WStuttering, also known as stammering, is a speech disorder in which the flow of speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words or phrases, and involuntary silent pauses or blocks during which the person who stutters is unable to produce sounds. The exact etiology of stuttering is unknown; both genetics and neurophysiology are thought to contribute. There are many treatments and speech-language pathology techniques available that may help increase fluency in some people who stutter to the point where an untrained ear cannot identify a problem; however, there is essentially no cure for the disorder at present.
WAlcibiades, son of Cleinias, from the deme of Scambonidae, was a prominent Athenian statesman, orator, and general. He was the last famous member of his mother's aristocratic family, the Alcmaeonidae, which fell from prominence after the Peloponnesian War. He played a major role in the second half of that conflict as a strategic advisor, military commander, and politician.
WRowan Sebastian Atkinson is an English actor, comedian and writer. He is best known for his work on the sitcoms Blackadder (1983–1989) and Mr. Bean (1990–1995). Atkinson first came to prominence in the BBC sketch comedy show Not the Nine O'Clock News (1979–1982), receiving the 1981 BAFTA for Best Entertainment Performance, and via his participation in The Secret Policeman's Ball (1979). His other work includes the James Bond film Never Say Never Again (1983), playing a bumbling vicar in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), voicing the red-billed hornbill Zazu in The Lion King (1994), and playing jewellery salesman Rufus in Love Actually (2003). Atkinson also featured in the BBC sitcom The Thin Blue Line (1995–1996). His work in theatre includes the role of Fagin in the 2009 West End revival of the musical Oliver!.
WJoseph Barnett, also known by his nicknames Danny Barnett and “Joe”, was a fish porter who worked at Billingsgate Market in the 19th century, located in the East End of London, and later became known for being the roommate of Mary Jane Kelly. It was not suspected that he had murdered her and, even less, that he was Jack the Ripper, until recently, when he was proposed on the basis of speculation and circumstantial evidence.
WEmily Olivia Leah Blunt is a British actress. She is the recipient of various accolades, including a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Critics' Choice Movie Award, in addition to nominations for three British Academy Film Awards.
WElizabeth Bowen CBE was an Irish - British novelist and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well her fiction about life in wartime London.
WCharles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer of children's fiction, notably Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. The poems "Jabberwocky" and The Hunting of the Snark are classified in the genre of literary nonsense. He was also a mathematician, photographer, inventor, and Anglican deacon.
WSir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, was a British statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955. Best known for his wartime leadership as Prime Minister, Churchill was also a Sandhurst-educated soldier, a Nobel Prize-winning writer and historian, a prolific painter, and one of the longest-serving politicians in British history. Apart from two years between 1922 and 1924, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies. Ideologically an economic liberal and imperialist, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955, though he was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924.
WMarion Cecilia Davies was an American actress, producer, screenwriter, and philanthropist. Educated in a religious convent, Davies fled the school to pursue a career as a chorus girl. As a teenager, she appeared in several Broadway musicals and one film, Runaway Romany (1917). She soon became a featured performer in the Ziegfeld Follies. While performing in the 1916 Follies, the nineteen-year-old Marion met the fifty-three-year-old newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst, and became his mistress. Hearst took over management of Davies' career and promoted her as a motion picture actress. Hearst financed Davies' pictures and promoted her career extensively in his newspapers and Hearst newsreels. He founded Cosmopolitan Pictures to produce her films. By 1924, Davies was the number one female box office star in Hollywood because of the popularity of When Knighthood Was in Flower and Little Old New York, which were among the biggest box-office hits of their respective years. During the zenith of the Jazz Age, Davies became renowned as the hostess of lavish soirees for Hollywood actors and political elites. However, in 1924, her name became linked with scandal when film producer Thomas Ince died at a party aboard Hearst's yacht.
WVirgil Donati is an Australian drummer, composer and producer. He holds the drum sticks in the traditional style and is also proficient at the keyboard. Donati also performed in Melbourne with Jack Jones in a Van Halen tribute band known as Hans Valen before inviting Jones into Donati's own bands The State and Southern Sons.
WKatherine Edwina "Kay" Francis was an American stage and film actress. After a brief period on Broadway in the late 1920s, she moved to film and achieved her greatest success between 1930 and 1936, when she was the number one female star and highest-paid actress at Warner Bros. studio.
WGareth Paul Gates is an English singer-songwriter. He was the runner-up in the first series of the ITV talent show Pop Idol in 2002. Gates has sold over 3.5 million records in the UK. He is also known for having a stutter, and has talked about his speech impediment publicly. Gates used the McGuire Programme to manage his stutter and is now a speech coach with the programme.
WGeorge VI was King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth from 11 December 1936 until his death in 1952. He was concurrently the last Emperor of India until August 1947, when the British Raj was dissolved.
WAnna Margaret Glenn was an American advocate for people with disabilities and communication disorders and the wife of astronaut and senator John Glenn. A stutterer from an early age, Glenn was notable for raising awareness of stuttering among children and adults as well as other disabilities.
WClaire Elise Boucher, known professionally as Grimes, is a Canadian musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer. Her music has incorporated elements of varied styles, including dream pop, electronic, R&B, and hip hop, while touching on science fiction and feminist themes. She has released five studio albums.
WRobert Christian Hansen, known in the media as the "Butcher Baker", was an American serial killer. Between 1971 and 1983, Hansen abducted, raped, and murdered at least 17 women in and around Anchorage, Alaska; he hunted many of them down in the wilderness with a Ruger Mini-14 and a knife. He was arrested and convicted in 1983, and was sentenced to 461 years and a life sentence without the possibility of parole. He died in 2014 of natural causes due to lingering health conditions at age 75.
WBlessed Hermann of Reichenau, also known by other names, was an 11th-century Benedictine monk and scholar. He composed works on history, music theory, mathematics, and astronomy, as well as many hymns. He has traditionally been credited with the composition of "Salve Regina", "Veni Sancte Spiritus", and "Alma Redemptoris Mater", although these attributions are sometimes questioned. His cultus and beatification were confirmed by the Roman Catholic Church in 1863.
WElizabeth Inchbald was an English novelist, actress and dramatist. She wrote two novels that have remained prominent to this day. She successfully translated and adapted several plays from German and French.
WVincent Edward "Bo" Jackson is an American former professional baseball and American football player. He is the only professional athlete in history to be named an All-Star in both baseball and football. Jackson's elite achievements in multiple sports have given him the reputation as one of the greatest athletes of all time.
WSamuel Leroy Jackson is an American actor and producer. Widely regarded as one of the most popular actors of his generation, the films in which he has appeared have collectively grossed over $27 billion worldwide, making him the highest-grossing actor of all time. He rose to fame with films such as Coming to America (1988), Goodfellas (1990), Patriot Games (1992), Juice (1992), Menace II Society (1993), True Romance (1993), Jurassic Park (1993), and Fresh (1994). Jackson continued acting gaining prominence for his collaborations with director Spike Lee in the films School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo' Better Blues (1990), Jungle Fever (1991), Oldboy (2013) and Chi-Raq (2015) and in the Quentin Tarantino films Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Django Unchained (2012), and The Hateful Eight (2015). For his role in Pulp Fiction, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. In 2021 it was announced by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences that Jackson will be the recipient of the Honorary Academy Award.
WJames Earl Jones is an American actor whose career spans more than seven decades. He has been described as "one of America's most distinguished and versatile" actors for his performances in film, theater, and television, and "one of the greatest actors in American history". Jones has been said to possess "one of the best-known voices in show business, a stirring basso profondo that has lent gravel and gravitas" to his projects, including live-action acting, voice acting, and commercial voice-overs. Jones has a stutter which was more pronounced in his youth. In his episode of Biography, he said it was helped by poetry and acting. A pre-med major in college, he served in the United States Army during the Korean War before pursuing a career in acting. Since his Broadway debut in 1957, he has performed in several Shakespeare plays including Othello, Hamlet, Coriolanus, and King Lear.
WRichard Otto Bruno Kastner was a German stage and film actor, screenwriter, and film producer whose career was most prominent in the 1910s and 1920s during the silent film era. Kastner was one of the most popular leading men in German films during his career's peak in the 1920s.
WAnatoli Petrovich Ktorov was a Soviet and Russian film and stage actor. People's Artist of the USSR (1963).
WWilliam Somerset Maugham was an English playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest-paid author during the 1930s.
WTodd McFarlane is a Canadian comic book creator, artist, writer, filmmaker and entrepreneur, best known for his work as the artist on The Amazing Spider-Man and as the writer and artist on the superhero horror-fantasy series Spawn.
WDavid Stephen Mitchell is an English novelist, television writer, and screenwriter.
WFritz Yngvar Moen was a Norwegian man wrongfully convicted of two distinct murders, serving a total of 18 years in prison. After the convictions were quashed, an official inquiry was instigated to establish what had gone wrong in the authorities' handling of the case, and on 25 June 2007 the commission delivered harsh criticism to the police, the prosecution and the courts in what was immediately termed Norway's worst miscarriage of justice of all time.
WIrina Vladimirovna Odoyevtseva was a Russian poet, novelist and memoirist, and the wife of the poet Georgy Ivanov.
WCharles Talbut Onions was an English grammarian and lexicographer and the fourth editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
WAdalberto "Junior" Ortiz Colón, is a former Major League Baseball catcher. He played all or part of thirteen seasons in the majors from 1982 to 1994. He was a member of the 1991 World Champion Minnesota Twins.
WNikki Payne, is a Canadian comedian and actress, from Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia, Canada. Born with a cleft palate, she is well known for incorporating her lisp into her comedy act. She has won three Canadian Comedy Awards for Best Stand-up Newcomer and Best Female Stand-up in 2003, 2005 & 2008.
WRobert James Kenneth Peston is a British journalist, presenter, and founder of the education charity Speakers for Schools. He is the Political Editor of ITV News and host of the weekly political discussion show Peston. From February 2006 until March 2014, he was the Business Editor for BBC News and Economics Editor from March 2014 to November 2015. He became known to a wider public with his reporting of the late-2000s financial crisis, especially with his scoop on the Northern Rock crisis.
WPeter I, called the Just or the Cruel, was King of Portugal from 1357 until his death. He was the third but only surviving son of Afonso IV of Portugal and his wife, Beatrice of Castile.
WAlfred Rehder was a German-American botanical taxonomist and dendrologist who worked at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. He is generally regarded as the foremost dendrologist of his generation.
WAlan Sidney Patrick Rickman was an English actor and director. Known for his deep, languid voice, he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and became a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), performing in modern and classical theatre productions. He played the Vicomte de Valmont in the RSC stage production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1985, and after the production transferred to the West End in 1986 and Broadway in 1987, he was nominated for a Tony Award.
WJohn Paul Larkin, known professionally as Scatman John, was an American musician. A prolific jazz pianist and vocalist for several decades, he rose to prominence during the 1990s through his fusion of scat singing and dance music. He recorded five albums, which were released between 1986 and 2001.
WCharles Raymond Starkweather was an American spree killer who murdered eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming between December 1957 and January 1958, when he was 19 years old. He killed ten of his victims between January 21 and January 29, 1958, the date of his arrest. During his spree in 1958, Starkweather was accompanied by his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate.
WMikhail Sergeyevich Tolstykh, better known by his call-sign Givi (Ги́ви), was a commander of the Donetsk People's Republic's Somalia Battalion of the Separatist Forces in the war in Donbas.
WMichael Gerard Tyson is an American former professional boxer who competed from 1985 to 2005. Nicknamed "Iron Mike" and "Kid Dynamite" in his early career, and later known as "The Baddest Man on the Planet", Tyson is considered to be one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time. He reigned as the undisputed world heavyweight champion from 1987 to 1990. Tyson won his first 19 professional fights by knockout, 12 of them in the first round. Claiming his first belt at 20 years, four months, and 22 days old, Tyson holds the record as the youngest boxer ever to win a heavyweight title. He was the first heavyweight boxer to simultaneously hold the WBA, WBC and IBF titles, as well as the only heavyweight to unify them in succession. The following year, Tyson became the lineal champion when he knocked out Michael Spinks in 91 seconds of the first round. In 1990, Tyson was knocked out by underdog Buster Douglas in one of the biggest upsets in history.
WMegan Alexanda Washington is an Australian musician and songwriter who works mononymously as Washington. Originally performing jazz music, her style shifted to indie pop and alternative rock. She has released three studio albums, I Believe You Liar, There There and Batflowers. Both I Believe You Liar and There There reached the top 5 on the ARIA Albums Chart. Her music has been described by I-D as "sexy synth-laden pop" and in 2019 the Sydney Morning Herald said of her intimate tour run, that "Washington’s impressive command of her relatively small stage gave proof her music can work anywhere, anyway, any time." She has won three ARIA Music Awards with two in 2010 for I Believe You Liar, Best Female Artist and Breakthrough Artist – Release. The other win was Best Cover Art for Batflowers in 2020, shared with Adam Dal Pozzo and Michelle Pitiris.
WLucy Worsley is a British historian, author, curator, and television presenter. She is Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces but is best known as a presenter of BBC Television series on historical topics.