ON THIS DAY
FROM THE ARCHIVE MARCH 10, 1978
COLEEN NOLAN, aged just 12, is set to join the Nolan Sisters, the family singing group with origins in Dublin. She replaces her sister Denise, 25, who is going solo. ‘I am absolutely thrilled to bits – I can’t wait to make my first appearance,’ said Coleen, who turns 13 soon.
MARCH 10, 1984
ROCK star Sting and his wife Frances Tomelty were granted a ‘quickie’ divorce in London yesterday. The actress, 36, said: ‘It has all been amicably settled. There is always sadness in these things but I have my work to help me get over it.’ The pair, who have two children, split when Sting fell for actress Trudie Styler.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
OLIVIA WILDE, 39. The US actress, right, was in TV drama House and directed, produced and starred in the film Don’t Worry Darling (dating co-star Harry Styles). Last year she was promoting the film in front of 4,000 people when a representative of the father of her two children, actor Jason Sudeikis, served custody papers. She said it wasn’t ‘entirely surprising... I mean, there’s a reason I left that relationship’. KATHARINE HOUGHTON, 78. The American actress played Sidney Poitier’s fiancée and Katharine Hepburn’s daughter in 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. In real life, Hepburn was her aunt. The film portrayed a woman who brings her black fiancé home to meet her parents. Yet Houghton said: ‘I don’t think it did a thing for civil rights... It was a movie for white people.’
BORN ON THIS DAY
BARRY FITZGERALD (1888-1961). Born William Joseph Shields in Portobello, Dublin, the scene-stealing actor, right, began his career in theatre before going on to star in Hollywood films including Bringing Up Baby, The Quiet Man and Going My Way, for which he was Oscar-nominated as both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. He died at home in Dublin aged 72, and is buried in Deansgrange Cemetery. JAMES EARL RAY (1928-1998). The American assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr in 1968. He pleaded guilty to the crime, but afterwards claimed that he was set up. At his death in prison, aged 70, King’s widow, Coretta, lamented there was no trial, saying it ‘would have produced new revelations about the assassination’.
ON MARCH 10 . . .
IN 1876, speech is sent over a telephone wire for the first time as inventor Alexander Graham Bell tells his assistant: ‘Mr Watson, come here; I want you.’ IN 2020, as coronavirus spreads here and in the UK, the Cheltenham Festival begins, with 125,000 racegoers – among them many Irish fans – packing the stands.
WORD WIZARDRY GUESS THE DEFINITION: Murcous (1684)
A) Evil; wicked. B) Blind. C) One who cuts off his thumb to escape military service.
Answer below. PHRASE EXPLAINED Hope springs eternal: Meaning it is human nature always to find cause for optimism. It is from Alexander Pope’s 1733 An Essay On Man: ‘hope springs eternal in the human breast’.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
What we call evil is simply ignorance bumping its head in the dark.
Henry Ford, US industrialist (1863-1947)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT do you call it when one cat sues another? A claw-suit. Guess The Definition answer: C