Childhood Of Celebrities : Karen Carpenter

Carpenter was born in New Haven, Connecticut, USA to Agnes Reuwer Tatum and Harold Bertram Carpenter.

Richard had developed an interest in music at an early age, becoming a piano prodigy. The family moved in 1963 to the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, California. The move to Southern California, home of many recording studios and record companies, was intended in part to foster Richard’s budding musical career.

When Karen Carpenter went to Downey High School, she didn’t care for gym class, so she asked Richard to ask the conductor of the band if she could substitute band for gym class. The conductor agreed to take her into the band, and gave her the glockenspiel. She didn’t like the glockenspiel, and upon admiring the performance of a friend who played the drums, she asked the conductor if she could play the drums instead.

Drumming came naturally to Carpenter, and she practiced for several hours a day—her drumming can be heard in many of the Carpenters’ songs. When she was 17, Carpenter went on “The Stillman Diet” with a doctor’s guidance, and lost between 20 and 25 pounds.

In 1968, John Wayne met the Carpenters on a talent show called “Your All American College Show.” He urged Carpenter to try out for a role in the film “True Grit.” Carpenter auditioned, but Kim Darby was selected instead.

Credit : Wikipedia

Technorati Tags: Celebrities, Famous, Singer, Karen Carpenter

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Childhood Of Celebrities : Alicia Keys

Keys was the only child born to an Irish-Italian mother, Teresa “Terri” Augello, and a Jamaican father, Craig Cook, in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, New York. Terri was a paralegal and actress, but Keys was raised in a semi-poor home in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. Keys’ mother and father separated during her early childhood, thus she was raised by her mother during her formative years. Her mother was the one who most supported her during the time she was developing her musical talents. In 1985, Keys and a group of other girls won the parts of Rudy Huxtable’s sleepover guests in an episode of The Cosby Show called “Slumber Party”, aired on March 28 (the episode became the only time Keys was credited under her real name). She began playing the piano when she was seven, learning classical music by composers such as Beethoven, Mozart, and her favorite, Chopin. The press reported in 2005 that Keys was attempting to reconcile with her father. However, Keys denied this and said her words were misinterpreted.

Keys graduated from the Professional Performing Arts School, a high school in Manhattan, at the age of sixteen as valedictorian. Although accepted to Columbia University at age sixteen with a scholarship, she decided instead to pursue her musical career. Keys signed a demo deal with Jermaine Dupri and his So So Def label, then distributed by Columbia Records. She wrote and recorded a song entitled “Dah Dee Dah (Sexy Thing)”, which appeared on the soundtrack to the 1997 blockbuster, Men in Black. The song was Keys’ first professional recording; it was never released as a single and her record contract with Columbia Records ended quickly. Keys later met Clive Davis, who signed her to Arista Records, which has since disbanded. Following her mentor Clive Davis to his newly-formed J Records label, she recorded the songs “Rock wit U” and “Rear View Mirror”, featured on the soundtracks to the films Shaft (2000) and Dr. Dolittle 2 (2001) respectively. Keys then released her debut album Songs in A Minor in 2001, the title being a reference to both her classical aspirations and to the fact that she wrote most of the songs at a very young age.

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Childhood Of Celebrities : Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, then Cicero, a suburb of Chicago (during his early life, the area in which Hemingway was born split from Cicero and became Oak Park in 1902). Hemingway was the first son and the second child born to Clarence Edmonds “Doctor Ed” Hemingway, a country doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway. Hemingway’s father attended the birth of Ernest and blew a horn on his front porch to announce to the neighbors that his wife had given birth to a boy. The Hemingways lived in a six-bedroom Victorian house built by Ernest’s widowed maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall, an English immigrant and Civil War veteran who lived with the family. Hemingway was his namesake.

Hemingway’s neurotic mother had considerable talent and had once aspired to an opera career and earned money giving voice and music lessons. She was domineering and narrowly religious, mirroring the strict Protestant ethic of Oak Park, which Hemingway later said had “wide lawns and narrow minds”. His mother had wanted to have a set of twins and when this did not happen, she dressed Ernest and his sister Marcelline (eighteen months his senior) in girl clothes and also did their hair in the same style, keeping the image of “twins” in effect. Some biographers have suggested that Grace Hemingway further “feminised” her son in his youth by calling him “Ernestine”, but male infants and toddlers of the Victorian middle-class were often dressed as females. Many themes in Hemingway’s work point to destructive interactions between male and female sexual partners (cf. “Hills Like White Elephants”), within marital unions (cf. Now I Lay Me,The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber), and among most other combinations of men and women (cf. The Sun Also Rises); in addition certain posthumously published pieces contain ambiguous treatment of gender roles. However, the connection between Hemingway’s depiction of these human conditions and his own early childhood experiences has not been presumptively established.

While his mother hoped that her son would develop an interest in music, Hemingway adopted his father’s outdoorsman hobbies of hunting, fishing, and camping in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan. The family owned a house called Windemere on Michigan’s Walloon Lake and often spent summers vacationing there. These early experiences in close contact with nature instilled in Hemingway a lifelong passion for outdoor adventure and for living in remote or isolated areas.

Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School from September, 1913 until graduation in June 1917. He excelled both academically and athletically; he boxed, played football, and displayed particular talent in English classes. His first writing experience was writing for “Trapeze” and “Tabula” (the school’s newspaper and original literary magazine, respectively) in his junior year, then serving as editor in his senior year. He sometimes wrote under the pen name Ring Lardner, Jr., a nod to his literary hero Ring Lardner.

After high school, Hemingway did not want to go to college. Instead, at age eighteen, he began his writing career as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star. Although he worked at the newspaper for only six months (October 17, 1917-April 30, 1918), throughout his lifetime he used the guidance of the Star’s style guide as a foundation for his writing style: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.” In honor of the centennial year of Hemingway’s birth (1899), The Star named Hemingway its top reporter of the last hundred years.

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Childhood Of Celebrities : Uri Geller

Born to Jewish parents from Hungary and Austria, Geller was named after a cousin who had been killed in a bus accident. According to Geller, he first became aware of his paranormal abilities when he was four, claiming that after a light from the sky knocked him to the ground, his spoon bent and broke.

Geller is a distant relative of Sigmund Freud on his mother’s side.

He served as a paratrooper in the Israeli Army, and was wounded in action during the 1967 Six-Day War. He worked as a photographic model in 1968 and 1969, and in the same year, he began to perform for small audiences as a nightclub entertainer, becoming well-known in Israel. Geller also became popular in the early 1970s in the United States. He also received attention from the scientific community who were interested in examining his claims of psychic abilities. At the peak of his career in the 1970s he worked full-time, performing for television audiences worldwide.

He claims that he has accumulated wealth in part by performing dowsing services to find commodities such as oil, gold, and minerals, but that the companies he has worked for are reluctant to admit it. In recent years, he has performed demonstrations such as spoon-bending much less frequently in public.

Geller currently lives in Sonning-on-Thames, Berkshire, England. He makes various personal appearances, is involved with art and design projects, and contributes articles to newspapers, magazines, and an Internet web column. He is a vegan and speaks four languages: English, Hebrew, Hungarian and German.

He owns a 1976 Cadillac adorned with thousands of pieces of bent tableware given to him by celebrities or otherwise having historical or other significance. It includes spoons from celebrities such as John Lennon and the Spice Girls, and those with which Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy ate. Geller designed the logo for popular music group N*SYNC and contributed artwork to Michael Jackson’s CD, “Invincible.”

Jackson was best man when Geller renewed his wedding vows in 2001. He also negotiated the famous TV interview between Jackson with the journalist Martin Bashir: “Living with Michael Jackson”. In BBC television interviews, Geller has since admitted that he has not been in contact with Jackson since this time. Geller says that he has split with Jackson because of anti-Semitic statements he had purportedly made.

In an appearance on Esther Rantzen’s 1996 television talk show Esther, Geller claimed to have suffered from Anorexia nervosa for several years.

Geller is the president of International Friends of Magen David Adom, a group that lobbied the International Committee of the Red Cross to recognise Magen David Adom (”Red Star of David”) as a humanitarian relief organisation.

In 2002, he became honorary co-chairman of the English Nationwide Conference football club Exeter City, who were relegated to the Nationwide Conference in May 2003. He has since severed formal ties with the club. The same year, he appeared as a contestant on the first series of the British reality TV show, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here!.

In 2007 Geller hosted a reality show in Israel called “The Successor” (”היורש”), where the contestants performed magic tricks and Geller was accused of “trickery”.

He has also written sixteen fiction and nonfiction books.

Technorati Tags: Uri Geller, Famous Paranormalist

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