Famous Birthdays on November 9

Blue Öyster Cult is an American rock band formed on Long Island, New York, in the hamlet of Stony Brook, in 1967. They have sold 25 million records worldwide, including 7 million in the United States. Their fusion of hard rock with psychedelia and penchant for occult, fantastical and tongue-in-cheek lyrics had a major influence on heavy metal music. They developed a cult following and enjoyed mainstream success with "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" (1976), "Godzilla" (1977) and "Burnin' for You" (1981), which remain classic rock radio staples. They were early adopters of the music video format, and their videos were in heavy rotation on MTV in its early period.

Karim Kharbouch, known professionally as French Montana, is a Moroccan and American rapper. Born and raised in Morocco, he immigrated to New York City with his family at the age of 13 and began his career as a battle rapper in the early 2000s — under the name Young French. He first gained recognition hosting the locally-tailored DVD series Cocaine City during the 2000s, which centered around interviews of hip hop figures. He pursued a recording career while doing so, releasing several underground projects before signing with Sean Combs's Bad Boy Records and Rick Ross's Maybach Music Group, in a triple-joint venture with Interscope Records in 2012.

Isaiah Edwin Leopold, better known as Ed Wynn, was an American actor and comedian. He began his career in vaudeville in 1903 and was known for his Perfect Fool comedy character, his pioneering radio show of the 1930s, his performances in classic Disney films such as Alice in Wonderland and Mary Poppins, and his later career as a dramatic actor, which continued into the 1960s. Wynn's variety show (1949–1950), The Ed Wynn Show, won a Peabody Award and an Emmy Award. Late in his career, he began alternating his comedic work with acclaimed dramatic performances; earning nominations for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA award for The Great Man, and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Diary of Anne Frank.

Fernando Ferreira Meirelles is a Brazilian filmmaker. He is best known for co-directing the film City of God, released in 2002 in Brazil and in 2003 in the U.S. by Miramax Films, which received international critical acclaim. For his work in the film, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director. He was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Director in 2005 for The Constant Gardener, which garnered the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Rachel Weisz. He also directed the 2008 adaptation of José Saramago's novel Blindness, and the 2011 film 360. In 2019, Meirelles directed The Two Popes for Netflix.

Anne Sexton was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Her poetry often drew on her experiences with mental illness, including bipolar disorder and suicidal ideation, as well as aspects of her personal life. She was known for blending fairy tales, mythology, and religious imagery with autobiographical themes. Sexton’s work continues to be widely read and studied for its emotional intensity and lasting influence on contemporary American poetry. After her death, one of her daughters has alleged abuse in accounts discussed in some later biographies and scholarship.

Adam Troy Dunn, nicknamed "Big Donkey", is an American former professional baseball left fielder and first baseman. He played 14 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB), primarily for the Cincinnati Reds. A two-time MLB All-Star, Dunn was known for his prodigious power and his high propensity to strike out. He hit 38 or more home runs in seven straight seasons, tied with Babe Ruth for the second-longest such streak in MLB history, and was 11th all-time in at bats per home run at the time of his retirement. In addition, in 2004, he hit the fourth-longest home run in MLB history, a 535-foot blast that landed in a different state. However, he ranks third on the all-time strikeout list, with 2,379, and still holds the American League record for most strikeouts in a single season, with 222 in 2012.

Viktor Hermann Brack was a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS), a convicted war criminal and one of the prominent organisers of the involuntary euthanasia programme Aktion T4; this Nazi initiative resulted in the systematic murder of 275,000 to 300,000 disabled people. He held various positions of responsibility in Hitler's Chancellery in Berlin. Following his role in the T4 programme, Brack was one of the men identified as responsible for the gassing of Jews in extermination camps, having conferred with Odilo Globočnik about its use in the practical implementation of the Final Solution. Brack was sentenced to death in 1947 during the Doctors' Trial and executed by hanging in 1948.

Arthur Louis Hugo Rudolph was a German rocket engineer who was a leader of the effort to develop the V-2 rocket. After World War II, the United States government's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) brought him to the U.S. as part of the clandestine Operation Paperclip, where he became one of the main developers of the U.S. space program. He worked within the U.S. Army and NASA, where he managed the development of several systems, including the Pershing missile and the Saturn V Moon rocket. In 1984, the U.S. government investigated him for war crimes, and he agreed to renounce his United States citizenship and leave the U.S. in return for not being prosecuted.

Philip Gibson Hodge Jr. was an American engineer who specialized in mechanics of elastic and plastic behavior of materials. His work resulted in significant advancements in plasticity theory including developments in the method of characteristics, limit-analysis, piecewise linear isotropic plasticity, and nonlinear programming applications. Hodge was the technical editor of American Society of Mechanical Engineers Journal of Applied Mechanics from 1971-1976. From 1984 to 2000 he was the secretary of the U. S. National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, its longest serving Secretary. In 1949 he became assistant professor of Mathematics at UCLA, then moved on to become associate professor of applied mechanics at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1953, Professor of Mechanics at Illinois Institute of Technology in 1957, and professor of mechanics at the University of Minnesota in 1971, where he remained until he retired in 1991. After retirement he was professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota and visiting professor emeritus at Stanford University.

Grace Atkinson, better known as Ti-Grace Atkinson, is an American radical feminist activist, writer and philosopher. She was an early member of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and presided over the New York chapter in 1967–68, though she quickly grew disillusioned with the group. She left to form The Feminists, which she left a few years later due to internal disputes. Atkinson was a member of the Daughters of Bilitis and an advocate for political lesbianism. Atkinson has been largely inactive since the 1970s, but resurfaced in 2013 to co-author an open statement expressing radical feminists' concerns about what they perceived as the silencing of discussion around "the currently fashionable concept of gender."

Maud Howe Elliott was an American novelist, most notable for her Pulitzer Prize-winning collaboration with her sisters, Laura E. Richards and Florence Hall, on their mother's biography The Life of Julia Ward Howe (1916). Her other works included A Newport Aquarelle (1883); Phillida (1891); Kasper Craig (1892); Mammon, later published as Honor: A Novel (1893); Roma Beata, Letters from the Eternal City (1903); Sun and Shadow in Spain (1908);The Eleventh Hour in the Life of Julia Ward Howe (1911); Three Generations (1923); Lord Byron's Helmet (1927); John Elliott, The Story of an Artist (1930); My Cousin, F. Marion Crawford (1934); and This Was My Newport (1944).

Paul Drummond Cameron is an American psychologist. While employed at various institutions, including the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, he conducted research on passive smoking, but he is best known today for his claims about homosexuality. After a successful 1982 campaign against a gay rights proposal in Lincoln, Nebraska, he established the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (ISIS), now known as the Family Research Institute (FRI). As FRI's chairman, Cameron has written contentious papers asserting unproven associations between homosexuality and the perpetration of child sexual abuse and reduced life expectancy. These have been heavily criticized and frequently discredited by others in the field.

Chitresh Das was a classical dancer of the North Indian style of Kathak. Born in Calcutta, Das was a performer, choreographer, composer and educator. He was instrumental in bringing Kathak to the US and is credited with having established Kathak amongst the Indian diaspora in America. In 1979, Das established the Chhandam School of Kathak and the Chitresh Das Dance Company in California. In 2002, he founded Chhandam Nritya Bharati in India. There were ten branches of Chhandam worldwide. Until his death in 2015, Das taught dance as a way of life, a path for attaining self-knowledge and as a service to society.

Alessandro Del Piero is an Italian former professional footballer who mainly played as a second striker, although he was capable of playing in several offensive positions. Since 2015, he has worked as a pundit for Sky Sport Italia. A technically gifted and creative supporting forward who was also a free-kick specialist, he is regarded as one of the greatest players of all time and one of the greatest players in Juventus's history. He is currently the second highest all-time Italian top-scorer in all competitions, with 346 goals, behind only Silvio Piola, with 390 goals. In his career Del Piero scored 462 goals.

Florence Rena Sabin was an American physician and medical scientist known for pioneering work on the development of the lymphatic system and for later transforming public health in Colorado. She was the first woman to hold a full professorship at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and the first woman to head a department at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. During retirement she led a public-health reform campaign in Colorado that produced the “Sabin Health Laws”; in 1951 she received the Albert Lasker Public Service Award for her public-health work.

Robert Frank was a Swiss American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ ... ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century." Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.

Dorothy Jean Dandridge was an American actress and singer. She was the first African American to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for Carmen Jones (1954), a performance which also earned her a nomination for a BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress. Dandridge had also performed as a vocalist in venues such as the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater. During her early career, she performed as a part of the Wonder Children, later the Dandridge Sisters, and appeared in a succession of films, usually in uncredited roles.

Gabrielle Sunshine Miller is a Canadian actress who, since the start of her career in 1993, has appeared in many television films and series episodes, including leading roles in two of Canada's most popular concurrently-running series, the sitcom Corner Gas (2004–09) and the comedy-drama Robson Arms (2005–08). She was also a regular or semi-regular on the TV series Pasadena (2002), Alienated (2003–04), Call Me Fitz (2012–13), Mother Up! (2013) and Good Witch (2015–16). Most recently, she guest starred on a season 25 episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Ryan Patrick Murphy is an American writer, director, and producer, working mainly in television. He has often been described as "the most powerful man" in modern television and signed the largest development deal in television history with Netflix. Murphy is noted for having created a shift in inclusive storytelling that "brought marginalized characters to the masses." His accolades include six Primetime Emmy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, a Tony Award, four Producers Guild of America Awards and two Golden Globe Awards, including the honorary Carol Burnett Award.