Famous & 65

Look who's turning 65 this month

Find out which celebrities are turning 65 this month!

Image Source: Wikipedia

July 3 - Montel Williams, talk show host

Host of the long-running The Montel Williams Show, Williams currently hosts Military Makeover: Operation Career on Lifetime. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999 and is active with the MS Foundation, a nonprofit he founded. 

Williams served in the United States Marine Corps as well as the United States Navy. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a major in engineering and a minor in international security affairs. He went on to serve 17 years in active duty, followed by five years in the reserves. 

The Montel Williams Show ran from 1991 to 2008. Williams received a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show host in 1996, and the show was nominated for Outstanding Talk Show twice. Self-declared psychic Sylvia Browne was a repeat guest throughout its run, leading to controversy related to a pair of kidnapping victims. 

Image Source: Wikipedia

July 9 - Tom Hanks, actor

You surely already know much about the film career of Hanks, so we’ve put together a few facts that you might not know about this cherished actor.

Hanks was generally disliked by students and teachers in high school, where he spent years as a “Bible-toting evangelical,” according to one journalist. Hanks himself says,” I was a geek, a spaz. I was horribly, painfully, terribly shy. At the same time, I was the guy who’d yell out funny captions during filmstrips. But I didn’t get into trouble. I was always a real good kid and pretty responsible.”

In his college years, Hanks says, "I spent a lot of time going to plays. I wouldn't take dates with me. I'd just drive to a theater, buy myself a ticket, sit in the seat and read the program, and then get into the play completely. I spent a lot of time like that, seeing Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Ibsen, and all that.”

As a little boy, Hanks wanted to be …. An astronaut! He’s a member of the National Space Society and produced the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. Hanks is also an honorary member of the United States Army Rangers Hall of Fame for his portrayal of a captain in Saving Private Ryan, and Hanks served as spokesman for the WWII Memorial Campaign.

He uses manual typewriters on a near-daily basis, and created the Hanx Writer app to allow users to mimic the experience.

 

Image Source: Wikipedia

July 25 - Frances Arnold, chemist

Arnold became the first American woman (and fifth woman in the prize’s 117-year history) to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018 for her work in directed evolution. She currently serves on President Joe Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. 

Arnold was never a conformist. She left home in high school, hitchhiking to Washington, D.C. to protest the war in Vietnam. Her independence led to a lot of missed days at school and subsequent low grades, although she aced standardized tests and was determined to attend the alma mater of her nuclear physicist father: Princeton. 

She achieved her goal, working on a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering and considered a career as a diplomat after taking Russian, Italian and economics. Instead, she took a gap year to work in an Italian factory that manufactured parts for nuclear reactors and came back to study energy and environmental studies. After graduation in 1979, she went to South Korea, Brazil and then Colorado to work in engineering, including designing solar energy facilities for areas out in the boondocks. 

Arnold earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at UC Berkeley. She is the co-inventor of no less than 40 U.S. patents and cofounded both Gevo, a company that makes fuels and chemicals from renewable resources, and Provivi, which researches alternatives to pesticides for crop protection. 

Image Source: Wikipedia

July 26 - Dorothy Hamill, ice skater

Raise your hand if you got a bob after seeing Dorothy Hamill win the 1976 Olympic figure skating championship! “America’s sweetheart” started skating at age eight and gained national prominence when she won the novice ladies at the U.S. Championships when she was just 12 years old. A year later, she placed second at the junior level. Hamill wore the crown of U.S. champion in 1974, 1975 and 1976, when she was also World Champion in ladies’ singles. 

At the 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, Hamill dominated her event. She came in second in figures, then won both the short and long programs to take the gold medal. This would be the last time a single skater would have an Olympic win without a triple jump. She did develop a new move, the “Hamill camel,” a camel spin that evolves into a sit spin. 

For the next seven years, Hamill headlined Ice Capades shows. In 1993, the Associated Press ran a national study to find the most popular athlete in America. It wasn’t Michael Jordan, Joe Montana, Magic Johnson or even Wayne Gretzky. You guessed it: Hamill, along with fellow Olympian and gymnast Mary Lou Retton, topped the list. 

Learn more about Hamill in her autobiographies On and Off the Ice and Skating Life: My Story.

Sources:

https://www.wikipedia.org

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