A Swedish actress who crossed from silent film into sound without loss: Anna Christie, Grand Hotel, Queen Christina, Ninotchka. In 1941, aged thirty-six, she left the cinema and spent the next half-century as a recluse in New York, giving not a single interview. Born in Stockholm on 18 September...
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An astronomer and populariser whose series Cosmos was watched by half a billion people; he worked on the Mariner, Viking and Voyager missions and composed the message on the golden record sent beyond the Solar System. He insisted on the photograph called Pale Blue Dot — the Earth from six billion...
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A mathematician, daughter of Lord Byron, who worked with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine. In the notes to her translation of a paper about it she set out a method for computing Bernoulli numbers — taken to be the first program — and observed that such a machine might work not only on...
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A physicist who in 1913 proposed a model of the atom with permitted electron orbits and took the Nobel Prize for it; his institute in Copenhagen became the place where quantum mechanics took shape. His long argument with Einstein over whether God plays dice remains the best-known disagreement in...
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A director who took suspense apart into technique and built half a century of cinema on it: Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, Rear Window. He made more than fifty pictures without once winning an Oscar for direction, and appeared briefly in almost every one of them. Born in Leytonstone, London, on 13...
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A writer who published little in his lifetime and left instructions for his friend Max Brod to burn the rest; Brod disobeyed, and so The Trial, The Castle and Amerika appeared. He worked at an insurance office, wrote at night, and died of tuberculosis at forty, a year before the first of those...
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A poet, composer and educator who in 1913 became the first non-European to take the Nobel Prize in Literature, for Gitanjali. He wrote the anthems of two countries, India and Bangladesh, founded a school at Santiniketan, and renounced his knighthood after the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Born in...
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An Argentine doctor whose journey across Latin America by motorcycle turned into a political conversion; with Fidel Castro he brought the Cuban revolution to power in 1959 and became minister of industry. Leaving his posts, he went to raise revolt in the Congo and Bolivia, where he was captured and
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The sixteenth president of the United States, who took office on the eve of the Civil War and carried the country through four years of rupture: the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery. The Gettysburg Address, two hundred and seventy words long, became the...
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A singer and businesswoman whose career became the pattern for pop music: a change of face from record to record, full control of her masters, and a knack for turning scandal into takings. Like a Prayer, Vogue and Ray of Light are years apart and sound like the work of different performers. Born in
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