Do You Remember Them? - 1980s Trivia Quiz

Answer: Jesse Owens

James Cleveland "Jesse" Owens was born in 1913 in the small community of Oakville in northern Alabama. He is, arguably, the greatest track and field athlete of all time. Owens had already produced a performance dubbed "the greatest 45 minutes ever in sport" before he even reached the Olympics: representing Ohio State University at the 1935 Big Ten Conference track meet, he tied one world record and broke three others in the space of just three-quarters of an hour. A year later, at the Olympic Games in Hitler's Berlin, Owens won four gold medals, in the 100m, 200, long jump and 4 x 100m relay, mocking the Nazi myth of Aryan supremacy.

Owens was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976 and was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1990. A street near the Olympic Stadium and a Berlin secondary school were named in his honour in 1984. The Jesse Owens Award, now given annually to the best American track & field athlete, was inaugurated in 1981. Ohio State University's athletic stadium was renamed the Jesse Owens Memorial Stadium in 2001. U.S. postage stamps were issued in his honour in 1990 and 1998.

Answer: William Wyler

William Wyler was born in 1902 in the city of Mulhouse in Alsace-Lorraine, which was then part of the German Empire but is now on the French side of the border. He directed his first film, "The Crook Buster", in 1925, a Western, like most of his early work. His first nomination for Best Director came in 1936, for the drama "Dodsworth" starring Walter Huston. He won with his fifth nomination, for "Mrs Miniver" in 1942 and followed that with "The Best Years of Our Lives" in 1946. "Ben Hur" in 1959 gave Wyler his third win, with all three films also winning the Best Picture award.

Wyler's 12 nominations in the Best Director category far exceed the total amassed by any other director -- Martin Scorsese's eight nomination in 2013 tied him for second place with Billy Wilder. John Ford won four Best Director awards and, Frank Capra matched Wyler's total of three, but neither managed to also direct three Best Picture winners.

Answer: Leonid Brezhnev

He was born Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev in 1906 in the industrial city of Dniprodzerzhynsk, a port on the Dnieper in central Ukraine. A metallurgical engineer in the iron and steel industry by trade, Brezhnev ousted and succeeded Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964 as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and thus the country's 'de facto' leader. His 18 years in control of the world's largest country is shorter only than Joseph Stalin's 30 years at the helm.

Brezhnev's years in command coincided with the height of the Cold War, and by the time of his death spending on the military had reached 12.5% of GNP. He presided over military intervention in Czechoslovakia to crush the 'Prague Spring' and the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite the severed damage done to the Soviet economy during his tenure, polls of the Russian people invariably rank Brezhnev as their most popular 20th-century leader.

Answer: Tennessee Williams

He was born Thomas Lanier Williams III in 1911 in the city of Columbus in eastern Mississippi. After many years as a struggling writer, Williams was finally catapulted to stardom in 1944 when "The Glass Menagerie" became a Broadway sensation. His 1947 play "A Streetcar Named Desire" not only earned Williams a Pulitzer Prize for Drama but also led to international fame with the release of the 1951 film adaptation. Elia Kazan directed with Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden reprising their Broadway roles and Vivien Leigh joining from the London West End production. All except Brando (who lost to Humphrey Bogart's performance in "The African Queen") won Oscars, with Williams also nominated for Best Screenplay.

Williams collected his second Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", another play that became a hugely successful movie. Released in 1958, Richard Brooks directed an all-star cast that included Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman and Burl Ives.

Answer: Marvin Gaye

He was born Marvin Pentz Gay Jr. on April 2, 1944 in Washington DC and he began singing at the age of four in the church where his father was a minister. His first album, " The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye", was released in 1961 on Berry Gordy's Tamla Records label which had been incorporated into the Motown Corporation a year earlier. A run of five consecutive Top singles in the R&B chart began with "Pride and Joy" in 1962. "I'll Be Doggone" and "Ain't That Peculiar" topped that chart in 1965. Then came the breakthrough, with "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" in 1968, which topped the US Billboard 100 and the UK singles chart. Later hit singles include "Let's Get It On" (in 1973)"Got To Give It Up" (Part 1) (1977) and "Sexual Healing" (1982).

At just after noon on April 1, 1984, the day before what would have been Marvin Gaye's 45th birthday, he intervened in an argument between his parents. Minutes later, whilst talking with his mother, he was shot twice at point-blank range by his father. He was pronounced D.O.A. at California Hospital Medical Center in downtown Los Angeles.

Answer: Orson Welles

George Orson Welles was born in 1915 in the city of Kenosha in the extreme southeastern corner of Wisconsin. His career began in the theatre in the mid-1930s and by 1937 he had founded his own theatre company. His modern-dress adaptation of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" took Broawdway by storm when it opened in November 1937. That same year, he produced a much-acclaimed adaptation of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" for radio.

Welles' pièce de resistance for radio was an episode of his drama anthology series "The Mercury Theatre on the Air", broadcast on Halloween 1938, in which he narrated his adaptation of H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds". So genuine was the narrative that people tuning in during the programme genuinely thought that they were hearing new bulletins reporting that the world was being invaded by Martians.

Welles' most famous work was still to come, though: the 1941 film for which he was producer director and star, "Citizen Kane", is still regularly ranked as the greatest film of all time more than half a century later. People who have seen the film (has anyone not?) will recognize the significance of the "Rosebud" clue provided by the photograph.

Welles died on the same day as another Hollywood legend, Russian-born actor Yul Brynner (who was 65 years old).

Answer: Georgia O'Keefe

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was born in 1889 on a farm on the outskirts of the township of Sun Prairie in southern Wisconsin. She was a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She painted in numerous genres over the course of her long life, and she is acknowledged today as the "Mother of American Modernism".

Pedernal Mountain in New Mexico was one of O'Keefe's favourite subjects. She said of it: "It's my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it".

Following her death, O'Keefe's will became the subject of length legal challenges. The eventual upshot was that most of her assets (including many of her paintings) eventually ended up belonging to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe NM, which was established in 1995 to perpetuate her artistic legacy.

Answer: Fred Astaire

He was born Frederick Austerlitz in 1899 in Omaha, Nebraska and he made his stage debut at the age of just six. He made his first major film musical in 1933, "Dancing Lady" with Joan Crawford. His last was "That's Entertainment, Part II" in 1976, in which he both performed and narrated. He made some 35 film musicals in a career spanning most of the 20th century, ten of them in the memorable partnership with Ginger Rogers. Twelve years Astaire's junior, she died in 1995 at 83.

Astaire was presented (by Rogers) with an Honorary Oscar in 1950. Ten years later, he received the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award for "Lifetime Achievement in Motion Pictures". He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1972 and in 1978 he was the first recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors. He was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute in 1981. As late as 1975, he won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance in "Towering Inferno", proving once and for all that he could, after all, act.

Answer: Roy Orbison

Roy Kelton Orbison, known as "The Big O", was born in 1936 in the north Texas city of Vernon. He released his first single, "Trying to Get to You", in 1956 and his debut album, "Roy Orbison at the Rock House", five years later. His first hit single, "Only the Lonely (Know the Way I Feel)" reached number two in the US billboard 100 and topped the UK singles chart in 1960. "Running Scared" was his first US number one in 1961. "Crying" (1961), "Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream)" (1962), "In Dreams" (1963) and "It's Over" (1964) were all hits, but his signature song, released in 1964, was the worldwide number one hit "Oh, Pretty Woman".

Early in 1988, Orbison joined such luminaries as George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne to form the supergroup the "Traveling Wilburys". He was credited under the name 'Lefty Wilbury' on the group's debut album, released that same year.

Orbison was one of the first group of artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when it opened in 1987. He won six Grammys including a Lifetime Achievement award in 1998. He was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1989 and was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2010.

Answer: Lord Laurence Olivier

Born Laurence Kerr Olivier in 1907 in the Surrey market town of Dorking, some 20 miles south of London, he became Baron Olivier of Brighton OM Kt. He had many acting roles in his teens but his first major West End role came in 1930 in Noel Coward's "Private Lives". He made his film debut the same year, in "The Temporary Widow", a British-German comedy by Austrian director Gustav Ucicky.

The first of Olivier's twelve Oscar nominations came in 1939 for his performance as Heathcliff in the William Wyler directed adaptation of "Wuthering Heights". His first film as director, producer and star was a production of Shakespeare's "Henry V" in 1944. The film earned him an honorary Oscar "for his outstanding achievement as actor, producer and director in bringing Henry V to the screen". He also won his first Best Actor award for his performance in the title role. Four years later, he filled the same multiple roles in the film version of "Hamlet". He again won the Best Actor Oscar and was nominated as for the Best Director award. He also collected the Best Picture Oscar as the film's producer.

Olivier was knighted in 1947 and received a life peerage in 1970. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1981.