Sunday 12 October 2008

A distinguished bunch...

...who achieved fame in a variety of ways but have one thing in common. What was it?

Anne Bancroft, Claire Bloom, Alfred Brendel, Leslie Caron, Christopher Chataway, James Dean, Basil D'Oliveira, Lonnie Donegan, Mikhail Gorbachov, Goswell Frand, Larry Hagman, John le Carré, Arsenije Milosevic, Leonard Nimoy, Igor Oistrakh, Mordecai Richler, Boris Yeltsin.

[Of course, there are many possible answers, such as that all of them have, or had, two elbows but only one nose; this is not the answer I want. Other correct but unwanted answers are that
none of them married Zsa Zsa Gabor and none of their names rhyme with Butterworth.]

Here is a helpful clue: the answer would be the same if you added Françoise Arnoul or Lionel Blair but NOT if you added Al Jolson or Tony Blair.

The answer is HERE.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, Igor was an elbow down so that wouldn't work either. No-one knew during his active career, of course, but it came out later in his sister's writings.

Anonymous said...

No no, my dear fellow,
you're getting him mixed up with his father David (b. 1908 in Odessa, son of Fishl Oistrakh). Igor was thought to have had a full complement of elbows and two Nasenflügelen as well.

Froog said...

Can it really be said that Goswell Frand was born in 1931, since he is a figment of your imagination and of much more recent creation?

Anonymous said...

Did you say you trained as a lawyer? I call that pettifoggery.

Anyway, I am GF so he could be said to have been created with me: we are contemporaneous.