In Memoriam - 2025 Trivia Quiz

Answer: Rob Reiner

It seemed like making movies was in the genes for Rob Reiner, after following his famous father, Carl, into the same line of work. Reiner commenced as an actor with a number of small television roles until he landed "the big one"... the role of Michael "Meathead" Stivic in "All in the Family", a CBS sitcom that ran from 1971 to 1979. The role would earn Rob two Emmy Awards and a number of nominations.

As a film director, Reiner showed great versatility in his range of genres. Commencing with the mockumentary "This is... Spinal Tap" in 1984, he also gave us the romantic comedy "When Harry Met Sally" (1989), adapted a Stephen King short story into the wonderful coming of age drama "Stand by Me" (1986), the adventure romance "The Princess Bride" (1987), guided Kathy Bates to a Best Actress Oscar in the psychological thriller "Misery" (1989) and received a Best Picture Oscar nomination for the legal drama "A Few Good Men" (1992).

Answer: Frank Gehry

How good was Frank Gehry? So good that he was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989, an award that is considered the highest award in the field of architecture. The question then is... what made Frank Gehry so good? Part of the answer rest in his ability to incorporate unconventional geometric shapes into his designs. This made his buildings unique and innovative.

The exteriors of creations remained undulating and became works of art as well as functional structures. We can add to this his creative use of materials such as titanium and steel and his sensitivity to the surrounds of the building. Gehry's most celebrated works include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain, the DZ Bank Building in Berlin, the Dancing House in Prague, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and, even, his private residence in Santa Monica, California, which became a popular tourist attraction.

Answer: Jane Goodall

Picture this... a 26 year old woman from England, dressed in shorts and sneakers, perched high on a vantage point in the middle of what would become known as Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park, using her binoculars to zoom in and out to observe a troop of chimpanzees. There was no other civilization to be seen. Back in 1960, for months on end, this was just another ordinary day for Jane Goodall.

Six decades later she is still hailed as the "the world's preeminent chimpanzee expert", a woman who identified that the chimpanzee shared a number of key traits with humans. Among these were the creation of tools, forming lasting bonds, participating in organized wars, the handing down of knowledge and having complex emotions. In short, she made the world rethink that humans were not as uniquely different to other animals as they thought. Her work, and her writings such as "In the Shadow of Man" (1971), led to the advocation of conservation and the protection of, not just the chimpanzee, but the entire natural world.

Answer: Hulk Hogan

Hulk Hogan's importance to professional wrestling went well beyond the multiple world heavyweight titles that he'd won in the sport. Virtually, on his own, he elevated the sport from its own niche market into a global phenomenon, kicking off an age in the 1980s that became known as "Hulkamania". He became a pop culture icon with his own cartoon series, action figures, restaurants and energy drinks. There were also movie appearances such as the part of Thunderlips in "Rocky III" (1982) and sold out stadium shows like "WrestleMania III" (1987).

In the 1990s he would take "World Championship Wrestling" to new heights by joining the newly formed NOW (New World Order) as the villainous "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan. Ironically, despite his "good man" legacy from the 1980s, this made him (arguably) an even bigger drawcard in the annuls of professional wrestling.

Answer: Tom Stoppard

The above-named play debuted on Broadway in 1966. It won, for Stoppard, a Tony Award for Best Play but, more importantly, it opened the eyes of the world to a playwright who was a craftsman when it came to playing "language games", a stylist who managed to instil intellectual depth and playful wit to such profound themes as consciousness and reality. With remarkable skill, he instilled inventiveness into historical ideas and converted complex scientific themes into highly entertaining theatre.

His command of language and structure would help him garner further Tony Awards for such works as "Travesties" (1976), "The Real Thing" (1984), "The Coast of Utopia" (2007) and "Leopoldstadt" in 2023. Knighted for his services to literature in 1997, he also claimed an Oscar for adapting "Shakespeare's in Love" (1998) for the big screen. Appropriately, the lights in the theatres in London's West End were dimmed, on December2, 2025, to mark his passing three days earlier.

Answer: Dick Cheney

If I could use a single word to describe Dick Cheney career in politics, one that would readily come to mind is "meteoric". It all began in 1969 when he was working as a Senate intern for Donald Rumsfeld who, at the time, was the advisor to President Nixon.

After Nixon's resignation Cheney became a member of the team that transitioned Gerald Ford into the Presidentship of the United States. Come 1975 and he became Ford's Chief of Staff. From 1979 to 1989 he would serve as the state of Wyoming's Representative in Congress, until President George H. W. Bush would select him as his Secretary of Defence.

He would become President George W. Bush's Vice President in 2000, where he would serve two terms.

Answer: Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt

Sister Schmidt began her teaching career in the 1940s at the St. Bernard School in Glassell Park, California, and it wasn't until 1961 that she began her long association with Mundelein College in Chicago. During the early years here, she was also an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1991 she became the assistant dean and academic adviser at Chicago's Loyola University when it and Mundelein merged. Five years later, at the tender age of 77 years, she was appointed the chaplain of the university's men's basketball team, the Ramblers, where she acted as a spiritual adviser and as a scouting support. Her impact was such that a bobblehead figurine of her in 2011 and a "Sister Jean Day" (2012) were created in her honour. She would be inducted into Loyola's Athletics Hall of Fame, granted the university's highest honour, the Sword of Loyola and received an Apostolic Blessing from Pope Francis on her 100th birthday. She was 106 years old when she passed away on October 9, 2025.

Answer: Giorgio Armani

Armani has been hailed as a "fashion revolutionary" and "the "first post-modern designer". His impact on the fashion industry was immense... in broad terms, he softened menswear and hardened womenswear. His career began on the shop floor where, instead of design, he learned about fabrics, which ones appealed to customers, how they were constructed and which mills were the best to purchase them from. His design career began at the famed Cerruti 1881, where Nino Cerruti challenged him to find a way to bring haute couture to the middle classes. He did so by removing the confinements of the stiffer pre-war (WWII) styles and doing away with the rigid traditions that dominated fashion.

In the 1960s he changed the suit, giving it a more feminine feel for men, pre-empting the shift in masculinity that would occur in the 70s and 80s. He also saw the rise of women in the workforce and created an outfit for them that, whilst remaining feminine, placed them as an equivalent to men. Then came Hollywood where Armani began creating fashions for films. His touch was highly visible with the "power suit" that he created for Richard Gere's character in "American Gigolo" (1980) and his work was highly sought after for its celebrity style, in particular for "red-carpet fashion". Armani expanded his business into hotels, music and jewellery. He passed away in September 2025 at the age of 91, described as "the first designer since Coco Chanel to bring about a lasting change in the way people dress."

Answer: Chuck Mangione

Chuck Mangione, the man who constantly wore his signature brown felt hat, started playing piano at an early age but was inspired to switch to the trumpet when he saw Kirk Douglas, as Rick Martin, in the 1950 film "Young Man with a Horn". Whilst he was a prodigious talent, what made his rise to fame more remarkable was that he did so during a period when instrumentals were out of vogue. He was that good that he even reminded audiences that the fluegelhorn was, indeed, an instrument.

A one time member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Chuck's solo career saw him nominated for 11 Grammys (winning two) and recording over 30 albums with many of them achieving gold status. Among these were "Children of Sanchez" (1978) and "Fun and Games" (1979) but the album that took him into the stratosphere was "Feel so Good", an LP that peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 200 album charts, and one that was appropriately named... because that's how his music made people feel.

Answer: Jim Lovell

Let me set the record straight (before you get fired up to send me a correction note), the above phrase is one that was popularized by the 1995 film "Apollo 13" and they were not Lovell's actually words. The phrase "Okay, Houston... we've had a problem here" was delivered by crewman Jack Swigert. When NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) responded; "This is Houston. Say again, please", Lovell interjected to say "Ah, Houston, we've had a problem. We've had a Main B Bus Undervolt."

Jim Lovell was in charge of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission (1970) to the moon when an explosion of an oxygen tank in the Service Module, about 56 hours into the flight, crippled the craft's electrical and life-support systems. This forced the team to abandon their quest for the lunar surface and find their way back home. He had been selected as an astronaut for NASA in 1962. Three years later he was a member of the Gemini 7 mission, a precursor toward proving that humans could endure long space flights. The following year he was on board Gemini 12, the last of the Gemini missions, with the aim of perfecting the techniques that the Apollo astronauts would need to land on the moon. His last space mission, before Apollo 13, was on board Apollo 8 as the command module pilot and navigator.