If they were still alive today....

....these famed folk would be celebrating their birthday:

Johann Sebastian Bach would be 261 today.  Considered to be no less than one of the greatest, most brilliant and ingenious composers of all time--and not just in the Baroque style, which he was instrumental in developing and standardizing--but in any form of music ever written.  Sheer and utter genius which knew no bounds.
Here is a lovely performance of Air on a G String...pause...pause...pause...and you thought I was going to take the low road and make some crude remark about it being a song about a drafty dressing room for strippers, didn't you?  Well, nuh-uh...not me...'cause I'm a CLASSY GUY!




Modest Mussorgsky, or as I like to call him, Моде́ст Петро́вич Му́соргский would be 172.  He was one of Russia's all-time greatest composers, having composed what would surely be considered Russia's great nationalist opera, Boris Godunov.  His Pictures at an Exhibition (later fleshed-out by Maurice Ravel) is a popular concert showpiece for virtuoso pianists.  Alas, alcohol was his bête noire, and it did him in before he reached his 42nd birthday. This strange, unflattering portrait of him (above) was completed just before he died.  I'm doubting he would have approved it.  Here is part one (of three--the other two can be found at YouTube as well) of Pictures, played by the great Russian virtuoso, Evgeny Kissin:




Florenz "Flo" Ziegfeld would be 144.  He was the ultimate Broadway showman, sparing no expense in creating lavish, glamourous extravaganzas that lived up to his motto:  "Glorifying the American Girl".  That's a rather florid way of saying that he liked to push the envelope of naughtiness, presenting the most beautiful young women of the day in varying states of gorgeous undress.  But Ziegfeld also created and presented some of the greatest stars of the nineteen-teens and twenties (Fannie Brice, W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Marilyn Miller and many more, including his wife, the lovely Billie Burke--better known as the "Good Witch Glinda" in Wizard of Oz in 1939.  His most lasting legacy is having produced Showboat, the first real "book" Broadway musical, in which the songs were integral to the very involved plot, rather than a random, peppy dance number thrown in here or there, which was the norm in those days, prior to Showboat.  As the famous story goes, an investor questioned Ziegfeld's lavish expenditure on silk underthings for the Ziegfeld girls:  "But no one will even see them!" said the investor.  Ziegfeld replied, "Yes, but it will make them feel like Ziegfeld girls and it will show in their faces".  He died broke, and deeply in debt.  But I'll bet he sure had fun spending it all.

(Above, from the 1936 biopic, The Great Ziegfeld, which won the Best Picture Oscar that year.  How's that for a set?)


And a "glorifier of the American girl" in an entirely different way, filmmaker Russ Meyer would be 89 today.  His fascination with enormous bosoms bordered on obsession, which he manifested in his low-budget, campy sexploitation films, with luridly descriptive titles, such as:  Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962), Skyscrapers and Brassieres (1963), Mudhoney (1965), Mondo Topless (1966), and my personal favorite, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!--it's actually a pretty hilarious movie, if you're into female biker gang movies, which I most certainly am!  His most famous film, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) has a large cult following.  Me, I find it pretty unwatchable (and it was written by film critic Roger Ebert!).  I much prefer the original, Valley of the Dolls, whose screenplay was written by......

.....Helen Deutsch, who would be 105.  One of the most successful female screenwriters in the 40's-60's, she had a respectable run of some fine films (I'll Cry Tomorrow, Lili, National Velvet, The Unsinkable Molly Brown), but ended her career on a decided low note, co-scripting the dreadful (if wonderfully, thrillingly dreadful!) 1967 disaster, Valley of the Dolls.  I once went to the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center in New York, as I'd heard that one could study the original script in the research department.  I'm a rather devoted fan of the film and did get the script.  Scrawled across the front of it, in her own hand, Helen Deutsch wrote, "This was my original script, which 20th Century Fox took and butchered, totally destroying my original vision".  Ouch.  Wanna play a round of "Blame Game," there, Helen?  C'mon...she should have done what Patty Duke has finally gotten around to doing, which is to accept that she was part of one of the most legendary bombs of all time and have some fun with it! (for years, Patty would refuse to even discuss it in interviews, getting very prickly with hapless interviewers who didn't know she was so, er, "touchy" about Dolls). 


(Unfortunately, I could find not a single photo of Miss Deutsch...thus, I feel compelled to post a picture from her most legendary film....here's Patty Duke famously ripping the wig off of Susan Hayward's head in the ladies room...Deutsch wrote the famous, "Look...they drummed you right outta Hollywood" tirade that provokes this fight.  Helen, I personally thank you!)


(Deneuve & Dorléac in 1967 in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort in which they played twins)

Françoise Dorléac would be 69.  The equally stunning older sister of the exquisite Catherine Deneuve, she seemed destined for major stardom, just like her sister.  But her life was cut short at the age of 25, when she was involved in a horrible, one-car collision in the South of France in 1967, just days before the release of the "breakout" film she and her sister co-starred in that made Deneuve an international star, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort--and, presumably, would have done the same for her.