People (Births)

• 1968 – Cuba Gooding, Jr., American actor and producer.

People (Deaths)

• 2011 – Pete Postlethwaite, English actor (b. 1946).

Cuba Gooding Jr.

Cuba Mark Gooding Jr. (born 02 January 1968) is an American actor. He is the recipient of an Academy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and an Emmy nomination.

After his breakthrough role as Tre Styles in Boyz n the Hood (1991), he appeared in A Few Good Men (1992), The Tuskegee Airmen (1995), Outbreak (1995), and Jerry Maguire (1996), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

He gained later fame for his roles in Men of Honour (2000) as Carl Brashear, and in Michael Bay’s World War II epic Pearl Harbour (2001) as Doris Miller. His other films include As Good as It Gets (1997), What Dreams May Come (1998), Rat Race (2001), The Fighting Temptations (2003), American Gangster (2007), Gifted Hands (2009), Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013), and Selma (2014) as civil rights attorney Fred Gray. He also provided the voice of Buck the Horse in the animated feature film Home on the Range (2004).

In 2016, he portrayed O.J. Simpson in the FX drama series The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, receiving a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie, and co-starred in the sixth season of the FX anthology series American Horror Story, subtitled Roanoke.

Pete Postlethwaite

Peter William Postlethwaite, OBE (07 February 1946 to 02 January 2011) was an English character actor.

After minor television appearances, including in The Professionals, his first major success arose through the British autobiographical film Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). He had a transatlantic breakthrough when he portrayed David in Alien 3 (1992), and his international reputation was further solidified when he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for In the Name of the Father. Following this role, he portrayed the mysterious lawyer Mr. Kobayashi in The Usual Suspects, and went on to appear in a wide variety of films.

On television, Postlethwaite played Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill on Sharpe. He trained as a teacher and taught drama before training as an actor. Director Steven Spielberg called him “the best actor in the world” after working with him on The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997). He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2004 New Year Honours list. Less than one month after his death, he was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance in Ben Affleck’s The Town (2010).