Birthday's to share this week : 22nd - 28th January 2017.

Do you celebrate your Birthday this week?

Rosamund Pike does on 27th January - check out my tribute to this Birthday Girl turning 38, at the end of this feature.

Do you also share your birthday with a well known, highly regarded & famous Actor or Actress; share your special day with a Director, Producer, Writer, Cinematographer, Singer/Songwriter or Composer of repute; or share an interest in whoever might notch up another year in the coming seven days? Then, look no further! Whilst there will be too many to mention in this small but not insignificant and beautifully written and presented Blog, here are the more notable and noteworthy icons of the big screen, and the small screen, that you will recognise, and that you might just share your birthday with in the week ahead. If so, Happy Birthday to you from Odeon Online!

Sunday 22nd January

• Piper Laurie - Born 1932, turns 85 - Actress
• Linda Blair - Born 1959, turns 58 - Actress
• Diane Lane - Born 1965, turns 52 - Actress
• John Hurt - Born 1940, turns 77 - Actor
• Jim Jarmusch - Born 1953, turns 64 - Director | Producer | Writer | Actor | Editor | Composer  

Monday 23rd January

• Shin'ichi (Sonny) Chiba - Born 1939, turns 78 - Actor | Producer | Director | Stuntman
• Rutger Hauer - Born 1944, turns 73 - Actor | Producer | Director
• Richard Dean Anderson - Born 1950, turns 67 - Actor | Producer
• Richard Roxburgh - Born 1962, turns 55 - Actor | Writer | Producer | Director
• Ewen Bremner - Born 1972, turns 45 - Actor | Producer  

Tuesday 24th January

• Adrian Edmondson - Born 1957, turns 60 - Actor | Writer | Director
• Ed Helms - Born 1974, turns 43 - Actor | Writer | Producer | Singer
• Nastassja Kinski - Born 1961, turns 56 - Actress | Producer  

Wednesday 25th January

• Tobe Hooper - Born 1943, turns 74 - Director | Producer | Writer | Actor | Composer
• Whit Stillman - Born 1952, turns 65 - Director | Producer | Writer  

Thursday 26th January

• Scott Glenn - Born 1941, turns 76 - Actor
• David Strathairn - Born 1949, turns 68 - Actor
• Ellen DeGeneres - Born 1958, turns 59 - Television Personality | Actress | Writer | Producer  

Friday 27th January

• Mimi Rogers - Born 1956, turns 61 - Actress | Producer
• Bridget Fonda - Born 1964, turns 53 - Actress
• Rosamund Pike - Born 1979, turns 38 - Actress
• James Cromwell - Born 1940, turns 77 - Actor | Producer
• Frank Miller - Born 1957, turns 60 - Writer | Producer | Director | Actor
• Alan Cumming - Born 1965, turns 52 - Actor | Writer | Producer | Director | Singer  

Saturday 28th January

• Alan Alda - Born 1936, turns 81 - Actor | Writer | Producer | Director
• Frank Darabont - Born 1959, turns 58 - Writer | Producer | Director | Actor
• Elijah Wood - Born 1981, turns 36 - Actor | Producer | Singer
• Will Poulter - Born 1993, turns 24 - Actor | Writer  

Rosamund Mary Ellen Pike was born in London, England, to mother Caroline and father Julian Pike - both opera singers. Her father currently works at the Birmingham Conservatoire as Professor of Music and Head of Operatic Studies. Her parents work commitments saw the family travel extensively across Europe in Rosamund's earlier years up until when she was seven or so years of age. She won a scholarship to the  acclaimed independent Badminton Girls School, near Bristol, and while appearing in a production of 'Romeo and Juliet' as Juliet at the National Youth Theatre was noticed by a talent agent, who aided her in her early professional acting career aspirations. She eventually secured a place to study English Literature at Wadham College, at Oxford University from where she graduated. She took a year off to pursue her acting, gaining stage appearances in 'Skylight', 'All My Sons' and several Shakespeare plays. She graduated with a degree in 2001.

While still studying at Oxford she acted and Directed various stage plays, and from 1998 gained work on television. These included appearances on the Sci-Fi pilot for 'Seven Days' as a CIA Agent, the made for TV movie 'A Rather English Marriage', on three episodes of the BBC four part mini-series 'Wives and Daughters', on one episode of the Police procedural drama series 'Trial and Retribution' and then the two part 'Love in a Cold Climate'. In 2002 however, Pike gained her big screen debut playing Bond girl Miranda Frost, an undercover MI6 Agent and double agent to Pierce Brosnan's James Bond in Lee Tamahori's 'Die Another Day' - the twentieth film in the forty year running franchise. Whilst the film gained mixed critical reviews it did bring in US$432M and was the highest grossing Bond film of all-time, up to that point.

From here Pike has rarely been very far away from our big screens. In 2004 she starred in the Israeli film 'Promised Land', and then 'The Libertine' with Johnny Depp and John Malkovich. 2005 followed with Joe Wrights adaptation of 'Pride & Prejudice' with Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen, Donald Sutherland and Judi Dench and then a complete change of pace and genre with the Sci-Fi action horror offering 'Doom' with Karl Urban and Dwayne Johnson. 'Fracture' came next in 2007 with Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling and David Strathairn, then 'Fugitive Pieces', 'An Education' with Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Dominic Cooper and Emma Thompson and then a return to Sci-Fi action mystery with Jonathan Mostow's 'Surrogates' with Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames, and James Cromwell seeing out the decade. In the meantime, there had been further small screen appearances too on 'Foyle's War', 'The Tower' and made for television film 'Freewill'.

As the decade turned over there was the satirical thriller 'Burning Palms', comedy drama 'Barney's Version' with Paul Giamatti, Dustin Hoffman and Minnie Driver, the British film 'Made in Dagenham' with Bob Hoskins and then the Bond spoof 'Johnny English Reborn' with Rowan Atkinson which was a commercial success raking in US$160M from its US$45M budget outlay, but less of a critical one. 'The Big Year' with Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson came along in 2011 and bombed at the Box Office, unlike Pike's follow up film as Queen Andromeda in the epic adventure action fantasy 'Wrath of the Titans' with an all star cast featuring Sam Worthington, Bill Nighy, Ralph Fiennes, Liam Neeson, Edgar Ramirez, Danny Huston and Toby Kebbel. That film made US$306M at the global Box Office from its US$150M budget but fared well less well critically too.

The first instalment in big screen adaptation of Lee Child's character 'Jack Reacher' was released in 2012 with Pike starring as defence lawyer Helen Rodin opposite Tom Cruise as former US Military Police Officer turned drifter and righter or wrongs Jack Reacher.  The film recovered US$219M from its US$60M outlay, and has so far spawned one sequel - last years 'Jack Reacher : Never Go Back'. 'The Devil You Know' and then Edgar Wright's end of the world Sci-Fi comedy 'The World's End' with Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Pierce Brosnan, Eddie Marsan and Paddy Considine was released in 2013 to widespread critical acclaim. Pike teamed up with Brosnan for the third time in Nick Hornby's black comedy adaptation of 'A Long Way Down'. She also paired up with Simon Pegg again in 'Hector and the Search for Happiness' which also starred Toni Collette - her Co-Star from 'A Long Way Down'.

'What We Did On Our Holiday' was her third film offering of 2014, and closing out that year was David Fincher's acclaimed psychological thriller 'Gone Girl' in which Pike starred as Amy Dunne the missing and deranged wife opposite Ben Affleck's Nick Dunne. The film grossed US$370M from its US$61M budget, and garnered Pike her first Best Actress Academy Award nomination, as well as Golden Globe, BAFTA, SAG, and AACTA nods. All up the film received 64 award wins and a further 171 nominations.



2015 saw 'Return to Sender' with 'A United Kingdom' released just before Christmas and in the US not until early February. Here Pike stars opposite David Oyelowo in this biographical romantic drama film set in the late '40's when Seretse Khama, the Prince of Bechuanaland meets and falls in love with Ruth Williams, a London office clerk, and the couple have to deal with the fall out from their frowned upon inter-racial, mixed colour union.




Since 2015 Pike has voiced the characters of Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward and Captain Ridley O'Bannon in the remake of the cult '60's Gerry and Sylvia Anderson television series 'Thunderbirds' with this updated telling 'Thunderbirds Are Go' across two seasons so far and 39 episodes. Next up and due for release in 2017 are 'Hostiles', a Western with Christian Bale, Jesse Plemons, Stephen Lang and Ben Foster; 'High Wire Act', an action thriller with Jon Hamm; 'Entebbe' based on the 1976 terrorist hijacking of a passenger plane forced to land in Entebbe, Uganda, also starring Daniel Bruhl; and 'The Man with the Iron Heart' (formerly known as 'HHhH') with Mia Wasikowska, Jason Clarke and Jack O'Connell. Then due in 2018 and currently in pre-production is 'The Bends' another action thriller.

All up Pike has 42 Acting credits under her belt, excluding a number of stage acting roles, has one Academy Award, BAFTA, Golden Globe, SAG and AACTA nomination for her role in 'Gone Girl' and all told has so far accumulated 29 award wins and a total 51 other nominations. She was previously engaged to Director and Producer Joe Wright, and has since been in a steady relationship with mathematical researcher Robie Uniacke since 2009 and they have two sons together - Solo (born in 2012) and Atom (born in 2014).

Rosamund Pike - an English rose, never typecast and plays to her strengths, has been awarded as a Bond Girl and for 'Gone Girl', plays the cello and the piano, speaks both French and German, has the looks and increasingly the star power, and is very clearly in demand on stage, television and the big screen. Happy Birthday to you Rosamund, from Odeon Online.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-