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Photo Gallery
:: Video Gallery
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Pierce Brosnan
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Many, many actors are typecast due to their looks. Some are perennial villains, others knockabout dudes, or British aristocrats. Their talents are made obsolete by their faces, their actorly training is all for nothing. Feel sorry then for the man who is James Bond. For not only did Pierce Brosnan star as Agent 007, but he was such a perfect choice for the role that audiences considered him to be Bond even before he played the role. Throughout Timothy Dalton's tenure, even towards the end of Roger Moore's, Brosnan was Bond-in-waiting. Every character he played was seen as either a stop-gap or practice for the day he'd load that Beretta and slip behind the wheel of that Aston-Martin. It came as no surprise that, when he did take over, the ailing Bond franchise enjoyed its greatest successes ever.
Yet Brosnan's story is far more interesting than just a long, long wait for GoldenEye. He began as a stage actor of major repute in London's West End. He was a Golden Globe-nominated TV star and found major fame as Remington Steele. And, throughout his "lost" years, he turned in a series of notable performances in unheralded movies - he was just as likely to play a disturbed psychotic as a smooth sophisticate. His personal life, too, has been far more interesting (and trauma-ridden) than most.
He was born Pierce Brendan Brosnan on the 16th of May, 1953, in Navan, County Meath. Popularly known as An Uaimh, it's about 30 miles north-west of Dublin, just inland from Drogheda. His father, Thomas, was a carpenter who left mother Mary (known as May) before Pierce was a year old. Needing a career to support her son, May travelled to London to train as a nurse, leaving young Pierce with her parents, Philip and Kathleen Smith. Sadly, when he was 6, both grandparents died, so he was moved on to stay with relatives. He recalls spending lots of time in his aunt's pub, feeling lonely and abandoned. "But maybe that's where the acting comes from", he says "from spending so much time alone with your thoughts". |
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Newly entered celebrity
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Paris Hilton
Paris Hilton was born February 17, 1981, to Rick and Kathy Hilton, making her the great-granddaughter of Conrad Hilton, founder of the Hilton hotels and source of the family fortune -- estimated at $3 Read Biography
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The Rasmus
The four members of Helsinki's melodically rocking the Rasmus formed the band in 1995 while still in high school because Finland's English music scene -- in their own words -- "sucked." Their debut, Read Biography
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Eagles
One of the most commercially successful bands of the past three decades, the Eagles had a modest beginning as a California studio band.
Gathered by producer John Boylan in 1970, Glenn Frey (guitar) Read Biography
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Black Eyed Peas
They've transcended their vigilant hip-hop roots and have become a global phenomenon, the likes of which the music world has rarely seen. Ever-curious and ever-confident, that group is The Black Eyed Read Biography
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Queen
'This way Sir. We have a selection of midgets who'll be serving your cocaine on silver platters tonight while in the room marked 'Orgy' you can choose from an exotic array of women, er, and men from a Read Biography
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Coldplay
Coldplay never intended to become England's favorite rock & roll sons when their signature rock melodies ruled the charts throughout 2000. The Brit-rock quartet -- composed of Chris Martin (vocals/pia Read Biography
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Pearl Jam
Pearl Jam was one of the most popular bands of the grunge music era in the early 1990s. Before their mainstream success as "Pearl Jam", certain members had recorded successfully as Mother Love Bone a Read Biography
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Matchbox 20
Upon the release of their debut album, Yourself or Someone Like You, in the fall of 1996, Matchbox Twenty were pigeonholed as one of the legions of post-grunge guitar bands that roamed the American p Read Biography
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Red Hot Chili Peppers
Red Hot Chili Peppers were conceived in 1983 in a living room in Hollywood where four close buddies from Fairfax High School (Anthony Kiedis, Hillel Slovak, flea and Jack Irons) performed an acappella Read Biography
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INXS
INXS hailed from the pubs of Australia, which is part of the reason they never comfortably fit in with new wave. Even when the band branched out into synth pop on its early recordings, they were under Read Biography
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