Carol Burnett has something in common with Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg, Neil Simon and Tina Fey. They have all been recipients of the Mark Twain Prize for American humor, awarded annually since 1998 at an event held at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.. That may seem odd, since she was born in Texas in 1933 to parents who were both alcoholics. Her parents divorced wh

Elizabeth Taylor was born in February 1932 in a planned community called Hampstead Garden Suburb, in northwest London. Her parents were from Kansas. Her father was an art dealer who got into the business through a wealthy relative. He moved first to New York, where in 1926 he married a young actress, also from Kansas, by the name of Sara Sothern. Then a few years later he was transferred to work i

His parents had a small farm on  Cat Island  in the Bahamas. They traveled around the Caribbean selling tomatoes and other produce from their gardens. In February 1927 they were in Miami. The mother, Evelyn, was seven months pregnant, when she suddenly and unexpectedly went into labor. The boy was born two months premature. He was not expected to survive, but his parents stayed on in Miami for thr

He was born on August 11, 1921, in Ithaca, NY, while his father was attending Cornell University to earn a master’s degree in agriculture. His father went on to become a professor at Alabama A&M, and hold other positions at several southern universities. He was the grandson of slaves — both his grandparents on his father’s side had been slaves who had been fathered by white slave owners. He a

He was born in Pittsburgh in August 1928. He did not have an easy childhood. His parents had immigrated from Ukraine — his father in 1914 and his mother following later in 1921 — and his father worked in the Pennsylvania coal mines. The family lived in a rowhouse in a working class section of the city. As a child he apparently contracted scarlet fever, which caused his skin to be blotchy for the