Celebrity Birthdays in May
A look at the famous on the day they were born, including Cher, Lenny Kravitz
AARP Members Only Access, May 2023
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PHOTO BY: Steve Granitz/FilmMagic via Getty Images
May 31: Lea Thompson, 62
Before she became America’s sweetheart in the ’80s, Lea Thompson, 62, considered a very different career path — and she has a celebrity to thank for her shift into acting. Born in Rochester, Minnesota, on May 31, 1961, Thompson had studied ballet from a young age, winning scholarships to the American Ballet Theatre and the San Francisco Ballet. During an audition, Mikhail Baryshnikov reportedly told her she was “a beautiful dancer … but too stocky,” and she quit dancing to pursue acting. Thompson made her film debut in Jaws 3-D, which required her to learn how to water ski. Her big break came in 1985 with the start of the Back to the Future trilogy, in which she played the mother of Marty McFly. The following year, she appeared in the much-maligned Howard the Duck, before winning the Young Artist Award for best actress for Some Kind of Wonderful. The early 1990s brought roles in the films Dennis the Menace, The Little Rascals and The Beverly Hillbillies, then she made the leap to the small screen in her own sitcom, Caroline in the City, on which she played a Manhattan cartoonist for four seasons. Over the years, she returned to her dancer roots, playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret on Broadway and appearing on Dancing With the Stars, before returning to serialized television on the family drama Switched at Birth. This year, she began starring as mystery novelist Victoria Spencer in the Canadian crime series The Spencer Sisters, about a mother-daughter duo who are often mistaken for sisters and investigate tricky cases in their fictional town of Alder Bluffs. The show was such a hit across the border that the CW bought the rights to air it in the States this fall. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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May 30: Wynonna Judd, 59
Born Christina Claire Ciminella in Kentucky on May 30, 1964, Wynonna Judd, 59, didn’t have to look far for her perfect duet partner: She and her mother, Naomi, broke records together as The Judds, releasing six studio albums and 14 No. 1 country singles between 1983 and 1991. At the time, they were the biggest-selling duo in the history of country music, and they racked up five Grammys before splitting up when Naomi was diagnosed with hepatitis C. It didn’t take long for Wynonna to branch out on her own, beginning with her 1992 self-titled solo debut, which went five-times platinum. Following a string of successful albums, she briefly reunited with Naomi for a tour and later a TV docuseries on OWN called The Judds. She also opened up about her own struggles with her 2005 memoir, Coming Home to Myself. Following her appearance on Season 16 of Dancing With the Stars, Judd continued to release new music, including her 2020 EP Recollections, on which she recorded rootsy covers of songs by the likes of Nina Simone and the Grateful Dead. Last year, tragedy struck when Naomi died by suicide just one day before the pair was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Wynonna decided to keep their tour going, inviting such country superstars as Trisha Yearwood, Brandi Carlile and Kelsea Ballerini to join her onstage and celebrate her mother’s legacy. Filmmakers captured so much footage from the emotional tributes that it yielded a Paramount+ documentary called Wynonna Judd: Between Hell and Hallelujah and a CMT concert special called The Judds: Love Is Alive – The Final Concert, both of which started streaming last month. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Mike Coppola via Getty Images
May 29: Laverne Cox, 51
Trailblazing transgender artist and activist Laverne Cox, 51, was born in Mobile, Alabama, on May 29, 1972, and first started pursuing dance at the age of 8. After graduating from the Alabama School of Fine Arts, Cox went to college in New York, where she began to fully identify as a woman. She appeared in off-Broadway shows and TV series including Law and Order: SVU. Her life would change forever in 2012, when she was cast as Sophia Burset on the revolutionary Netflix prison dramedy Orange Is the New Black. In addition to becoming an instant fan favorite, the role led Cox to a number of historic firsts: She became the first openly transgender actress to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy and the first openly transgender person to appear on the covers of Time, Cosmopolitan, British Vogue and Essence and have a wax likeness of herself at Madame Tussauds. Later, following four Emmy nominations for Orange Is the New Black, she finally took home a Daytime Emmy for her work as an executive producer on Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word. On the big screen, she appeared in such films as Bad Hair and Promising Young Woman before returning to series television with the Shonda Rhimes–produced limited series Inventing Anna, about fake heiress Anna Delvey. Next she’s set to team up with another legendary producer, Norman Lear, on Clean Slate, about an Alabama car wash owner (played by comedian George Wallace) who reunites with his trans daughter after 17 years of estrangement. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Daniele Venturelli/WireImage via Getty Images
May 28: Kylie Minogue, 55
The best-selling Australian-born musician in history, Kylie Minogue, 55, was born in Melbourne on May 28, 1968, and she first made a splash in the entertainment world with her wildly popular turn as Charlene on the Aussie soap opera Neighbours. The performance earned her Logie Awards for most popular actress, but in 1988, she left TV behind to record her debut album, Kylie. Although her cover of the Little Eva hit “The Loco-Motion” landed her at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, she failed to make a splash in the U.S. for the next decade. Of course, that didn’t stop Minogue from becoming a massive star in her native Australia and the U.K., where she earned the title the Princess of Pop. Over the years, she became the first female artist to earn No. 1 albums in the United Kingdom in five consecutive decades, and 4 billion people watched her sing during the closing ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. In 2002, Minogue finally emerged back in the U.S. top 10 with “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” and two years later she won her first Grammy for best dance recording for “Come Into My World.” Following her recovery from breast cancer in 2005, Minogue continued to push her musical sound with albums like 2018’s country-tinged Golden and the back-to-basics sound of 2020’s DISCO. Now an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and an inductee into the Australia Recording Industry Association Hall of Fame, Minogue is set to release her 16th studio album, Tension, in September. She said of her latest creation, “I started this album with an open mind and a blank page.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Amy Sussman via Getty Images
May 27: Louis Gossett Jr., 87
An imposing figure in the acting world for seven decades, Louis Gossett Jr., 87, was born in Brooklyn on May 27, 1936, and he made his Broadway debut at the tender age of 17 in Take a Giant Step. In 1959, he was cast in one of the most groundbreaking theater works of the 20th century, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, and he made the leap to the big screen with the film adaptation, opposite luminaries like Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee. Following small TV roles on shows including Good Times and The Rockford Files, Gossett Jr. earned an Emmy for his role as Fiddler in the must-see 1977 miniseries Roots. He later made history with his role as Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. Emil Foley in the 1982 romance An Officer and a Gentleman, for which he became the first Black performer to win an Academy Award for best supporting actor. Over the decades, he remained an awards magnet, racking up seven more Primetime Emmy nominations, including for playing Egyptian leader Anwar al-Sadat in a 1983 miniseries and, most recently, for appearing in the 2019 HBO superhero miniseries Watchmen. Today Gossett Jr. shows no signs of slowing down, and this year, he’s set to appear in another film that, like Roots, means a lot in the world of Black culture: the film adaptation of the musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, which is expected to hit theaters this Christmas. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Mike Coppola via Getty Images
May 26: Lenny Kravitz, 59
Born in Manhattan on May 26, 1964, Lenny Kravitz, 59, had entertainment in his blood from the start. His father was NBC TV producer Sy Kravitz, his mother, The Jeffersons actress Roxie Roker. He taught himself to play piano and bass while he was a student at Beverly Hills High School, and he released his debut album, Let Love Rule, in 1989. Known for his genre-defying, era-spanning blend of rock, funk and soul, Kravitz was soon heating up the charts with hits like “It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over.” Between 1999 and 2002, he won four Grammys in a row for best male rock vocal performance — for “Fly Away,” “American Woman,” “Again” and “Dig In” — setting the record for the most consecutive wins by a male performer in a single category. The rocker is also known as the father of actress Zoë Kravitz, and he’s done a bit of acting himself, earning awards attention for his role in Precious and then stealing scenes as the stylist Cinna in the Hunger Games franchise. It’s been five years since the release of his last album, Raise Vibration, but Kravitz has been keeping busy, publishing a memoir called Let Love Rule, launching a brand of Mexican spirits called Nocheluna Sotol and appearing in the action romantic comedy Shotgun Wedding. After receiving the 2022 Fashion Icon award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, Kravitz will see his legendary status quite literally cemented when he receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame this year. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jon Kopaloff via Getty Images
May 25: Octavia Spencer, 53
The kind of beloved character actress who instantly elevates any movie she’s in, Octavia Spencer, 53, was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on May 25, 1970, one of seven children. She made her screen debut in the 1996 thriller A Time to Kill, and following memorable comedic roles in TV shows and films, she got her big break with The Help. Her scene-stealing turn as the no-nonsense maid Minny Jackson skyrocketed her onto the A-list, and she took home an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA and two Screen Actors Guild Awards for the role. Soon she was appearing in critically acclaimed dramas like Fruitvale Station and Get on Up while also branching out into bigger-budget fare like the young adult Divergent Series and even the CBS sitcom Mom, opposite The Help costar Allison Janney. Spencer returned to the 1960s setting of her Oscar-winning role for two more big films that led to two more Academy Award nominations: Hidden Figures, in which she was part of a trio of Black female mathematicians who helped America win the Space Race, and The Shape of Water, where she played a night-shift cleaner who encounters a strange aquatic being in the government facility where she works. In the years since, Spencer has continued to expand her range, appearing as a terrifying lonely woman in the cult horror hit Ma, as America’s first female self-made millionaire Madam C.J. Walker in the Netflix miniseries Self Made, and as a superhero in the comedy Thunder Force. These days you can catch her as true-crime podcaster Poppy Parnell on the Apple TV+ mystery series Truth Be Told, which returned for its third season earlier this year. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Araya Doheny/FilmMagic via Getty Images
May 24: John C. Reilly, 58
With his hangdog expression and quirky vulnerability, John C. Reilly, 58, has emerged as one of the most reliable comedic actors of his generation — so much so that it’s easy to forget just how accomplished a thespian he is. Born in Chicago on May 24, 1965, Reilly studied at the Goodman School of Drama before joining the esteemed Steppenwolf Theatre. He made his film debut in the Vietnam War drama Casualties of War and then amassed a slew of acclaimed supporting roles in films like Days of Thunder and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. But it was his work with director Paul Thomas Anderson on Boogie Nights and Magnolia that catapulted him to the big leagues. Around that time, he was also making a splash on Broadway, first in a still-talked-about revival of Sam Shepard’s True West that saw Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman trading off roles (they both earned Tony nominations) and then as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. On the big screen, he earned an Oscar nomination for his work in Chicago, which required him to sing the heartbreaking “Mister Cellophane.” He even more fully embraced his musical side in the raucous comedy Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a spoof of self-serious rock biopics for which he landed Grammy and Golden Globe nods. While he’s perhaps best known for his collaborations with Will Ferrell — including Step Brothers and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby — Reilly has never shied away from trying something new: voicing the hero in Disney’s Wreck It Ralph series, going dark in We Need to Talk About Kevin and starring as Oliver Hardy in Stan & Ollie. Most recently, he channeled 1980s-era L.A. Lakers owner Jerry Buss in the HBO comedy Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, which is scheduled to return for a second season. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Amy Sussman via Getty Images
May 23: Drew Carey, 65
Born in Cleveland on May 23, 1958, Drew Carey, 65, turned to comedy at a young age after the death of his father, and in his youth, he could often be found spending his afternoons with joke books or recordings of comedians. After two suicide attempts and expulsions from Kent State University, Carey sought structure in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, and it was a surprisingly strong fit: Over the course of six years, the Corps also helped define his trademark look, which included a flat-top buzz cut and thick-framed black glasses. By the 1980s, he was writing jokes for his DJ friend and after a successful spin on the regional stand-up circuit, Carey gained a more national profile with appearances on Star Search and The Tonight Show. His 1993 special Drew Carey: Human Cartoon picked up a CableACE Award for best writing in an entertainment special, and he soon got his first taste of the sitcom life with the short-lived series The Good Life. In 1995, he got his big break with The Drew Carey Show, a zany ensemble sitcom beloved for its wacky side characters (the overly made-up Mimi Bobeck Carey) and its theme song (“Cleveland Rocks”), and Carey emerged as a bona fide A-lister: The show was so popular that a Drew Carey doll hit store shelves! Carey had a hand in raising the stature of improv with his wildly popular game show Whose Line Is It Anyway? His position as a comedy world heavyweight was further cemented when he was honored with a N.Y. Friars Club Roast. Carey participated in another beloved entertainment institution when CBS announced him as the replacement for the retiring Bob Barker as the host of The Price Is Right, and he’s been going strong for more than 15 years, with an astonishing 2,500-plus episodes under his belt. This month, ABC News Studios included him as part of the four-part docuseries The Game Show Show, which featured interviews with Carey, Vanna White, Ken Jennings, Howie Mandel and more. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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May 22: Morrissey, 64
Before he became known as a mononymous rock star, Steven Patrick Morrissey, 64, was born in the Greater Manchester area on May 22, 1959, and he spent his childhood years falling in love with the works of Oscar Wilde and pop star David Bowie. In the early 1980s, Morrissey wrote two books on pop culture, one about the New York Dollsand a second about his obsession with James Dean. Around that time, he kicked off his rock career when he teamed up with guitarist Johnny Marr, bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce to form the Smiths; Morrissey was the brooding front man, known as much for his unique style and haircut as for his baritone voice and insightful, disaffected lyrics. In a decade derided for its manufactured pop excesses, the Smiths became a beacon for moody kids the world over, though their albums never quite achieved chart-topping success. Nonetheless, they’ve always been a favorite of critics, and Rolling Stone included Meat Is Murder on their list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. By 1987, musical differences splintered the band, and Morrissey went solo, finding considerably more success in the States than when he was with the Smiths: His 1992 album Your Arsenal earned a Grammy nomination for best alternative music album, and the single “The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get” cracked the Billboard top 50. Over the decades, his musical output has remained remarkably consistent, and the outspoken and often controversial musician returned to his writing roots with his 2013 memoir Autobiography, which Telegraph critic Neil McCormick called the best-written musical autobiography since Bob Dylan’s Chronicles. After his 14th solo album was shelved by his record label this year, Morrissey announced in February that he had already recorded a new 10-track follow-up called Without Music the World Dies. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: David Livingston via Getty Images
May 21: Mr. T, 71
There’s never been anyone in pop culture quite like Mr. T, 71, a tough guy with a heart of gold who brought his wildly unique persona to the worlds of television, film, advertisements and beyond. Born in Chicago on May 21, 1952, Laurence Tureaud was the youngest of 12 children, and he emerged as a dominant wrestler and football player in high school, before going on to win a football scholarship in college. Expelled after a year, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and became a military policeman. By the mid-1970s, he was gaining a reputation as one of the toughest bouncers in Chicago, and it was at that time that he developed his signature look — a hairstyle inspired by Mandinka warriors he read about in National Geographic, with gold chains that he claimed to have confiscated from fighting clubgoers. Celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Diana Ross and Muhammad Ali hired him to be their bodyguard, and in 1980, he appeared on NBC’s Games People Play in a cheeky competition called “The World’s Toughest Bouncer.” Among those watching the show was Sylvester Stallone, who cast Mr. T as the antagonistic boxer Clubber Lang in Rocky III, in which he developed his catchphrase “I pity the fool!” A breakout star, he soon headlined the action comedy D.C. Cab before taking center stage in the adventure TV series The A-Team, as Vietnam vet B.A. (“Bad Attitude”) Baracus. He parlayed that newfound fame into all realms of entertainment, starring in his own crime-fighting cartoon series, recording a rap album and dabbling in pro wrestling. After a bout with T-cell lymphoma, Mr. T returned to pop culture with cameos in projects such as Inspector Gadget and Not Another Teen Movie and voiced Officer Earl Devereaux in the animated feature Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. He competed on the 24th season of Dancing With the Stars, on which he emerged as an underdog fan favorite. Never one to take himself too seriously, Mr. T was cast in a Skechers ad campaign that plays off the common misspelling of the footwear brand, which sees folks erroneously adding a “T.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Dimitrios Kambouris via Getty Images
May 20: Cher, 77
A chart-topping “Goddess of Pop,” an Oscar-winning actress and the undisputed queen of reinvention, Cher, 77, can do almost anything. Born Cherilyn Sarkisian in El Centro, California, on May 20, 1946, the burgeoning pop diva dropped out of high school at the age of 16 and moved to Los Angeles, where she met Sonny Bono. The duo married in 1964 and released their massive radio hit “I Got You Babe” the following year. Soon, they were dominating both the airwaves, with The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour on television and Top 10 singles on the charts, such as “The Beat Goes On.” At the same time, her solo singing career was taking off, and after a divorce from Bono in 1975, Cher began stretching her acting muscles: She made a splash on Broadway with Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and soon earned her first Oscar nomination playing a lesbian nuclear facility employee in Silkwood. Future acting roles included Mask, in which she played the mother of a son with a rare facial deformity, and The Witches of Eastwick, and she finally picked up an Oscar for best actress for 1987’s Moonstruck. By the late 1980s, she was storming up the charts again, peaking at number 3 with “If I Could Turn Back Time,” which was paired with a music video that featured one of her most iconic outfits: a mesh catsuit with a matching black leather motorcycle jacket. Shockingly, she showed no signs of slowing down and had yet another career resurgence with 1998’s megahit, Grammy-winning disco track “Believe”; at 52, she became the oldest woman to ever top the Billboard charts. The 2018 Kennedy Center honoree appeared in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, which she followed up with an album and tour of ABBA covers. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Mark Sagliocco via Getty Images
May 19: Jodi Picoult, 57
Born on Long Island on May 19, 1966, novelist Jodi Picoult, 57, got her start as a writer earlier than most: She wrote and illustrated her first story, “The Lobster Which Misunderstood,” at the age of 5. She went on to study creative writing at Princeton and published two short stories in Seventeen before she graduated. Picoult released her first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale, in 1992, and in the three decades that followed, she has amassed an impressive collection of more than two dozen novels. Though some readers label her brand of popular fiction “chick-lit,” they’re doing a disservice to the wide-ranging issues she has covered in her novels, including the Holocaust (The Storyteller), gay rights (Sing You Home), the death penalty (Change of Heart) and assisted suicide (Mercy). “I’m never going to win the Nobel Prize for literature,” she says about her position in contemporary canon, “not going to win a National Book Award, never even going to be nominated. What you trade for that is sales and readership. And I would rather reach more people. It would be very nice to not be unfairly accused of being a bad writer, but hopefully, if you do pick up one of my books, you will be quickly disabused of that notion.” There are an estimated 40 million copies of her books in print in 35 countries, and many of them have reached an even wider audience by being adapted into films. Perhaps the highest-profile of the bunch was the 2009 drama My Sister’s Keeper, which touched on issues of childhood cancer and medical emancipation and starred Cameron Diaz and Abigail Breslin, and Netflix bought the rights to her 2021 novel Wish You Were Here before it even hit store shelves. In addition to novels, Picoult has written Wonder Woman graphic novels for DC Comics, and for her latest project, she teamed up with fellow novelist Jennifer Finney Boylan to cowrite Mad Honey, which was released in October. The project began, funnily enough, when Boylan tweeted about a dream she had had the night before in which she was cowriting a book with Picoult! —Nicholas DeRenzo
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May 18: Chow Yun-Fat, 68
Beloved for his high-energy roles in Hong Kong action films, Chow Yun-Fat, 68, was born on May 18, 1955, in the former British territory’s quiet Lamma Island, where he came from humble beginnings: The son of a vegetable farmer mother and a father who worked on oil tankers, Chow spent his youth selling dim sum and dropped out of school at 17. By the 1970s, he’d started an acting course and landed a TV contract, appearing in prime-time soap operas and gangster dramas. He starred in films including The Story of Woo Viet, in which he played a Vietnamese refugee trying to get to the United States, but his life changed forever when he teamed up with director John Woo on the 1986 blockbuster A Better Tomorrow. The film kicked off a fruitful collaboration between the actor and director. Chow excelled in a genre dubbed “heroic bloodshed,” which involved stylized action and often melodramatic themes. He emerged as something of a cult hero in the United States — Quentin Tarantino was a huge fan — and made more than 70 films from 1976 to 1995. But to conquer the global box office, he needed to learn English. He made his American film debut in 1998 opposite Mira Sorvino in The Replacement Killers and later starred as King Mongkut opposite Jodie Foster in Anna and the King. International audiences might know him best for his appearance in Ang Lee’s fantasy epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which was nominated for 10 Oscars, including best foreign language film. In the decades since, Chow has bounced back and forth between Chinese and American productions, including Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, in which he played a legendary Chinese pirate. Over his nearly half-century in entertainment, Chow has brought immeasurable success to the Hong Kong film industry, and the city’s Baptist University recently celebrated his accomplishments with an honorary doctorate. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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May 17: Enya, 62
The best-selling Irish solo act in music history (and second only to U2), Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin — better known as Enya, 62 — was born in an Irish-speaking region of County Donegal on May 17, 1961, one of nine kids in a highly musical family. After graduating from a convent boarding school, she joined the family band, Clannad, in which she sang backing vocals and played the Wurlitzer electric piano and synthesizer. She left the group in 1982 and was soon composing scores for the film The Frog Prince and the BBC documentary The Celts, the latter of which was released as her self-titled debut album. Blending Irish, classical and new age sounds, Enya broke out in a big way with her 1988 sophomore outing, Watermark, which was buoyed by the success of the ethereal single “Orinoco Flow” and went four-times platinum in the U.S. More massive hits followed, including Shepherd Moons, The Memory of Trees, A Day Without Rain and Amarantine, each of which won a Grammy Award for best new age album. In 2001, her single “Only Time” cracked the Billboard 100 Top 10 after it was used in news coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks. The song “May It Be,” written for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, earned nominations for best original song at the Oscars, the Golden Globes and the Grammys the following year. Her most recent album was 2015’s Dark Sky Island, which was inspired by the Channel Island of Sark and its designation as a dark-sky preserve. Known for her intense privacy, Enya purchased a Victorian mansion in 1997 that she completely renovated and renamed Manderley Castle, in honor of the house from Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca. While rumors always abound that Enya will release new music, as of next month, fans can get their hands on something to hold them over, when her 1997 career retrospective A Box of Dreams will be released for the first time on vinyl. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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May 16: Pierce Brosnan, 70
There may be more critically acclaimed actors, but few can match Pierce Brosnan, 70, for his pure, debonair charisma. Born in Ireland’s County Louth on May 16, 1953, Brosnan left home at 15 to pursue acting at the Drama Centre of London. He became a household name in 1982 when he was cast in the American TV romance Remington Steele as a former con man who plays the role of a fictitious supervisor to private investigator Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalist). Its blend of action, adventure and romantic comedy set him on a course to be named the fifth James Bond, and he started his four-film run with a bang: 1995’s GoldenEye opened to more than $350 million at the global box office, a record for the series at the time. Along the way, he starred in other films like the popular remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. After leaving Bond behind in 2002, Brosnan earned a Golden Globe nomination for playing a lonely hitman in the 2005 crime comedy The Matador. His post-007 career has also seen him dipping his toe into the water of movie musicals in the Mamma Mia! franchise and playing everyone from a British prime minister accused of war crimes in The Ghost Writer to a centaur/high-school teacher in Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Last year, Brosnan followed many of his acting peers into the superhero world with his turn as Kent Nelson/Doctor Fate in DC’s Black Adam, but he’s set to come back down to earth for the moving drama The Last Rifleman. In the film, he’s aging up with the help of a gray wig to play an 89-year-old World War II veteran who escapes from his nursing home in Northern Ireland to attend the 75th anniversary celebrations of the D-Day landing in Normandy. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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May 15: Chazz Palminteri, 71
Born in the Bronx on May 15, 1952, actor Chazz Palminteri, 71, has been drawing on his strong Italian American roots throughout his career on stage and screen. In the 1980s, as he was emerging as a talent on the off-Broadway stage, Palminteri worked as a nightclub bouncer and doorman to pay the rent, but he soon hit it big by telling his own story. His one-man show, A Bronx Tale, in which he played 18 characters from his youth, proved a hit and caught the attention of Robert De Niro. He approached Palminteri about turning the story into a movie, with De Niro making his directorial debut and playing Chazz’s father and Palminteri stealing scenes as local Mafia boss Sonny. Palminteri was already 41 when the film became a smash hit, but that didn’t stop him from being embraced as Hollywood’s next big thing. The following year, his performance as a hitman in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway earned him his first Oscar nomination, and he went on to play a romantic lead in The Perez Family and the U.S. customs agent questioning Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects. Over the years, Palminteri has often been typecast as criminals, but he never shied away from the comedic side he first showed off with A Bronx Tale. In 2010, he began recurring on Modern Family as Shorty, the best friend of Ed O’Neill’s patriarch Jay Pritchett. More recently, after a Broadway run of A Bronx Tale in the 2000s, he adapted the story into a musical, for which he wrote the book and later returned as Sonny toward the end of the show’s run. On the small screen, he recurred as crime bosses on Godfather of Harlem and Gravesend, but he’s returning to his roots with a tour of the original version of A Bronx Tale that will continue into the fall. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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May 14: Sofia Coppola, 52
Much has been written in recent years about “nepo babies,” and one of the biggest success stories of an entertainer who has transcended her family connections to become a true artist is Sofia Coppola, 52. Born on May 14, 1971, the daughter of director Francis Ford Coppola made her screen debut as an infant in the baptism scene in The Godfather. Under the stage name Domino, she appeared in films like The Outsiders and The Cotton Club before taking on a more prominent role in The Godfather Part III. Critics were less than kind, and she won Razzie Awards for Worst New Star and Worst Supporting Actress. By the late ’90s, Coppola decided to step behind the camera, and she was a well-respected wunderkind from the start, writing and directing The Virgin Suicides. With her sophomore outing, Lost in Translation, she picked up a Best Screenplay Oscar and became the first woman to be nominated for writing, directing and Best Picture in the same year. She dazzled with the stylistic daring of her Marie Antoinette, which blew the dust off the costumed biopic drama, and then won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion prize for best film for 2010’s Somewhere. In her directorial outings, Coppola has tackled such diverse subjects as a gang of fame-obsessed teens who burglarize celebrities (The Bling Ring), a girls school in Virginia during the Civil War (The Beguiled) and the relationship between a young novelist and her philandering father (On the Rocks). Playing said philanderer was frequent collaborator Bill Murray, whom Coppola also directed in the Emmy-nominated Netflix holiday special A Very Murray Christmas. Following a rare onscreen appearance alongside her husband, Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars, in a recent episode of the vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows, Coppola just might be channeling her real life as the wife of a rock star for her next project: Priscilla, a new take on the relationship between Elvis and Priscilla Presley. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Kevin Winter via Getty Images
May 13: Harvey Keitel, 84
Known for his mastery of playing gruff and often intimidating characters, Harvey Keitel, 84, was born in Brooklyn on May 13, 1939, and he came by his toughness quite naturally. He served in the United States Marine Corps for three years and was deployed to Lebanon in the late 1950s during a political crisis. Upon returning, he studied with acting revolutionaries Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, and he was soon cast in Martin Scorsese’s first film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, in 1967. It kicked off a fruitful collaboration that would see them reteaming throughout the 1970s on Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver, and later on The Last Temptation of Christ, in which he played Judas, and 2019’s The Irishman. Scorsese kept him busy, but Keitel brought his trademark Method intensity to a slew of diverse roles in the early ’90s, earning an Oscar nomination for playing the gangster Mickey Cohen in Bugsy, working with Quentin Tarantino on Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, playing a sympathetic police detective in Thelma & Louise and even donning Maori face tattoos for the New Zealand–set period drama The Piano. Following a turn as FBI Agent Peter Sadusky in the National Treasure franchise, Keitel has become a frequent collaborator with Wes Anderson, appearing most recently in the stop-motion animated film Isle of Dogs. Despite branching out into new genres, Keitel has always found a home in gritty crime dramas, and in 2021, he channeled the Jewish mob figure Meyer Lansky — aka “the Mob’s Accountant” — in the biopic Lansky. Next up, he’s set to star in a streaming series that will draw once again on his Jewish roots. In The Tattooist of Auschwitz, he’ll play a modern-day concentration camp survivor who was forced to tattoo his fellow prisoners. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jeff Christensen via AP
May 12: Ving Rhames, 64
Known for his imposing presence and his booming baritone voice, actor Ving Rhames, 64, was born in Harlem on May 12, 1959, and he cultivated a love of acting from an early age. After attending the New York High School of Performing Arts (aka the Fame school), he studied at SUNY Purchase — where classmate Stanley Tucci gave Irving a nickname that would stick — and then the Juilliard School of Drama. He made his Broadway debut in the 1984 play The Winter Boys, and by the early ‘90s, Rhames was landing increasingly meatier roles in films like Dave. Most movie fans started to sit up and take notice when Quentin Tarantino cast him as the crime boss Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction, after what producer Lawrence Bender called “one of the best auditions I’ve ever seen.” In 1996, he started his decades-spanning turn as computer hacker Luther Stickell in the Mission: Impossible franchise, though many fans might also remember him during that era for a kind gesture at the 1998 Golden Globe Awards: When he won Best Actor for playing the legendary boxing promoter Don King in HBO’s Don King: Only in America, he memorably — and tearfully — handed over his trophy to fellow nominee Jack Lemmon. The acting great called it “one of the nicest, sweetest moments I’ve ever known in my life.” Over the years, he’s kept stretching his acting muscle across all genres, playing a drag queen in Holiday Heart, voicing a no-nonsense social worker in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch franchise, taking over for Telly Savalas as the lollipop-loving police lieutenant in a Kojak reboot and even narrating Arby’s iconic “We have the meats!” commercials. Next up, he’s set to return to the world of Mission: Impossible for the two-part Dead Reckoning, which hits theaters this July and then some time next year. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Stephane Cardinale/Corbis via Getty Images
May 11: Tim Blake Nelson, 59
While many movie fans love Tim Blake Nelson, 59, for his decades as a reliable character actor, he’s more than a triple threat, with a résumé that also includes playwriting, singing and directing. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 11, 1964, Nelson studied classics at Brown and later went to Juilliard for acting, and he emerged in the 1990s as a promising young writer. The grandson of Jews who fled Nazi Germany in 1938, Nelson wrote the off-Broadway play The Grey Zone, about a squad of Jewish prisoners who were forced to help exterminate their fellow prisoners at Auschwitz. His classics major came in handy when he was cast in Joel and Ethan Coen’s folksy musical O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a 1930s-set retelling of Homer’s Odyssey. The brothers later admitted to The Guardian that Nelson was probably the only member of the cast or crew who’d read the source material! Nelson also did his own singing on “In the Jailhouse Now,” featured on the film’s Grammy-winning soundtrack. As a director, he helmed screen adaptations of his own plays as well as O, a high-school-set reimagining of Shakespeare’s Othello, while he continued to rack up supporting roles in acclaimed films like Minority Report, Syriana and Lincoln. And while he dipped a toe in the superhero waters with The Incredible Hulk and Fantastic Four, Nelson tended to be cast in more highbrow fare. He played Henry Bukowski in a 2013 biopic and appeared in two William Faulkner adaptations, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. He made sweet music with the Coens once again when he was cast as the titular singing gunslinger in the anthology Western The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and received a Critics’ Choice Television Awards nomination for HBO’s Watchmen, a superhero limited series set in his hometown of Tulsa. This spring, Nelson took the leap into big-budget action films with his turn as Borislov in the spy-themed rom-com Ghosted. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Behar Anthony/Sipa via AP
May 10: Linda Evangelista, 58
Perhaps the top supermodel to ever come out of Canada, Linda Evangelista, 58, was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, on May 10, 1965, and she enrolled in a modeling school at the age of 12. Despite losing the Miss Teen Niagara beauty pageant, Evangelista caught the eye of an agent and was signed to Elite Model Management by the early 1980s. By 1987, her face was gracing the cover of French Vogue, and a year later she developed what would become a signature look. Photographer Peter Lindbergh suggested she cut her hair into the pixie cut that went on to become known as “The Linda.” A longtime muse of photographer Steven Meisel, Evangelista was the face of Versace and Revlon and appeared in George Michael’s “Freedom! ‘90” music video. Part of “The Trinity,” which also included Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell, she’s often remembered for telling Vogue in 1990, “We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day,” a quote that some critics later compared to Marie Antoinette’s infamous “let them eat cake” remark. In the years that followed, Evangelista appeared in fashion documentaries like Unzipped and Catwalk and continued gracing the covers of magazines and serving as the face of big brand campaigns. In 2021, she was in the news for a much sadder reason when she claimed that side effects from a cosmetic procedure left her brutally disfigured and unable to work. But she reclaimed the narrative last September when she triumphantly appeared on the runway for the first time in 15 years, closing out the Fendi show at New York Fashion Week to thunderous applause. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Richard Shotwell/Invision via AP
May 9: Candice Bergen, 77
One of the most celebrated sitcom actresses to ever grace the medium, Candice Bergen, 77, was born on May 9, 1946, in Los Angeles, the daughter of famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen — and as a child she was often referred to d as “Charlie McCarthy’s little sister,” a reference to her dad’s puppet. After getting expelled from the University of Pennsylvania, she made her film debut in the 1966 Sidney Lumet movie The Group and went on to appear in The Sand Pebbles, opposite Steve McQueen, and The Wind and the Lion, opposite Sean Connery. Though she didn’t have much of a background in comedy, Bergen became the first woman to host Saturday Night Live, during its inaugural season in 1975, and she later became the first woman to join the Five-Timers Club in 1990. She earned her only Oscar nomination (so far) for her turn in Starting Over and a BAFTA nomination for Gandhi, in which she played the real-life documentary photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In 1988, Bergen was cast in what would become her defining role, as the titular television journalist on Murphy Brown; she was such an Emmy magnet that she took her name out of consideration after five wins, and when Murphy decided to become a single mother, she famously caught the attention of Vice President Dan Quayle. Over the years, she returned to the small screen with Boston Legal and has remained a constant presence in big-screen comedies like Sweet Home Alabama and Miss Congeniality, and she brought back Murphy for a rebooted 11th season in 2018. Bergen has kept quite busy in her 70s, taking on roles in films like Let Them All Talk and the blockbuster ensemble comedy Book Club, and she’ll be returning this month for the Italian-set sequel, Book Club:The Next Chapter. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Paul Archuleta/FilmMagic via Getty Images
May 8: Toni Tennille, 83
Born on May 8, 1940, in Montgomery, Alabama, Toni Tennille, 83, studied classical piano from childhood and at Auburn University became the sole female vocalist with their famed big band, the Auburn Knights. Postgraduation, she moved to Southern California, where she began acting with the South Coast Repertory Theater and one of the directors asked her to write the music for an ecology-themed rock musical called Mother Earth that eventually went to Broadway. During auditions for a San Francisco run of the show, she met Daryl Dragon, the onetime keyboardist of the Beach Boys, and they hit it off immediately. Originally performing as the Dragons, the duo picked up the much catchier moniker Captain & Tennille (he wore a captain’s hat), and they quickly emerged as an in-demand club act. They soon signed with A&M Records, and their cover of Neil Sedaka’s “Love Will Keep Us Together” became a breakout hit, reaching number 1 on the charts and winning a 1976 Grammy for record of the year. They followed in the footsteps of Sonny and Cher with an ABC variety show, The Captain and Tennille, and six more of their singles hit the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, including “Do That to Me One More Time” and “Muskrat Love.” Tennille would go on to appear on shows like The Love Boat and Fantasy Island and in the late 1990s, she toured with the Broadway musical Victor/Victoria. She and Dragon — who died of kidney failure in 2019 — divorced in 2014, and soon after she released her memoir, aptly titled Toni Tennille: A Memoir. Last November, she came out of retirement to play one of the most coveted roles in musical theater, Dolly Levi, in a production of Hello, Dolly at the Yavapai College Performing Arts Center in Prescott, Arizona. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Kristina Bumphrey/StarPix via Shutterstock
May 7: Breckin Meyer, 49
For a certain generation of movie lovers, Breckin Meyer, 49, represents a memorable period of lovably lightweight comedies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Born in Minneapolis on May 7, 1974, Meyer was raised in Los Angeles, where he went to elementary school with Drew Barrymore, who recently revealed that he was her first boyfriend. After meeting with the E.T. star’s agent, Meyer began acting in commercials, and he later made his film debut in the horror sequel Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, in which Krueger kills Meyer’s character while controlling him like a video game. He landed a decidedly bigger break in 1995 when he was cast as Travis, the skateboarding slacker/stoner, in the generation-defining comedy Clueless. Supporting roles followed in films like The Craft, Escape From L.A. and 54, but he’d finally have a chance to shine as the lead in Road Trip, a raunchy teen comedy about a college student who hits the road to track down a sex tape he accidentally sent to his long-distance girlfriend. The road movie trend continued with Rat Race, a sprawling ensemble comedy about a race for money in the star-studded model of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. In 2004, Meyer snagged the coveted role of Jon Arbuckle in Garfield: The Movie, opposite Bill Murray as the lasagna-loving orange cat; it was a critical bomb but performed well at the global box office. As a drummer, Meyer has played in the punk band the Street Walkin’ Cheetahs and as part of the backing band for Tom Morello’s side project, the Nightwatchman. Over the years, he’s earned five Emmy nominations for his work producing and writing the stop-motion animated series Robot Chicken, and he also found TV success playing the lawyer Jared Franklin in TNT’s Franklin & Bash. Following recurring roles on Designated Survivor and Good Girls, Meyer triggered a generation’s worth of collective nostalgia when he reunited with his Clueless castmates at this spring’s ’90s Con in Hartford, Connecticut. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jean Baptiste Lacroix/WireImage via Getty Images
May 6: Roma Downey, 63
Best known for her devotion to uplifting and often spiritual content, Roma Downey, 63, was born in Derry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on May 6, 1960. After getting her start at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, she toured the United States in a revival of the 1907 Irish drama The Playboy of the Western World and later made her Broadway debut in The Circle, opposite Rex Harrison. In 1991, she played former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy in the Emmy-winning A Woman Named Jackie, but it would be her role in the inspirational drama Touched by an Angel, on which she played the angel Monica, that would prove to be her big break. Over the span of nine seasons, Downey racked up two Emmy nominations and two Golden Globe nominations, and the show set her on a course to become a power player in Christian-tinged entertainment. In 2007, she married Survivor super-producer Mark Burnett, and together they founded LightWorkers Media, a Christian film production company. Their first project was the 2013 miniseries The Bible, on which she starred as Mary, which went on to earn a trio of Emmy nominations. She recently returned to the small screen in The Baxters, a family drama based on the book series by Karen Kingsbury, but she’s emerged as an even bigger force behind the scenes: In recent years, she’s produced projects like Faithkeepers, a documentary about religious persecution in the Middle East, and this year’s On a Wing and a Prayer, starring Dennis Quaid as a man who has to safely land a plane to save his family after the pilot dies mid-flight. The film premiered at the Sarasota Film Festival, which awarded Downey its lifetime achievement award. She’s also a best-selling author, releasing books such as this February’s Be an Angel: Devotions to Inspire and Encourage Love and Light Along the Way, a collection of quotes and reflections about the power of kindness. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Shutterstock
May 5: Kurt Loder, 78
Best known for his decades-long gig with MTV News, Kurt Loder, 78, was born in Ocean City, New Jersey, on May 5, 1945, and got his start as a journalist while serving in the U.S. Army. He went on to become a writer and senior editor at Rolling Stone for nine years, and in that capacity helped Tina Turner write her groundbreaking 1986 autobiography I, Tina, which was adapted into the film What’s Love Got to Do with It. The following year, he became the face of MTV’s burgeoning journalistic arm as the host of The Week in Rock, which later became MTV News, and music lovers came to recognize him as the authoritative voice in rock — something of a Walter Cronkite for the music video generation. He was one of the first people, for instance, to announce the death of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. Over the decades, he’s emerged as almost as much of a pop culture icon as the musicians he’s reported on and interviewed, appearing as himself (or a loosely fictionalized version of himself) in films and TV shows like Airheads, The Simpsons and Get Him to the Greek. In 2011, Loder published The Good, the Bad and the Godawful: 21st-Century Movie Reviews, a collection of his work as a film critic, and his discerning taste also came in handy when he served for years on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee. These days, you can read Loder’s film reviews on Reason.com. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jamie McCarthy via Getty Images
May 4: Ana Gasteyer, 56
A versatile Saturday Night Live cast member with a singing voice almost as big as her endless repertoire of original characters, Ana Gasteyer, 56, was born on May 4, 1967, in Washington, D.C. As a student at Northwestern University, she originally enrolled as a voice major before getting involved with the campus improv comedy group. Following her postgraduate stint with the Groundlings, she picked up small roles on shows like Seinfeld, on which she was a victim of the Soup Nazi. Her big break came in 1996, when she was cast on SNL, and over six seasons on the show she channeled the likes of Martha Stewart, Hillary Clinton and Celine Dion while creating popular original characters like high school music teacher Bobbie Mohan-Culp and NPR host Margaret Jo McCullen. She later reteamed with a few SNL castmates for Tina Fey’s Mean Girls, in which she played Lindsay Lohan’s mother, and she began to show off her musical talents with a slew of theater roles: She played Mrs. Peachum in the Broadway revival of The Threepenny Opera and was the original Elphaba in the Chicago production of Wicked, before returning to the role on the Great White Way. Over the years, Gasteyer has continued to steal scenes on sitcoms like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Suburgatory, People of Earth and The Goldbergs, on which she played drama teacher Ms. Cinoman. Recently, she’s become the comedy Christmas queen, starring in the films A Clüsterfünke Christmas opposite Rachel Dratch and Dolly Parton’s Magic Mountain Christmas; reaching the top five on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart with her 2019 album Sugar & Booze; and even appearing as a Christmas tree on The Masked Singer. In 2021, she took on her biggest role in years, starring as Katherine Hastings, the complicated CEO of a Detroit car company in American Auto. Gasteyer described her to People as a “flummoxed leader” but pointed out that she’s not stupid or incompetent — in other words, despite the comparisons, she’s not the spiritual successor to The Office’s Michael Scott. “I haven’t seen a show taking a crack comedically at the C-suite at the corporate level,” she says. “There’s a whole lot to be made fun of up there.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Kris Connor via Getty Images
May 3: Greg Gumbel, 77
A trusted American sports broadcaster for decades, Greg Gumbel, 77, was born on May 3, 1946, in New Orleans. He was selling hospital supplies in Detroit in 1973 when his younger brother, Bryant, told him about a job opening up at the NBC affiliate in Chicago, where they had grown up. He got the sportscasting gig after auditioning alongside hundreds of other applicants and quickly worked his way up the ranks at ESPN, the Madison Square Garden Network, and both NBC and CBS. He became known for his calm, laid-back style, with People magazine once describing him as “cool, incisive and seemingly effortless,” and writing that watching him in the booth was like “dropping in on a neighbor who is savvy and fanatical about sports.” He led CBS’s NFL Today in the early ’90s, moved over to NBC to anchor NFL coverage and in 1988 returned to CBS; along the way, he anchored the prime-time coverage of the 1994 Winter Olympics and picked up 11 Sports Emmy nominations. In 2001, Gumbel made history as the first Black sportscaster to call play-by-play for a Super Bowl game; before then, no Black announcer had ever headed up coverage of a network World Series game, NBA Finals, NHL Stanley Cup finals or NCAA Final Four. Since 1998, he has hosted and provided play-by-play calls for CBS Sports coverage of college basketball, celebrating his 25th season this year. In March, Gumbel signed a new contract with the network that will see him continuing NCAA hosting while stepping back from his NFL gig. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Brian Feinzimer/Variety via Getty Images
May 2: Donatella Versace, 68
Born in Reggio Calabria, Italy, on May 2, 1955, fashion icon Donatella Versace, 68, was the youngest daughter of a dressmaker mother, and she later told the New Yorker that she was “the best-dressed little girl in the city.” As a teenager, she developed her signature look of dark eyeliner and platinum blonde hair, and in the 1970s, she moved to Florence to study languages with the goal of becoming a teacher. She often traveled to Milan to help out her fashion designer brother, Gianni, and when he founded his eponymous clothing line in 1978, she took on the role of vice president. Her life would change forever on July 15, 1997, when Gianni was murdered outside of his Miami Beach mansion. Shortly after his death, Donatella was named the new artistic director of Versace. Under her skilled command, Versace maintained its international cache, and she created instantly iconic looks. Beyond the fashion world, she emerged as something of a pop culture icon, played by the likes of Maya Rudolph on Saturday Night Live, Gina Gershon in Lifetime’s House of Versace and Penélope Cruz in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. She’s always maintained a great sense of humor, even appearing alongside Dua Lipa and Megan Thee Stallion in a comedy sketch at the 2022 Grammys. This spring, she unveiled her new Versace Icons collection, which Vogue described as “an edit of essentials that draws on the designer’s own closet — as well as the house’s decades of experience dressing powerful women, from Princess Diana to Michelle Obama to Lady Gaga.” It’s a lineup, of course, in which Donatella Versace fits quite naturally. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Michael Hickey via Getty Images
May 1: Tim McGraw, 56
Born in Louisiana on May 1, 1967, country star Tim McGraw, 56, was raised by a single mother and didn’t know that his father was the famed MLB pitcher Tug McGraw until he was 11 years old. He had played in Little League as a kid, but during college, he bought a guitar at a pawn shop and started exploring a new passion. He dropped out of college and moved to Nashville in 1989, securing a record contract within a year and a half. While his 1993 debut album failed to make much of a splash, he had a bona fide breakout with his sophomore outing, Not a Moment Too Soon, which went on to become one of the best-selling albums of the year across all genres. In 1996, he cemented his status as one of the biggest power couples in popular music when he married Faith Hill, and the couple earned a Grammy for their duet “Let’s Make Love” in 2001. Over the years, he’s had a whopping 60 crossover singles on the Billboard Hot 100, including “Over and Over,” a surprisingly successful duet with the rapper Nelly. Beyond the world of music, the 20-time Grammy nominee threw his cowboy hat into the world of acting, making his feature film debut in 2004’s Black Cloud. In the years since, he’s appeared in blockbuster hits like Friday Night Lights and The Blind Side and even tackled his own industry in the musical drama Country Strong. Last year, he and Hill co-starred together in the Yellowstone prequel series 1883, in which he played a Civil War veteran who joins a westward wagon train and establishes a ranch in Montana. In anticipation of his 17th studio album, which is set for release later this year, McGraw recently debuted a new single, Standing Room Only, on which he contends with fame and his lasting legacy: “I wanna live a life, live a life / Like a dollar and the clock on the wall don’t own me. … Live a life so when I die / There’s standing room only, standing room only.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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