Tony Curtis
Celebrities : Tony Curtis
Tony Curtis (Bernard Schwartz), the eldest of three sons of a Manuel and Helen Schwartz, was born on June 3, 1925, in New York City. Curtis grew up in an impoverished section of the Bronx, and had joined a street gang by the age of eleven. He joined the Navy in 1943, and upon his release from active duty, he returned to New York where he used the GI Bill to war, attend the City College of New York. He took acting lessons at the Dramatic Workshop and first gained attention in a Greenwich Village stage production of “Golden Boy”. He was quickly offered a seven year contract by Universal Pictures. In 1948 he headed for California where his screen debut had him dancing with Yvonne de Carlo in Criss Cross (1948). His few seconds on screen were enough to generate tens of thousands of fan letters a week asking for a lock of his hair. Universal realized it had a rising star. Soon afterward, his good looks made him a matinee idol, initially under the name James Curtis, and then Anthony Curtis. Read more »
Uma Thurman
Thurman was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Nena Birgitte Caroline von Schlebrügge (b. 1941), was a fashion model who was born in Mexico City, Mexico, to German nobleman Friedrich Karl Johannes von Schlebrügge and Birgit Holmquist, who was from Trelleborg, Sweden. Thurman’s father, Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman, was born in New York City to Elizabeth Dean Farrar, a stage actress, and Beverly Reid Thurman, Jr., an Associated Press editor and U.N. translator. Thurman’s mother was briefly married in 1964 to LSD guru Timothy Leary after the two were introduced by Salvador Dalí; she married Thurman’s father in 1967. Thurman’s father, a recognized scholar and professor at Columbia University of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies, was the first westerner to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk. He gave his children a Buddhist upbringing: Uma is named after an Uma Chenpo (in Tibetan; Mahamadhyamaka in Sanskrit, meaning “Great Middle Way”). She has three brothers, Ganden (b. 1971), Dechen (b. 1973) and Mipam (b. 1978), and a half-sister named Taya (b. 1960) from her father’s previous marriage. She and her siblings spent extended amounts of time in Almora, India as children, and the Dalai Lama would sometimes visit their home.
Since Professor Thurman moved between various universities, the family often relocated when Uma was a child. She grew up mostly in Amherst, Massachusetts and Woodstock, New York. Thurman is described as having been an awkward and introverted young girl who was frequently teased as a child for her large frame, unique angular bone structure, unusual name (sometimes using the name “Uma Karen” instead of her birth-name), and size 11 feet (Thurman’s famously large feet would later be lovingly filmed by Quentin Tarantino in the films he made with her). Even friends made a point of highlighting her unusual features — when she was ten years old, a friend’s mother suggested she receive a nose job.
Although these unique physical attributes would later make her beauty iconic, these childhood attentions may have led to her bouts with body dysmorphic disorder, a syndrome involving a disturbed body image, which she discussed in an interview with Talk magazine in 2001.
Thurman attended Northfield Mount Hermon, a college preparatory boarding school in Northfield, Massachusetts, where she received her first acting experiences in school plays. She was unathletic and earned average grades in school, but excelled in acting from a young age. It was after performing in a production of The Crucible that she was noticed by talent scouts, and was persuaded to act professionally. Thurman left her high school to pursue an acting career in New York City and to attend the Professional Children’s School where she dropped out before graduating.
Credit : Wikipedia
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