Famous Birthdays on January 14

Benedict Arnold was an American-born British military officer who served during the American Revolutionary War. He fought with distinction for the American Continental Army and rose to the rank of major general before defecting to the British in 1780. General George Washington had given him his fullest trust and had placed him in command of West Point in New York. Arnold was planning to surrender the fort to British forces, but the plot was discovered in September 1780, whereupon he fled to the British lines. In the later part of the war, Arnold was commissioned as a brigadier general in the British Army and placed in command of the American Legion. He led British forces in battle against the army which he had once commanded, and his name became synonymous with treason and betrayal in the United States.

Kevin Serge Durand is a Canadian actor. He is known for his work in numerous film and television roles, including portraying Vasiliy Fet in The Strain, Joshua in Dark Angel, Martin Keamy in Lost, Frederick Gideon in Locke & Key, Fred J. Dukes / The Blob in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Barry Burton in Resident Evil: Retribution, Gabriel in Legion, Little John in Robin Hood, Jeeves Tremor in Smokin' Aces, Carlos in The Butterfly Effect, and Proximus Caesar in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. He received a 2012 Best Supporting Actor Genie nomination for his portrayal of Lenny Jackson in Citizen Gangster and Zipacna in the series Stargate SG-1.

Jordan Elizabeth Ladd is an American actress. The daughter of actress Cheryl Ladd and producer David Ladd, she initially worked with her mother in several made-for-television films, before appearing at nineteen in the direct-to-video erotic film Embrace of the Vampire (1994). She subsequently appeared in the drama Nowhere (1997) and the comedy Never Been Kissed (1999). Ladd became known as a scream queen, having appeared in several successful horror films, including Cabin Fever (2002), Club Dread (2004), Death Proof (2007), and Grace (2009). Ladd is also known for work with director David Lynch appearing in his films Darkened Room (2002) and Inland Empire (2006).

Geoff Tate is an American singer and songwriter. He rose to fame with the progressive metal band Queensrÿche, who had commercial success with their 1988 album Operation: Mindcrime and 1990 album Empire. Tate is ranked fourteenth on Hit Parader's list of the 100 Greatest Metal Vocalists of All Time. He was voted No. 2 on That Metal Show's top 5 hard rock vocalists of the 1980s. In 2012, he won the Vegas Rocks! Magazine Music Award for "Voice in Progressive Heavy Metal". In 2015, he placed ninth on OC Weekly's list of the 10 Best High-Pitched Metal Singers. After his farewell tour as Queensrÿche, he renamed his band Operation: Mindcrime, after the Queensrÿche album of the same name.

Murray Bookchin was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher. Influenced by the works of G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Peter Kropotkin, he was a pioneer in the environmental movement. Bookchin formulated and developed the theory of social ecology and urban planning within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology. Among the most important were Our Synthetic Environment (1962), Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), The Ecology of Freedom (1982), and Urbanization Without Cities (1987). In the late 1990s, he became disenchanted with what he saw as an increasingly apolitical "lifestylism" of the contemporary anarchist movement, stopped referring to himself as an anarchist, and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called "communalism", which seeks to reconcile and expand Marxist, syndicalist, and anarchist thought.

Donald Glenn Garlits is an American race car driver and automotive engineer. Born in Tampa, Florida, Garlits is considered the godfather of drag racing, he is known as "Big Daddy" to drag racing fans around the world. A pioneer in the field of drag racing, he perfected the rear-engine Top Fuel dragster, an innovation motivated by the loss of part of his foot in a dragster accident. This design was notably safer since it put most of the fuel processing and rotating parts of the dragster behind the driver. The driver was placed in front of nearly all the mechanical components, thus protecting him and allowing him to activate a variety of safety equipment in the event of catastrophic mechanical failure or a fire. Garlits was an early promoter of the full-body, fire-resistant Nomex driving suit, complete with socks, gloves, and balaclava.

Siegmund Nimsgern was a German bass-baritone who made an international career. His signature roles were "evil, dark, ambiguous figures" such as Pizarro in Beethoven's Fidelio and Telramund in Wagner's Lohengrin. Other dark roles he performed include Kaspar in Weber's Der Freischütz, Ruthven in Marschner's Der Vampyr, Klingsor in Wagner's Parsifal, Scarpia in Puccini's Tosca, Bartók's Bluebeard and Hindemith's Cardillac. He performed at La Scala in Milan and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and portrayed Wotan in Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival from 1983 to 1986. He was also known for performing works by Bach in concert and in recordings, including cantata cycles and major works with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Helmuth Rilling. He recorded Schoenberg's Die Jakobsleiter and Gurre-Lieder conducted by Pierre Boulez and took part in a 1989 recording of Lohengrin that won a Grammy Award.

Kenneth Lloyd Sailors was an American professional basketball player and played in the 1940s and early 1950s. A 5 ft 10 in (1.78 m) point guard, he is regarded as being one of the players who developed the jump shot as an alternative to the two-handed, flat-footed set shot. After being named All-American in college basketball for Wyoming in 1942 and 1943, Sailors served in the United States Marine Corps during World War II and returned to play for the Cowboys after the war again winning All-American honors in 1946. Sailors played pro basketball for several teams, then moved to Alaska with his wife and became a high school basketball coach in Glennallen, Alaska north of Valdez.

Selahattin Ülkümen was a Turkish diplomat who was recognized by Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations in 1989, with his name being listed at Yad Vashem in the city of Jerusalem. During World War II, he was serving as a consul-general of Turkey on the island of Rhodes, Greece, which had been invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany. Ülkümen assisted the island's Jews by personally intervening to prevent as many of them as possible from being deported by the Germans amidst the Holocaust. In total, he managed to save around 50 Jews—13 on the basis of their Turkish citizenship, and the remainder through his own initiatives.

Nadia Maftouni is an Iranian academic, philosophical author and artist. She is best known as a leading Researcher on Farabian, Avicennian and Suhrawardian philosophy with her modern reading of their works. She is also an established researcher in Jurisprudence and Islamic History. She is a professor at the University of Tehran, where she is an alumna and a member of the department of Philosophy and Islamic Theology. She is a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School and she is on the board of History of Philosophy Quarterly. She is also famous for proposing to Iranian artist Hossein Nuri when he was already in a wheelchair.

Shawn Crawford is a retired American sprint athlete. He competed in the 100 meters and 200 meters events. In the 200 meter sprint, Crawford won gold at the 2004 Summer Olympics and silver at the 2008 Summer Olympics. He originally finished 4th in the race but after the 2nd and 3rd-place winners were disqualified, he moved up to a silver. On April 17, 2013, Crawford was suspended for two years for missing out-of-competition drug tests. His coach, Bob Kersee claimed that Crawford retired after the 2012 United States Olympic Trials and USA Track & Field said he filed retirement papers in 2013.

Hugo Dyonizy Steinhaus was a Polish mathematician and educator. Steinhaus obtained his PhD under David Hilbert at Göttingen University in 1911 and later became a professor at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów, where he helped establish what later became known as the Lwów School of Mathematics. He is credited with "discovering" mathematician Stefan Banach, with whom he gave a notable contribution to functional analysis through the Banach–Steinhaus theorem. After World War II Steinhaus played an important part in the establishment of the mathematics department at Wrocław University and in the revival of Polish mathematics from the destruction of the war.

Vincent Terrell Jackson was an American professional football wide receiver who played for 12 seasons in the National Football League (NFL). He played college football for the Northern Colorado Bears and was selected by the San Diego Chargers in the second round of the 2005 NFL draft. Jackson also played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He was selected to the Pro Bowl thrice and exceeded 1,000 receiving yards six times in his career. Jackson died in 2021, with the official cause of his death reported as chronic alcohol abuse. An autopsy found Stage 2 chronic traumatic encephalopathy in his brain.

Edna Moscelyne Larkin Jasinski was a Native American ballerina and one of the Five Moons", Indigenous ballerinas from Oklahoma who gained international fame in the 20th century. After dancing with the Original Ballet Russe and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, she and her husband settled in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where in 1956 they founded the Tulsa Ballet and its associated school. It became a major regional company in the American Southwest and made its New York City debut in 1983. She is portrayed in the mural Flight of Spirit displayed in the Rotunda of the Oklahoma State Capitol building.

Byron Antron Leftwich is an American football coach and former quarterback who played in the National Football League (NFL) for 10 seasons. He played college football for the Marshall Thundering Herd, winning MAC Most Valuable Player twice between 2001 and 2002. Leftwich was selected seventh overall in the 2003 NFL draft by the Jacksonville Jaguars, where he held a starting role during his first four seasons. He spent the remainder of his career as a backup for the Atlanta Falcons, Pittsburgh Steelers, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers and was a member of the Steelers team that won Super Bowl XLIII.

William Bendix was an American film, radio, and television actor, known for his portrayals of rough, blue-collar characters. He gained significant recognition for his role in Wake Island, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Bendix is also remembered for playing Chester A. Riley, the earnest and clumsy aircraft plant worker, in both the radio and television versions of The Life of Riley. Additionally, he portrayed baseball legend Babe Ruth in The Babe Ruth Story. Bendix frequently co-starred with Alan Ladd, appearing in ten films together; both actors died in 1964.

David Shepard Smith Jr. is an American former broadcast journalist. He served as chief general news anchor and host of The News with Shepard Smith on CNBC, a daily evening newscast launched in late September 2020; but his program was canceled in November 2022. Smith is best known for his 23-year career at the Fox News Channel, which he joined at its 1996 inception and where he served as chief anchor and managing editor of the breaking news division. Smith hosted several programs in his tenure at Fox, including Fox Report, Studio B and Shepard Smith Reporting.

Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was a British photographer, designer, and diarist. Renowned for his elegant and often theatrical style, Beaton's work appeared in leading publications such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. He gained international acclaim for his portraits of celebrities, royalty, and socialites, as well as his work in fashion, theatre, and film. Though he is best known for his celebrity portraits, Beaton was also one of the most prolific photographers of life during World War II, taking over 7,000 photographs between 1940 and 1945 in Britain as well as in China and Africa.

Emily Margaret Watson is an English actress. She began her career on stage and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1992. In 2002, she starred in productions of Twelfth Night and Uncle Vanya at the Donmar Warehouse, and was nominated for the Olivier Award for Best Actress for the latter. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her debut film role as a newlywed in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996) and for her portrayal of Jacqueline du Pré in Anand Tucker's Hilary and Jackie (1998).