Islington

The Old Red Lion Theatre is a fringe theatre, situated above a pub at The Angel, in the London Borough of Islington. It was founded in 1948 as the... Old Red Lion Theatre Club. The pub in itself is one of the oldest in London, having first been built in 1415 in what was then the rural village of Islington in open countryside and fields. A house called Goose Farm and some nearby cattle pens were the only structures to adjoin it, and St John Street was a country lane. In the late 18th century Chester Road became notorious for highwaymen, with patrols being provided to protect those travelling along it at night. At this time descriptions state that the Old Red Lion was a small brick house with three trees in its forecourt, visited by William Hogarth , Samuel Johnson and Thomas Paine . The Old Red Lion was rebuilt in 1899, adding two exits onto different streets.
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Dana Rosemary Scallon , known in her singing career simply as Dana, is an Irish singer and former Member of the European Parliament . She achieved... fame when she won Eurovision Song Contest 1970 with "All Kinds of Everything", a subsequent worldwide million-seller. She has released over thirty singles and thirty albums as a songwriter and performer of Christian music. She entered politics in 1997, running in the Irish presidential election and subsequently being elected as the MEP for Connacht–Ulster. Scallon was an independent candidate in the Irish 2011 presidential election but was eliminated on the first count having received 51,220 votes which placed her sixth, above the other female candidate Mary Davis. Scallon was born in Islington, North London. Her father, who worked as a porter at nearby King's Cross station, was a native of Derry, Northern Ireland; he had been forced to relocate his family due to the high unemployment there after the war.
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Charles Robert "Charlie" Watts is an English drummer, best known as a member of The Rolling Stones. He is also the leader of a jazz band, a record... producer, commercial artist, and horse breeder. Charles Robert "Charlie" Watts was born to Charles Watts, a lorry driver for a precursor of British Rail and his wife Lilian at University College Hospital, London, and raised in Islington and then Kingsbury. He attended Tylers Croft Secondary Modern School from 1952 to 1956; as a schoolboy, he displayed a talent for art, cricket and football. Watts' parents gave him his first drum kit in 1955; he was interested in jazz, and would practice drumming along with jazz records he collected. After completing secondary school, he enrolled at Harrow Art School , which he attended until 1960. After leaving school, Watts worked as a graphic designer for an advertising company called Charlie Daniels Studios, and also played drums occasionally with local bands in coffee shops and clubs. In 1961 he met Alexis Korner, who invited him to join his band, Blues Incorporated.
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Heath Andrew Ledger was an Australian television and film actor. After performing roles in Australian television and film during the 1990s, Ledger... left his homeland for the United States in 1998 to develop his film career. His work encompassed nineteen films, including 10 Things I Hate About You , The Patriot , A Knight's Tale , Brokeback Mountain , and The Dark Knight . In addition to acting, he produced and directed music videos and aspired to be a film director. For his portrayal of Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain, Ledger won the 2005 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and the 2006 "Best Actor" award from the Australian Film Institute and was nominated for the 2005 Academy Award for Best Actor as well as the 2006 BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. Posthumously he shared the 2007 Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award with the rest of the ensemble cast, the director, and the casting director for the film I'm Not There, which was inspired by the life and songs of American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.
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Emily Watson is an actress.

Hubert Gregg was a BBC broadcaster, writer and stage actor. At the end of his life he was probably best known for the BBC Radio 2 "oldies" shows A... Square Deal and Thanks For The Memory. In an earlier era he had also been a novelist, a theatre director and a hit songwriter. Born in Islington, London, he worked for the BBC from the 1930s onwards, wrote the wartime hit "I'm Going To Get Lit Up When The Lights Go On In London" in 1943, and on seeing the German Doodlebugs flying over London, composed the song "Maybe It's Because I'm A Londoner", which became a hit and London folk anthem in 1947. Gregg spoke German fluently, and during the war worked for the BBC German service, to such good effect that Goebbels assumed he must be a German traitor. He was married three times: his first wife was musical comedy star Zoe Gail, with whom he had a daughter, actress-writer Stacey Gregg; his second wife being the actress and singer Pat Kirkwood.
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John Richard Hegley is an English performance poet, comedian, musician and songwriter. He was born in the Newington Green area of Islington, London,... England, into a Roman Catholic household. He was brought up in Luton and Bristol. After school he worked as a bus conductor and civil servant before attending the University of Bradford, where he gained a B.Sc. in European Literature and the History of Ideas and Sociology. Hegley has French ancestry and claims he is descended from the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. His paternal grandmother was a dancer with the Folies Bergère. Hegley began his performing career at London's Comedy Store in 1980, and received national exposure when he appeared with his backing band the Popticians on Carrott's Lib in 1983, and recorded two sessions for John Peel in 1983 and 1984. Hegley published his first poetry collection, Visions of the Bone Idol , pieces from which were later incorporated into Glad to Wear Glasses, in 1984. Hegley has written a number of collections of poetry, ranging from the surreal through the humorous to the personal and emotional.
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George Grossmith was an English comedian, writer, composer, actor, and singer. His performing career spanned more than four decades. As a writer and... composer, he created 18 comic operas, nearly 100 musical sketches, some 600 songs and piano pieces, three books and both serious and comic pieces for newspapers and magazines. Grossmith is best remembered for two aspects of his career. First, he created a series of nine memorable characters in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan from 1877 to 1889, including Sir Joseph Porter, in H.M.S. Pinafore , the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance and Ko-Ko in The Mikado . Second, he wrote, in collaboration with his brother Weedon, the 1892 comic novel Diary of a Nobody. Grossmith was also famous in his day for performing his own comic piano sketches and songs, both before and after his Gilbert and Sullivan days, becoming the most popular British solo performer of the 1890s. Some of his comic songs endure today, including "See Me Dance the Polka". He continued to perform into the first decade of the 20th century. His son, George Grossmith, Jr.
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Sir Alan William Parker, CBE is an English film director, producer, writer and actor. He has been active in both the British cinema and American... cinema and was a founding member of the Directors Guild of Great Britain. Parker was born into a working class family in Islington, North London, the son of Elsie Ellen, a dressmaker, and William Leslie Parker, a house painter. He attended Dame Alice Owen's School. Parker started out as a copywriter for advertising agencies in the 1960s and 1970s and later began to write his own television commercial scripts. His most celebrated and enduring advertising work was when he worked for famed London agency Collett Dickenson Pearce where he directed many award winning commercials, including the famous Cinzano vermouth advertisement, starring Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins, shown in the UK. His film career began through his association with producer David Puttnam, now Lord Puttnam, when he wrote the screenplay for the feature Melody . Puttnam would later produce a number of Parker's films including Midnight Express .
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Dwain Anthony Chambers is an English sprinter of Afro-Caribbean descent. He has won medals on the international stage numerous times and is one of... the fastest European sprinters in the history of recorded athletics. His primary event is the 100 metres sprint, in which he has the second fastest time by a British sprinter. He is the European record holder for the 60 metres and 4 × 100 metres relay events with 6.42 seconds and 37.73 s respectively. He received a two-year ban in 2003 for taking performance enhancing drugs. Chambers was a promising young athlete, setting a junior world record of 10.06 s in the 100 m. He was the bronze medallist in the 1999 World Championships and made his first Olympic appearance at the Sydney 2000 Games; he turned in the best 100 m performance by a European at both events. By 2001, he had become the top British sprinter, breaking the 10-second barrier twice at the Edmonton World Championships. He became the 100 m European champion and record holder in 2002 but, in October 2003, he received a two-year athletics ban and a ban from the Olympics for life for using THG, a banned substance.
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Emily Watson is an actress.

Hubert Gregg was a BBC broadcaster, writer and stage actor. At the end of his life he was probably best known for the BBC Radio 2 "oldies" shows A... Square Deal and Thanks For The Memory. In an earlier era he had also been a novelist, a theatre director and a hit songwriter. Born in Islington, London, he worked for the BBC from the 1930s onwards, wrote the wartime hit "I'm Going To Get Lit Up When The Lights Go On In London" in 1943, and on seeing the German Doodlebugs flying over London, composed the song "Maybe It's Because I'm A Londoner", which became a hit and London folk anthem in 1947. Gregg spoke German fluently, and during the war worked for the BBC German service, to such good effect that Goebbels assumed he must be a German traitor. He was married three times: his first wife was musical comedy star Zoe Gail, with whom he had a daughter, actress-writer Stacey Gregg; his second wife being the actress and singer Pat Kirkwood.
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John Richard Hegley is an English performance poet, comedian, musician and songwriter. He was born in the Newington Green area of Islington, London,... England, into a Roman Catholic household. He was brought up in Luton and Bristol. After school he worked as a bus conductor and civil servant before attending the University of Bradford, where he gained a B.Sc. in European Literature and the History of Ideas and Sociology. Hegley has French ancestry and claims he is descended from the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. His paternal grandmother was a dancer with the Folies Bergère. Hegley began his performing career at London's Comedy Store in 1980, and received national exposure when he appeared with his backing band the Popticians on Carrott's Lib in 1983, and recorded two sessions for John Peel in 1983 and 1984. Hegley published his first poetry collection, Visions of the Bone Idol , pieces from which were later incorporated into Glad to Wear Glasses, in 1984. Hegley has written a number of collections of poetry, ranging from the surreal through the humorous to the personal and emotional.
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