Marilyn Monroe

Billie Holiday

She was born in Baltimore in 1915. Her real name was Eleanora Fagan. Her mother worked as a maid. In 1927 Eleanora and her mother moved to New York. Eleanora started singing in night Clubs in Harlem to make some money. She was an excellent blues and jazz singer. She was only 18 years old when she made her first record in 1933. After that, she recorded more than 200 songs and became very famous. She did not get much money from her records and worked as a night club singer all her life. In1954 she went on a tour to Europe, where she gave ten concerts in Germany. She died in New York in 1959.

Ernest Hemingway

He was born in Illinois in 1899. He had five brothers and sisters. During the First World War he was an ambulance driver in Italy. After the war he returned to the USA. He got married for the first time in 1921. He became a journalist and a writer. He wrote six novels and a lot of short stories. He married four times and travelled a lot in Europe and Africa. He lived in Paris and other European cities. He was a war correspondent in Spain during the Civil War. He was in Spain from 1936 to 1939. In 1954 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He spent the last years of his life in Cuba and on Key West, an island in Florida. He died in Indiana in 1961.

Humphrey Bogart

He was born in New York in 1899. He started to work as an office boy for a theatre production company in 1918. Two years later he became a manager and then an actor. He made his first film in 1922. He made more than 80 films. His best film was Casablanca (1942). He married four times. His last wife was Lauren Bacall, a famous actress. They had two children. He died of cancer in 1957.

Andy Warhol

He was born in Forest City in Pennsylvania in 1928. In 1945 he went to Pittsburgh and studied art. Four years later he found a job as a graphic designer in New York. He became famous as a pop artist in the 1960s. He painted ordinary objects (soup cans, Coca Cola and ketchup bottles, and laundry detergent boxes). He also made portraits of film stars (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor) and musicians (Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger). In 1963 he opened a film studio and became a film producer. He made almost 80 films. In 1968 a woman shot him, but did not kill him. In the following years, he started a magazine (1969), wrote two books about himself and his art (1975 and 1980), made several video clips (1980) and, of course, 50 painted pictures. He died in New York in 1987.

John Lennon

He was born in Liverpool in 1940. He started a band when he was fifteen. In 1959 he formed The Beatles with Paul McCartney. They made their first record in 1962. After that they made about 30 more records and three films. In1969 he married Yoko Ono, a Japanese artist. She was his second wife. He left The Beatles in 1970 and started to work with Yoko. They made six albums together. In 1980 a 25-year-old fan shot him in front of his apartment in New York.

Elvis Presley

He was born in Mississippi in 1935. His father was a truck driver. In 1953 he recorded his first song for $4 at a studio in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1954 he recorded three more songs. A disc jockey in Memphis played his songs on the radio and one became a hit. In 1955 when he got a record contract and a lot of money, he bought his mother a pink Cadillac. He built his dream house in Memphis. It was called "Graceland". He met his wife, Priscilla, in 1959 when he was in the army in Germany. They got married in 1967 in Las Vegas. In 1968 their daughter, Lisa Marie, was born. He died of a heart attack at "Graceland" in 1977.

Agatha Christie

She was an English writer. She was born in Torquay in 1890. She got married in 1916. She wrote hundreds of detective novels. She invented the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and the village spinster Miss Marple. In 1926 she had an argument with her husband and disappeared for a week. The police looked for her because they thought she was dead. She divorced her first husband in 1928 and got married again in 1930. She died in Wallingford, Oxfordshire in 1976.