January 10, 1943 – September 20, 1973
Jim Croce was a singer-songwriter whose instantly recognizable songs were popular in the early 1970s. His legend and impact only grew in the wake of his untimely death at the age of just 30.
Hits like “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim,” “Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels),” and “Time in a Bottle” remain well-loved to this day.
November 22, 1819 – December 22, 1880
What’s in a name?
Born Mary Anne Evans – but known more prominently by her pen name – George Eliot was a Victorian novelist known for her depictions of rural English life and the intertwining themes of politics and humanism. Like contemporaries Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, Eliot became very popular thanks in part to her vivid accounts of Victorian life, specifically the countryside in which her books took place.
But, her writing was probably the most Victorian thing about Mary Anne Evans (who also went by “Mary Ann” and “Marian” at various points of her life). The rest of her life was anything but the buttoned-up ideal of the time.
November 25, 1984 – January 19, 2022
César Award winning actor, Gaspard Ulliel, was one of the most promising French actors of the early 21st Century. By the time he was 30, Ulliel had appeared in a number of international hits including A Very Long Engagement and as the titular characters in both Hannibal Rising and Saint Laurent. In addition to winning two César Awards (for Engagement and Saint Laurent) he was nominated for a number of other prestigious awards during his brief career.
Ulliel also appeared in more than a dozen television shows and made-for-TV movies in France. His first English-language series, Disney and Marvel’s Moon Knight, would end up being his last performance.
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July 10, 1830 – November 13, 1903
The (arguably literal) father of French Impressionism, Camille Pissarro convened, nurtured and pushed the collective that defined one of the most famous movements in modern art history. Born on the island of St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies, Pissarro learned painting from local masters and initially concentrated on the lives and culture of the Caribbean people. He attended boarding school in France and – after spending some time in South America – returned to Paris at the age of 25 to embark on a career as an artist.
His focus on natural settings and rural life remained throughout his career. While he continued his studies at the Académie Suisse and the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Pissarro met fellow artists like Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne. They shared frustration with the strict rules that surrounded the official Salon in Paris. Together, the artists explored themes and techniques that allowed them to express themselves in new, unconventional ways.
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January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004
Susan Sontag was an American novelist and essayist whose criticism covered a wide range of topics throughout the 1960s, ’70s and 80s. Her breakout work was 1964’s essay Notes on ‘Camp’ which popularized “camp” as an aesthetic sensibility. She went on to write Against Interpretation, On Photography and Illness as Metaphor as well as a number of novels and other fictional works. Sontag was also a filmmaker and occasionally directed theatre…including a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in a war-torn theatre in Bosnia in 1994. She was a prolific activist who wrote and spoke out about subjects like the Vietnam war, feminism, human rights and the AIDS epidemic of the ’80s.
February 23, 1684 – April 14, 1759
Before Beethoven, before Mozart, before Tchaikovsky…there was Handel. One of the big three composers of the pre-Classical Baroque era (along with Bach and Vivaldi) Georg Friederich Händel quickly became known in his Brandendburg-Prussian hometown (modern-day Germany). Before the age of 10, he was discovered playing a church organ and his formal music education commenced. Marked by distinctively harmonic – if LONG – cantatas and church compositions, Handel’s early career led him to Hamburg and then to Italy, where he composed sacred church music when classic Italian opera was not allowed by the Pope.
January 22, 1946 – April 08, 2010
The history of popular culture – and counter-cultural music in particular – is riddled with provocateurs. Characters whose entire being longs to push boundaries and shock the system. Enter Malcolm McLaren.
Whether selling original clothes out of a dingy shop in Chelsea or building the foundational architecture of the punk rock subgenre of music, McLaren approached everything he did with a proverbial thumb in the eye of “The Man”.
July 24, 1802 – December 05, 1870
French novelist and playwright, Alexandre Dumas, was a leading voice in the 19th Romantic literary movement. Born of a mixed-race lineage stemming from the Caribbean French colony known today as Haiti, Dumas used his struggles with race issues along with his travels throughout a changing European landscape to craft historical fiction that was both immediately popular and enduring. Though a successful playwright at the start of his career, his most famous works are arguably his many novels, including “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers.” Like many of his contemporaries, much of his writing was released serially and later compiled into the works we know today.
January 6, 1705 – April 17, 1790
The key. The kite. The bifocals. The legend.
Benjamin Franklin is arguably one of the most popular and famous Americans in the history of the country. Born in Boston to English colonists, Ben was one of 17 children between his father’s two marriages. Originally, his father wanted him to be a minister, but could not afford to pay for more than two years of school. Young Ben dropped out and became an apprentice in his brother’s printshop.
Printmaking would define much of Franklin’s early life. He moved himself to Philadelphia and began publishing leaflets, newsletters and – eventually – newspapers. Gravitating toward critique and satire, his writings (often under pseudonyms) became very popular. He made a very good living having founded a number of papers in Pennsylvania and other colonies.
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February 11, 1967 – March 4, 1990
Casual sports fans may not immediately know the name Hank Gathers, but fans of college basketball likely know it too well. Gathers was a standout power forward at Loyola Marymount University during the late 1980s. He led the nation in both scoring (32.7 points/game) and rebounds (13.7/game) his junior year for the Lions. In a December home game during his senior year, Gathers collapsed on the court. After seeing doctors, he was diagnosed with a heart condition and given a regimen of medications. He missed two games and, when he returned, claimed the medication had a negative affect on his performance. His dosage was adjusted down over the following weeks and it’s believed he refused to take the meds at all on game days. He continued; however, to play well over this stretch. On March 4th, 1990, during a West Coast Conference Tournament game against Portland, Gathers collapsed again. This time, he never got up.
Celebrity Graveland 