Topics

Art

1,236 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 9 of 21.

481. Europe hailed Marian Anderson's voice while American hotels turned her awayJean Sibelius was so moved after hearing her sing in Helsinki that he told his wife to serve champagne instead of coffee. Arturo Toscanini said a voice like hers came along once i…
482. Marion Davies was a gifted comedian buried by her powerful patron's publicityMost people who know Marion Davies's name know it through a fictional character: the talentless singer pushed on the public by a newspaper baron in Citizen Kane. Orson Welles hims…
483. Kishore Kumar once sang both halves of a love duet himselfWhen Lata Mangeshkar was out of town and a duet had to be recorded, Kishore Kumar simply sang the woman's part too. The yodelling playback singer from Khandwa won eight Filmfare a…
484. Jim Carrey went from a family living in a van to $20 million a filmAs a teenager, Jim Carrey spent months sleeping in a tent by Lake Ontario while his family lived in a Volkswagen van. Within two decades he had become the first comic actor paid $…
485. Jodie Foster was discovered by accident at a casting call meant for her brotherHer mother brought three-year-old Jodie Foster along only because her brother Buddy had an audition. Casting agents noticed her instead, and a sunscreen advert followed. She went …
486. Josh Brolin lost a TV role to Johnny Depp and gained a lifelong friendJosh Brolin found fame as a teenager in The Goonies, then decided his own acting was so bad he walked away from films for years. A slow rebuild through stage work in Rochester eve…
487. Coretta Scott King paid the hospital bill when Julia Roberts was bornJulia Roberts's parents ran the only racially integrated theatre troupe in their part of Georgia, and taught acting to the King children. When money ran short, Coretta Scott King …
488. Before his Booker win, Julian Barnes defined dirty words for the Oxford dictionaryJulian Barnes spent three years compiling entries for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement, with sport and rude words as his speciality. He later became a novelist who won the…
489. Casting agents told Kathy Bates she wasn't pretty enough; she won an OscarEarly in her career Kathy Bates heard from more than one casting agent that her looks would hold her back. She kept taking odd, older, stranger parts, worked the till at the Museu…
490. Bollywood star Katrina Kaif began with a flop and barely any HindiKatrina Kaif was born in Hong Kong, schooled at home across a dozen countries, and discovered at a London fashion show. Her first Hindi film bombed and her shaky Hindi cost her ro…
491. 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…
492. 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…
493. 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…
494. 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…
495. A two-time Oscar winner also made the best-selling VHS tape everJane Fonda won best actress twice in the 1970s, yet one of her biggest hits had no plot at all. Jane Fonda's Workout, released in 1982, became the highest-selling VHS ever, and it…
496. 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…
497. 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…
498. 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…
499. 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…
500. 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 …
501. 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…
502. 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…
503. 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…
504. 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…
505. 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…
506. 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…
507. 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…
508. 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 …
509. 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…
510. 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…
511. 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…
512. 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…
513. 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 …
514. 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…
515. 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…
516. 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 …
517. The word dildo probably began as nonsense syllables in old balladsFor centuries nobody could say where the word came from. Guesses included a boat's oar peg and the Italian diletto, meaning delight. In 2018 the Oxford English Dictionary settled …
518. 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…
519. 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…
520. 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…
521. 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 …
522. 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…
523. 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…
524. Annie Hall's famous menswear look was partly Diane Keaton's own wardrobeThe neckties, waistcoats, baggy trousers and fedoras of Annie Hall set off a late-1970s fashion wave, with women adopting pantsuits and men's clothing. Diane Keaton had dressed th…
525. 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 …
526. 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…
527. 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 …
528. 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…
529. 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…
530. 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…
531. 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…
532. 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 …
533. 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 …
534. 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…
535. 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…
536. 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…
537. 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…
538. 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…
539. 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…
540. Darren Aronofsky spent ten years casting The Whale, then found Brendan FraserFor a decade Darren Aronofsky could not find the right lead for The Whale. Then he caught Brendan Fraser in the trailer for a low-budget Brazilian film and, as he put it, a light …

Open the feed