There were once two boys who grew up in the ‘mean streets’ of New York, born one year and a few blocks apart. They weren’t from the poorest families but they were far from rich. One of the boys was fully Italian, the other had an Italian father, and an Irish mother. Growing up, they saw ‘wiseguys’ and made men and gangsters in the street. They saw the gangs, even had friends who joined them... their early childhood was Goodfellas. One of the friends was the son of an actress-turned-seamstress. The other was the son of a painter who had left his wife because he was gay — his mother had been an artist. Not surprisingly, both kids inherited the ‘artistic gene’ from their parents and, from their fathers’ humble immigrant origins, a strong drive to make it in the world. The two boys grew into men and went their separate ways. They met again in their twenties. The half-Irish one, the tallest and most handsome of the two, had gone to acting school and was now an actor known as Robert De Niro. His friend, a creative fellow but too short for leading man status, was Martin Scorsese. Scorsese wanted to recreate the world they had grown up in and make it come to life for a young audience largely unfamiliar with it. Mean Streets. Taxi Driver. Raging Bull. The King of Comedy. Goodfellas. Scorsese directed movies. De Niro acted in them. As it turned out, Scorsese was a damned fine director, and script writer. De Niro was a damn fine actor. They would come to define cinema in many ways, and put their mark on the genre of mafia films and organised crime drama like no one else before them, and no one else after.

Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood actress in the 1940s and 1950s, and she was considered "the most beautiful woman in the world" during her time. She began her acting career in Austria and became notorious for being the first woman to simulate an orgasm on screen in 1933. It was during this time that she also got married to Friedrich Mandl, a Vienna-based arms dealer with ties to Mussolini and later Hitler. The marriage did not last long. In her own words, she wrote, "I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife... He was the absolute monarch in his marriage... I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded and imprisoned, having no mind, no life of its own." According to her autobiography, she disguised herself as one of the maids and managed to flee to Paris. Others say she convinced her husband to wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party and then disappeared afterwards. She eventually booked a liner to New York, where she met the head of MGM, who was impressed enough to offer her a $500-a-week contract to work as an actress. In 1938, she arrived in Hollywood and went on to star in several movies, working with the likes of Clark Gable and James Stewart. Beyond her acting career, Lamarr was also a scientist and co-patented spread-spectrum technology during World War II to prevent the Nazis from jamming navy torpedoes. However, her invention was rejected and wouldn't be implemented until the Cold War in 1962. The technology would eventually be used in developing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology.