Paula Julie Abdul is an American singer, dancer, choreographer, actress, and television personality. She began her career as a cheerleader for the Los Angeles Lakers at the age of 18 and later became the head choreographer for the Laker Girls, where she was discovered by the Jacksons. After choreographing music videos for Janet Jackson, Abdul became a choreographer at the height of the music video era and soon thereafter she was signed to Virgin Records. Her debut studio album Forever Your Girl (1988) became one of the most successful debut albums at that time, selling seven million copies in the United States and setting a record for the most number-one singles from a debut album on the Billboard Hot 100 chart: "Straight Up", "Forever Your Girl", "Cold Hearted", and "Opposites Attract". Her second album Spellbound (1991) scored her two more chart-toppers – "Rush Rush" and "The Promise of a New Day". With six number-one singles on Hot 100, Abdul tied Diana Ross for the third-most chart-toppers among female solo artists at the time.
Petula Clark CBE is a British singer, actress, and songwriter. She started her professional career as a child performer and has had the longest career of any British entertainer, spanning more than 85 years.
Top of the Pops (TOTP) is a British music chart television programme, made by the BBC and broadcast weekly between 1 January 1964 and 30 July 2006. The programme was the world's longest-running weekly music show. For most of its history, it was broadcast on Thursday evenings on BBC One. Each show consisted of performances of some of the week's best-selling popular music records, usually excluding any tracks moving down the chart, including a rundown of that week's singles chart. This was originally the Top 20, though this varied throughout the show's history. The Top 30 was used from 1969, and the Top 40 from 1984.
Stephanie Zimbalist is an American actress best known for her role as Laura Holt in the NBC detective series Remington Steele.
Mary Higgins Clark was an American author of suspense novels. Each of her 51 books was a bestseller in the United States and various European countries, and all of her novels remained in print as of 2015, with her debut suspense novel, Where Are the Children?, in its 75th printing.
Mary Lambert Gary is an American director. She has directed music videos, television episodes and feature films, mainly in the horror genre.
Carol Higgins Clark was an American mystery author and actress. She was the daughter of suspense writer Mary Higgins Clark, with whom she co-authored several Christmas novels, and the former sister-in-law of author Mary Jane Clark.
Douglas Clegg is an American horror and dark fantasy author, and a pioneer in the field of e-publishing. He maintains a strong Internet presence through his website.
Deck The Halls is a 2003 thriller novel by American authors Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark.
This is a list of bestselling novels in the United States in the 1980s, as determined by Publishers Weekly. The list features the most popular novels of each year from 1980 through 1989.
This is a list of bestselling novels in the United States in the 1990s, as determined by Publishers Weekly. The list features the most popular novels of each year from 1990 through 1999.
Yannick Denis Bisson is a Canadian film and television actor and director. He is famous for playing Detective William Murdoch on the series Murdoch Mysteries for over 15 years, since 2008.
Mary McGarry Morris is an American novelist, short story author and playwright from New England. She uses its towns as settings for her works. In 1991, Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times described Morris as "one of the most skillful new writers at work in America today"; The Washington Post has described her as a "superb storyteller"; and The Miami Herald has called her "one of our finest American writers".
Autumn de Wilde is an American photographer and film director best known for her portraiture and commercial work photography of musicians, as well as her music video works. In 2020 she directed her first feature film, Emma.
Liza Cody is an English crime fiction writer.
Kenneth Steven Gord is a Canadian film and television producer.
Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. Her portrayal in the arts and popular culture has been mixed. In the words of one critic she attracted "musical opprobrium like no other British political leader". Such opinion is divergent from mainstream opinion polling which tends to place her as the most popular British prime minister since Winston Churchill.
Patricia Schartle Myrer (1923–2010) was an editor, literary agent and publishing executive based in New York City. She was editor-in-chief of Appleton-Century-Crofts publishing. She eventually became president of McIntosh & Otis literary agency. She married novelist Anton Myrer in 1970. Some of the authors she represented were Mary Higgins Clark, Patricia Highsmith and Eleanor Hibbert. She retired in 1984 and died in 2010.
Maura Higgins is an Irish television personality, television presenter and model. She rose to prominence in 2019, when she was a finalist on the fifth series of ITV2 reality series Love Island. Since her appearance on the show⁹, Higgins has collaborated with numerous fashion and makeup brands. In 2020, she was a contestant on series 12 of the ITV show Dancing on Ice. Higgins has served as an agony aunt on This Morning and hosted the Irish version of the reality television competition Glow Up. She has been a contestant on Cooking with the Stars.
Catriona McPherson is a Scottish writer. She is best known for her Dandy Gilver series. Her novels have won an Agatha Award, two Anthony Awards, six Lefty Awards, and two Macavity Awards.
