Chaim Topol, also spelled Haym Topol, mononymously known as Topol, is an Israeli actor, comedian, singer, film producer, author and illustrator. He is best known for his portrayal of Tevye the Dairyman, the lead role in the musical Fiddler on the Roof, on both stage and screen, having performed this role more than 3,500 times in shows and revivals from the late 1960s through 2009.
Lieutenant Colonel James David Graham Niven was a British actor, soldier, memoirist, and novelist. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as Major Pollock in Separate Tables (1958). Niven's other roles included Squadron Leader Peter Carter in A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Sir Charles Lytton in The Pink Panther (1963), and James Bond in Casino Royale (1967).
Fiddler on the Roof is a musical with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and book by Joseph Stein, set in the Pale of Settlement of Imperial Russia in or around 1905. It is based on Tevye and his Daughters and other tales by Sholem Aleichem. The story centers on Tevye, a milkman in the village of Anatevka, who attempts to maintain his Jewish religious and cultural traditions as outside influences encroach upon his family's lives. He must cope with the strong-willed actions of his three older daughters who wish to marry for love; their choices of husbands are successively less palatable for Tevye. An edict of the tsar eventually evicts the Jews from their village.
George Henry Sanders was a British actor and singer whose career spanned over 40 years. His heavy, upper-class English accent and smooth, bass voice often led him to be cast as sophisticated but villainous characters. He is remembered for his roles as Jack Favell in Rebecca (1940), Scott ffolliott in Foreign Correspondent, The Saran of Gaza in Samson and Delilah (1949), the most popular film of the year, Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, Sir Brian De Bois-Guilbert in Ivanhoe (1952), King Richard the Lionheart in King Richard and the Crusaders (1954), Mr. Freeze in a two-part episode of Batman (1966), and the voice of Shere Khan in Disney's The Jungle Book (1967). Fans of detective stories know Sanders as Simon Templar, The Saint, (1939–41), and the suave crimefighter The Falcon (1941–42).
R. L. Burnside was an American blues singer, songwriter and guitarist. He played music for much of his life but received little recognition before the early 1990s. In the latter half of that decade, Burnside recorded and toured with Jon Spencer, garnering crossover appeal and introducing his music to a new fan base in the punk and garage rock scenes.
Force 10 from Navarone is a 1978 war film loosely based on Alistair MacLean's 1968 novel of the same name. It is a sequel to the 1961 film The Guns of Navarone. The parts of Mallory and Miller are played by Robert Shaw, and Edward Fox, succeeding in the roles originally portrayed by Gregory Peck and David Niven. It was directed by Guy Hamilton and also stars Harrison Ford, Carl Weathers, Barbara Bach, Franco Nero, and Richard Kiel.
John Lee Thompson was a British film director, active in London and Hollywood, best known for award-winning films such as Woman in a Dressing Gown, Ice Cold in Alex and The Guns of Navarone along with cult classics like Cape Fear, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and The White Buffalo.
Pavle "Paja" Vuisić was a Yugoslav actor, known as one of the most recognizable faces of former Yugoslav cinema.
The Charge of the Light Brigade is a 1936 American historical adventure film from Warner Bros., starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. It was directed by Michael Curtiz and produced by Samuel Bischoff, with Hal B. Wallis as the executive producer. The film's screenplay is by Michael Jacoby and Rowland Leigh, from a story by Michael Jacoby, and based on the 1854 poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The music score was composed by Max Steiner, his first for Warner Bros., and the cinematography was by Sol Polito. Scenes were shot at the following California locations: Lone Pine, Sherwood Lake, Lasky Mesa, Chatsworth, and Sonora. The Sierra Nevada mountains were used for the Khyber Pass scenes.
Gérard Oury was a French film director, actor and writer.
The Guns of Navarone is a 1961 adventure war film directed by J. Lee Thompson from a screenplay by Carl Foreman, based on Alistair MacLean's 1957 novel of the same name. Foreman also produced the film. The film stars Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn, along with Stanley Baker, Anthony Quayle, Irene Papas, Gia Scala, James Darren and Richard Harris. The book and the film share a plot: the efforts of an Allied commando unit to destroy a seemingly impregnable German fortress that threatens Allied naval ships in the Aegean Sea.
Force 10 from Navarone is a World War II novel by Scottish author Alistair MacLean. It serves as a sequel to MacLean's 1957 The Guns of Navarone, but follows the events of the 1961 film adaptation of the same name. It features various characters from the film who were not in the book, and leaves out major characters from the book.
The McKenzie Break is a 1970 British war drama film starring Brian Keith as Jack Connor, an intelligence officer investigating recent disturbances at a prisoner of war (POW) camp in Scotland. The Nazi German POWs are led by the charismatic and ruthless Willi Schlüter. Filmed in DeLuxe Color, the picture was directed by Lamont Johnson,
Fiddler on the Roof is a 1971 American period musical film produced and directed by Norman Jewison from a screenplay written by Joseph Stein, based on the 1964 stage musical of the same name by Stein, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick. Set in early 20th-century Imperial Russia, the film centers on Tevye, played by Topol, a poor Jewish milkman who is faced with the challenge of marrying off his five daughters amidst the growing tension in his shtetl. The cast also features Norma Crane, Leonard Frey, Molly Picon, Paul Mann, Rosalind Harris, Michèle Marsh, Neva Small and Paul Michael Glaser. The musical score, composed by Bock with lyrics by Harnick, was adapted and conducted by John Williams.
The King's Thief is a 1955 swashbuckling CinemaScope adventure film directed by Robert Z. Leonard, who replaced Hugo Fregonese during filming. Released on August 5, 1955, the film takes place in London at the time of Charles II and stars Ann Blyth, Edmund Purdom, David Niven, George Sanders and Roger Moore.
Burnside's North Carolina Expedition was a series of engagements fought along the North Carolina Coast between February and June 1862. The expedition was part of Winfield Scott's overall Anaconda Plan, which aimed at closing blockade-running ports inside the Outer Banks. The amphibious operation was carried out primarily by New England and North Carolina troops under Brig. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside and assisted by the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron under Captain Louis M. Goldsborough.
A Kiss in the Dark is a 1949 comedy film directed by Delmer Daves, starring David Niven and Jane Wyman, and featuring Wayne Morris, Victor Moore, Broderick Crawford, and Maria Ouspenskaya. The plot revolves around a pianist who purchases, solely as a hands-off investment, an apartment house full of loony tenants.
I Was Nineteen is a 1968 East German film produced by Konrad Wolf for the DEFA studio. It tells the story of a young German, Gregor Hecker, who fled the Nazis with his parents to Moscow and now, in early 1945, returns to Germany as a lieutenant in the Red Army. The film strives to maintain an aura of authenticity and pay homage to history by intersplicing fictional sequences with real documentary sequences and having references to popular/well-known music and literature at the time. The film depicts the personal experiences of the director Konrad Wolf and of his friend Vladimir Gall in fictionalized form and deals with themes of the meaning of "homeland".
The Camp on Blood Island is a 1958 British World War II film, directed by Val Guest for Hammer Film Productions and starring André Morell, Carl Möhner, Edward Underdown and Walter Fitzgerald.
Maria Plieseis was an Austrian anti-government activist in her home region, the Salzkammergut. She married and was widowed in 1941 and joined the Communist Party in 1942, and by 1947, despite having ended up in the part of Austria under American military occupation, she emerged as a high-profile Communist activist. She was listed for prosecution as a defendant at the trial which followed the "Bad Ischl Milk Demonstrations", but took temporary refuge in the Soviet occupation zone and thereby avoided US military justice).
