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People: Famous People born in 1879

People in chronological context: 1879 (MDCCCLXXIX) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Monday of the Julian calendar, the 1879th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 879th year of the 2nd millennium, the 79th year of the 19th century, and the 10th and last year of the 1870s decade. As of the start of 1879, the Gregorian calendar was 12 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923. ()

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384 people found (page 1/13):

Jane Darwell(† 87)

Actress | Palmyra, Missouri (US)

Jane Darwell (born Patti Woodard; October 15, 1879 – August 13, 1967) was an American actress of stage, film, and television. With appearances in more than 100 major movies spanning half a century, Darwell is perhaps best remembered for her poignant portrayal of the matriarch and leader of the Joad family in the film adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, for which she received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

* 10/15/1879

Lewis Stone(† 73)

Actor | Worcester, Massachusetts (US)

Lewis Shepard Stone (November 15, 1879 – September 12, 1953) was an American film actor. He spent 29 years as a contract player at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and was best known for his portrayal of Judge James Hardy in the studio's popular Andy Hardy film series. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1929 for his performance as Russian Count Pahlen in The Patriot. Stone was also cast in seven films with Greta Garbo, including in the role of Doctor Otternschlag in the 1932 drama Grand Hotel.

* 11/15/1879

Edward Rigby(† 72)

Actor | Ashford, Kent, England (GB)

Edward Rigby was a British character actor.

* 02/05/1879

George Kirby(† 74)

Actor | London, England (GB)

George Kirby (June 8, 1923 – September 30, 1995) was an American comedian, singer, and actor.

* 02/18/1879

Sydney Greenstreet(† 74)

Actor | Sandwich, Kent, England (GB)

Sydney Hughes Greenstreet (December 27, 1879 – January 18, 1954) was a British and American actor. While he did not begin his career in films until the age of 61, he had a run of significant motion pictures in a Hollywood career lasting through the 1940s. He is best remembered for the three Warner Bros. films - The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), and Passage to Marseille (1944) - with both Humphrey Bogart (5 films total with Greenstreet) and Peter Lorre (9 films with Greenstreet, 3 of which were also with Bogart). He portrayed Nero Wolfe on radio during 1950 and 1951. He became an American citizen in 1925.

* 12/27/1879

Clem Bevans(† 83)

Actor | Cozaddale, Ohio (US)

Clem Guy Bevans (October 16, 1880 – August 11, 1963) was an American character actor best remembered for playing eccentric, grumpy old men.

* 10/16/1879

Victor Sjöström(† 80)

Crew | Silbodal, Värmlands län (SE)

Victor David Sjöström (20 September 1879 – 3 January 1960), sometimes known in the United States as Victor Seastrom, was a pioneering Swedish film director, screenwriter, and actor. He began his career in Sweden, before moving to Hollywood in 1924. Sjöström worked primarily in the silent era; his best known films include The Phantom Carriage (1921), He Who Gets Slapped (1924), and The Wind (1928). Sjöström was Sweden's most prominent director in the "Golden Age of Silent Film" in Europe. Later in life, he played the leading role in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957).

* 09/20/1879

Ethel Barrymore(† 79)

Actress | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (US)

Ethel Barrymore was the second of three children seemingly destined for the actor's life of their parents Maurice and Georgiana. Maurice Barrymore had emigrated from England in 1875, and after graduating from Cambridge in law had shocked his family by becoming an actor. Georgiana Drew of Philadelphia acted in her parents' stage company. The two met and married as members of Augustin Daly's company in New York. They both acted with some of the great stage personalities of the mid Victorian theater of America and England. The Barrymore children were born and grew up in Philadelphia. Though older brother Lionel Barrymore began acting early with his mother's relatives in the Drew theater company, Ethel, after a traditional girl's schooling, planned on becoming a concert pianist.The lure of the stage was perhaps congenital, however. She made her debut as a stage actress during the New York City season of 1894. Her youthful stage presence was at once a pleasure, a strikingly pretty and winsome face and large dark eyes that seemed to look out from her very soul. Her natural talent and distinctive voice only reinforced the physical presence of someone destined to command any role set before her. After the opportunity to appear on the London stage with English great Henry Irving in "The Bells" (1897) and later in "Peter the Great" (1898), she returned to New York to star in the Clyde Fitch play "Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines" (1901) (produced by her friend and benefactor Charles Frohman), which brought her initial American acclaim. Lead roles, such as Nora in Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" (1905) and starring in "Alice By the Fire" (also 1905), "Mid-Channel" (1910) and "Trelawney of the Wells" (1911) proved her popularity as a warm and charismatic star of American stage. In the meantime she married stockbroker Russell Griswold Colt in 1909 and gave birth to three children while continuing her acting career.Although the stage was her first love, she did heed the call of the silver screen, and though not achieving the matinée idol image that younger brother John Barrymore garnered in silent movies after similar chemistry on stage, she won over audiences from her first film appearance in The Nightingale (1914). However, her early film roles, steady through 1919, took a back seat to continued stage triumphs: "Declassee" (1919), her impassioned Juliet in "Romeo and Juliet" (1922), "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" (1924) and, especially, "The Constant Wife" (1926).She harnessed her considerable talents in the role of an activist as well, being a bedrock supporter of the Actors Equity Association and, in fact, had been a prominent figure in the actors strike of 1919. By 1930 she was entering middle age and her movie roles reflected this. Except for Rasputin and the Empress (1932) with her brothers, the roles were elderly mothers and grandmothers, dowager ladies and spinster aunts. Perhaps wisely she put off Hollywood for over a decade, with stage work that included her most endearing role in "The Corn is Green" (a tour that lasted from 1940 to 1942). She finally moved to Southern California in 1940.When she passed away in 1959, she was interred near her brothers at Calvary Cemetery in East Los Angeles.

* 08/15/1879

Warner Oland(† 58)

Actor | Nyby, Västerbottens län (SE)

Warner Oland (born Johan Verner Ölund; October 3, 1879 – August 6, 1938) was a Swedish-American actor. His career included time on Broadway and numerous film appearances. He is most remembered for playing several Chinese and Chinese-American characters: Dr. Fu Manchu, Henry Chang in Shanghai Express, and, most notably, Honolulu Police detective Lieutenant Charlie Chan in 16 films.

* 10/03/1879

Max Schreck(† 56)

Actor | Berlin (DE)

Friedrich Gustav Maximilian Schreck (6 September 1879 – 20 February 1936), known professionally as Max Schreck, was a German actor, best known for his lead role as the vampire Count Orlok in the film Nosferatu (1922).

* 09/06/1879

E. E. Clive(† 60)

Actor | Blaenavon, Monmouthshire, Wales (GB)

Edward Erskholme Clive was a Welsh stage actor and director who had a prolific acting career in Britain and America. He also played numerous supporting roles in Hollywood movies between 1933 and his death. E. E. Clive was born on 28 August 1879 in Blaenavon in Monmouthshire. Clive studied for a medical career, and had completed four years of medical studies at St Bartholomew's Hospital before switching his focus to acting at age 22. Touring the provinces for a decade, Clive became an expert at virtually every sort of regional dialect in the British Isles. He moved to the US in 1912, where after working in the Orpheum vaudeville circuit he set up his own stock company in Boston. By the 1920s, his company was operating in Hollywood; among his repertory players were such up-and-comers as Rosalind Russell. He also worked at the Broadway in several plays. E. E. Clive made his film debut as a village police constable in 1933's The Invisible Man with Claude Rains, then spent the next seven years showing up in wry supporting and bit parts, where he often portrayed comical versions of English stereotypes. He often played butlers, reporters, aristocrats, shopkeepers and cabbies during his short film career. Though his roles were often small, Clive was a well-known and prolific character actor of his time. Among his best-known roles was the incompetent Burgomaster in James Whale's horror classic Bride of Frankenstein (1935). He was a semi-regular as Tenny the Butler in Paramount Pictures' Bulldog Drummond B series, starring John Howard; he also played butlers in other movies like Bachelor Mother with David Niven and Ginger Rogers. In 1939, Clive appeared in The Little Princess as the lawyer Mr. Barrows, and the first two entries of the classic Sherlock Holmes series starring Basil Rathbone. One of Clive's last roles was Sir William Lucas in the 1940 literature adaption Pride and Prejudice (1940) with Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. E. E. Clive died on 6 June 1940, of a heart ailment, in his Hollywood home. He was survived by his wife Eleanor and their child. Clive was a member of the Euclid lodge of Freemasons in Boston.

* 08/28/1879

Albert Einstein(† 76)

Actor | Ulm, Kingdom of Württemberg, German Empire

Albert Einstein ( EYEN-styne; German: [ˈalbɛɐt ˈʔaɪnʃtaɪn] ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely held to be one of the greatest and most influential scientists of all time. Best known for developing the theory of relativity, Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics, and was thus a central figure in the revolutionary reshaping of the scientific understanding of nature that modern physics accomplished in the first decades of the twentieth century. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from relativity theory, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World, Einstein was ranked the greatest physicist of all time. His intellectual achievements and originality have made the word Einstein broadly synonymous with genius. Born in the German Empire, Einstein moved to Switzerland in 1895, forsaking his German citizenship (as a subject of the Kingdom of Württemberg) the following year. In 1897, at the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Swiss federal polytechnic school in Zürich, graduating in 1900. In 1901, he acquired Swiss citizenship, which he kept for the rest of his life. In 1903, he secured a permanent position at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. In 1905, he submitted a successful PhD dissertation to the University of Zurich. In 1914, he moved to Berlin in order to join the Prussian Academy of Sciences and the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1917, he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics; he also became a German citizen again, this time as a subject of the Kingdom of Prussia. In 1933, while he was visiting the United States, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Horrified by the Nazi "war of extermination" against his fellow Jews, Einstein decided to remain in the US, and was granted American citizenship in 1940. On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential German nuclear weapons program and recommending that the US begin similar research. Einstein supported the Allies but generally viewed the idea of nuclear weapons with great dismay. In 1905, sometimes described as his annus mirabilis (miracle year), Einstein published four groundbreaking papers. These outlined a theory of the photoelectric effect, explained Brownian motion, introduced his special theory of relativity—a theory which addressed the inability of classical mechanics to account satisfactorily for the behavior of the electromagnetic field—and demonstrated that if the special theory is correct, mass and energy are equivalent to each other. In 1915, he proposed a general theory of relativity that extended his system of mechanics to incorporate gravitation. A cosmological paper that he published the following year laid out the implications of general relativity for the modeling of the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. The middle part of his career also saw him making important contributions to statistical mechanics and quantum theory. Especially notable was his work on the quantum physics of radiation, in which light consists of particles, subsequently called photons. For much of the last phase of his academic life, Einstein worked on two endeavors that proved ultimately unsuccessful. Firstly, he advocated against quantum theory's introduction of fundamental randomness into science's picture of the world, objecting that "God does not play dice". Secondly, he attempted to devise a unified field theory by generalizing his geometric theory of gravitation to include electromagnetism too. As a result, he became increasingly isolated from the mainstream of modern physics.

* 03/14/1879
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Laura Hope Crews(† 62)

Actress | San Francisco, California (US)

Laura Hope Crews (December 12, 1879 – November 12, 1942) was an American actress. Although she is best remembered today for her later work as a character actress in motion pictures of the 1930s, she also was prolific on stage; among her films roles was the role of Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind.

* 12/12/1879

Houseley Stevenson(† 74)

Actor | London, England (GB)

Houseley Stevenson (30 July 1879 – 6 August 1953) was a British-American character actor who was born in London on July 30, 1879, and died in Duarte, California on August 6, 1953. He began his movie career in 1936 and had a short career in early television productions. Stevenson performed in live stage productions in New York under the name Houseley Stevens. He was a resident teacher at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. He was the father of actors Houseley Stevenson Jr., Edward Stevenson and Onslow Stevens.

* 07/30/1879

Sara Allgood(† 70)

Actress | Dublin (IE)

Sarah Ellen Allgood (30 October 1880 – 13 September 1950), known as Sara Allgood, was an Irish-American actress. She first studied drama with the Irish nationalist Daughters of Ireland and was at the opening of the Irish National Theatre Society. In 1904, she had her first big role in Spreading the News and was a full-time actress the following year. In 1915, she toured Australia and New Zealand as the lead in Peg o' My Heart. Her acting career continued in Dublin, London, and the U.S. She appeared in a number of films, most notably being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Beth Morgan in the 1941 film How Green Was My Valley. She became an American citizen in 1945 and died of a heart attack in 1950.

* 10/31/1879

Otto Hoffman(† 65)

Actor | Brooklyn (US)

Otto F. Hoffman (May 2, 1879 – June 23, 1944) was an American film actor. He appeared in almost 200 films between 1915 and 1944. He was born in New York City and died in Los Angeles, California, from lung cancer. Hoffman's Broadway credits include The Strange Woman (1913), The Spring Maid (1910), and A Broken Idol (1909). He was also active in stock theater productions. Hoffman debuted in film in 1906 in a production of the Edison Company in New York. Later he worked for Goldwyn Pictures.

* 05/02/1879

Ernest Thesiger(† 81)

Actor | Chelsea, London, England (GB)

Ernest Thesiger, CBE, was an English stage and screen actor. He is best known for his distinctive performance as Dr. Septimus Pretorius in James Whale's 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein.

* 01/15/1879

Lucile Watson(† 83)

Actress | Quebec City, Quebec (CA)

Canadian born Lucile Watson was a stage, screen, and television actress in America.

* 05/27/1879

Paul Porcasi(† 67)

Actor | Palermo (IT)

Paul Porcasi (1 January 1879 – 8 August 1946) was an Italian actor. He appeared in more than 140 films from 1917 to 1945.

* 01/01/1879

Neal Hart(† 69)

Actor | Staten Island, New York (US)

Neal Hart (April 7, 1879 – April 2, 1949) was an American actor and director of the silent era.

* 04/07/1879

Leona Roberts(† 74)

Actress | Mills Township, Bond County, Illinois (US)

Leona Roberts (born Leona Celinda Doty; July 26, 1879 – January 29, 1954) was an American stage and film actress.

* 07/26/1879

E.M. Forster(† 91)

Crew | London (GB)

Edward Morgan Forster (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) was an English author, best known for his novels, particularly A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924). He also wrote numerous short stories, essays, speeches and broadcasts, as well as a limited number of biographies and some pageant plays. He also co-authored the opera Billy Budd (1951). Today, he is considered one of the most successful of the Edwardian era English novelists. After attending Tonbridge School he studied history and classics at King's College, Cambridge, where he met fellow future writers such as Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. He then travelled throughout Europe before publishing his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, in 1905. Many of his novels examine class difference and hypocrisy. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 22 separate years.

* 01/01/1879

Samuel Goldwyn(† 94)

Crew | Warsaw (PL)

Samuel Goldwyn (born Szmul Gelbfisz), also known as Samuel Goldfish, was a Polish American film producer. He was most well known for being the founding contributor and executive of several motion picture studios in Hollywood. In 1916, Goldwyn partnered with Broadway producers Edgar and Archibald Selwyn, using a combination of both names to call their movie-making enterprise Goldwyn Pictures. Seeing an opportunity, Samuel Gelbfisz then had his name legally changed to Samuel Goldwyn, which he used for the rest of his life. Goldwyn Pictures proved successful but it is their Leo the Lion trademark for which the organization is most famous. On April 10, 1924, Goldwyn Pictures was acquired by Marcus Loew and merged into his Metro Pictures Corporation. Despite the inclusion of his name, Goldwyn had no role in the management or production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Before the sale and merger of Goldwyn Pictures in April 1924, Goldwyn had established Samuel Goldwyn Productions in 1923 as a production-only operation (with no distribution arm). Their first feature was Potash and Perlmutter, released in September 1923 through First National Pictures. Some of the early productions bear the name Howard Productions, named for Goldwyn's wife Frances Howard. For 35 years, Goldwyn built a reputation in filmmaking and developed an eye for finding the talent for making films. William Wyler directed many of his most celebrated productions, and he hired writers such as Ben Hecht, Sidney Howard, Dorothy Parker, and Lillian Hellman. (According to legend, at a heated story conference Goldwyn scolded someone —in most accounts Mrs. Parker, who recalled he had once been a glove maker— with the retort: “Don't you point that finger at me. I knew it when it had a thimble on it!” During that time, Goldwyn made numerous films and reigned as the most successful independent producer in the US. Many of his films were forgettable; his collaboration with John Ford, however, resulted in Best Picture Oscar nomination for Arrowsmith (1931). William Wyler was responsible for most of Goldwyn's highly lauded films, with Best Picture Oscar nominations for Dodsworth (1936), Dead End (1937), Wuthering Heights (1939), The Little Foxes (1941) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1948). The leading actors in several of Goldwyn films, especially those directed by William Wyler, were also Oscar-nominated for their performances. Throughout the 1930s, Goldwyn released all his films through United Artists, but beginning in 1941, and continuing almost through the end of his career, Goldwyn released his films through RKO Radio Pictures. Goldwyn died at his home in Los Angeles in 1974 from natural causes, at the probable age of 94. He was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. In the 1980s, Samuel Goldwyn Studio was sold to Warner Bros. There is a theater named after him in Beverly Hills and he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1631 Vine Street.

* 08/17/1879

Eric Campbell(† 38)

Actor | Sale (GB)

Alfred Eric Campbell (26 April 1879 – 20 December 1917) was a Scottish actor. He was a key member of Charlie Chaplin's film ensemble, invariably playing an intimidating bully, and appeared in eleven of Chaplin's films before he was killed in a car crash at the age of 38. He is the subject of a documentary by filmmaker Kevin Macdonald.

* 04/26/1879

Will Rogers(† 55)

Actor | Oologah, Indian Territory (now Oklahoma)

William Penn Adair Rogers (November 4, 1879 – August 15, 1935) was an American vaudeville performer, actor, and humorous social commentator. He was born as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, in the Indian Territory (now part of Oklahoma), and is known as "Oklahoma's Favorite Son". As an entertainer and humorist, he traveled around the world three times, made 71 films (50 silent films and 21 "talkies"), and wrote more than 4,000 nationally syndicated newspaper columns. By the mid-1930s, Rogers was hugely popular in the United States for his leading political wit and was the highest paid of Hollywood film stars. He died in 1935 with aviator Wiley Post when their small airplane crashed in northern Alaska. Rogers began his career as a performer on vaudeville. His rope act led to success in the Ziegfeld Follies, which in turn led to the first of his many movie contracts. His 1920s syndicated newspaper column and his radio appearances increased his visibility and popularity. Rogers crusaded for aviation expansion and provided Americans with first-hand accounts of his world travels. His earthy anecdotes and folksy style allowed him to poke fun at gangsters, prohibition, politicians, government programs, and a host of other controversial topics in a way that found general acclaim from a national audience with no one offended. His aphorisms, couched in humorous terms, were widely quoted, for example, "I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a Democrat." One of Rogers's most famous sayings was "I never met a man I didn't like" and he even provided an epigram on this famous epigram: When I die, my epitaph, or whatever you call those signs on gravestones, is going to read: "I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I dident [sic] like." I am so proud of that, I can hardly wait to die so it can be carved.

* 11/04/1879

Robert Elliott(† 72)

Actor | Columbus, Ohio (US)

Richard Robert Elliott (October 9, 1879 – November 15, 1951) was an American character actor who appeared in 102 Hollywood films and television shows from 1916 to 1951.

* 10/09/1879

Georg John(† 62)

Actor | Schmiegel (PL)

Georg John (born Georg Jacobsohn; 23 July 1879 – 18 November 1941) was a German stage and film actor.

* 07/22/1879

Leon M. Lion(† 68)

Actor | London (GB)

Leon Marks Lion (12 March 1879 – 28 March 1947) was an English stage and film actor, playwright, theatrical director and producer. He starred in Joseph Jefferson Farjeon's 1925 hit play Number 17 as well as its subsequent 1932 film adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock.

* 03/12/1879

Philipp Lothar Mayring(† 68)

Crew | Würzburg (DE)

Philipp Lothar Mayring (19 September 1879 – 6 July 1948) was a German screenwriter, actor and film director. He worked on the screenplays for over seventy films, and directed another twelve.

* 09/19/1879

Hampton Del Ruth(† 78)

Crew | Delaware (US)

Hampton Del Ruth (September 7, 1879 – May 15, 1958) was an American film actor, director, screenwriter, and film producer. Among other work, he wrote the intertitles for the final American studio-made silent film Legong: Dance of the Virgins (1935). Del Ruth began working in film in 1913 and continued until the early 1930s. He also wrote at least two novels: Port o' Heart's Desire (1926) and Without Restraint (1936). He was the older brother of film director Roy Del Ruth and uncle of Cinematographer Thomas Del Ruth.

* 09/07/1879
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