1571) Audrey Meadows

Audrey Meadows (née Cotter, 1922 – 1996). American actress best known for her role as the deadpan housewife Alice Kramden on the 1950s American television comedy The Honeymooners. She was the younger sister of Hollywood leading lady Jayne Meadows.
She also appeared in feature films such as That Touch of Mink, Take Her, She's Mine and Rosie!

Meadows served as director of the First National Bank of Denver for 11 years, the first woman to hold this position. For twenty years, from 1961 to 1981, she was an advisory director of Continental Airlines, where she was actively involved in marketing programs that included the designs of flight attendant and customer service agent uniforms, aircraft interiors, and Continental's exclusive "President's Club" airport club lounges.

- "Trademark: Red hair" https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0575031/bio/#trademark

- "This is especially true if you have a color set, because Audrey Meadows is the kind of girl color TV was invented for with her red gold hair, greenish eyes and lovely complexion." https://tralfaz.blogspot.com/2016/07/alice-of-hula-hoop.html

- "Yep, she’s Alice Kramden in cartoon form, right down to Meadows’ red hair."  https://outsider.com/.../the-honeymooners-these-4.../

 

1570) Ken Swofford

Kenneth Charles Swofford (1933 – 2018), American film and television actor, often cast in villain, police officer or 'everyman' roles.
Between 1962 and 1995, Swofford's film credits included Thelma & Louise, Skyjacked, Black Roses and The Andromeda Strain, while his TV career during the same period was prolific: he appeared on such television series as Gunsmoke, Police Story, The Rockford Files, Simon & Simon, Fame, Switch, The Oregon Trail, Rich Man, Poor Man Book II, Murder, She Wrote, and as a cast member of the mystery series Ellery Queen.
In 1989, Swofford was convicted of felony drunk driving and sentenced to 28 months in prison, after which he made a comeback and continued to work steadily until retiring in 1995. In 2001, he supplied the voice of the coach in Recess: School's Out, and played Officer White in Teacher's Pet (2004), which was his last role before retiring permanently. Nonetheless, in 2018 he voiced the title character of Happy the Angry Polar Bear in a film written and directed by his grandson, Brandon.

- "With his burly build and distinctive red hair he was often cast in villain, police officer or 'everyman' roles... In an interview in 1976 the distinctive, red-headed actor described the advantages of an acting career..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Swofford

- "American film and television actor noted for his red hair and ruddy complexion." https://www.themoviedb.org/person/45308-ken-swofford...

- "Ruddy, red-haired, burly-framed American character actor of the 1960s and 1970s." https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0842855/bio/

 

 

1569) Miriam Rothschild

Miriam Louisa Rothschild (1908 – 2005). British natural scientist and author with contributions to zoology, entomology, and botany.

Her father was Charles Rothschild of the Rothschild family and her mother Rózsika Edle Rothschild (née von Wertheimstein), a Hungarian sportswoman. Her brother was Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild and one of her sisters (Kathleen Annie) Pannonica Rothschild (Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter) would later be a bebop jazz enthusiast and patroness of Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker.

Her father had described about 500 new species of flea, and her uncle Lionel Walter Rothschild had built a private natural history museum at Tring. By the age of four she had started collecting ladybird beetles and caterpillars and taking a tame quail to bed with her.

She was educated at home until the age of 17, when she demanded to go to school. She thence attended evening classes in zoology at Chelsea College of Science and Technology and classes during the day in literature at Bedford College, London.

In 1943 she married Captain George Lane. Lane, a Hungarian-born British soldier, had changed his name from Lanyi in case of enemy capture. They had six children, four biological: Mary Rozsiska (1945–2010), Charles Daniel (born 1948), Charlotte Teresa (born 1951) and Johanna Miriam (born 1951); and two adopted. The marriage was dissolved in 1957 but the pair remained on good terms.

During the 1930s Rothschild made a name for herself at the Marine Biological Station in Plymouth, studying the mollusc Nucula and its trematode parasites.

Rothschild was a leading authority on fleas. She was the first person to work out the flea's jumping mechanism. She also studied the flea's reproductive cycle and linked this, in rabbits, to the hormonal changes within the host. Her New Naturalist book on parasitism (Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos) was a huge success.

In addition to her work on fleas and other parasites, Rothschild studied insects in the order Lepidoptera. Specifically, she was interested in chemical ecology and mimicry.

Another area of Lepidoptera research that Rothschild pursued was that of the production of antibiotics by butterflies.

Rothschild was a pioneer among women in entomology and became the first woman trustee of the Natural History Museum (1967–1975), the first woman president of Royal Entomological Society (1993–1994), the first woman to serve on the Committee for Conservation of the National Trust, and the first woman member of the eight-member Entomological Club.

 

- "She had red hair (though it later greyed), a bulky figure and wore a loose, mauve silk dress and matching kerchief..." https://www.bionity.com/.../encycl.../Miriam_Rothschild.html

 

 

1568) Janet Currie

Janet Currie (1909-1934). American actress and beauty queen.

At 18, Janet won a role in the stage show Earl Carroll's Sketchbook and later appeared in the hit Broadway musical Once In A Lifetime. This led to a contract with MGM in 1930. Janet landed a role in the Three Stooges comedy Meet The Baron (1933). but was soon diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. She underwent an operation, but died because of complications.

 

- "The beautiful redhead was offered a part in the show." https://www.classicactresses.org/2021/12/janetcurrie.html

 

 

1567) Maurice "Red" Elder

Maurice "Red" Elder (1916 – 2011). American football and baseball coach. He served as the head football coach at Colorado State University Pueblo (CSU Pueblo) from 1946 to 1951.

Elder was a fullback at Kansas State University in the mid–1930s, where he played on the conference champion 1934 Kansas State Wildcats football team. He was drafted by the Washington Redskins of the National Football League (NFL) in 1937 but dropped out of training camp and, instead, pursued a career in coaching.

He married twice, had five children, 16 grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.

Elder was the maternal grandfather of NFL quarterback Jeff Garcia.

 

- "He added, “And he’s who I got my red hair from.” https://gilroydispatch.com/always-positive-maurice-red.../

 

 

1566) Ursula Hirschmann

Ursula Hirschmann (1913 – 1991). German anti-fascist activist and advocate of European federalism.

Hirschmann was born into a middle-class Jewish family to Carl Hirschmann and Hedwig Marcuse in Berlin. She studied economics at Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1932, she joined the youth organization of the Social Democratic Party to participate in the resistance against the advance of the Nazis.

In the summer of 1933, she moved to Paris, where she became re-acquainted with Eugenio Colorni, a young Italian philosopher and socialist whom she had already met in Berlin. She married him in Trieste in 1935. They had three daughters: Silvia, Renata, and Eva.
The couple became engaged in the clandestine anti-fascist opposition. In 1939, Colorni was arrested and sent to confinement on the island of Ventotene. Hirschmann followed her husband there, but as she was not herself held in confinement, she could travel back to the mainland.
Among the other prisoners and friends of Colorni on Ventotene were Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli, who in 1941, co-authored the famous Ventotene Manifesto "for a free and united Europe", i. e., an early sketch of a post-war democratic European Union. Hirschmann managed to bring the text of the manifesto to the mainland, and took part in its dissemination. On 27 and 28 August 1943, she participated in the foundation of the European Federalist Movement in Milan.
Having escaped from Ventotene in 1943, Colorni was murdered by fascists in Rome in May 1944. Thereafter, Spinelli became her second husband and adopted her daughters. The couple went to Switzerland, and from there to Rome, where they settled after the war. They had three daughters: Diana, Barbara, and Sara Spinelli.
In 1975, Hirschmann founded the Association Femmes pour l'Europe in Brussels, then in the first days of December of that year, suffered from a cerebral hemorrhage, followed by aphasia, from which she was never to recover completely.

 

- "I capelli color rame, folti, tirati indietro, le cingevano il capo coprendole le orecchie ed erano raccolti in una massa pesante sopra la nuca. [Her thick copper-coloured hair, pulled back from her head, covered her ears and was gathered in a heavy mass at the nape of her neck.]" https://www.lebellepagine.it/.../res640412_Ursula...

 

 

1565) Annabelle Rankin

Dame Annabelle Jane Mary Rankin (1908 – 1986). Australian politician and diplomat. She was the first woman from Queensland elected to parliament, the first woman federal departmental minister, and the first Australian woman to be appointed head of a foreign mission.

Rankin was born in Brisbane, the daughter of state MP Colin Rankin. A member of the Liberal Party, she was elected to the Senate at the 1946 federal election, taking her seat the following year. She was the second woman elected to the Senate, after Dorothy Tangney. Rankin was the Liberal Party's chief whip from 1947 to 1950 and from 1951 to 1966; she remains the longest-serving whip in the party's history, in either chamber of parliament. In 1966, she was made Minister for Housing in the Holt government, becoming the first woman to hold a ministerial portfolio. She held that position until her retirement from politics in 1971. As High Commissioner to New Zealand from 1971 to 1974, she was the first woman to head an Australian mission overseas.

 

- "Dame Annabelle was easily recognisable from her auburn hair and warm brown eyes, and combined a cheerful, friendly demeanour with a strong, uncompromising will, and apparently tireless energy." https://waltzingmorethanmatilda.com/.../famous-names.../ 

 

- "Enid Lyons remarked that ‘Her appearance charmed me [with] her warm brown eyes, her Titian-red hair’." https://adb.anu.edu.au/.../rankin-dame-annabelle-jane-15857