December 4 Birthday Wishes

Alex North [1910 - 1991]
Ned Romero [1926 - ]
Victor French [1934 - 1989]
Jeff Bridges [1949 - ]

Alex North was an acclaimed film composer, one of only 2 to win the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Lifetime Achievement Award (The other being Ennio Morricone). He was one of the first modernist composers, whose score would contain themes, one of which was turned into the song Unchained Melody. He also wrote the jazz based score for A Streetcar Named Desire, as well as scores for Viva Zapata, Cleopatra (1963), The Misfits, Spartacus, The Rainmaker, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. he composed a score for 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was discarded by Stanly Kubrick in favor of classical pieces from Johann Strauss. He then rework the unused music for the films Shoes of the Fisherman, Shanks, and Dragonslayer.

Ned Romero was an opera singer as well as an actor, and his first TV appearance was doing an opera skit on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Some of his TV appearances include Death Valley Days, Ironside, Emergency, The Six Million Dollar Man, Kung Fu, Police Woman, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Walker: Texas Ranger. Partially of Native American descent, he earned an Emmy nomination for the role of Chief Joseph in I Will Fight No More Forever.

Victor French made dozens of appearances in shows like Gunsmoke, Get Smart, Bonanza, and The Waltons, and made a name for himself as Isiah Edwards on Little House on the Prairie, Chief Roy Mobey on the sitcom Carter Country, and again with his friend Michael Landon on Highway To Heaven. He was a heavy smoker, and died of lung cancer at the age of 54, two years before his friend Landon would pass away from pancreatic cancer at the age of 54.

Jeff Bridges, the son of Lloyd Bridges and brother of Beau Bridges, made his first screen appearance at the age of 4 months in 1950's The Company She Keeps. He and Beau made appearances on Se Hunt and the Lloyd Bridges Show, and then to long film career in which he earned 6 Oscar nominations (for The Last Picture Show, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Starman, The Contender, Crazy Heart, and True Grit (2010)), and won the Best Actor statue for Crazy Heart.

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Horst Buchholz (1933-2003) was born in Berlin during the rise of the Third Reich, and during the 1940s was evacuated from Germany, and grew up in foster care in Czechoslovakia, and returned to Berlin in the 1950s where he started his acting career. He made several films in Germany in the '50s, and then went on to international stardom in The Magnificent Seven in 1960, and Fanny in 1961. Over the years he appeared in many foreign and American films and TV shows, including Raid on Entebbe, Logan's Run (TV series), Charlies Angels (TV series), Sahara, Aces: Iron Eagle III, and Life Is Beautiful. He died of pneumonia at the age of 69.