Category: Oscar Profile

Born April 18, 1956 in Biloxi, Mississippi, Eric Roberts is the son of actors who ran an acting school in Atlanta, Georgia, where he grew up. His younger siblings, Julia Roberts and Lisa Roberts Gillan are also actors. Roberts got his start in the now defunct television soap opera, Another World in 1977. The following…

Born June 29, 1911 in New York, New York, Bernard Herrmann was the son of middle-class Jewish parents, born into a family of Russian origin. His father encouraged his interest in music. Started out as a violinist a violinist, he became a composer at 13 and a conductor of his own orchestra at 20. Later…

Born April 7, 1939 in Detroit, Michigan, Francis Ford Coppola’s father Carmine was a flautist with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. His mother Italia was a former actress. Two years after his birth his father was named principal flautist for the NBC Symphony Orchestra and the family moved to Woodside, Queens. Originally trained as a musician,…

Today is St. Patrick’s Day. No one in the history of film symbolizes St. Patrick’s Day, and the Irish in general, more than John Martin Feeney, known professionally as John Ford. Contrary to public perception, Ford was not born in Ireland, but in in Cape Elizabeth, Maine on February 1, 1894. One of eleven children…

Born April 8, 1942 in Los Angeles, California, Douglas Trumbull was the son of an aerospace engineer who had briefly worked as visual effects creator for 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. His mother, who died when he was 7, was an artist. As a child, he liked to construct mechanical and electrical devices such as…

Born March 19, 1923, Giuseppe Rotunno entered the film industry as a still photographer at Cinecitta Studios in Rome but lost his job due to his anti-fascist views. Conscripted and sent to Greece in 1942, he then served as a newsreel cameraman with the Italian army film unit. In 1943, he was captured during the…

Born August 20, 1983 in Los Angeles, California, Andrew Garfield is the son of an American father and an English mother. He moved with his parents and older brother to Surrey, England when he was three. He holds joint American and British citizenship. Garfield made his acting debut at 9 in a local Surrey production…

Born May 26, 1914 in Lancashire, England, Geoffrey Unsworth was a British cinematographer who worked on some of the most important films in cinema history spanning more than forty years. Unsworth began his career with British Gaumont in 1932 when he was 18. He went to work for Technicolor in 1938 where his first assignment…

Born December 9, 1934 in Yorkshire, England, to a physician who was also general practitioner for a local theatre and his wife, the wardrobe mistress, Judith Olivia (Judi) Dench grew up to become one of her country’s greatest actresses. Although she intended to become a set designer, she followed her brother Jeff into acting school…

Born August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York to a telephone lineman and his wife, Lucille Ball’s father died of scarlet fever at the age of 27 when she was 3. With her mother working several jobs to make ends meet, she and her brother Fred (1915-2007) were raised by their paternal grandparents until her…

Born August 21, 1913 in Alexandria, Egypt, his birth registered in Perth, Australia, where he was raised by his Australian parents, Robert Krasker studied photography in Paris and Dresden in his youth, briefly working for Paramount in their Dresden studio before moving to London in 1932 where he was hired by Alexander Korda’s London Films…

Born November 30, 1886 in New York, N.Y., Karl Struss was taken out of high school by his father after an illness to work in his factory, the Seybel & Strauss wire bonnet factory. Having developed an interest in photography, Struss was given an exhibition of his work by Alfred Stieglitz in 1910. He studied…

Born December 11, 1931 in Humacao, Puerto Rico, Rosa Dolores Alverio Marcano, known to the world by her stage name of Rita Moreno, was the daughter of a 17-year-old seamstress and her farmer husband. When she was 4, her mother moved with her to New York, leaving her younger son behind with her faithless husband.…

Born February 13, 1934 New York, New York, George Segal (Jr.) was raised in Great Neck, Long Island, New York by his father, a malt and hop agent, and his wife. Interested in acting since seeing Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire when he was nine, he moved back to Manhattan with his mother…

Born June 20, 1967 in Honolulu, Hawaii, Nicole Kidman was raised in a suburb of Sydney, Australia by her Australian parents who were visiting Hawaii on educational visas at the time of her birth. Young Kidman’s first love was ballet, but she soon gravitated toward drama and made her film debut in the 1983 Australian…