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Lara Fabian is a Belgian-Italian international singer who holds Canadian citizenship. Multilingual, she sings in French, Italian and English. She... has also sung in Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, Greek, and German. She has sold over 10 million records worldwide. She is a lyric soprano with a vocal range that spans four octaves from E-flat 3 to G#6 in live performances, and has reached up to A5. Born to a Belgian father and a Sicilian mother in Etterbeek, Belgium, Fabian spent her first five years in her mother's hometown of Catania in Sicily, before moving back to Brussels, Belgium. She began singing, dancing and taking piano lessons at a young age, and began formal music lessons at age eight. She began writing and performing her own songs during her ten years of formal music study. Fabian's songs were influenced by her classical vocal and music theory training, and by contemporary artists such as Barbra Streisand and Queen. During the 1980s, Fabian entered a number of European competitions and won several prizes. She released her first single, "L'Aziza est en pleurs" / "Il y avait" in 1986.
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Neelie Kroes is the European Commissioner for Competition since November, 2004. She was the former Dutch Minister of Transport Water and Management... and State Secretary of Transport and Water Management. She was member of the board of commissioners of several multinational companies. She was born in 1942, in Rotterdam, Zuid-Holland. She received her Masters in Economics in 1965 from Erasmus University.
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Sophia Helena in 't Veld is a Dutch Member of the European Parliament for the social liberal party Democrats 66 as part of the Alliance of Liberals... and Democrats for Europe. Sophia Helena in 't Veld was born on 13 September 1963 in Vollenhove, Overijssel, the Netherlands. From 1982 to 1991, she studied history at Leiden University. From 1996 to 2004, she was the secretary general of the ELDR group in the Committee of the Regions. In the 2004 internal party elections she defeated the sitting D66 MEPs. She has been a Member of the European Parliament since 20 July 2004, for Democrats 66 as part of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe parliamentary group. She is an Honorary Associate of the UK National Secular Society, which in 2011 awarded her with the Secularist of the Year prize. She has also sought a condemnation of Pope Benedict XVI over his critical comments on gender theory. A Washington judge ruled in 2009 that the United States government does not need to explain to Dutch MEP Sophie in 't Veld why she must undergo additional security checks each time she visits the US.
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Sylvain Chauveau is a critically acclaimed instrumental music and electronic music artist and composer from Bayonne, France. Sylvain Chauveau was... born in Bayonne, France , and now lives in Brussels, Belgium. Since 1998, he composes music for piano, strings, winds, voice and electronics. He plays live worldwide. He has released solo records on Type, FatCat, Creative Sources, Nature Bliss, and Les Disques du Soleil et de l'Acier. He has composed soundtracks for feature films and original music for dance shows. Sylvain Chauveau is also a member of the avant-rock band Arca , of the collective 0 , and of the improv duo On . 1. Fat Cat Records 2. Buttimer, Colin "Un Autre Decembre", BBC.co.uk, June 21, 2007. 3. Bussolini, Brandon "S", Dusted Magazine, November 14, 2007.
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Anca Parghel , Romanian jazz artist, was a singer who excelled in scat, improvisation and vocal percussion. She claimed to be a polyglot, speaking... seven different languages, including English, German, Portuguese and her native Romanian. Born to a poor family she began singing at the age of three and was up onstage quickly as a prodigy child. She also sang in her church choir. She left home at age 14 to study at the Music High School in Iaşi, later attending the Iaşi Conservatory which she graduated in 1981 . However, since jazz was not exactly popular nor officially encouraged in this part of the world living behind the Iron Curtain, Anca studied jazz on her own. At the age of 18 she married painter Virgiliu Parghel , with whom she had two sons, Ciprian and Tudor. Anca Parghel taught music for a living in Suceava at the local Arts high-school before turning to a professional singing career .
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Natacha Atlas is a Belgian singer known for her fusion of Arabic and Western electronic music, particularly hip-hop. She once termed her music... "cha'abi moderne" . Her music has been influenced by many styles including Arabic, hip hop, drum 'n' bass and reggae. Atlas began her career as part of the world fusion group Transglobal Underground. In 1995, she began to focus on her solo career with the release of Diaspora. She has since released seven solo albums and been a part of numerous collaborations. Her version of "Mon Amie La Rose" became a surprise success in France, reaching 16 on the French Singles Charts in 1999. She is a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Conference Against Racism. Atlas was born to a father of Moroccan, Egyptian, and Palestinian ancestry who was born in Jerusalem and a British mother who had converted to Islam. Her paternal grandfather was born in Egypt, but grew up in Palestine, immigrating to Europe at age 15. She concedes to being "maybe 10 percent Jewish or something.
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Audrey Hepburn was a British actress and humanitarian. Although modest about her acting ability, Hepburn remains one of the world's most famous... actresses of all time, remembered as a film and fashion icon of the twentieth century. Redefining glamour with "elfin" features and a gamine waif-like figure that inspired designs by Hubert de Givenchy, she was inducted in the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame, and ranked, by the American Film Institute, as the third greatest female screen legend in the history of American cinema. Born in Ixelles, a district of Brussels, Hepburn spent her childhood between Belgium, England and the Netherlands, including German-occupied Arnhem during the Second World War. From 1939 on she studied ballet in Arnhem and after the war with Sonia Gaskell in Amsterdam. In 1948 she moved to London where she continued in ballet and performed as a chorus girl in various West End musical theatre productions.
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Chantal Anne Akerman is a Belgian film director, artist, and professor of film at the European Graduate School. Akerman's best-known film, Jeanne... Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles , exemplifies a dedication to the ellipses of conventional narrative cinema. Akerman was born to an observant Jewish family in Brussels, Belgium. Her grandparents and her mother were sent to Auschwitz; only her mother came back. This is a very important factor in her personal experience, and her mother's anxiety is a recurrent theme in her filmography. Akerman claims that, at the age of 15, after viewing Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou , she decided to make movies the same night. At 18, Akerman entered the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion, a Belgian film school. During her first term, however, Akerman chose to leave and make Saute ma ville, a thirteen-minute black-and-white picture in 35mm. Akerman partially subsidized Saute ma ville from shares she sold on the Antwerp diamond exchange, procuring its remaining budget through clerical work. In 1971, Saute ma ville premiered at the Oberhausen short-film festival.
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Guillaume Dufay was a Franco-Flemish composer of the early Renaissance. As the central figure in the Burgundian School, he was the most famous and... influential composer in Europe in the mid-15th century. From the evidence of his will, he was probably born in Beersel, in the vicinity of Brussels. Circumstantial evidence claims him to have been born the illegitimate child of an unknown priest and a woman named Marie Du Fayt, though this suggestion is as of yet unproven. Marie moved with her son to Cambrai early in his life, staying with a relative who was a canon of the cathedral there. Soon Dufay's musical gifts were noticed by the cathedral authorities, who evidently gave him a thorough training in music; he studied with Rogier de Hesdin during the summer of 1409, and he was listed as a choirboy in the cathedral from 1409 to 1412. During those years he studied with Nicolas Malin, and the authorities must have been impressed with the boy's gifts because they gave him his own copy of Villedieu’s Doctrinale in 1411, a highly unusual event for one so young.
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Agnès Varda is a French film director and professor at the European Graduate School. Her movies, photographs, and art installations focus on... documentary realism, feminist issues, and social commentary — with a distinct experimental style. The career of Agnès Varda is an important and often overlooked voice in the modern French cinema. Her career pre-dates the start of the Nouvelle Vague , andLa Pointe Courte contains many elements specific to that movement that make it famous. Varda was born Arlette Varda in Brussels, Belgium, the daughter of Christiane and Eugene Jean Varda, an engineer. Her mother was French and her father's family were Greek refugees from Asia Minor. Varda studied Art History at the Ecole du Louvre before getting a job as the official photographer for the Théâtre National Populaire in Paris. She liked photography but was interested in moving into film. After spending a few days filming the small French fishing town of La Pointe Courte for a terminally ill friend who could no longer visit on his own, Varda decided to shoot a feature film of her own.
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Brian Molko is a songwriter, lead vocalist, and guitarist of the band Placebo. He is known in particular for his nasal, high-pitched vocals,... androgynous appearance, and unique, Sonic Youth-influenced guitar style and tuning. He was born to an American father of French-Italian heritage and a Scottish mother. Molko's family moved frequently during his childhood including to Scotland, Liberia, Lebanon, and Luxembourg. Brian Molko has referred to a period spent in his mother's home town of Dundee, Scotland, as "where I grew up". While Molko was brought up in a strict household that disapproved of artistic expression , he rebelled by affecting an androgynous image, wearing nail polish, lipstick, and eyeliner, and listening to punk music. Molko initially attended the European School of Luxembourg but had to leave due to excessive bullying; he later attended the American International School of Luxembourg and went on to study drama at Goldsmiths College in London.
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