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William Windom (1923 - 2012)

Windom was born on September 28, 1923, in New York City. He was the son of Isobel Wells (née Peckham) and Paul Windom, an architect. He was the great-grandson of the United States Secretary of the Treasury of the same name. He served in the United States Army in the European Theater of Operations in […]

William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850)

The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland, part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, […]

William Wyler (1902 - 1981)

William Wyler was born to a Jewish family in Mulhouse, Alsace (then part of the German Empire). His Swiss father, Leopold, started as a traveling salesman which he later turned into a thriving haberdashery business in Mulhouse. His mother, Melanie (née Auerbach; died February 13, 1955, Los Angeles, aged 77), was German, and a cousin […]

Willie Pep (1922 - 2006)

Willie Pep American professional boxer, world featherweight (126 pounds) champion during the 1940s. Pep specialized in finesse rather than slugging prowess and competed successfully in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. His rivalry with American Sandy Saddler is considered one of the greatest of 20th-century American pugilism. Pep began his professional boxing career in 1940. He […]

Willie Williams (1956 - 2005)

William James “Flip” Williams, Jr. (November 9, 1956 – October 25, 2005) was a mass murderer executed by lethal injection. He was convicted of the September 2, 1991 murders of three rival drug dealers and a visitor to their Youngstown, Ohio home.  Williams had returned to the neighborhood after a long absence to find that […]

Willis Bouchey (1907 - 1977)

Willis Ben Bouchey (May 24, 1907 – September 27, 1977) was an American character actor who appeared in almost 150 films and television shows. He was born in Vernon, Michigan, but reared by his mother and stepfather in Washington State. Bouchey may be best known for his movie appearances in The Horse Soldiers, The Long Gray […]

Willoughby Gray (1916 - 1993)

Willoughby was born in London, his mother Mary Henderson had married John Gray, who was killed in action in Iraq soon after his birth. (Though several sources suggest he was born in Aberdeen, Scotland). In 1918 Mary re married and Willoughby became the stepson of Lieutenant General Henry Pownall.  He achieved popularity in the mid-1950s […]

Wilma Mankiller (1945 - 2010)

Wilma Pearl Mankiller was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the sixth of eleven children, to Charley Mankiller (November 15, 1914 – February 20, 1971) and Clara Irene Sitton (born September 18, 1921). Her father was a full-blooded Cherokee and her mother was a Caucasian woman of Dutch and Irish descent who acculturated herself to Cherokee life. […]

Wilson Pickett (1941 - 2006)

Wilson Pickett Wilson Pickett, the soul music pioneer whose insistent wail turned songs like “In the Midnight Hour” into hits, died yesterday in Virginia. He was 64. The cause was a heart attack, Margo Lewis, his manager, said. She added that Mr. Pickett had spent the twilight of his career playing dozens of concert dates […]

Windell Middlebrooks (1979 - 2015)

Windell Middlebrooks was born in Fort Worth, Texas. He was an alumnus of Sterling College in Sterling, Kansas, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Theatre/Communications, the Los Angeles Film Studies Center, and University of California, Irvine, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts in acting in 2004. For one season, he worked at the […]

Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. Widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the 20th century, Churchill was also an officer in the British […]

Wisława Szymborska (1923 - 2012)

Wisława Szymborska was born on 2 July 1923 in Prowent, Poland (now part of Kórnik, Poland), the daughter of Wincenty and Anna (née Rottermund) Szymborski. Her father was at that time the steward of Count Władysław Zamoyski, a Polish patriot and charitable patron. After the death of Count Zamoyski in 1924, her family moved to […]

Wolfgang Preiss (1910 - 2002)

Wolfgang Preiss (27 February 1910 – 27 November 2002) was a German theatre, film and television actor. The son of a teacher, Preiss studied philosophy, German and drama in the early 1930s. He also took private acting classes with Hans Schlenck, making his stage début in Munich in 1932. He went to appear in various theatre […]

Wolfgang Sawallisch (1923 - 2013)

Sawallisch was born in Munich on August 26, 1923. At the age of five, he was already playing the piano and by the time he was ten, he had decided he wanted to become a concert pianist. As a child, he was greatly influenced by Richard Strauss and Hans Knappertsbusch.  At first, he studied composition […]

Wolfman Jack (1938 - 1995)

Wolfman Jack Wolfman Jack, the rock-and-roll disk jockey whose unmistakable raspy voice and on-the-air howls brought him something of a cult following as one of America’s best-known radio personalities, died yesterday at his home in Belvidere, N.C. He was 57. The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter, Joy Renee Smith. He was a […]

Woodrow Wilson (1856 - 1924)

Woodrow Wilson 28th US President, 34th New Jersey Governor, Nobel Peace Prize Winner. He is best remembered for keeping America neutral at the start of World War I, but reluctantly entering the war in 1917, joining the Allied Powers, primarily Britain and France, to defeat the Central Powers led by Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman […]