Grammy nominations, including best new artist, and they continued to garner praise for their follow-ups, Return of Saturn in 2000 and Rock Steady in 2001. It was with that fifth album that they finally broke through at the Grammys, winning back-to-back trophies for best pop performance by a duo or group for “Hey Baby” and “Underneath It All.” After collaborating with other artists on singles like “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” (with Eve) and “South Side” (with Moby), Stefani released her first solo album, Love.Angel.Music.Baby, in 2004, which was propelled by singles like “Hollaback Girl”; her follow-up, The Sweet Escape, hit number 3 on the Billboard album chart. An occasional actress with appearances as herself in King of the Hill and Zoolander, she played Hollywood legend Jean Harlow in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. Stefani joined the coaching panel of NBC’s The Voice in 2014, and while she found much success as a popular singing mentor, she also found something else: a new husband, fellow judge Blake Shelton. The couple released the duets “Happy Anywhere” and “Nobody But You” together in 2020, and they tied the knot last summer. In September 2022, Stefani joined her hubby onstage at the Grand Ole Opry for her in-person debut at the hallowed country music hall, though it was technically her second appearance after their pandemic-era virtual concert from their Oklahoma ranch. "I never in my wildest dreams would imagine being part of that,” she said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show about her foray into country. “And to be on a song that goes No. 1 in a genre that I have no business being part of, twice, and now up for these awards, it’s pretty monumental and exciting and unexpected.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Fontaine via Zuma Press
Oct. 2: Sting, 71
Born in Wallsend, Northumberland, England, on Oct. 2, 1951, Gordon Sumner, 71, began performing in local clubs while studying at a teachers’ training college. It was during that time that he earned his stage name Sting because he had a penchant for wearing a yellow-and-black-striped sweater. After working as a teacher for two years, he moved to London in 1977 and soon formed the new wave trio the Police. With hits such as “Roxanne” and “Every Breath You Take,” the band had six singles reach the top 10 and earned five Grammys. Rolling Stone included 1983’s Synchronicity on its list of “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” writing, “[It] became one of the Eighties’ biggest pop-rock blockbusters, perhaps the finest example of Sting’s unique gift for distilling complex psychological and romantic dramas, which still ruled radio and MTV, while making proggy musicianship and dense composition palatable to the mall-rat masses.” While Sting would go on to match that critical and commercial success as a solo artist, his talents extended way beyond writing radio hits: He acted in films like Dune and Quadrophenia; earned four Oscar nominations for his songs for movies; established the Rainforest Foundation to protect the ecosystem and the indigenous peoples who call it home; and even wrote and starred in the Broadway musical The Last Ship, about a northern English shipbuilding town. A Kennedy Center honoree and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee as a member of the Police, Sting has been keeping busy. In addition to playing himself on the first season of Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, he released his Duets compilation album, featuring collaborations with the likes of Mary J. Blige and Eric Clapton, and his 15th studio album, The Bridge. Explaining the title, he said, “These songs are between one place and another, between one state of mind and another, between life and death, between relationships. Between pandemics, and between eras — politically, socially and psychologically, all of us are stuck in the middle of something. We need a bridge.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Michael Kovac/Getty Images for AF
Oct. 1: Julie Andrews, 87
Born in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England, on Oct. 1, 1935, Julie Andrews, 87, got her start singing at an early age when she joined her pianist mother and singer stepfather in the family music-hall act at 10. By 1947, she was singing an operatic aria in a revue at the London Hippodrome, and in 1954 she made her Broadway debut in the musical comedy The Boy Friend. Andrews soon went on to originate two of the most iconic stage roles of the 1960s: Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady and Guinevere in Camelot, both of which earned her Tony nominations. While she was famously passed over for the My Fair Lady film in favor of Audrey Hepburn in 1965, Andrews got the last laugh when she was cast in the Disney musical Mary Poppins in the same year, winning the Academy Award for best actress. “I know you Americans are famous for your hospitality,” she said in her speech, “but this is really ridiculous.” The following year, she earned a second Oscar nomination for playing Maria in The Sound of Music, and James Powers summed up her appeal as follows in his review for The Hollywood Reporter: “This lady is not just a great star, she is a whole whirling, dazzling constellation. She is not just an ordinary movie personality, she is a phenomenon. Once there was Mary Pickford, then there was Garbo, now there is Julie. She is very likely going to be the object of one of the most intense and sustained love affairs between moviegoers and a star in the history of motion pictures.” After appearing in Thoroughly Modern Millie, Andrews earned her third Oscar nomination for 1982’s Victor/Victoria, in which she starred as a 1930s soprano who can’t get a job and decides to pose as a female impersonator instead. She returned to the role for a 1995 Broadway production, though she famously declined her Tony nomination when the rest of the cast and crew — including her husband, the director and librettist Blake Edwards — was snubbed. Later in her career, the Hollywood royal embraced her regal side, starring as Queen Clarisse Renaldi in The Princess Diaries and voicing the Queen in the Shrek franchise. More recently, she lent her voice to the Despicable Me films as Gru’s mom and the Shonda Rhimes executive-produced Netflix period drama Bridgerton as the narrator, Lady Whistledown. In June, Andrews was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award, and she said in her acceptance speech, “The night reminds me with great clarity how many people are involved with making movies. What a huge collaborative effort it takes to bring film to the screen. My husband Blake never liked when people referred to filmmaking as the business or an industry. He insisted that film was an art form and should always be called that.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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