Jack Lemmon
Jack Lemmon, actor, was born as John Uhler Lemmon III on Feb. 8, 1925 in Boston, MA. He attended prep schools before Harvard, where he was in the Dramatic Club. He was a Navy ensign during World War II.
After the War ended, he played piano in a tavern, played roles on radio and on and off Broadway. His first movie was in 1954. And in 1955 he won "Best Supporting Actor" for his role as Ensign Pulver in "Mister Roberts". He also received nominations in for "Some Like It Hot" (1959), "The Apartment" (1960), "Days of Wine and Roses" (1962), "The China Syndrome" (1979), "Tribute" (1980) and "Missing" (1982).
Jack Lemmon won the Best Actor Oscar for "Save The Tiger" (1973). In 1988 he received the Life Achievement Award of the American Film Institute.
In 1958 Jack Lemmon co-starred in the Western movie, "Cowboy". And in 1993 he was the narrator of "The Wild West," a TVmini-series documentary about the American West.
Jack Lemmon died on June 27, 2001 from complications related to cancer.
CLICK HEREto view the complete filmography of Jack Lemmon.
Carolyn B. Leonard
Carolyn B. Leonard has been earning her living as a writer since 1980. She began as a stringer for the state-wide DAILY OKLAHOMAN, writing Sunday features and covering spot news events. Then she became the editor of a rural weekly newspaper, the award-winning Harper County Journal for several years. She continued to freelance for magazines and other newspapers.
Then in 1988 she moved to Oklahoma City to start a second career as an editor with a government agency. She attended night classes to further her writing projects.
She began a third career as a small press publisher when she established "Sage Press," which enabled local poets to have their books published at a low investment. Two years in a row the Sage Press entries claimed the "Best Published Book of Poetry" award in the state writer's competition.
Ms. Leonard took early retirement from the government when her newsletter claimed the "Overall Best In the Nation" award in 1995. She then took a part-time job at the state capitol editing and proofing legislative bills for the governor's signature. She says this experience taught her more about the legislative process than she could have learned any other way. She now enjoys writing freelancing at home, and is working on a non-fiction book about the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma.
She is a member and past president of the Writers of the Purple Sage. She is a member of the Oklahoma City Writers, Inc., Central State Writers Institute, and the Oklahoma Writers Federation.
Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard was born on Oct. 11, 1925 in New Orleans, La. He and his parents settled in Detroit in 1935. He acquired the nickname "Dutch" in high school. He served with the Navy Seabees in the South Pacific during World War II, then he received went to the University of Detroit, finally graduating in 1950. He worked for an advertising agency in Detroit and wrote fiction on the side. He sold his first Western short story in 1951 to Argosy. That success was followed by many sales to such pulp magazines as Zane Grey's Western and Dime Western. Two such short stories were sold to Hollywood and became movies--"3:10 to Yuma" (Columbia, 1957), starring Glenn Ford and Van heflin; and "The Tall T" (Columbia, 1957), starring Randolph Scott.In 1961 Elmore Leonard quit his advertising job to become a full-time fiction writer, but had to resort to writing advertising copy on a freelance basis until Twentieth Century-Fox paid him $10,000 for the rights to Hombre and turned it into a 1967 movie starring Paul Newman. Leonard switched to contemporary fiction, next, and sold The Big Bounce to Fawcett Books and the movie rights to Warner Brothers. Both the book and the movie (starring Ryan O'Neal and Leigh Taylor-Young) came out in 1969.
Elmore Leonard's book The Moonshine War (Doubleday, 1969) was turned into a movie by the same name by MGM in 1970. Then, returning to Westerns, he sold Valdez Is Coming to Gold Medal (1970) and sold the movie rights to United Artists. They gave Burt Lancaster the leading role in the 1970 movie. His book Mr. Majestyk (Dell) was made into a 1974 United Artists firm starring Charles Bronson. Other books include Fifty-Two Pickup (Dell, 1974), Unknown Man No. 89 (Delacorte, 1977), City Primeval (Arbor House, 1980), Split Images (Arbor House, 1982), Cat Chaser (Arbor House, 1982), Stick (Arbor House, 1983)--a Book-of-the-Month alternate selection, Glitz (Arbor House, 1985), Gunsights (Bantam, 1985), Last Stand at Saber River (Bantam,1985), Law at Randado (Thorndike Press, 1986), Double Dutch Treat (Arbor House, 1986), and Bandit.
Newsweek magazine called Elmore Leonard "the greatest crime writer in America".
Craig Lesley
Craig Lesley received his B.A. in English at Whitman College (Walla Walla, Wash.) in 1967, his M.A. in English at the University of Kansas in 1970, and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts in 1980. He and his wife have two daughters. He has taught English at Northwestern Michigan College (170-71), and taught English and Creative Writing at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City, Oregon (1971-84, 1985-88). He was a Writer-In-Residence at Lewis and Clark College in Portland (1984-85).
Craig Lesley is the author of Winterkill (Houghton Mifflin, 1984), which won both a Spur and the Medicine Pipe Bearer's Award from the WWA, and edited with Jill Landem, The Interior Country: Stories of the Modern West (Ohio University Press, 1987). His second novel, River Song (Houghton Mifflin), was published in 1989 and takes up where Winterkill left off.
Lesley's articles and short fiction have appeared in Seattle Review, The Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Valley Review, Northwest Review, Writers' Forum 5, 6 & 7, Dictionary of Literary Biography,and in New Students in Two-year Colleges. Lesley is a two-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award.
Joan Leslie
Joan Leslie, actress, ws born as Joan Agnes Theresa Sadie Brodel on Jan 26, 1925, in Detroit, Michigan. On stage before her third birthday, Joan made her professional debut at nine. She was singing and dancing with her older sisters as "The Three Brodels". In 1936 she went to Hollywood after an MGM talent scout caught the sisters in a New York nightclub.
Joan Leslie was a fan favorite during her tenure at Warner Bros. from 1941to 1946. She was especially popular with servicemen . She was billed as Joan Brodel, amd the youngster continued to play child roles and bits for various studios through 1940. That's when Warner Bros. signed her to a long-term contract.
Her big break came when Warners cast her in a key role in an upcoming Humphrey Bogart film. Now billed as "Joan Leslie," the newcomer debuted sensationally in the gangster classic "High Sierra." In 1943, she became Fred Astaire's youngest dance partner, celebrating her 18th birthday on the set of "The Sky's the Limit."
Joan Leigh emerged from her teens with an impressive list of screen credits. However, Warner Bros. began to put Joan in second-rate pictures. In 1946, Joan Leslie sought and obtained her release from her studio commitment.
Joan was finding it difficult to land first-rate roles in the first-rate pictures in leaner postwar Hollywood. Years later, Joan speculated that she was being blacklisted for breaking with Warners. She would never again enjoy the tremendous popular success she had while under contract to a major Hollywood studio.
Married in 1950 to Dr. William Caldwell, Joan made her last movie for theatrical release in 1957 (The Revolt of Mamie Stover, made at Twentieth Century-Fox).
Joan Leslie's film career started with "Camille" in 1937 and ended with "Fire in the Dark" (1991, TV).
She appeared in nearly 50 movies, including such Westerns as "High Sierra" (1941), "The Wagons Roll at Night" (1941), "Northwest Stampede" (1948), "Man in the Saddle" (1951), "The Woman They Almost Lynched" (1953) and "Jubilee Trail" (1954).
CLICK HERE to view the complete filmography of Joan Leslie.
Len Levinson
Len Levinson has over 60 novels to his credit, ranging from mystery to romance and most everything in between. His first novel was Private Sessions (Midwood, 1974), using the name "March Hastings". He is the author of two Western novels for Charter, Apache Dawn (1989) and Gold Town (1989), both under the name of "Clay Dawson".Len Levinson's other pen names have included Bruno Rossi, Robert Novak, Nelson DeMille, Leonard Jordan, Lee Chang, Philip Rawls, Nicholas Brady, Glen Chase, Cynthia Wilkerson, Richard Gallagher, Philip Kirk, Gordon Davis, J. Farragut Jones, Jonathan Scofield, Richard Hale Curtis, and 16 books for Jove under the name of John Mackie.
Preston Lewis
Preston Lewis was born on May 22, 1950, in Abilene, TX. He received his B.A. in journalism from Baylor University in 1972, and he earned his M.A. in 1975 from Ohio State University, where he was a Kiplinger Fellow of Public Affairs Reporting.He spent 1970-76 as a newspaper reporter (The Orange (Tx) Leader, The Waco (Tx) News-Tribune, The Abilene (Tx) Reporter-News, Lubbock (Tx) Avalanche-Journal). And the next four years he was the director of public affairs for Water, Inc.
Then in 1980 he began his present employment with Texas Tech University. From 1980 to 1987 he was the manager of the Tech news bureau, then he became assistant director of the news bureau of the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center.He has been a member of Western Writers of America since 1971. He became President of WWA in 1996, serving to 1998.(See his photo and a profile of him by Dale Walker in the Feb., 1996 issue of Roundup Magazine).
Lewis has written for such magazines as Old West, Livestock Weekly, The Cattleman, Columbia Journalism Review, The Quill, Baptist Standard, Baylor Line, Texas Techsan, Republic Scene, Sundancer, Flightime, College Store Journal, The Roundup Quarterly and True West.
His novels number some 15 and include Hard Texas Winter (Tower Publications, 1981), New Mexico Showdown (using the pen name of Will Camp; Pinnacle, 1989) and The Lady and Doc Holiday (Eakin Press/Diamond Books Imprint, 1989). His book, The Lady and Doc Holliday (Diamond Books, Eakin Publications), resulted in a nice photo and article in the Dallas Morning News on Jan. 7, 1990. His "Will Camp" series for Harper and Row now includes Tarnished Badge, Santa Fe Run, Choctaw Trail, Vigilante Justice, Blood Saga, Escape from Silverton and Lone Survivor.
In addition, Preston Lewis has written three of the "Bonanza" series of novels for Bantam: Journey of the Horse, The Money Hole, and The Trail to Timberline. He wrote as "Dale Colter" in Trail of Death. He is doing a series of "Memoirs of H.H. Lomax" for Bantam, the first three of which were The Demise of Billy the Kid, The Redemption of Jesse James, and Mix-up at the O.K. Corral.
Francois Leydet
Francois Leydet is the author of The Coyote: Defiant Songdog of the West (University of Oklahoma Press, 1981).
Dr. Margot Liberty
Dr. Margot Liberty is the author with John Stands-In-Timber of Cheyenne Memories (Yale University Press, 1967), and of American Indian Intellectual (West Publishing, 1970). With Raymond Wood, she wrote Anthropology on the Great Plains (University of Nebraska Pres, 1979).Dr. Margot Liberty is the curator of Trail End Historic Center in Sheridan, Wyoming.
Clay Lindley
Clay Lindley graduated from high school at Silver City, N.M. Diagnosed with leukemia in 1965, Lindley was among the first pediatric cancer patients cured of lukemia with innovative chemotherapy pioneered at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Tx. He received his bachelor's dgree in 1981 from Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas. And it was there, during his college days, that he worked on several ranches in the area. Later, he went to work for the Department of Agriculture as a Range Conservationist.A gifted entertainer and musician, he writes and performs cowboy poetry and songs. He is perhaps most famous for his "The Cowboy Nerd" poem, one of ten in a booklet titled, "The Cowboy Nerd and Other Favorites". He and Gil Prather often perform together as "The Jose Brothers".
Lucy Liu
Lucy Liu starred with Jackie Chan in the 2000 release movie, "Shanghai Noon" (a play on the classic cowboy movie, "High Noon").
This listing is far from complete and may contain errors.
Therefore, all Western entertainers and/or their agents
are requested to submit recommended changes by
contacting Stan Paregien through his e-mail address.
As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, O God.
--- Bible: Psalm 42:1
© 2003 by Stan Paregien, Sr.