Intellect PlusEntertainers
1,262 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 20 of 22.
The ragman's son who helped crack Hollywood's blacklistIssur Danielovitch grew up on the poorest street in Amsterdam, New York, the son of a junk collector. As Kirk Douglas he became a 1950s box-office giant, gave a blacklisted writer…
Jake Gyllenhaal's parents kept turning down the roles he wonGrowing up inside a Hollywood family did not mean easy access to Hollywood. Jake Gyllenhaal's director father and screenwriter mother let him audition as a boy, then often refused…
Tagging along to his sister's ballet class made Jamie Bell a BAFTA winnerA boy from Billingham started dancing only because he went with his older sister to her ballet lessons. A few years later he beat more than 2,000 other hopefuls to play Billy Elli…
Jamie Foxx picked a gender-neutral stage name to get called up soonerAt open-mic nights in 1989, Eric Bishop noticed that women comics were often summoned to the stage first. So he chose a name that gave nothing away, borrowing the surname from Red…
Jane Wyman won an Oscar without saying a single word on screenFor Johnny Belinda in 1948, Jane Wyman played a young deaf woman who never speaks, and prepared for more than six months. She became the first sound-era winner of the best actress…
Van Damme was briefly the Predator, until he quit the sweltering suitBefore Bloodsport made him a star, Jean-Claude Van Damme was cast as the alien in Predator, meant to move like an agile ninja. He left after a few days, reportedly complaining the…
A chance meeting at a gas station helped put Jennifer Aniston in FriendsAfter four television shows sank beneath her, a discouraged Jennifer Aniston spotted NBC's entertainment chief Warren Littlefield at a Los Angeles gas station and asked him for re…
To play Ree Dolly, Jennifer Lawrence learned to skin squirrels and chop woodA week before shooting Winter's Bone, a teenage Jennifer Lawrence went to live in the Ozarks with the family whose life inspired the story. She picked up fighting, squirrel skinni…
Jacques Tati mimed the tennis player, the racquet and the ball at onceBefore Monsieur Hulot shuffled onto screens with his raincoat and pipe, Jacques Tati was a picture framer's apprentice who amused rugby teammates by impersonating them. He turned …
Hayley Mills won the very last juvenile Oscar Hollywood ever handed outA director hunting for a boy cast 12-year-old Hayley Mills instead, and a Disney producer who saw the result made her Pollyanna. That role earned her the final Academy Juvenile Aw…
Before he died, Heath Ledger was planning to direct The Queen's GambitHeath Ledger is remembered for his Joker, but the chess-loving Australian who hustled games in Washington Square Park was also preparing to become a director. His first feature wa…- Hugh Jackman is 11 inches taller than the comic-book Wolverine he playedThe comic describes Wolverine as 5 ft 3 in; Hugh Jackman is 6 ft 2 in. To shrink him, directors filmed him from odd angles or from the waist up while co-stars stood on platform so…
Jacob Elordi landed Euphoria on what he planned as his last auditionBroke, sleeping in his car at times and with his US visa running out, Jacob Elordi was helping a friend tape an audition for Euphoria when he decided to try for it himself, intend…
France's future president once sold communist newspapers and nearly mastered Russian by 17At 16 Jacques Chirac went looking for a Sanskrit tutor in Paris and found a White Russian exile who taught him Russian instead. He briefly sold the communist daily L'Humanité, and…- Goldie Hawn turned a 'dumb blonde' giggle into an Oscar on her first major filmGoldie Hawn trained as a dancer from the age of three and was working as a go-go dancer in New York before television found her. Cast as a scatterbrained blonde on Laugh-In, she u…
Blacklisted by reviewers, Gore Vidal secretly paid his bills writing mysteries as Edgar BoxAfter his 1948 novel about a young man accepting his homosexuality, Gore Vidal claimed a leading New York Times critic would not review any of his books. So he invented a pen name…
Grace Kelly's Hollywood career lasted barely five years before she became a princessRejected by Bennington College over weak maths marks and warned by her father that acting was barely respectable, Grace Kelly went from a forgettable film debut in 1951 to a Best …
Ethan Hawke's first film flopped so badly he quit acting as a teenagerAt fourteen Ethan Hawke landed a part in Explorers, watched it sink at the box office, and walked away from acting. He later said he would never recommend that a child act. Then D…
America's first air traffic controllers worked with blackboards, maps and mental arithmeticBefore radar, keeping planes apart on US airways meant chalk, paper charts and quick sums in a controller's head. The agency that grew out of those beginnings, the Federal Aviatio…
To play Charlie Parker, Forest Whitaker shut himself in a loft with a saxophonePreparing for Clint Eastwood's Bird, Forest Whitaker took sax lessons and lived in a loft furnished with little more than a bed, a couch and an alto saxophone. The gamble paid off…
Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman were voted least likely to succeedAt the Pasadena Playhouse, classmates singled out two outsiders as the students least likely to make it: Gene Hackman and his friend Dustin Hoffman. Hackman also got the lowest ma…
George Strait has 60 number-one songs, more than any artist in any genreNo musician of any style has topped the charts as often as George Strait: 60 number ones, 44 of them on Billboard's country list. Yet the Texan grew up playing Beatles songs in a …
In 1940 Germany made France sign its surrender in the 1918 railway carriageHitler's generals chose their venue with care. The 1940 armistice that split France in two was signed in Compiègne Forest, in the same railway carriage where Germany had surrender…
Glenn Close spent fifteen childhood years inside a movement she calls a cultFrom the age of seven, Glenn Close lived in communal centres run by Moral Re-Armament, a movement that decided what she wore and what she could say. She broke free at 22, creditin…
Emma Stone pitched her parents a PowerPoint called Project Hollywood, and wonAt fourteen, a girl from Scottsdale, Arizona, built a slideshow to persuade her parents to let her move to Los Angeles. It worked. By 2017 Emma Stone was the highest-paid actress …
Drew Barrymore hosted Saturday Night Live at seven and was emancipated at fourteenDrew Barrymore won the part of Gertie in E.T. after telling Steven Spielberg she fronted a punk band. The film became the biggest earner of the 1980s, and at 7 she became the youn…
The lord's right of the first night may never have been lawMedieval lords supposedly had a legal right to sleep with any peasant bride on her wedding night. The idea runs from Gilgamesh to Mozart, yet hard evidence is thin. The only medie…- After The Graduate made him a star, Dustin Hoffman signed on for unemploymentThe Graduate was a colossal hit, yet Dustin Hoffman cleared only about 4,000 dollars from his 20,000-dollar fee once taxes and living costs were paid. When that ran out he claimed…
- Emily Blunt beat a childhood stutter by speaking in other people's voicesBetween the ages of seven and fourteen, Emily Blunt's stutter was so severe she called it an imposter living in her body. A teacher nudged her into school plays, where putting on …
Before Hollywood, Danny DeVito styled hair, including for the deadLong before he played Louie De Palma or the Penguin, Danny DeVito worked in his sister's New Jersey salon. After one customer passed away, her relatives wanted him to style her fo…- A camp talent show turned Denzel Washington from undecided student into actorDenzel Washington drifted through Fordham unsure what to study, even taking a semester off. Working at a YMCA summer camp in Connecticut, he joined a staff talent show, and a coll…
A Turkic-speaking Judaic people who argued they were not JewsThe Karaim of Crimea follow a form of Judaism that accepts only the Hebrew Bible and rejects the Talmud, yet most say they descend from the Khazars or other Turkic peoples rather …- The Tamil film star whose debut flopped now runs the stateAt 18, Vijay was mocked for his looks after his first leading role sank at the box office. Three decades later he was one of India's best-paid actors, and in May 2026 the party he…
A stranger's secret thousand-dollar loan sent Carol Burnett to New YorkIn 1954 a shipbuilding millionaire watched a UCLA student perform at a party and lent her $1,000 on three conditions: repay it in five years, never name him, and help other young …
A bingo jackpot paid for Catherine Zeta-Jones's first dance lessonsHer Swansea family's £100,000 bingo win funded the dance classes of a hyperactive girl. At seventeen she was the second understudy in 42nd Street until both women ahead of her wer…
An argument with a bank teller launched Charlize Theron's Hollywood careerIn Los Angeles in 1994, broke and living in a motel, Theron was pleading with a bank clerk to cash her mother's out-of-state rent cheque. The man behind her in the queue, talent a…
Charlotte Rampling kept a family secret from her mother for decadesFor most of her life Rampling told people her sister Sarah died of a brain haemorrhage. She and her father had agreed her mother must never learn it was suicide, and they held tha…
From a beach tent in Maui to $15 billion at the box officeChris Pratt once lived out of a van and a tent on a Hawaiian beach, working just enough hours to pay for gas and fishing gear. A director spotted him waiting tables at a Bubba Gum…
Spinal Tap's lead guitarist once sat in the House of LordsChristopher Guest, the man who played Nigel Tufnel in This Is Spinal Tap, is also the 5th Baron Haden-Guest. He inherited the title in 1996 and attended the Lords regularly until …- At 16, Claire Danes was hailed the Meryl Streep of her generationBaz Luhrmann gave Claire Danes that label after casting her as Juliet in 1996, and she reportedly turned down the female lead in Titanic the same year. Then, having made 13 films …
- Burt Lancaster went from circus acrobat to Hollywood star via an elevatorAfter an injury ended his circus act and the war ended his Army entertainment job, Burt Lancaster was visiting his girlfriend at work when a producer sharing the elevator urged hi…
Ava Gardner was discovered through a photo in a Fifth Avenue shop windowIn 1940 a photographer brother-in-law put his portrait of an 18-year-old from rural North Carolina in his studio window. A clerk who liked pretending to be an MGM talent scout spo…
Good Will Hunting started as a 40-page class assignment at HarvardIn 1992 Matt Damon wrote 40 pages for a Harvard playwriting class and roped in his childhood friend Ben Affleck to perform scenes with him. Five years later the finished script wo…
Bo Burnham posted songs for his brother and became an early YouTube starIn December 2006 a teenager in suburban Massachusetts wanted his older brother, away at university in New York, to hear two songs he had written. A friend suggested filming them i…
The boa constrictor is the only animal everyone calls by its Latin nameEvery boid snake constricts its prey, yet only one species gets called a boa constrictor in everyday English, which happens to be its formal scientific name too. No other animal i…
Brad Pitt quit college two weeks short of a degree to chase filmsA journalism student from Missouri realised movies were not made anywhere near home, so with a fortnight of coursework left he dropped out and drove to Los Angeles. His first star…
Bruce Willis found acting was the one thing that eased his stutterAt his New Jersey high school, classmates mocked Bruce Willis's stutter with the nickname Buck-Buck. He joined the drama club and discovered that on stage the stammer faded. He we…
Before Captain Holt, Andre Braugher was a Juilliard-trained Shakespearean and Emmy-winning detectiveMillions knew Andre Braugher as the deadpan Captain Raymond Holt of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Long before that comedy, he had studied engineering at Stanford, trained at Juilliard, won …
Anne Hathaway won her Oscar playing the role that first hooked herAt eight, Anne Hathaway sat watching her mother play Fantine on the first national tour of Les Misérables, and fell for the stage. Decades later she played that same doomed woman …- Five Oscar nominations, zero wins: Annette Bening's remarkable near-miss careerAnnette Bening has been up for five Academy Awards, two Tonys and a Primetime Emmy without winning any of them, which puts her in the rare club of actors nominated for the full Tr…
Anouk Aimée's stage surname was a gift from the poet Jacques PrévertBorn Françoise Dreyfus, she took her first name from a role she played at 14, and the screenwriter Jacques Prévert suggested the surname Aimée, French for beloved. Over seven deca…
Italy's heel has more coastline than any other mainland Italian regionApulia, or Puglia, forms both the spur and the heel of the Italian boot, and no other mainland region has a longer shoreline. People have lived here for at least 250,000 years, an…
The chef of kings was fired from the Savoy for supplier kickbacksAuguste Escoffier gave the world peach Melba, the five codified mother sauces and the kitchen brigade system restaurants still use. He also confessed to pocketing supplier kickbac…
Amanda Seyfried lost the Regina George part and built a career anywayAmanda Seyfried read for the queen bee, Regina George, in Mean Girls, but the producers handed her Karen Smith, the dim sidekick. That consolation role opened the door to an Oscar…
Asked about the 1980 election, Amy Carter named nuclear arms controlAt nine, Amy Carter moved into the White House, roller-skated across the East Room and hosted sleepovers in a South Lawn treehouse while Secret Service agents kept watch below. He…
One stage performance of Othello launched Aaron Pierre toward Green LanternAaron Pierre spent his childhood sprinting and idolising Maurice Greene, not rehearsing lines. Then Barry Jenkins watched him play Cassio at Shakespeare's Globe and messaged him a…
Kurosawa’s rough-voiced lion who redefined the samuraiToshiro Mifune (1920–1997) stacked more than 180 screen credits, yet sixteen films with Akira Kurosawa made him Japan’s most famous actor abroad. He prepared for Rashomon and Seve…
The Polish prodigy who shattered ballet’s polite jumpVaslav Nijinsky (born 1889 or 1890 in Kiev; died 1950) is still called the greatest male dancer of the early twentieth century. With Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes he choreographed L’…
Two Oscars, yet she insisted the stage came firstVivien Leigh (1913–1967), born Vivian Mary Hartley in Darjeeling, won Best Actress Oscars as Scarlett O’Hara (1939) and Blanche DuBois. For thirty years she treated film as a side…
The first Black Best Actor grew up on Cat Island farmsSidney Poitier (20 February 1927 – 6 January 2022), youngest of seven Afro-Bahamian farmers’ children, was born in Miami on a produce trip—securing U.S. citizenship—then raised on…