John Wayne wins Best Actor Oscar

Year
1970
Month Day
April 07

On April 7, 1970, the legendary actor John Wayne wins his first—and only—acting Academy Award, for his star turn in the director Henry Hathaway’s Western True Grit.

Wayne appeared in some 150 movies over the course of his long and storied career. He established his tough, rugged, uniquely American screen persona most vividly in the many acclaimed films he made for the directors John Ford and Howard Hawks from the late 1940s into the early 1960s. He earned his first Oscar nomination, in the Best Actor category, for Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). The Alamo (1960), which Wayne produced, directed and starred in, earned a Best Picture nomination.

Wayne’s Oscar for True Grit at the 42nd annual Academy Awards in 1970 was generally considered to be a largely sentimental win, and a long-overdue reward for one of Hollywood’s most enduring performers. The Academy had failed to even nominate Wayne for any of his most celebrated performances, in films such as Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), The Quiet Man (1952), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and especially Ford’s The Searchers (1956), considered by many to be the greatest Western ever made. In True Grit, Wayne played a drunken, foul-tempered but endearing U.S. marshal named Rooster Cogburn, who becomes an unlikely hero when he helps a young girl avenge the murder of her father. He would reprise the role in the film’s sequel, Rooster Cogburn (1975), opposite Katharine Hepburn.

Nominated for seven Oscars at the 42nd annual awards ceremony that night, John Schlesinger’s gritty urban drama Midnight Cowboy won in the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay categories. The film’s stars, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, were both nominated in the Best Actor category but lost out to Wayne. Richard Burton (as King Henry VIII in Anne of the Thousand Days) and Peter O’Toole (as the beloved schoolmaster Arthur Chipping in Goodbye, Mr. Chips) rounded out the category. It was the fourth of what would be eight career nominations (and no wins) for O’Toole.

In 1964, Wayne battled lung cancer, undergoing surgery to remove his entire left lung. He went public with news of his illness in hopes of convincing people to remain vigilant about cancer. In his last movie, The Shootist (1976), Wayne portrayed an aging gunfighter dying of cancer. Three years later, the great actor himself succumbed to stomach cancer at the age of 72 on June 11, 1979.

Source

Avalanche buries skiers in France


Year
1970
Month Day
February 10

On February 10, 1970, an avalanche crashes down on a ski resort in Val d’Isere, France, killing 42 people, mostly young skiers. This disaster was the worst such incident in French history.

The resort at Val d’Isere was operated by a nonprofit youth organization and attracted many young ski enthusiasts. On the morning of February 10, most of the guests were eating breakfast in a large room facing the mountain. Suddenly, there was an explosion-like sound and approximately 100,000 cubic yards of snow came rushing down the mountain. Three trail workers who were on the hill were swept away and killed.

The young people inside the hotel had little time to react. The snow exploded through the hotel’s large windows and swallowed the crowd inside. Some people were thrown down hallways and through windows. Others were buried so deeply that they could not move at all. Outside, the snow pushed cars right off the road and blocked access to the hotel. The snow was 100 yards high in some spots.

Thirty-nine people inside the hotel lost their lives to the avalanche and 60 more suffered serious injuries. French President Georges Pompidou declared it a national tragedy, and authorities ordered evacuations of other resorts in the region. This proved to be a wise move, as other avalanches followed in the next few days. In fact, the abandoned hotel at Val d’Isere was struck again two days later.

Source

Bodies of family killed by United Mine Workers found


Updated:
Original:
Year
1970
Month Day
January 05

The bodies of dissident union leader Joseph “Jock” Yablonski, his wife, and daughter are discovered in their Clarksville, Pennsylvania, farmhouse by Yablonski’s son Kenneth. The family had been dead for nearly a week, killed on New Year’s Eve by killers hired by the United Mine Workers (UMW) union leadership. Yablonski’s murder eventually brought down the whole union leadership and ended the widespread corruption of the union under UMW President Tony Boyle.

Jock Yablonski ran against Boyle in the 1969 election for the leadership of the UMW. He accused Boyle of nepotism and misuse of union funds, while also pushing for greater voting rights for rank-and-file members. On December 9, 1969, Boyle won the election but Yablonski asked the U.S. Labor Department to investigate the election for possible fraud.

At that point, Boyle sought to have Yablonski killed. Paul Gilly and Claude Vealey were hired by a UMW leader, Albert Pass, to carry out the murder. In mid-December, Gilly and Vealey went to Yablonski’s house but lost their nerve at the last moment. When they returned two weeks later with Buddy Martin, they shot Yablonski, his wife, Margaret, and 25-year-old daughter, Charlotte.

Eventually, an investigation into the murders exposed the conspiracy and nine people were convicted for their involvement, including Tony Boyle, who died in prison. Fortunately, the scandal prompted serious reform of the UMW union.

Source

Sam Sheppard, the inspiration for “The Fugitive,” dies

Year
1970
Month Day
April 06

On April 6, 1970, Sam Sheppard, a doctor convicted of murdering his pregnant wife in a trial that caused a media frenzy in the 1950s, dies of liver failure. After a decade in prison, Sheppard was released following a re-trial. His story is rumored to have loosely inspired the television series and movie “The Fugitive.”

On July 4, 1954, Sheppard’s wife Marilyn was beaten to death in the couple’s Bay Village, Ohio, home. Sheppard, an osteopathic doctor, contended the “bushy-haired” attacker had beaten him as well. The Sheppards’ son slept through the murder in a bedroom down the hall. Sam Sheppard was arrested for murder and stood trial in the fall of 1954. The case generated massive media attention, and some members of the press were accused of supporting the perception that Sheppard was guilty. Prosecutors argued that Sheppard was motivated to kill his wife because he was cheating on her and wanted out of his marriage. In his defense, Sheppard’s attorney said his client had sustained serious injuries that could only have been inflicted by an intruder.

In December 1964, a jury convicted Sheppard of second-degree murder and he was sentenced to life in prison. However, after a decade behind bars, Sheppard’s new criminal defense attorney F. Lee Bailey convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to grant his client a new trial because he had been denied due process. At the second trial, Sheppard was found not guilty in November 1966. The case put Bailey on the map, and he went on to represent many high-profile clients, including the Boston Strangler, Patty Hearst and O.J. Simpson.

After being released from prison, Sheppard briefly returned to his medical career and later embarked on a short stint as a pro wrestler, going by the name “The Killer Sheppard.” No one else was ever charged for Marilyn Sheppard’s murder; in the late 1950s, however, a window washer named Richard Eberling, who had worked at the Sheppard house, came under suspicion when one of Marilyn’s rings was found in his possession. In the 1980s, Eberling was convicted of murdering another woman, and he died in prison. Sam Sheppard, who became a heavy drinker in the last years of his life, died of liver failure on April 6, 1970, at age 46. His son has made multiple attempts to clear Sheppard’s name, including unsuccessfully suing the government for wrongful imprisonment of his father in 2000.

Source

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wins the Nobel Prize in Literature

Year
1970
Month Day
October 08

One of Russia’s best-known contemporary writers, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, wins the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in 1918 in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn was a leading writer and critic of Soviet internal oppression. Arrested in 1945 for criticizing the Stalin regime, he served eight years in Russian prisons and labor camps. Upon his release in 1953 he was sent into “internal exile” in Asiatic Russia. After Stalin’s death, Solzhenitsyn was released from his exile and began writing in earnest. His first publication, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963), appeared in the somewhat less repressive atmosphere of Nikita Khrushchev’s regime (1955-1964). The book was widely read in both Russia and the West, and its harsh criticisms of Stalinist repression provided a dramatic insight into the Soviet system.

Eventually, however, Soviet officials clamped down on Solzhenitsyn and other Russian artists, and henceforth his works had to be secreted out of Russia in order to be published. These works included Cancer Ward (1968) and the massive three-volume The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 (1973-1978). The Soviet government further demonstrated its displeasure over Solzhenitsyn’s writings by preventing him from personally accepting his Nobel Prize in 1970. In 1974, he was expelled from the Soviet Union for treason, and he moved to the United States. Although celebrated as a symbol of anticommunist resistance, Solzhenitsyn was also extremely critical of many aspects of American society; particularly what he termed its incessant materialism. He returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure in Moscow on August 3, 2008. He was 89.

Source