January 12 Dateline

Birthdays

1729 - Lazzaro Spallanzani, Italian naturalist, biologist and physiologist, one of the pioneers of experimental biology of bodily functions, animal animal reproduction, and animal echolocation. (Spallanzani's experiment in relation to those of  John Needham and Francesco Redi. Uploaded by Michael Post. Accessed January 12, 2019.)

1876 - Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, Italian composer and teacher, best known for his comic operas such as Il segreto di Susanna. A number of his works were based on plays by Carlo Goldoni, including Le donne curiose, I quatro rusteghi and Il campiello. (E. Wolf Ferrari's Serenade for Strings, uploaded by john1951w. Accessed January 12, 2013.  Matthieu Lange conducts the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. Transferred from a 1951 Urania LP.  Slightly dated sound, still of high musical quality. )

1876 - Jack Griffith London (born John Griffith Chaney), American novelist, journalist, and social activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction. His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as "The Pearls of Parlay", and "The Heathen".

1899 - Paul Hermann Müller (also known as Pauly Mueller), Swiss chemist, Nobel laureate who received the 1948 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine for his 1939 discovery of insecticidal qualities and use of DDT in the control of vector diseases such as malaria and yellow fever.

1926 - Morton Feldman, American composer. A major figure in 20th-century music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown. Feldman's works are characterized by notational innovations he developed to create his characteristic sound: rhythms that seem to be free and floating; pitch shadings that seem softly unfocused; a generally quiet and slowly evolving music; recurring asymmetric patterns. His later works, after 1977, explore extremes of duration.

1948 - Anthony Andrews, English actor best known for his role as Lord Sebastian Flyte in the ITV miniseries Brideshead Revisited (1981). He is also known for playing the title roles in Ivanhoe, Operation Daybreak and The Scarlet Pimpernel, and for portraying Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in The King's Speech (2010). For his performance in Brideshead Revisited, Andrews won a Golden Globe and BAFTA TV Award, as well as being nominated for an Emmy.

1951 - Kirstie Louise Alley, American actress. Her breakout role was as Rebecca Howe on the NBC sitcom Cheers, receiving an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe in 1991 for the role. She starred on the sitcom Veronica's Closet, earning additional Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Alley appeared in films. She won her second Emmy Award in 1994 for the television film David's Mother. She received a further Emmy nomination in the crime drama series The Last Don. Alley later appeared on Kirstie Alley's Big Life. In 2013, she returned to acting with the title role in the sitcom Kirstie.

1964 - Clare Margaret Holman, English actress, teacher and stage play director. She portrayed forensic pathologist Dr. Laura Hobson in the crime drama series Inspector Morse and its spin-off Lewis from 1995 to 2015. In 2013 she played the role of Liz in the Tricycle Theatre production of the Moira Buffini play Handbagged. She appeared in the film Suite Francaise. In 2015, she appeared as Myra Bolton in Doris Lessing's play, Each His Own Wilderness, at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, London. Holman teaches drama at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and has directed six episodes of Doctors and two episodes of Holby City.


Lefties:
None known

More birthdays and historical events, January 12 - On This Day

Historical Events

1592 - Titus Andronicus, possibly Shakespeare's earliest tragedy, is first staged at the polygonal Rose Theatre.

1879 -  The British initiate the Anglo-Zulu war, entering Zululand in South Africa. Shortly afterwards, the battles of Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift follow.

1928 - Vladimir Horowitz makes his American debut as soloist in Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, with Sir Thomas Beecham conducting.

1945 - The Soviets begin a large offensive in Eastern Europe against the Nazis.

1976 - Dame Agatha Christie passes away at age 85 from natural causes at her home in Winterbrook, Cholsey. Her murder mystery, The Mousetrap, is the world's longest-running play. She is best known for her numerous detective novels and short story collections that she wrote under her own name, most of which revolve around the investigative work of her created characters: Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple, Parker Pyne, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, and Harley Quin/Mr. Satterhwaite. Dame Christie also wrote under the pen name Mary Westmacott. (Website: Home of Agatha Christie)

2010 - A giant earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 hits Haiti, killing thousands of people and destroying a lot of the country.  



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

(c) June 2007. Updated January 12, 2023. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.