ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
FEBRUARY 3, 1958
FILM actress Rita Hayworth, 39, was married in Hollywood yesterday — for the fifth time — to 42-year-old film producer James Hill. She said: ‘This is definitely my last fling into matrimony.’ [Although the couple divorced in 1961, Hayworth never married again.]
FEBRUARY 3, 1970
BERTRAND RUSSELL died last night at his home in Wales. He was 97. Earl Russell, a mathematician and philosopher, never gave up trying to save the world from nuclear war. He was married four times, wrote more than 40 books and was a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
WARWICK DAVIS, 50. The 3ft 6in actor from Surrey starred in Return Of The Jedi and as Professor Flitwick in the Harry Potter movies. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant wrote the sitcom Life’s Too Short for Davis (right), who now hosts ITV quiz show Tenable. He was born with a genetic disorder called spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita (SED) and his parents were told he would die before he was a teenager. KIRSTY WARK, 65. The Scottish journalist has hosted the BBC’s Newsnight since 1993 and interrogated everyone from Madonna to Margaret Thatcher. The late Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy said Wark was ‘a fierce foe when the studio lights go on, great fun in the bar’. Wark says female broadcasters are still not allowed to have grey hair: ‘Men are a “silver-haired fox” yet women are viewed as some medieval witch. It’s totally unfair.’
BORN ON THIS DAY
GERTRUDE STEIN ( 1874- 1946). The American writer spent much of her life in Paris with leading American and English writers she dubbed ‘the Lost Generation’. She was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway and claimed to have discovered Picasso, Matisse and Braque. Not everyone was a fan, though. A New York Times critic branded one of her books ‘Chinese water torture; it never stops and it is always the same’. FRANKIE VAUGHAN (19281999). The Liverpool-born crooner (right) nicknamed ‘Mr Moonlight’ after one of his biggest hits, Give Me The Moonlight, appeared with Marilyn Monroe in 1960 film Let’s Make Love. He learned to sing in the choir at his Leeds synagogue. Born Frank Ableson, his stage name came from his Russian grandmother, who said he’d be her ‘number vorn’ singer.
ON FEBRUARY 3
IN 1960, in a speech in South Africa, PM Harold Macmillan spoke of the ‘wind of change’ blowing through the continent as African countries sought independence.
IN 1999, Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie and English actor Jonny Lee Miller divorced after three years of marriage.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Preterite (c early 14th century)
A) Grammatical tense for events in the past. B) A know-it-all. C) A polite person.
Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED:
Smell a rat — To be suspicious; from the 1800s, it alludes to the fact that rats are smelly and infectious, and describes a snitch or informant.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
A tRUth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
William Blake, poet (1757-1827)
JOKE OF THE DAY
HOW does a train eat? It goes chew chew.
Guess the Definition answer: A