Portal:Biography

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The Biography Portal

Biography (from the Greek words bios (βιος), meaning 'life', and graphein, meaning 'to write') is a genre of literature or film which presents a relatively full account of the most interesting and important events of a notable person's life. While a biography may focus on a fictional person, the term usually refers to non-fiction works. As opposed to summaries of people's lives, such as profiles or curriculum vitae, a biography is a continuous narrative which interprets and explains the person's character, personality, and social context.

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Featured biography

A. E. J. Collins was a cricketer and soldier, most famous for his achievement, as a schoolboy, of the highest-ever recorded score in cricket, 628 not out, over four afternoons in June 1899. Collins' record-making innings drew a large crowd and increasing media interest: spectators at the Old Cliftonian match being played nearby were drawn away to watch a junior school house cricket match. Collins joined the British Army in 1902. He studied at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, before becoming an officer in the Royal Engineers. He served in France during World War I, where he was killed in action in 1914.

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Selected portrait

Buzz Aldrin (born January 20, 1930 as Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr.) is an American pilot and astronaut. He was the Lunar Module Pilot for the Apollo 11 mission, the first lunar landing. He was the second person to set foot on the Moon and was the second human ever to step on an extraterrestrial world. Here, he walks on the surface of the Moon near the leg of the Lunar Module. (read more...)

Photograph taken by Neil A. Armstrong, mission commander, with a 70mm lunar surface camera. Source:NASA

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Did you know...

• ...that former child actor Richard Eyer, who played the boy who runs "afowl" of the goose in William Wyler's 1956 film Friendly Persuasion, is now an elementary school teacher in Bishop, California?
• ...that 1985 NCAA hurdling champion Thomas Wilcher won the Michigan High School Athletic Association team track & field championship three consecutive times, both as an athlete and a coach?
• ...that after winning three medals at the 1992 Summer Olympics as a 16-year-old, Anita Nall retired from competitive swimming in 2000 due to chronic fatigue syndrome?

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WikiProjects

See also: Biographies of living persons

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On this day - September 3

Births

• 1499 - Diane de Poitiers, (pictured) mistress of Henri II of France (d. 1566)
• 1810 - Paul Kane, Canadian painter (d. 1871)
• 1869 - Fritz Pregl, Slovenian chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1930)
• 1875 - Ferdinand Porsche, Austrian automotive engineer (d. 1951)
• 1899 - Frank Macfarlane Burnet, Australian biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 1985)
• 1913 - Alan Ladd, American actor (d. 1964)
• 1942 - Al Jardine, American musician (the Beach Boys)
• 1955 - Steve Jones, English musician (Sex Pistols)
• 1964 - Adam Curry, Internet entrepreneur
• 1965 - Charlie Sheen, American actor
• 1970 - Gareth Southgate, English footballer
• 1981 - Fearne Cotton, British television presenter

Deaths

• 1658 - Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England (b. 1599)
• 1883 - Ivan Turgenev, Russian author (b. 1818)
• 1948 - Edvard Beneš, President of Czechoslovakia (b. 1884)
• 1962 - E. E. Cummings, American poet (b. 1894)
• 1991 - Frank Capra, American film director (b. 1897)
• 2005 - William Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States (b. 1924)

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