A star five times over
QUESTION Can you have more than one star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?
CROONER Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy, has the unique distinction of having been awarded stars in the five fields recognised on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: motion pictures, TV, radio, music and live performance.
Autry was a top money- making entertainer and businessman. He retired from showbusiness in 1964, having made over than 100 films and 600 records.
When he died aged 91 in 1998, his obituary said: ‘ He was enormously successful at almost anything he tried — radio, records, songwriting, TV, real estate and business — as well as movies and museums.’
Bob Hope and singer Tony Martin are next with four stars each.
Thirty- three performers, including Frank Sinatra, Danny Kaye, Perry Como and Jack Benny, have three stars.
The Walk of Fame was conceived in 1953 by E. M. Stuart, president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, to ‘maintain the glory of a community whose name means glamour and excitement in the four corners of the world’.
A string of lawsuits prevented the walk’s inauguration until 1960. By that time, 1,529 names had been selected to be immortalised in stars embedded in the pavement of Hollywood Boulevard. It was first proposed that each star feature a caricature of the celebrity. However, this was changed in favour of five brass symbols: a classic film camera, TV, phonograph record, radio microphone and comedy/tragedy masks.
Actress Joanne Woodward is often considered to be the first person to receive a star on the Walk of Fame, perhaps because she was the first to be photographed with hers.
However, she was one of eight selected randomly from the original list that were laid concurrently.
Today, the Walk of Fame extends for 15 blocks and is 1.3 miles long.
Harry Maddison, London SE9.
QUESTION Are there any female coaches in the Football League?
THERE are no full-time female coaches in men’s professional first-team football in Britain.
There are 85 category one to three academies in England, training boys through to professional level and employing hundreds of coaches.
A handful are women: Natalie Henderson at Newcastle United, Coreen Brown at Arsenal, Nia Davies at Swansea City, Shelley Strange at Reading, Manisha Tailor at QPR and Hannah Dingley at Forest Green Rovers.
In 2018, Natasha Orchard Smith became the first female head coach in semi-professional football when she took charge of Arlesey Town in the Spartan South Midlands Football League, the ninth tier of English football.
In 2014, Michelle ‘Shelley’ Kerr made history as the first woman manager of a men’s team in the UK, taking charge of Stirling University in the Lowland League, the Scottish fifth tier.
In 2017, she was head coach of the Scotland women’s team, taking them to the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup. Helen Crooks, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs.
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