People (Births)

• 1936 – Burt Reynolds, American actor and director (d. 2018)
• 1954 – Wesley Strick, American director and screenwriter
• 1971 – Damian Lewis, English actor

People (Deaths)

• 1948 – Sergei Eisenstein, Russian director and screenwriter (b. 1898)

Burt Reynolds

Burton Leon Reynolds Jr. (11 February 1936 to 06 September 2018) was an American actor, considered a sex symbol and icon of 1970s American popular culture.

Reynolds made his film debut in the low budget Angel Baby (1961), billed fourth. He followed it with a role in a war film, Armoured Command (1961).

Reynolds had been offered a lead role in M*A*S*H (1970), but turned it down.

Albert R. Broccoli asked Reynolds to take over the role of James Bond from Sean Connery, but he turned that role down, saying, “An American can’t play James Bond. It just can’t be done.”

He had supporting roles in Universal Soldier II: Brothers in Arms (1998) and Universal Soldier III: Unfinished Business (1998).

Wesley Strick

Wesley Strick (born 11 February 1954) is an American screenwriter who has written such films as Arachnophobia, Batman Returns and Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear. Since 2015, Strick has worked as a writer/executive producer on The Man in the High Castle (2015-2019).

Damian Lewis

Damian Watcyn Lewis CBE (born 11 February 1971) is an English actor, presenter and producer. He is best known for portraying US Army Major Richard Winters in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (2001), which earned him a Golden Globe nomination. He also portrayed US Marine Gunnery Sergeant Nicholas Brody in the Showtime series Homeland, which earned him a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award. His performance as Henry VIII of England in Wolf Hall earned him his third Primetime Emmy nomination and fourth Golden Globe nomination. He portrayed Bobby Axelrod in the Showtime series Billions in the first five seasons and appeared in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) as actor Steve McQueen.

Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (Russian: Сергей Михайлович Эйзенштейн, romanized: Sergey Mikhaylovich Eyzenshteyn; 22 January [O.S. 10 January] 1898 to 11 February 1948) was a Soviet film director, screenwriter, film editor and film theorist. He was a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage. He is noted in particular for his silent films Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), as well as the historical epics Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944, 1958). In its 2012 decennial poll, the magazine Sight & Sound named his Battleship Potemkin the 11th-greatest film of all time.

In 1918, he left school and joined the Red Army to serve in the Russian Revolution, although his father Mikhail supported the opposite side. This brought his father to Germany after the defeat of the Tsarist government, and Sergei to Petrograd, Vologda, and Dvinsk. In 1920, Sergei was transferred to a command position in Minsk, after success providing propaganda for the October Revolution.