If they were still alive today....

...these folks would be celebrating their natal day:


Knute Rockne was born in Norway 123 years ago today.  He went on to become, arguably, the greatest college football coach in history, leading Notre Dame's "Fighting Irish" to five national championships during his coaching career there, from 1918 to 1930.  He was killed in a plane crash, aged 43, in 1931, near Bazaar, Kansas.


Considered one of (if not the) greatest baroque composers, Antonio Vivaldi would have been 333.  His series of violin concerti called The Four Seasons is one of the most well-known of classical compositions.  As we happily exit winter, here is Itzhak Perlman performing the "Spring" section:





Talented singer and great beauty Barbara McNair would be 77.  She appeared opposite Elvis Presley as a nun in his final (and dreadful!) film, A Change of Habit.  She died of throat cancer in 2007.



Pearl White would be 122.  One of the very first "movie stars," she was made famous by her appearance as the title character in the Perils of Pauline series---and later, Exploits of Elaine, highly energetic "adventure" films, in which she famously did all of her own stunts.  Her career was well over-with by the time talking films came about and she died in 1938 of cirrhosis of the liver, having become addicted to painkillers and alcohol, supposedly exacerbated by her film-related injuries.


Dorothy Mackaill would be 108.  Largely forgotten today, she was quite a popular actress in her day, from the late silent era through the early 1930's.  Her stock-in-trade was the fast-living "bad girl".  Her characterizations really pushed the boundaries of censorship in the "Pre-Code" days (the "Code" being the studio-sanctioned censorship of prurient material in films, instituted around 1934).  Here she is , performing the ever-popular "Cannibal Love" (!):







Great American film and stage actor John Garfield would be 98 today.  Regular readers of this blog may think that I have an obsession with victims of the McCarthy Era witchhunts.  Not really...but I continue to be amazed as I do research how many lives were utterly ruined during that horrible moment in history.  John Garfield is yet another.  He was one of Warner Brothers' most popular young leading men in the 1930's and 40's.  His brooding, naturalistic style of acting was greatly influential on subsequent "method actors," such as Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and James Dean.  He was forced to speak before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, where he refused to "name names".  He was rendered unemployable, and he died of heart failure at the age of 39.  As newer generations discover Garfield and his films, his remarkably contemporary style keeps his memory alive.