famous people

Christian Lacroix (full name-Christian Marie Marc Lacroix) is a French fashion designer born in Arles on May 16, 1951.

His childhood was spent delighting in Provencal and Gypsy traditions, theatre, opera, and museum visits. Near the end of his adolescence, Lacroix began studying Art History at the University of Montpellier. Later, he continued his studies at the Sorbonne and the Ecole du Louvre hoping to realise his long-cherished dream of becoming a museum curator.

However, a completely different fate was awaiting him. First, he met his future wife Françoise who coaxed him to draw. Around the same time, he ran across the designer Jean-Jacques Picart the collaboration with whom propelled Lacroix to stardom as the hottest designer of the late 1980s.

In 1987 he opened his own couture house and since then his star has been in the ascendant as his house has been successfully selling products ranging from handbags to perfumes and children's wear.

As a designer he is renowned for the theatrical style of his clothes as well as for closing all his haute couture fashion shows with a model dressed up as a bride.

Apart from all that, Lacroix is the darling of many Hollywood stars and starlets and he, for instance, designed the wedding dress of Grammy award winning Christina Aguliera.

Today, his company owns 1,000 flagship stores around the world and his retirement is still light years away.

To read more, visit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Lacroix

http://www.infomat.com/whoswho/christianlacroix.html

http://www.christian-lacroix.fr/
(Lacroix's official site)

famous people

Heidi Klum, a supermodel, actress, TV presenter, fashion designer, television producer, and singer was born on the first of June, 1973, in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany.

Until the age of 18, when she won a televised modelling contest hosted by Thomas Gottschalk, Heidi Klum had been a "normal" girl. After she had finished school, Klum accepted the modelling contrat she had won and worked fleetingly as a model touring Europe before moving permanently to the USA. There she carried out modelling jobs with little success, but she didn't falter under the pressure of not making it immediately.

Finally, her time came. In 1998 she appeared on the cover of the "Sports Illustrated Swimsuit" and she has been in the limelight ever since.

First of all, Klum tried acting out an appeared on screen in the 1998 feature film "54" , the comedy "Blow Dry", the ABC hit sitcom "Spin City", "Sex and the City", "The Webber Show" and "Malcolm in the Middle."

Then, she hosted her own reality TV show "Project Runway." The show was a contest for 12 would-be fashion designers to win a contract as the clothes designer for "Banana Republic." This show was nominated for an Emmy.

More recent, she is hosting the show "Germany's Next Top Model" where 17 budding models are fighting to win a modelling contract with IMG. Klum is also the face of numberless companies like McDonald's or Birkenstock.

Finally, let me finish the biography of this amazingly beautiful woman with a quote of hers:

"I'm very lucky. I get a lot of roles because of my name as a model and I probably wouldn't have got them without it. You have to make the best of your situation."



Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi_Klum
(her biography)

http://www.superiorpics.com/heidi_klum/
(biography+pics)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany%27s_Next_Top_Model
(about Germany's Next Top Model)

famous people

(Sorry, I needed to publish it again because the first time around I've published it too soon, so this is the end version)

Ruth Barbara Rendell was born on seventh February 1930 in London to a family of teachers.

After high school she worked as a journalist for Essex newspapers. In 1964 her first mystery novel featuring the enduring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford "From Doon With Death" was published.

Parallely, she started to write her psychological crime novels, exploring the dark sides of the human nature, like in the novel "Live Flesh"which was adapted for film by Pedro Almodovar.

Her third strand of writing is published under the pseudonym Barabara Vine. The style of these novels is akin to her psychological crime novels yet barely any crime is committed in them.

Ruth Rendell is credited for her elegant writing style, her sharp insights into the human mind and her convincing plots. She is believed to have upgraded the traditional whodunnit into a why dunnit. Several of her works were adapted for film and television. Since she has started writing in the 1960s, she has won innumerable awards like the Sunday Times Literary Award.

Apart from being a prodigious writer, she has also been a member of the House of Lords as a life peer, who is campaining against slavery, torture and female genital mutilation, since 1997.

My source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Rendell (biography and bibliography)

Other absorbing sites on Ruth Rendell:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/04/11/barendell11.xml&page=7

(a first-class transcript of an interview with the strict vegeterian Ruth Rendell)

http://wiredforbooks.org/ruthrendell/

(an compelling audio interview with Ruth Rendell about her writing on CBS Radio, New York)

famous people

Joanne Rowling is an English writer, best known under her pen name J.K. Rowling and for creating Harry Potter, a seemingly ordinary boy who discovers that he is a wizard.

She was born in Yate, South Gloucestershire, on 31 July 1965.

After studying French and Classics at the University of Exeter , she moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International. During this period, while she was on a four-hour delayed-train trip between Manchester and London, she had the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry and began to write immediatelly.

Rowling then moved to Portugal to teach English. Once there, she found herself a man, married and gave birth to a daughter. Unfortunately, the marriage was not an untroubled one and she divorced from her husband and settled down in Edinburgh. Unemployed and living from the dole, she completed the first Harry Potter novel there.


Only then did the difficult part of her journey begin. The book was handed down from publisher to publisher until Bloomsbury decided to take it not before warning Rowling that she cannot make a living out of writing children's books. How wrong they were...

In June 1997, Bloomsbury published Philosopher’s Stone with an initial print run of only one-thousand copies, five-hundred of which were distributed to libraries. Today, such copies are each valued at between £16,000 and £25,000.

To date, six of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter series, one for each of Harry’s school years, have already been published and all have broken sales records. The last three volumes in the series have been the fastest-selling books in history.

Joane Rowling's fortune today is estimated to be just over 1 billion dollars, making her the second richest female entertainer in the world. Moreover, she is the first person to become an US-dollar billionaire by writing books.

If you wish to know more, visit:
http://www.jkrowling.com/

and if you wish to read an interview with her, take a look at:
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/1999/03/cov_31featureb.html

famous people

Joscelyn Eve Stoker , best known by her stage name Joss Stone, is a BRIT Award- and Grammy Award-winning English soul, R&B, and blues singer, songwriter, and occasional actress who has sold over nine million albums worldwide.

In her early years she listened to a wide variety of music performed by such artists as Dusty Springfield and Aretha Franklin.

In 2001, at the age of fourteen, she appeared on the BBC Television's talent show Star for a Night singing Donna Summer's 1979 "On the Radio". She told MTV News, "I kind of clicked into soul music more than anything else because of the vocals. You've got to have good vocals to sing soul music and I always liked it ever since I was little".

In 2002, she decided to back her ability by flying out from England for an audition in New York City with S-Curve CEO Steve Greenberg. She also signed a global music publishing deal with BMG Music Publishing in the UK.
Since then, she has performed with such artists as Blondie and Gladys Knight, and she has catapluted herself in the league of the top singers of the 21. century.

To find out more about this artist, visit:

http://www.jossstone.co.uk/

famous people

Chloë Hanslip is a 19-year-old British violin virtuoso.

She started to play the violin when she was five. By the time she was ten, she had played at major concert halls all over Europe and North America.

Chloë was only 13 when she recorded her first CD for Warner Classics UK- the youngest artist ever to be signed to that record label.

Apart from being a violin prodigy, she is also fluent in German, Italian and Spanish. She has even been offered a place at Oxford which she hasn't taken up because the violin is her first love.

You can find out more about this accomplished young artist, whose mission it is to make classical music more appealing to the young, on:

www.chloehanslip.com

famous people

"She doesn't give a shit what people say about her as long as they say it", someone once wrote about the Greek-born author Arianna Huffington.

At the moment, though, she is the one who is doing the talking. Her political blog The Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/) set up in May 2005, is one of the most influential in America.

Born Arianna Stassinopoulos on 15 July 1950 in Athens, Huffington says she was a shy youngster. This did not stop her studying in Cambridge, however, even though she spoke little English.

In 1974, Huffington wrote the first of 11 books, The Female Woman, on the role of women in society. Six years later she moved to the US.

Within a few months, using what Vanity Fair calls her "dazzling intelligence", she began calling Henry Kissinger and the Reagans her friends. She later met and married millionaire Michael Huffington (picture left), with whom she has two daughters.

When her husband ran as a Republican for a seat in the US House of Representatives in 1992, she supported him. In the late 1990s, however, she switched her loyalties to the Democrats.

In 2003, she campaigned against Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger for the post of governor in California.

famous people

Sandra Oh's face has been on our screens a lot recently. Perhaps you saw her in the comedy Sideways, in which she played a single mother working in a Californian winery.

Or maybe you enjoy watching the television series Grey's Anatomy, where Oh has a main role as Dr Cristina Yang.

Sandra Oh is a daugther of Korean immigrants and was born in Ottawa. She began acting at the age of 10. By the age of 15 she was working on television, in the theatre and advertising. Oh has received a number of awards over the years for her acting. In 1993, she was nominated for a Gemini (if you wish to find out more about Canada's Emmy, visit http://www.geminiawards.ca/)
for her performance in the TV movie The Diary of Evelyn Lau. One year later, Oh received a Genie ( if you wish to know more about Canada's Oscar, look at http://www.academy.ca/)
for playing the role of a young Chinese-Canadian in Double Happiness.

Since 1996 she has been living in Los Angeles, so as to boost her career. She said about her move:

" I wish I could stay in Canada, [but] there is just not enough for me to do.... I'm not going to sit there, waiting around, being rejected and frustrated that there are no stories for me to tell."

famous people

Damien Hirst is one of Britain's most successful living artists. A member of a group known as the Young British Artists (if you wish to find out more about them, take a look at http://www.answers.com/topic/young-british-artists)

he attracted attention in the late 1980s with his shocking installations and wild lifestyle. Much of his work is about death and decay. In 1990, he created the installation A thousand years, which showed insects and worms feeding off the head of a dead cow in a glass case. Born in Bristol on 7 June 1965, Hirst left school with few qualifications. He won a place at Goldsmith College for an art course on his second try. His phenomenal success in the past 20 years has, in part, been the result of support from the British art collector Charles Saatchi. You can read his biography at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2000/newsmakers/2124645.stm

In 2000, Saatchi paid one million pounds for one of Hirst's sculptures. Hirst, who is married with two sons, lives in Devon. He is currently working on what will probably be the most expensive piece of art ever created: a skull in platinum set with 8,500 diamonds. "I want people to see it and be astounded," he said.

Here is one of his installations for you to ponder on. By the way, it is called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991).

famous people

As a way of improving our language skills and general knowledge, I thought about presenting a famous person to you each week. (the idea came to me thanks to the mag Spotlight, which is just great for language learners, where they do the same thing and I just adapted it) But not people like Britney Spears, who are only famous because of drugs and boyfriends. I wish to present to you celebrities that have made the world a better place for a reason whatsoever. This week I'm going to tell you something about Martha Stewart:

Martha Stewart has made a career of giving advice to people. She is renowned as a lifestyle guru, cookbook author, magazine editor, TV presenter and head of a million-dollar business empire. She was born in 1941 in New Jersey. In the beginning of her career she was a stockbroker. When she and her husband bought and renovated an old house in Connecticut, she began to realize her talent for home decorating. In 1976, Stewart started her own catering company. A guest at one of her parties, a publisher, was so impressed by the food that he asked her to write a cookery book ("Entertaining"), which became a bestseller. Several more books followed. Then came the year 2002 and Stewart became infamous because she was sent to prison for five months for insider trading. Today, Martha Stewarts' name is still one most Americans turn to when looking for tips to do their home up.