1523) Christopher Chataway

Sir Christopher John Chataway (1931 – 2014). British middle- and long-distance runner, television news broadcaster, and Conservative politician.

 

- "During his four-year international career as a runner, Chataway, nicknamed the Red Fox because of his ginger hair..." https://www.theguardian.com/.../19/sir-christopher-chataway

 

- "... with 300 metres to go, three men charged past him - the red-headed Christopher Chataway of Great Britain..." https://www.theguardian.com/.../nov/23/guardianobituaries

 

- "Chataway, his red hair bouncing with each jaunty stride, moved into the lead." https://books.google.it/books?id=fs7PCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT167...

 

 

1522) Frances Clara Cleveland

Frances Clara Cleveland Preston (born Frank Clara Folsom; 1864 – 1947). First Lady of the United States from 1886 to 1889, and again from 1893 to 1897 as the wife of President Grover Cleveland. Becoming First Lady at age 21, she remains the youngest wife of a sitting president.

She was originally given the first name Frank, in honor of an uncle, but later decided to adopt the feminine variant Frances. A long-time close friend of her father, Oscar Folsom, Grover Cleveland met his future wife when she was an infant and he was twenty-seven years old. Cleveland proposed marriage to Frances in the spring of 1885 and they were married the following year, in the Blue Room of the White House. Cleveland was aged forty-nine, Frances, twenty-one.

The Clevelands had five children: Ruth (1891–1904), Esther (1893–1980), Marion (1895–1977), Richard (1897–1974), and Francis (1903–1995). British philosopher Philippa Foot was their granddaughter through Esther.

After her husband's death in 1908, Frances Cleveland remained in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1913, at the age of forty-eight, she married Thomas J. Preston Jr., a professor of archaeology at her alma mater, Wells College. She was the first presidential widow to remarry.

 

- "First came her coif, lovely auburn hair swept up from the forehead..." https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../a4a9bdf4-dd4b-11e3...

 

 

1521) Mary Curzon, Baroness Curzon of Kedleston

Mary Victoria Curzon, Baroness Curzon of Kedleston (née Leiter; 1870 – 1906). British peeress of American background who was Vicereine of India, as the wife of Lord Curzon of Kedleston, Viceroy of India. As Vicereine of India, she held the highest official title in the Indian Empire that a woman could hold.

She was born in Chicago, the daughter of Mary Theresa (née Carver) and Levi Leiter, the wealthy co-founder of Field and Leiter dry goods business, and later partner in the Marshall Fields retail empire. On her father's side, she was of Swiss-German descent.

Mary was introduced to London society in 1890. She met a young man, George Curzon, a Conservative Member of Parliament who was thirty-five years old, had been representing Southport for eight years, and was heir to the Barony of Scarsdale. They were married in 1895.

Mary Curzon and her three daughters are considered to be part of the inspiration for the fictional characters Lady Grantham and her three daughters, particularly in respect to the inability to produce a male heir, and the importance of a woman's virtue in the Downton Abbey television series written by Julian Fellowes and produced by ITV.

 

- "She had a complexion of most delicate pink-and-white and her long hair was a shade of auburn with Titian glints." https://archive.org/.../2015.458978.Curzon---The-End-Of...

 

 

 

PS: please note that sometimes Mary Curzon is described as black-haired, like in the Wikipedia page about her.

1520) Philip Herbert, 5th Earl of Pembroke

Philip Herbert, 5th Earl of Pembroke, 2nd Earl of Montgomery (1621 – 1669). English nobleman and politician. He was the son of Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke, and his first wife Susan de Vere.

His father and his uncle William were the 'incomparable pair of brethren' to whom the First Folio of Shakespeare's collected works was dedicated in 1623.

His paternal grandmother was Mary Sidney, sister of Philip and Robert Sidney.

 

 

1519) John Spencer, 8th Earl Spencer

Edward John Spencer, 8th Earl Spencer (1924 – 1992). British nobleman, military officer, and courtier. He was the father of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the maternal grandfather of William, Prince of Wales, and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex.

In 1954 Spencer and Frances Ruth Roche, the younger daughter of the 4th Baron Fermoy, were married in Westminster Abbey. They had five children, but the marriage was not a happy one and, in 1967, Frances left John to be with Peter Shand Kydd, an heir to a wallpaper fortune in Australia, whom she had met the year before.

 

- "He was slim and tanned, his red hair slicked back to frame his high forehead and his well-define features." https://books.google.it/books?id=22M-DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT15...

 

 

1508) Charles, Count of Angoulême

Charles of Orléans (1459 – 1496). Count of Angoulême from 1467 until his death. He succeeded his father, John, and was initially under the regency of his mother, Marguerite de Rohan, assisted by Jean I de La Rochefoucauld, one of his vassals.

Charles commissioned the luxuriously illustrated Heures de Charles d'Angoulême.

Charles married Louise of Savoy, daughter of Philip the Landless and Margaret of Bourbon. They had two children: Marguerite of Angoulême and François of Angoulême, who became King of France as Francis I.

 

 

1517) Diane de Poitiers

Diane de Poitiers (1500 – 1566). French noblewoman and prominent courtier. She wielded much power and influence as King Henry II's royal mistress and adviser until his death. Her position increased her wealth and family's status. She was a major patron of French Renaissance architecture.

Her parents were Jean de Poitiers, Seigneur de Saint Vallier, and Jeanne de Batarnay. She became a keen athlete, and kept a fit figure by riding and swimming regularly, remaining in good physical condition for her time. She was educated according to the principles of Renaissance humanism, including Greek and Latin, rhetoric, etiquette, finance, law, and architecture.

On 29 March 1515, at the age of 15, Diane was married to Louis de Brézé, seigneur d'Anet, Count of Maulévrier, and Grand Seneschal of Normandy, who was 39 years her senior. He was a grandson of King Charles VII by his mistress Agnès Sorel and served as a courtier to King Francis I. They had two daughters, Françoise (1518–1574) and Louise (1521–1577).

Shortly after her marriage, Diane became lady-in-waiting to Queen Claude of France. After the Queen died, she served in the same capacity to Louise of Savoy, the King's mother, and then Queen Eleanor of Austria.

Based on allusions in their correspondence, it is generally believed that Diane became the mistress of future king Henry II in 1534, when she was 35 years old and Henry was 15.

Despite his occasional affair with such as Philippa Duci, Janet Fleming, and Nicole de Savigny, Diane remained Henry's lifelong companion. For the next 25 years, she was one of the most powerful women in France.

When French experts dug up her remains in 2009, they found high levels of gold in her hair. It is suggested that the "drinkable gold" that she "reportedly" regularly took, believed to preserve youth, may have ultimately killed her.

 

- "Artists and poets alike have been unable to agree on Diane's hair color. I had always thought that it was strawberry blonde, a color between red and blonde, because of a locket at Anet." http://diane-de-poitiers.blogspot.com/.../dianes-hair.html

 

- "Two waves of reddish-golden hair showed from a snood of black silk mesh encrusted with pearls." https://lostpastremembered.blogspot.com/.../beauty-brains...

 

- "Tall, thin, with “red-gold” hair and blue eyes..." https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/france/pays-de-la-loire/sordid-secrets-loire-chateaux-visit-area-style/

 

Diane de Poitiers' lock of hair

Painting by the school of Fontainebleau, 1590

Painting by the schoold of Fontainebleau

 

1516) John Cairncross

John Cairncross (1913 – 1995). British civil servant who became an intelligence officer and spy during the Second World War. As a Soviet double agent, he passed to the Soviet Union the raw Tunny decryptions that influenced the Battle of Kursk. He was alleged to be the fifth member of the Cambridge Five. He was also notable as a translator, literary scholar and writer of non-fiction.

According to The Washington Post, the suggestion that John Cairncross was the "fifth man" of the Cambridge ring was not confirmed until 1990, by Soviet double-agent Oleg Gordievsky. This was re-confirmed by former KGB agent Yuri Modin's book published in 1994: My Five Cambridge Friends Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt, and Cairncross by Their KGB Controller.

One of his brothers was the economist Sir Alexander Kirkland Cairncross (a.k.a. Alec Cairncross). The journalist Frances Cairncross is his niece.

 

- "But his broad Scots accent, red hair, rather bad-tempered personality and lack of social graces distinguished him from most of his contemporaries at Cambridge." https://www.cliomuse.com/imitation-game-turing-bletchley...

 

- "Cairncross... was a clever, rather frail-looking Scotsman with a shock of red hair and a broad accent." https://spartacus-educational.com/SScairncross.htm

 

- "That temperament, combined with his surname and his red hair, may better explain the nickname." https://www.tandfonline.com/.../10.../02684527.2022.2065613

 

 

1515) Rufina Pukhova

Rufina Ivanovna Pukhova (1932 - 2021). Russian memoir writer.

She was the last wife of Kim Philby, a KGB double agent who rose in rank through British Intelligence along with the Cambridge Five. She met Philby through George Blake. Pukhova and Philby married in 1971. She is the author of The Private Life of Kim Philby: The Moscow Years (2000). Pukhova was born in Moscow to a Russian father and a Polish mother.

Before meeting Kim Philby, Pukhova worked as a copy editor in Russia.

 

- "Rufina was a red-haired beauty of 38 when she met Kim... She is now 61, with her red hair thinning." https://www-independent-co-uk

 

- "The funeral, attended by about 200 mourners led by Philby’s red-haired Russian wife, Rufa..." https://www.latimes.com/.../la-xpm-1988-05-13-mn-3510...

 

 

 

(PS: as you probably know, the name Rufina comes from the Latin rufus, red-haired).

1514) Christine Ell

Christine Ell. Owner of the club “Christine’s” in the Greenwich Village, which she started in around 1918/1919. She was also a member of the Prvincetown Players.

Ell was the illegitimate daughter of a Danish serving girl and a German army officer. When she and her family came to America, she was placed in service by her mother and step-father, then forced into factory work when she was still a child. Seduced by her step-father, a laborer named Lockhaven, Ell left home when she was 14 and moved to Denver, where she became a prostitute. Inspired by the lectures of Emma Goldman, Ell followed her back to New York.

She married Louis B. Ell, whom she loved, but had extramarital affairs with the two O’Neill brothers.

Charlie Chaplin cast her as “Louise, a Maid” in his 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux (1947).

According to historian Paul Avrich, the original of Anna Christie (from the 1921 play Anna Christie, by Eugene O’Neill) was Christine Ell. She is in part also the model for Josie Hogan, from another of O’Neill’s plays, A Moon for the Misbegotten.

 

- "Described by her friend Agnes Boulton as “tall and voluptuous, with the ugliest face ever seen on a woman … and the most gorgeous, the most wonderful pile of red–gold hair..." https://www.jeweltheatre.net/.../Character-Josie-Hogan.pdf

 

- "... she became friendly with Christine Ell, a flamboyant redhead who had just opened a self-named restaurant..." https://books.google.it/books?id=6e-GshOGqsIC&pg=PA149...

 

- "There Christine Ell, a cheerful red-headed woman whose husband was the stage carpenter for the Provincetown..." https://books.google.it/books?id=AdRw9A2a8K8C&pg=PA135...

 

“Interior with Group of People around Red-Headed Woman,” by Charles Demuth (1919). Ell is the red-headed woman.

 

 

 

 

A photograph of a painting by Charles Ellis showing, from bottom left to right: James Light, Charles (“Hutch”) Collins, Christine Ell, “Jig” Cook, and O’Neill

 

 

Christine Ell as the maid Louise in Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux

 

1513) Alan Berg

Alan Harrison Berg (1934 – 1984). American talk radio show host in Denver, Colorado. Born to a Jewish family, he had outspoken atheistic and liberal views and a confrontational interview style.

At age 22, Berg was one of the youngest people to pass the Illinois state bar examination and he went into practice in Chicago. However, he began to experience neuromuscular seizures and had become an alcoholic. His then-wife, Judith Lee Berg (née Halpern), convinced him to quit his practice to seek help. They moved to Denver, her hometown, and he entered rehabilitation voluntarily. Although he completed his treatment, he continued to be plagued by seizures. He was ultimately diagnosed with a brain tumor. After it was surgically removed, he made a full recovery. For the rest of his life, Berg wore long bangs to hide the surgical scars.

Berg was murdered by members of the neo-Nazi group The Order.

 

- "As a youngster, he had bright red hair and a temper to match." https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/alan-berg

 

- "He was flamboyant to say the least; six foot four, skinny as a post, with a shock of red hair, and long bangs, combed forward to cover a scar that he had from brain surgery." https://www.dailykos.com/.../-The-Nazis-Assassinated-My...