Today marks the beginning of my journey into an unglamorous number of 34, and perhaps we start the week by looking at some interesting little things happened on 14 April, most of them will surely makes me feel even older that I already am.
(1) The 52nd Academy Awards actually happened on my birthday: April 14th, 1980. Best Picture won by a movie called Kramer vs. Kramer which I did watch many years later. The same movie earned acting giants Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep their first golden man. Also winning that year was an actress I have a lot of respect for: Sally Field. She earned her first Best Actress prize for Norma Rae, a movie unfortunately I have never watched before.
(2) Besides 1980, the Oscars only had its ceremony on April 14th in one other year: 1969. In that year, the musical Oliver! won Best Picture. This musical is the last of a string of musicals that won Best Picture in the 50s and 60s, and we would have to wait for another 34 years when Chicago won in 2003. Also happened in the same ceremony: A rare tie in major category, where Barbra Streisand and Katherine Hepburn shared the Best Actress prize.
(3) In 1865, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was shot in Ford's Theatre by John Wilkes Booth. He died the next day. President Lincoln was the subject of numerous films and TV series, but majority of them focused on his life story and the assassination itself usually played just a small part in the film. In recent years, the two examples I can immediately think of are National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets (2007) and Lincoln (2012). There was a movie in 2010, The Conspirator, where the assassination was the main plot, but I didn't watch the film.
(4) In 1894, the first ever commercial motion picture house opened in New York City using ten Kinetoscopes, a device for peep-show viewing of films.
(5) In 1912, The British passenger liner RMS Titanic hits an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 23:40 (sinks morning of April 15th). This event of course was the center of lots of movies and TV shows, but the most famous one undoubtedly would be the 1997 James Cameron version. The movie was so popular back then, I still have problem listening to My Heart Will Go On without rolling my eyes even 17 years later.
(6) In 1939, The Grapes of Wrath, by American author John Steinbeck was first published by the Viking Press. The book later became a movie of the same name. This movie, together with another 40s drama depicting the life of a family, How Green Was My Valley, would be my two favorite films from that era.
(7) Some actors and actresses born on April 14th: Brad Garrett (Everybody Loves Raymond), Adrien Brody (The Pianist), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Robert Carlyle (Once Upon a Time), Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine), Julie Christie (Doctor Zhivago)
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