January 5 Dateline

Birthdays

 1762 - Constanze Mozart Niesen (born Maria Constanze Cäcilia Josepha Johanna Aloysia Weber), trained Austrian singer. She married twice, her first husband being Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and was later, jointly with her second husband Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, Mozart's biographer. She and Mozart had six children: Karl Thomas Mozart, Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, and four others who died in infancy.

1909 - Stephen Cole Kleene, American mathematician. One of the students of Alonzo Church, Kleene, along with Rózsa Péter, Alan Turing, Emil Post, is best known as a founder of the branch of mathematical logic known as recursion theory, which subsequently helped to provide the foundations of theoretical computer science. Kleene's work grounds the study of computable functions. A number of mathematical concepts are named after him: Kleene hierarchy, Kleene algebra, the Kleene star (Kleene closure), Kleene's recursion theorem and the Kleene fixed-point theorem. He also invented regular expressions in 1951 to describe McCulloch-Pitts neural networks, and made significant contributions to the foundations of mathematical intuitionism.

1917 - Jane Wyman (born Sarah Jane Mayfield), American actress, singer, dancer, and philanthropist. She was the winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress for the film Johnny Belinda. She was also the first wife of actor Ronald Reagan (later the 40th president of the United States). They married in 1940 and divorced in 1948. A popular contract player, she frequently played the leading lady, her roles including starring alongside William Hopper in Public Wedding, Ronald Reagan and Eddie Albert in Brother Rat and its sequel Brother Rat and a Baby, Dennis Morgan in Bad Men of Missouri, Marlene Dietrich in Stage Fright, and Sterling Hayden in So Big. She was also featured opposite Rock Hudson in Magnificent Obsession and All That Heaven Allows, both directed by Douglas Sirk. She was a three-time winner of a Golden Globe Award. She achieved continuing success in the television soap opera Falcon Crest (1981–1990), in which Wyman played the lead role of villainous matriarch Angela Channing.

1917 - Wieland Wagner, German opera director of Bayreuth Festival and grandson of Richard Wagner. As co-director of the Bayreuth Festival when it re-opened after World War II, he was noted for innovative new stagings of the operas, departing from the naturalistic scenery and lighting of the originals. His wartime involvement in the development of the V-2 rocket was kept secret for many years.

1926 - William De Witt Snodgrass, American poet who also wrote under the pseudonym S. S. Gardons. His first book of poems, Heart' Needle, wins the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. By the time Heart's Needle was published, in 1959, Snodgrass had already won The Hudson Review Fellowship in Poetry and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Poetry Prize. However, his first book brought him more: a citation from the Poetry Society of America, a grant from the National Institute of Arts, and, most important of all, 1960's Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

1931 - Alfred Brendel, Austrian Pianist, Poet and Author, known particularly for his performances of Mozart, Schubert, Schoenberg, and especially Beethoven. (Brendel plays Schubert's famous Four Impromptus, D 899, Op 90. Uploaded by Classical Vault 1. Accessed January 5, 2013.)

1931 - Robert Selden Duvall, American actor and filmmaker. He has been nominated for seven Academy Awards (winning for his performance in Tender Mercies) and seven Golden Globe Awards (winning four), and has won a BAFTA, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and an Emmy Award. He received the National Medal of Arts in 2005. Duvall began appearing in theater during the late 1950s, moving into television and film roles during the early 1960s, playing Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird and appearing in Captain Newman, M.D., as Major Frank Burns in the blockbuster comedy MASH and the lead role in THX 1138, as well as Horton Foote's adaptation of William Faulkner's Tomorrow, which was developed at The Actors Studio and is Duvall's personal favorite. This was followed by a series of critically lauded performances in commercially successful films.

1932 - Umberto Eco, OMRI, Italian philologist, novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician, and university professor. He is widely known for his 1980 novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), a intellectual & historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory.

1942 - Maurizio Pollini, Italian Classical pianist, especially noted for his performances of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and also for championing modern composers such as Boulez, Luigi Nano, and Bruno Maderna.(Pollini exquisitely plays Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 23 "Appassionata." Uploaded by The Gold Piano. Accessed January 5, 2016.)

1946 - Diane Hall Keaton, American actress and filmmaker. Known for her idiosyncratic personality and dressing style, Keaton has received an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and the AFI Life Achievement Award. She rose to prominence with her first major film role as Kay Adams-Corleone in The Godfather, and its two sequels The Godfather Part II  and The Godfather Part III. But the films that most shaped her career were those with director and co-star Woody Allen, beginning with Play It Again, Sam; then Sleeper and Love and Death, that established her as a comic actor. Her fourth, the romantic comedy Annie Hall, won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. To avoid being typecast as her Annie Hall  persona, Keaton became an accomplished dramatic performer, starring in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Interiors, and received three more Academy Award nominations for playing feminist activist Louise Bryant in Reds, a woman with leukemia in Marvin's Room, and a dramatist in Something's Gotta Give. Other popular films followed, including The First Wives Club and Book Club. 

Leftie:
Actress Diane Keaton

More birthdays and historical events, January 5 - On This Day

 

Historical Events

1531 - Pope Clemens VII forbids King Henry VIII to remarry, indirectly, leading to the formation of the Church of England.

1896 - An Austrian newspaper reports that German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen has discovered a new type of radiation called X-rays, using the mathematical designation for something unknown.

1914 - Ford Motor Company announces and 8-hour workday and minimum wage of five U.S. dollars for a day's labour.

1950 -  Based on the Author's novel of the same name, the The Member of the Wedding by Caron McCullers, opens at the Empire Theatre in New York, New York, to critical acclaim.  

1964 - Pope Paul VI meets the Greek patriarch Athenagora I in Jerusalem, the first meeting of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity leaders since 1439. 

1993 - Washington State, U.S. executes Westley Allan Dodd by hanging. It is the first legal hanging in the U.S. since 1965.




Resources:

 
1. Asiado, Tel. The World's Movers and Shapers. New Hampshire: Ore Mountain Publishing House (2005)

2. Britannica. www.britannica.com
3. Chambers Biographical Dictionary, 19th Ed. London: Chambers Harrap, 2011
4. Dateline. Sydney: Millennium House, (2006)
5. Grun, Bernard. The Timetables of History, New 3rd Revised Ed. Simon & Schuster/Touchstone (1991)
6. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.



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