John Houseman (born Jacques Haussmann, September 22, 1902 – October 31, 1988) was a Romanian-born British-American actor and film producer. Academy Award-winning actor John Houseman's main contribution to American culture was not his own performances on film but rather, his role as a midwife to one of the greatest actor-directors-cinematic geniuses his adopted country ever produced (Orson Welles) and as a midwife to a whole generation of actors as head of the Julliard School.
Houseman was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1902, the son of a British mother of Welsh and Irish descent and a Jewish father of Romanian ancestry who ran a grain business. He was educated in England at Clifton College, became a British citizen and worked in the grain trade in London before emigrating to the United States in 1925, where he took the stage name of John Houseman. He became an American citizen in 1943.
He directed "Four Saints in Three Acts" for the theater in 1934. Houseman joined with Orson Welles (whom he affectionately called "The Dog-Faced Boy") in 1937 to mount startling productions of the classics in their avant-garde Mercury Theater. Their most important success was a modern-dress version of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," in which the spectre of Hitler and Mussolini's Fascist states were evoked. The Mercury Theatre on the Air subsequently became famous for its notorious 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, which had put much of the country in a panic.
As a producer assigned to Unit 891 of the Federal Theater Project funded by the government's Works Progress Administration, he produced the legendary production "Cradle Will Rock," a musical about the tyranny of capitalism. On Broadway, apart from the Mercury Theatre and the WPA, Houseman directed "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1939) and "Liberty Jones" and produced "Native Son" (1941). During World War Two, Houseman went to work for the Office of War Information and was involved in broadcasting radio propaganda for the Voice of America. After the war, Houseman returned to directing and produced Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 1953 version of Julius Caesar (1953).
Toward what looked like the end of a long career, when he was 66 years old, Mr. Houseman helped establish the school of drama at the Juilliard School and also became the co-founder and longtime artistic director of the Acting Company, the touring repertory group whose alumni include Kevin Kline and Patti LuPone. He resigned as artistic director last summer.
He helped establish the acting program at New York's famous Julliard School for the Arts, where he influenced a new generation of actors. Ironically, he had appeared in only one major movie, in a supporting role, before being tapped to replace James Mason in The Paper Chase (1973). He won an Oscar for the role and began a 15-year career as a highly sought after supporting player (Three Days of the Condor, Rollerball, The Cheap Detective, Ghost Story, My Bodyguard, Naked Gun, Winds of War, Noble House, and many others). Houseman, who wrote three volumes of memoirs, Run-Through (1972), Front and Center (1979) and Final Dress (1983), died in 1988 after making major contributions to the theater and film.
Attila Weinberger (aka AG Weinberger, born August 30, 1965 in Oradea) is a Romanian blues guitarist, singer, and producer.
In the mid eighties, Weinberger made the transition from rock to blues, then promoting this genre. In 1986 he began his career as a bluesman, setting up with Harry Tavitian (piano), Corneliu Stroe (drums) and Cătălin Rotaru (bass) the first blues band in Romania - Transylvanian Blues Community. Ignoring the communist censorship, the four managed to make tours in the country with a great success.
After 1990, Weinberger toured in Germany, Switzerland, Israel, Turkey, Hungary (where in 1992 sang in the opening of the concert of the famous guitarist Al Di Meola). In 1991, he established his own blues band - Weinberger Blues Machine. He released the first blues album in Romania - Good Morning, Mr. Blues (1996), followed in 1997 by Standard Weinberger. The release of this album concert was televised and had the merit of removing the blues from underground, giving it public. However, the album won the prize for Best Jazz Disc of 1997.
A.G. Weinberger - I Heard It Through The Grapevine
A.G.Weinberger - Take Me To The Highway
A.G. Weinberger - Spoonful
AG Weinberger - Break The Man
Further, the musician produced and presented two weekly radio shows, on radio stations Radio Contact and Romania Youth. In 1998, he established the foundation BlueSylvania and he sang at the festival Bluestock in Memphis, Tennessee (being the only non-American singer accepted). At the end of 1999, Weiberger released his 3rd album - Transylvania Avenue. Between 2000-2004 he was in a "cultural exile" in the U.S., singing in Chicago, New-York (at Decade, Bitter End, Red Lion), Las Vegas, and touring over 30,000 miles across U.S. In July 2006, Weinberger released the 4th album, Nashville Calling, a first for the music market in Romania: the first blues album by a Romanian artist recorded and produced entirely in the U.S. Followed Guitar Man vol. 1 & 2. For now, Weinberger produces and presents a successful show on a Romanian public TV channel, The Lollipop.
Mihai Creţu, also known as Michael Cretu or Curly M.C. (born May 18, 1957, in Bucharest, Romania), is a Romanian musician best known as the creator of the Enigma project.
Cretu was born to a Romanian father and a mother of Austrian ancestry. His uncle, Ion Voicu, a famous Romanian violinist and the director of the Bucharest Philharmonic, told Michael's parents that he had talent in music and as such, he studied classical music at Liceul Nr. 2 in Bucharest in 1965 and in Paris, France, in 1968. He later attended the Academy of Music in Frankfurt, Germany, from 1975 to 1978, attaining a degree in music. Cretu was taken on as a keyboard player and producer for Frank Farian, the German mastermind behind successful acts of the 1970s and 1980s such as Boney M and Milli Vanilli.
In the 1980s, Cretu took over production for the pop quartet Hubert Kah and started writing songs with the band leader Hubert Kemmler, achieving a number of hits. Among his other work, Cretu was also one of the producers of Mike Oldfield's 1987 album "Islands", and the producer of Peter Schilling's 1989 album "The Different Story (World of Lust and Crime)". In 1998, Cretu teamed up with Jens Gad (they previously worked together on "Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi!") and created the album "The Energy of Sound" under the name Trance Atlantic Airwaves. Cretu and Gad also worked with Jamaican singer Andru Donalds, achieving some success in Europe with a cover version of the song "All Out of Love" (1999).
Cretu met his future wife, Sandra Lauer, when he was playing keyboards on the band Arabesque’s live touring show. In collaboration with several Hubert Kah band members, he co-wrote and produced several successful albums and singles for her, beginning with the song "Maria Magdalena" which topped the charts in 21 countries. The band was simply called Sandra, although Sandra's full name is now often used for filing and identification purposes. Cretu married her on 7 January 1988. They have twins named Nikita and Sebastian, who were born in July 1995. Michael and Sandra divorced in November 2007, citing "personal and professional differences". Another band of Cretu's was called Moti Special ("Cold Days, Hot Nights"), which Cretu produced and performed with in the mid-1980s. He owned the first A.R.T. Studios in Ibiza.
Sandra - Loreen
He has worked with many producers, musicians, and artists in his long career. These include Sandra Cretu, Frank Farian, Boney M, Goombay Dance Band, Peter Cornelius, Manfred "Tissy" Thiers and Mike Oldfield in his pre-Enigma days, and Jens Gad, Frank Peterson, David Fairstein, ATB, Jam & Spoon, Peter Ries, Ruth-Ann Boyle and Andru Donalds during the course of the project.
After Cretu's marriage to Sandra in 1988, he had an idea, following suggestions made by David Fairstein, for a musical new-age dance project under the name, presented by Fairstein, of Enigma. Cretu worked with Frank Peterson and David Fairstein to create their ground-breaking first single "Sadeness," which became a surprise hit. MCMXC a.D., the album, which was released in 1990, was hugely successful. It is believed to have sold about 20 million copies worldwide. One of the aims of Enigma was to present music that has never been heard before and is not being produced anywhere, which also forced Cretu to continually move in new musical directions and to stay ahead of imitators.
Enigma - Sadeness
MCMXC a.D. stayed on the charts for 282 weeks on the Billboard charts and dropped off two years after its second album, "The Cross of Changes", was released in 1993. Prior to this, Frank Peterson had some disagreements with Cretu and he left the project in 1991. Cretu changed Enigma's direction from Gregorian chants to tribal chants for its second album, and this led to "Return to Innocence", which became a worldwide hit. Cretu was approached by Paramount Pictures to write the soundtrack of the movie Sliver and he came up with another 1993 single, "Carly's Song", the title of the track based on the character of the leading actress in the movie.
Enigma - Return to Innocence
In 1996, Enigma's third album, "Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi!" was released. Stylistically, it sounded like a combination of the first and second albums, but it failed to achieve the same level of success. For the fourth album, Cretu steered the project in another direction by using samples of Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" for the album "The Screen Behind the Mirror". Andru Donalds and Ruth-Ann Boyle first appeared on this release. Although Jens Gad had been working with Cretu on the earlier albums, this was the first time that he had been given actual credits.
Enigma - Mea Culpa
Deciding that the first chapter for Enigma was closed, Cretu released two sets of compilation albums: "Love Sensuality Devotion: The Greatest Hits" and "Love Sensuality Devotion: The Remix Collection". By then Cretu was undecided if he should continue with the project, but eventually he came up with "Voyageur" in 2003. Familiar sounds of the Shakuhachi flute, tribal, or Gregorian chants were replaced with more pop-oriented tunes and beats. In March 2006, a new single called "Hello & Welcome" was released in anticipation of another album. "A Posteriori" was the sixth Enigma studio album. It was released 22 September 2006. "Seven Lives Many Faces" became the seventh Enigma studio album. It was released 19 September 2008.
In 2001, Crocodile-Music, Cretu`s management stated that a total of 100 million Cretu-produced records had been sold. By the year 2007, Michael Cretu`s Enigma project had sold over 40 million studio albums.
Petru Popescu (born. February 1, 1944 in Bucharest, Romania) is a Romanian writer, director and movie producer, author of best-selling novels "Almost Adam" and "Amazon Beaming".
Born in family of intellectuals, he was traumatized by premature death of his twin brother and the divorce of his parents. He studied Germanic languages at Bucharest University, graduating in 1967. His made his debut with a poetry book, "Zeu printre blocuri" (A God Between Apartment Buildings), then wrote in 1969 "Prins" (Caught), a novel of grand success, which launched him as a reference writer in Romanian literature. He is known for his romance with Zoe Ceauşescu, daughter of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, but claims are said to be exaggerated by media and Securitate (the Secret Police).
Petru Popescu obtained a scholarship in Vienna (1971-1972), and in 1974 accepted an invitation from the University of Iowa to participate at International Writing Program seminary. At that point, he decided to leave Romania and establish residence in the United States. From then on, he steadily followed a successful path as a novelist and author of several Hollywood movie scripts. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he returned often to Romania as of 1992, where most of his works have been translated from English and published.
Valeriu Lazarov (also known as Valerio Lazarov; December 20, 1935, Bârlad, Romania - August 11, 2009, Madrid, Spain), was a well-known TV producer, director, writer, actor.
He made his debut at the Romanian public television, then went to Spain, where he received Spanish citizenship in 1972. In 1979, Lazarov reached the Italian national TV channel, RAI, to produce a series of shows, called "Tilt". Shortly after, he started working for Silvio Berlusconi at Canale 5, where he became production director, president of the administration board and director of the production center Videotime. In 1985 he got back to Spain, where he worked as producer at the Spanish National Television, as well as general manager and delegate adviser to TV station Telcinco, till 1994, when he was replaced by Maurizio Carlotti. In 1995 he set up his own production company, Prime Time Communications.
Lazarov revolutionized TV entertainment shows in Romania at the end of the 1990s, producing successful shows, such as "Surprises, surprises", "Out of Love" or "The Star Rain" and many soap operas. Lazarov is called by the international press "one of the most respected TV professionals and part of the vanguard of his times". Highly respected in Romania and Spain, Lazarov was nicknamed “Mister Zoom” for the way he maneuvered TV cameras.
Cristian Nemescu (March 31, 1979, Bucharest - August 24, 2006, Bucharest), Romanian director, writer and producer.
He graduated the Academy of Theater and Cinema in Bucharest in 2003. His graduation film was a short story entitled Poveste de la scara C (C Block Story), which has won the NYU International Student Film Festival and the Premiers Plans in Angers, France. The European Academy Awards nominated as "best short film" of that year. Nemescu won over 20 awards, including Grand Prize at the NYU International Student Film Festival in New York, Special Jury Prize at the Brussels Short Film Festival in Belgium, Public's Choice at Milan Film Festival in Italy, Public Prize at the International Festival Grenzland Filmtage Germany.
The director died in a car crash along with his sound engineer Andrei Toncu. His last movie California Dreamin' (Nesfârşit) (2007), starring Armand Assante, was in post-production, when the accident happened. It was later awarded the Un Certain Regard Awards at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.
On 28 May 2007, the president of Romania granted post mortem by a decree, the National Order "For Merit" in rank of Knight, for "outstanding contribution to the promotion of Romanian cinema".
This blog represents the work of a team of students and teachers from Secondary School no. 1 Luduş, Romania. Join us to an imaginary trip through people, facts, and places from Romania...
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