ON THIS DAY
January 26, 2023
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE JANUARY 26, 1989
AT LAST . . . here is Jack Nicholson as the Joker in his most bizarre film role. The Hollywood star plays the villain in the movie tipped as the blockbuster of the year — Batman. Nicholson says that as a child he loved the cartoon stories: ‘It was the only comic book that took place at night.’
JANUARY 26, 1996
A KILLER used one of America’s oldest laws to insist on execution by firing squad rather than lethal injection. But he was denied his last wish — a cigarette — by one of Utah’s newest laws. John Taylor, 36, wanted a smoke with his pizza and cola, but prison chiefs told him smoking indoors was barred under the state’s Indoor Clean Air Act.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
COL NEEDHAM, 56. The lancashire-born film buff founded the Internet Movie database, or IMdb, which he sold to Amazon in 1998 for a reported £44 million. described as ‘the most powerful Brit in Hollywood’, his favourite stars are Cary Grant and katharine Hepburn. Still chief executive, he oversees hundreds of staff. TYGER DREW-HONEY, 27. The Surreyborn actor shot to fame playing Jake Brockman in BBC sitcom Outnumbered. He said the role meant that, as a teenager, he ‘couldn’t be snapped holding a beer, that sort of thing. It made me conscious that I had an image to protect.’
BORN ON THIS DAY
JOAN LESLIE ( 1925
2015). The U.S. actress, who played the love interest of Humphrey Bogart in
High Sierra, signed with
MGM aged 11, and was described as ‘sweet innocence without seeming too sugary’. She later fought to escape a contract with
Warner Bros that she described as ‘slavery’. After winning, she said: ‘They don’t consider me now a perpetual ingenue.’ DAME PAULA REGO (1935-2022). The Portuguese-born British painter was hailed as ‘one of Europe’s most influential contemporary figurative artists’. Her work has featured in the art collections of Charles Saatchi and Madonna. She said: ‘If you’re frightened of something, the best thing is to draw it.’
ON JANUARY 26 . . .
IN 1961, Elvis Presley was at Uk number one with Are you lonesome Tonight?
IN 2020, U.S. basketball star kobe Bryant died along with his daughter and seven others in a helicopter crash in California.
WORD WIZARDRY GUESS THE DEFINITION: Yarden (coined 2018)
A) To exaggerate with the hands.
B) A small yard behind a house that has been turned into a garden.
C) The hideout of an illegal gang.
answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Little grey cells: Refers to the brain cells ( implying extreme intelligence or sharpness); Agatha Christie coined it for her character Hercule Poirot, who solved some of the world’s most puzzling crimes using his ‘little grey cells’.