Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911)
American-Hungarian journalist and publisher, who created along with William Randolph Hearst a new and controversial type of journalism. Pulitzer saw himself as a crusader on the side of people and a spokesman for democracy. He supported labor, attacked trusts and monopolies, and revealed political corruption. When journalism was not a respectable way of earning one's living, Pulitzer was committed to raising the standards of the profession. Pulitzer was the founder of the Pulitzer Prizes. Today the most prestigious prize in journalism is named after him.
Tony Curtis (1925 - )
Tony Curtis is an American-Hungarian film actor. He is best known for light comic roles, especially as a musician on the run from gangsters in Some Like It Hot (1959) with Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe. He has also played serious dramatic roles, such as an escaped convict in The Defiant Ones (1958), which earned him an Academy Award nomination. Since 1949, he has appeared in more than 100 films and has made frequent television appearances. Curtis was born as Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx, New York, the son of Hungarian immigrants Helen Klein and Emanuel Schwartz.
Jerry Seinfield (1954 - )
Jerome Allen "Jerry" Seinfeld is an American-Hungarian comedian, actor and writer. He is often described as an observational comedian. He is best known for playing a semi-fictional version of himself in the situation comedy, Seinfeld, (1989-1998), which he co-created, helped write and, in the show's final two seasons, executive produced.
Seinfeld was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Kálmán, was of Hungarian Jewish background and owned a sign company, and his mother, Betty, is of Syrian Jewish descent.
Andrew Vajna (1944 - )
Andrew George Vajna (born Vajna András György) is a film producer who has emigrated from Hungary to the US in 1956. His first involvment in the film industry was the operation of movie theaters in the Far East. He founded a company with Mario Kassar called Carolco which went on to produce many blockbuster movies. He has done numerous films (frequently in association with Mario Kassar), including the Rambo movies, Die Hard with a Vengeance, and multiple Terminator movies and series.
Michael Curtiz (1886 - 1962)
Michael Curtiz was an Academy Award-winning Hungarian-American filmmaker. He directed at least 50 films in Europe and a further hundred in the United States, among the best-known being The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels with Dirty Faces, Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and White Christmas. He thrived in the heyday of the Warner Bros. studio in the 1930s and '40s.
Curtiz was born Manó Kertész Kaminer to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. He claimed to have been born December 24, 1886. Both the date and the year are open to doubt: he was fond of telling tall stories about his early years, including that he had run away from home to join the circus and that he had been a member of the Hungarian fencing team at the 1912 Olympic Games, but he seems to have had a conventional middle-class upbringing. He studied at the Royal Academy of Theater and Art, Budapest, before beginning his career as an actor and director as Mihály Kertész at the National Hungarian Theater in 1912.
Adolph Zukor (1873 - 1976)
Adolf Zukor was a film mogul and founder of Paramount Pictures.He was born in Ricse, Hungary, which was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
In 1912, Adolph Zukor established Famous Players in Famous Plays as the American distribution company for the French film production Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth starring Sarah Bernhardt. The following year he obtained the financial backing of the Frohman brothers, the powerful New York City theatre impresarios. Their primary goal was to bring noted stage actors to the screen and they created the Famous Players Film Company that produced The Prisoner of Zenda (1913). The studio evolved into Famous Players-Lasky and then Paramount Pictures, of which he served as president until 1936 when he was elevated to chairman of the board. He revolutionized the film industry by organizing production, distribution, and exhibition within a single company.
Zukor was also an accomplished director and producer. He retired from Paramount Pictures in 1959 and thereafter assumed Chairman Emeritus status, a position he held up until his death at the age of 103 in Los Angeles.
Alexander Korda (1893 - 1956)
Sir Alexander Korda was a Hungarian-born film director and producer. He was a leading figure in the British film industry, the founder of London Films and the owner of British Lion, a film distributing company.
Korda was born as Sándor László Kellner to a Jewish family in Pusztatúrpásztó in Hungary, where he worked as a journalist before going into films as a producer. He also worked in Vienna, Berlin, Paris and Hollywood, becoming director of United Artists. He worked closely with many artists on his films, including his Hungarian friend, painter and set designer Emile Lahner.
The first film Korda made in the United States, in 1927, was titled The Stolen Bride. By 1932 he made 16 more films in the U.S. The last one, Service for Ladies, was made in 1931 and released in 1932 after Korda had already relocated to London. In 1936 he became a British national.
Bela Lugosi (1882 - 1956)
Béla Lugosi was a Hungarian-born American actor of stage and screen, well known for playing Count Dracula in the Broadway play and subsequent film version. In the last years of his career he featured in several of Ed Wood's low budget films.
Lugosi, the youngest of four children, was born as Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in Lugos, at the time part of Austria–Hungary (now Lugoj, Romania), to Paula de Vojnich and István Blasko, a banker. Lugosi began acting on stage in several Shakespearean plays and in other major roles, and when appearing in Hungarian silent films he used the stage name Arisztid Olt. During World War I, he served as an infantry lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian Army.
Alanis Morisette (1974 - )
Alanis Nadine Morissette is a Canadian-Hungarian singer-songwriter, record producer and occasional actress. She has won eleven Juno Awards and seven Grammy Awards, and has sold over 60 million albums worldwide.
Alanis Morissette was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the daughter of Georgia Mary Ann Feuerstein, a Hungarian-born teacher, and Alan Richard Morissette, a French-Canadian high school principal.
Calvin Klein (1942 - )
Calvin Richard Klein is an American fashion designer. In 1968, he launched the company that would later become Calvin Klein Inc.
Born Richard Klein in The Bronx to Hungarian immigrants, he attended the High School of Industrial Art and matriculated, but never graduated, from New York's Fashion Institute of Technology, receiving an honorary Doctorate at the graduation ceremony in 2003. He did his apprenticeship in 1962 at an oldline cloak-and-suit manufacturer, and spent five years designing at other New York shops.
Gene Simmons (1949 - )
Gene Simmons is an Israeli-born American-Hungarian hard rock bass guitarist and vocalist. He is best known as "The Demon" his blood-spitting, fire-breathing, and tongue-wagging persona in the hard rock band Kiss, an act he co-founded in the early 1970s.
Simmons was born in Haifa, Israel, and emigrated to New York City at the age of eight, with his mother Florence Klein, a Hungarian immigrant and the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust.
Goldie Hawn (1945 - )
Goldie Jean Hawn is an American Academy Award-winning actress, director and producer. She is best known for starring in popular film comedies of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
Hawn was born Goldie Jean Hawn in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Laura Steinhoff, a jewelry shop and dance school owner, and Edward Rutledge Hawn, a band musician who played at major events in Washington. Hawn's mother was the daughter of immigrants from Hungary.
Jaime Lee Curtis (1958 - )
Jamie Lee Curtis is a two-time Golden Globe-winning, BAFTA-winning, and Emmy-nominated American film actress and an author of children's books. Although she was initially known as a "scream queen" because of her starring roles in many horror films early in her career such as Halloween, The Fog, Prom Night and Terror Train, Curtis has since compiled a body of work that covers many genres. Her 1998 book, Today I Feel Silly, and Other Moods That Make My Day, made the best-seller list in The New York Times.
Curtis was born in Los Angeles, California, the child of well-known actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Her paternal grandparents were immigrants from Hungary.
Joaquin Phoenix (1974 - )
Joaquin Rafael Phoenix formerly credited as Leaf Phoenix, is an award-winning American-Puerto Rican former film actor. He is from a family of performers and is the younger brother of late actor River Phoenix.
His father, John Lee Bottom, was from Fontana, California. His mother, Arlyn Phoenix Dunetz, was born in the Bronx, New York to a Hungarian family.
Uri Geller (1946 - )
Uri Geller (György Gellér) is an Israeli-British-Hungarian performer and celebrity who claimed to have psychic powers.
Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, to Jewish parents with Hungarian background. He was the only child of retired Army sergeant Itzhaak Geller and Manzy Freud. Geller says he is a relative of Sigmund Freud on his mother's side.
Paul Newman (1925 - 2008)
Paul Leonard Newman was an American actor, film director, entrepreneur, humanitarian, and auto racing enthusiast. He won numerous awards, including an Academy Award for his performance in the 1986 Martin Scorsese film The Color of Money and eight other nominations three Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Cannes Film Festival Award, an Emmy award, and many honorary awards. He also won several national championships as a driver in Sports Car Club of America road racing, and his race teams won several championships in open wheel IndyCar racing.
Newman was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the son of Theresa Fetzer and Arthur Samuel Newman, who ran a profitable sporting goods store Newman's father was the son of immigrants from Poland and Hungary. Newman's mother was born to a Slovak family in the former Austria–Hungary (now in Slovakia).
Emile Lahner (1893 - 1980)
Emile Lahner was a Hungarian born painter who moved to Paris in 1924 and became part of the School of Paris, a group of international artists working in Paris between 1900 and 1940.
Lahner was born in 1893 in the village of Nagyberezna in the Carpathian Mountains of Hungary. Lahner's mother died in childbirth and he became an orphan at the age of seven when his father was killed in an accident. Placed in the care of a bishop guardian, he was sent to boarding school to begin training as an engineer. Lahner abandoned his engineering career in 1921 and enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Budapest where he studied under the masters Janos Vaszary and Kochine, seminal figures in the Art Nouveau movement.
Victor Vasarely (1906 - 1997)
Victor Vasarely (Vásárhelyi Győző) was a Hungarian French artist whose work is generally seen aligned with Op-art. Zebra, created by Vasarely in the 1930s, is considered by some to be one of the earliest examples of Op-art. Vasarely died in Paris in 1997.
Vasarely was born in Pécs and grew up in Piešťany (then Pöstyén) and Budapest where in 1925 he took up medical studies at Budapest University. In 1927 he abandoned medicine to learn traditional academic painting at the private Podolini-Volkmann Academy. In 1928/1929, he enrolled at Sándor Bortnyik's műhely (lit. "workshop", in existence until 1938), then widely recognized as the center of Bauhaus studies in Budapest. Cash-strapped, the műhely could not offer all that the Bauhaus offered. Instead it concentrated on applied graphic art and typographical design.
Zsa Zsa Gabor (1917 - )
Zsa Zsa Gabor is a Hungarian-born American actress and socialite.
Zsa Zsa Gabor was born as Sári Gábor in Budapest the middle daughter of Vilmos Gábor, a soldier, and Jolie Gábor. Her sisters, Magda and Eva, also became actresses and socialites. Their mother, Jolie Tilleman, was of Jewish descent, and was related to Annette Tilleman, the wife of California politician Tom Lantos.
Rachel Hannah Weisz (1970 - )
Rachel Weisz is an Academy Award-winning English actress. She gained wide public recognition after her portrayal of Evelyn "Evy" Carnahan-O'Connell in the Hollywood films The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. In 2001, she starred opposite Hugh Grant in the hit About a Boy and continued to garner leading roles in Hollywood productions. Her performance in The Constant Gardener (2005) won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, along with other major motion picture awards.
Weisz was born in Westminster, England, and grew up in the Hampstead Garden Suburb. Her mother, Edith Ruth, is a Vienna-born Austrian teacher turned psychotherapist. Her father, George Weisz, is a Hungarian-born inventor whose family fled to England to escape Nazi persecution.
Sir Georg Solti (1912 – 1997)
Sir Solti was a Hungarian-British orchestral and operatic conductor. Solti was born György Stern in Budapest, his parents Moricz Stern and Teréz Rosenbaum. His cousin was László Moholy-Nagy, the painter and photographer and co-founder of the Bauhaus. His father Germanized György's name to Georg and changed his family name to Solti, to shield them from antisemitism.
Sir Georg Solti holds the record for having received the most Grammy awards. He personally won 31 Grammys, including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and is listed for 38 Grammys (6 went to the engineer and 1 to a soloist); he was nominated an additional 74 times before his death in 1997.
Emeric Pressburger (1902 – 1988)
Pressburger was an Oscar-winning Hungarian-British screenwriter, film director, and producer. He is known for his series of collaborations with Michael Powell.
Emeric Pressburger (Imre József Emmerich Pressburger) was born in Miskolc, Hungary. He was the only son of Kálmán Pressburger, estate manager, and his second wife, Kätherina Wichs. He studied mathematics and engineering at the Universities of Prague and Stuttgart before his father's death forced him to abandon his studies.
He began a career as a journalist. After working in Hungary and Germany he turned to screenwriting in the late 1920s, working for UFA in Berlin (having moved there in 1926). The rise of the Nazis forced him to flee to Paris, where he again worked as screenwriter, and then to London. He later said, "the worst things that happened to me were the political consequences of events beyond my control ... the best things were exactly the same."
Georgia Slowe (1966 - )
Georgia Slowe is an English actress. Georgia grew up in a traditional Jewish home as the daughter of two Jewish parents, Michael and Zsuzsanna. Her Hungarian-born mother, also known as Zsuzsi was hidden in a cellar during the Second World War after her parents were captured by Nazi soldiers. Georgia's grandmother, Litzy was murdered on the banks of the Danube, by being stripped, shot and pushed into a freezing lake, along with many other women. Her grandfather survived the Holocaust and was reunited with his young daughter after the liberation. Zsuzsi escaped the country after the 1956 revolution at the age of 15.
Georgia's father, Michael, is of Russian descent. Her surname Slowe was changed from Slovedinski by her great-grandfather.
Johnny Weissmuller (1904 - 1984)
Hungarian born Weissmuller was an American swimmer and actor who was one of the world's best swimmers in the 1920s, winning five Olympic gold medals and one bronze medal. He won fifty-two US National Championships and set sixty-seven world records. After his swimming career, he became the sixth actor to portray Tarzan in films, a role he played in twelve motion pictures. Dozens of other actors have also played Tarzan, but Weissmuller is by far the best known. His character's distinctive, ululating Tarzan yell is still often used in films.
Robert Capa (1913 – 1954)
Robert Capa was born Endre Ernő Friedmann. A self-proclaimed "photo-journalist," he was a 20th century combat photographer who covered five different wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War. He documented the course of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, the Battle of Normandy on Omaha Beach and the liberation of Paris. To Capa, technical considerations were secondary to catching a dramatic moment. His action photographs, such as those taken during the 1944 Normandy invasion, portray the violence of war with unique impact. In 1947, Capa cofounded prestigious Magnum Photos with, among others, the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. The organization was the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers.
Born of Jewish parents in Budapest, Austria-Hungary in 1913, Capa originally wanted to be a writer; however, he found work in photography in Berlin and grew to love the art. In 1933, he moved from Germany to France because of the rise of Nazism, but found it difficult to find work there as a freelance journalist. He adopted the name "Robert Capa" around this time because he felt that it would be recognizable and American-sounding since it was similar to that of film director Frank Capra. (In fact, "cápa" is a Hungarian word meaning 'shark'.)
Paul Simon (1941 - )
Paul Frederic Simon is an American singer-songwriter and musician, perhaps best known for his partnership with Art Garfunkel in the duo Simon & Garfunkel. In 2006, Time magazine called him one of the 100 "people who shape our world."
Paul Simon was born in Newark, New Jersey to Hungarian parents Bella an Elementary School teacher, and Louis Simon a college professor, bassoon player, and dance bandleader who performed under the name "Lee Sims." Simon's musical career began at Forest Hills High School when he and his friend Art Garfunkel began singing together as a duo, occasionally performing at school dances. Their idols were the Everly Brothers, whom they often emulated or imitated in their early recordings. Paul took the biggest interest in Jazz, Folk of Woody Guthrie, and Folk blues like Lead Belly and others. Simon and Garfunkel were named "Tom & Jerry" by their record company and it was under this name that the duo first had success.
Simon is a proponent of music education for children. In 2003, he signed on as an official supporter of Little Kids Rock, a nonprofit organization that provides free musical instruments and free lessons to children in public schools throughout the U.S.A. He sits on the organization's board of directors as an honorary member.
László Moholy-Nagy (1895 - 1946)
László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.
Moholy-Nagy was born László Weisz to a family of mixed Jewish and Hungarian heritage. His cousin was Georg Solti. He changed his German-Jewish surname to the Magyar surname of his uncle, Nagy. Later, he added the pseudonym Moholy to his surname, after the name of the town Mohol in which he grew up. After studying law in Budapest and serving in World War I, Moholy-Nagy was in Vienna in 1919, where he first discovered constructivism in exhibitions of works of Malevich, Naum Gabo and El Lissitzky
