Famke Beumer was born November 5, 1965 in Amstelveen, part of metropolitan Amsterdam in North Holland. Both her sisters – one older, one younger – are blonde haired and blue eyed, and as a hazel eyed brunette who would grow to 5’11” in height, Beumer had little aspiration to enter the performing arts. As a [...]

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Viggo Mortensen was born October 20, 1958 in Manhattan. His Danish father had met his American mother skiing in Norway, where she worked in the U.S. Embassy. Mortensen spent much of his childhood in Argentina, where his father found work managing a ranch. His parents divorced when he was 11 and Mortensen returned to upstate [...]

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In case you’ve been too distracted clockin’ those big bills, here are the first five installments of the United Federation of Character Actors, a bi-monthly feature at This Distracted Globe which profiles a character actor on the eve of his or her birthday. Click on their names to backtrack to the original article.

Joan Allen, Manhunter. [...]

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Isaac Liev Schreiber was born October 4, 1967. His father was a theater actor, his mother a “painter-slash-political activist.” Divorced by the time Schreiber was 5 years old, he grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Schreiber recalls, “I took a kind of beating. I was one of those ‘Can I play?’ kids, [...]

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