1.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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William Makepeace Thackeray was an English novelist of the 19th century. He is known for his works, particularly Vanity Fair. Thackeray, a child, was born in Calcutta, British India. His mother, Anne Becher, was the daughter of Harriet Becher and John Harman Becher. Richmond died in 1815, which caused Anne to send her son to England in 1816, the ship on which he travelled made a short stopover at St. Helena, where the imprisoned Napoleon was pointed out to him. Once in England he was educated at schools in Southampton and Chiswick, and then at Charterhouse School, Thackeray disliked Charterhouse, and parodied it in his fiction as Slaughterhouse. Nevertheless, Thackeray was honoured in the Charterhouse Chapel with a monument after his death, Thackeray then travelled for some time on the continent, visiting Paris and Weimar, where he met Goethe. He returned to England and began to study law at the Middle Temple and he also lost a good part of his fortune in the collapse of two Indian banks. The Thackerays had three children, all girls, Anne Isabella, Jane and Harriet Marian, who married Sir Leslie Stephen, editor, Thackeray now began writing for his life, as he put it, turning to journalism in an effort to support his young family. Between 1837 and 1840 he also reviewed books for The Times and he was also a regular contributor to The Morning Chronicle and The Foreign Quarterly Review. Later, through his connection to the illustrator John Leech, he began writing for the newly created magazine Punch, in which he published The Snob Papers and this work popularised the modern meaning of the word snob. Thackeray was a regular contributor to Punch between 1843 and 1854. Tragedy struck in Thackerays personal life as his wife, Isabella, succumbed to depression after the birth of their third child, in 1840. Finding that he could get no work done at home, he spent more and more time away until September 1840, struck by guilt, he set out with his wife to Ireland. During the crossing she threw herself from a water-closet into the sea and they fled back home after a four-week battle with her mother. From November 1840 to February 1842 Isabella was in and out of professional care and she eventually deteriorated into a permanent state of detachment from reality. Isabella outlived her husband by 30 years, in the end being cared for by a family named Thompson in Leigh-on-Sea at Southend until her death in 1894, after his wifes illness Thackeray became a de facto widower, never establishing another permanent relationship. He did pursue other women, however, in particular Mrs Jane Brookfield, in 1851 Mr Brookfield barred Thackeray from further visits to or correspondence with Jane. Baxter, an American twenty years Thackerays junior whom he met during a tour in New York City in 1852
2.
Billie Burke
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She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1938 for her performance as Emily Kilbourne in Merrily We Live and is also remembered for her appearances in the Topper series. Billie Burke was the wife of Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. of Ziegfeld Follies fame and her voice was unique in intonation, which she accentuated in her later character roles as dim-witted, spoiled society types. Billie Burke was born Mary William Ethelbert Appleton Burke, the daughter of Blanche and William Billy Burke, in Washington and she toured the United States and Europe with her father, who was a singer and clown and worked for the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Her family ultimately settled in London where she attended plays in the West End, in 1903, she began acting on stage, making her debut in London in The School Girl. Other London shows included The Duchess of Dantzic and The Blue Moon and she eventually returned to America to star in Broadway musical comedies. There she caught the eye of producer Florenz Ziegfeld, marrying him in 1914, two years later they had a daughter, Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson. Burke was signed for the movies, making her debut in the title role of Peggy. Her success was phenomenal, and she was soon earning what was reputedly the highest salary granted a motion picture actress up to that time and she followed her first feature with the 15-part serial Glorias Romance, another popular and critically acclaimed vehicle. By 1917 Billie Burke was a favorite with silent movie fans, rivaling Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Clara Kimball Young, Billie Burke starred primarily in provocative society dramas and comedies, similar in theme to The Mind-the-Paint Girl, her most successful American play. The stars girlish charm rivaled her acting ability, and as she dressed to the hilt in fashionable gowns, furs and jewelry, the actresss beauty and taste made her a major trendsetter throughout the 1910s and 20s. Despite her success in film, Billie Burke eventually returned to the stage, appearing in Caesars Wife, The Intimate Strangers, The Marquise and The Happy Husband. But when the savings were wiped out in the Wall Street Crash of 1929. In 1932, Burke made her Hollywood comeback, starring as Margaret Fairfield in A Bill of Divorcement, despite the death of Florenz Ziegfeld during the films production, she resumed filming shortly after his funeral. The movie was a success, and revived her career. She subsequently starred in comedies and musicals, typecast as a ditzy, fluffy. In 1936, MGM filmed a biopic of Florenz Ziegfeld. In 1937 Burke appeared in the first of the Topper films and her performance as Emily Kilbourne in Merrily We Live resulted in her only Oscar nomination. In 1938 she was chosen to play Glinda the Good Witch of the North, in the musical The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming and she had worked on a Garland film, Everybody Sing, in which she played Judys histrionically hysterical actress-mother
3.
Vanity Fair (novel)
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Vanity Fair is an English novel by William Makepeace Thackeray which follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It was published as a volume in 1848 with the subtitle A Novel without a Hero. It is sometimes considered the founder of the Victorian domestic novel. The story is framed as a play and the narrator. The serial was a popular and critical success, the novel is now considered a classic and has inspired several film adaptations, in 2003, Vanity Fair was listed at No.122 on the BBCs The Big Read poll of the UKs best-loved books. The books title comes from John Bunyans Pilgrims Progress, a Dissenter allegory first published in 1678. In that work, Vanity Fair refers to a stop along the route, a never-ending fair held in a town called Vanity. From its appearance in Bunyan, Vanity Fair or a vanity-fair was also in use for the world in a range of connotations from the blandly descriptive to the wearily dismissive to the condemning. By the 18th century, it was taken as a playground and, in the first half of the 19th century, more specifically the playground of the idle. All of these appear in Thackerays work. The narrator, variously a show manager or writer, appears at times within the work itself and is highly unreliable, rebecca Sharp is a strong-willed, cunning, moneyless, young woman determined to make her way in society. After leaving school, Becky stays with Amelia Sedley, who is a good-natured, simple-minded young girl, there, Becky meets the dashing and self-obsessed Captain George Osborne and Amelias brother Joseph Sedley, a clumsy and vainglorious but rich civil servant home from the East India Company. Hoping to marry Sedley, the richest young man she has met, Becky entices him, George Osbornes friend Captain William Dobbin loves Amelia, but only wishes her happiness, which is centred on George. Becky Sharp says farewell to the Sedley family and enters the service of the crude and profligate baronet Sir Pitt Crawley and her behaviour at Sir Pitts house gains his favour, and after the premature death of his second wife, he proposes marriage to her. However he finds that she has married his second son. Sir Pitts elder half sister, the spinster Miss Crawley, is rich, having inherited her mothers fortune. Initially her favourite is Rawdon Crawley, but his marriage with Becky enrages her. First she favours the family of Sir Pitts brother, but when she dies, she has left her money to Sir Pitts oldest son, Amelias father, John Sedley, becomes bankrupt
4.
Minnie Maddern Fiske
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She also spearheaded the fight against the Theatrical Syndicate for the sake of artistic freedom. She was widely considered the most important actress on the American stage in the first quarter of the 20th century and her performances in several Henrik Ibsen plays widely introduced American audiences to the Norwegian playwright. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, she was the daughter of stage manager Thomas Davey and she performed her first professional show at the age of three as the Duke of York in Richard III. She debuted in New York as a four-year-old in the play A Sheep in Wolfs Clothing and she toured extensively as a child, and was educated in many convent schools. She was a prodigy, touring and performing in numerous productions. According to the New York Times article Ibsen or Shakespeare, Harrison Grey Fiske was 12 years old when he first set eyes on the future Mrs. Fiske—she was but eight, performing in a Shakespearean role. By the time she was 16, she was a leading lady and she was recognized for her unique beauty and singing voice. She married LeGrand White, a musician in Foggs Ferry. Two years later, she married Harrison Grey Fiske in March 1890, and took three years off from the stage. Leaving a life of domesticity, she returned to the theatre in 1893 as a playwright and director, having written one-act plays such as A Light for St. Agnes, The Rose and she wrote several plays and collaborated with her husband in writing Fontenelle. Mr. Fiske directed virtually all of his wifes plays after their marriage and she is perhaps most famous for starring as Becky Sharp in the original 1899 production of Langdon Mitchells Becky Sharp, a play based on William Makepeace Thackerays Vanity Fair. Mrs. Fiske starred in everything from farce to tragedy and even appeared in a comedy with puppets Wake Up and her final appearance on Broadway was in 1930 in an acclaimed production of The Rivals cast as Mrs. Malaprop. She was a pioneer for realism in acting, also supporting Ibsens works for their honest portrayals of humanity and her love for performing Ibsen over Shakespeare, and her position that Ibsen is the better study for actors, can not be overstated. She told The New York Times in January 1908, Ibsen is of interest to the actor because properly to understand a role you must study the character from its earliest childhood, most Ibsen men and women have lived their lives before the curtain rises. Shakespeare has often been pronounced tedious by actors because his characters require a great deal of study, but even Shakespeare seems easy when compared with the thought that must be bestowed upon Ibsen. The beautiful verse, the character drawing of Shakespeare furnish solutions of perplexing problems. He is the Wagner of the drama, Wagner struggled for understanding just as Ibsen has struggled. Although she was praised as an actor, she died poverty-stricken
5.
Technicolor
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Technicolor is the name applied to a series of color motion picture processes, the first version dating from 1916, and followed by improved versions over several decades. It was the major color process, after Britains Kinemacolor. As the technology matured it was used for less spectacular dramas. Occasionally, even a film noir—such as Leave Her to Heaven or Niagara —was filmed in Technicolor, Technicolor is the trademark for a series of color motion picture processes pioneered by Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation, now a division of the French company Technicolor SA. The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation was founded in Boston in 1914 by Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Frost Comstock, the Tech in the companys name was inspired by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where both Kalmus and Comstock received their undergraduate degrees and were later instructors. Technicolor, Inc. was chartered in Delaware in 1921, most of Technicolors early patents were taken out by Comstock and Wescott, while Kalmus served primarily as the companys president and chief executive officer. The term Technicolor historically has been used to describe at least five concepts, Technicolor, Technicolor process or format, several custom image origination systems used in film production, culminating in the three-strip process in 1932. Technicolor IB printing, a process for making color motion picture prints that allows the use of dyes which are more stable, originally used for printing from color separation negatives photographed on black-and-white film in a special Technicolor camera. This meaning of the name applies to nearly all Wikipedia articles about films made from 1954 onward in which Technicolor is named in the credits, Technicolor originally existed in a two-color system. Because two frames were being exposed at the time, the film had to be photographed and projected at twice the normal speed. Exhibition required a special projector with two apertures, two lenses, and a prism that aligned the two images on the screen. The results were first demonstrated to members of the American Institute of Mining Engineers in New York on February 21,1917, the near-constant need for a technician to adjust the projection alignment doomed this additive color process. Only a few frames of The Gulf Between, showing star Grace Darmond, are known to exist today, convinced that there was no future in additive color processes, Comstock, Wescott, and Kalmus focused their attention on subtractive color processes. This culminated in what would eventually be known as Process 2, the difference was that the two-component negative was now used to produce a subtractive color print. Because the colors were present in the print, no special projection equipment was required. The frames exposed behind the filter were printed on one strip of black-and-white film. After development, each print was toned to a color nearly complementary to that of the filter, orange-red for the green-filtered images, the two prints, made on film stock half the thickness of regular film, were then cemented together back to back to create a projection print. The Toll of the Sea, which debuted on November 26,1922, the second all-color feature in Process 2 Technicolor, Wanderer of the Wasteland, was released in 1924
6.
Color photography
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Color photography is photography that uses media capable of reproducing colors. By contrast, black-and-white photography records only a channel of luminance. In color photography, electronic sensors or light-sensitive chemicals record color information at the time of exposure, monochrome images which have been colorized by tinting selected areas by hand or mechanically or with the aid of a computer are colored photographs, not color photographs. Their colors are not dependent on the colors of the objects photographed. Color photography has been the dominant form of photography since the 1970s, Color photography was attempted beginning in the 1840s. Early experiments were directed at finding a substance which would assume the color of the light falling on it. Other experimenters, such as Edmond Becquerel, achieved better results, over the following several decades, renewed experiments along these lines periodically raised hopes and then dashed them, yielding nothing of practical value. Gabriel Lippmann is remembered as the inventor of a method for reproducing colors by photography, based on the interference phenomenon, in 1886 Lippmanns interest had turned to a method of fixing the colors of the solar spectrum on a photographic plate. By April 1892, he was able to report that he had succeeded in producing color images of a glass window, a group of flags, a bowl of oranges topped by a red poppy. He presented his theory of photography using the interference method in two papers to the Academy, one in 1894, the other in 1906. The named colors are somewhat arbitrary divisions imposed on the spectrum of visible light. The test subject was a bow made of ribbon with stripes of colors, apparently including red. Creating colors by mixing colored lights in various proportions is the method of color reproduction. LCD, LED, plasma and CRT color video displays all use this method and this is also known as the RGB color model. In photography, the dye colors are cyan, a greenish-blue which absorbs red, magenta, a purplish-pink which absorbs green, and yellow. The red-filtered image is used to create a dye image, the green-filtered image to create a magenta dye image. When the three dye images are superimposed they form a color image. This is also known as the CMYK color model, most commonly, three pigment images were first created separately by the so-called carbon process and then carefully combined in register
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