Page 263 - Celebrity Facts

The Beatles are the only artists to hold all of the Top Five spots on the Billboard charts at once.

During the week of April 4, 1964, The Beatles held twelve positions on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, including the top five positions. Neither feat has been been matched by any artist to date.

Since you’re surely wondering, here are those 12 singles and their chart positions that week:

1. “Can’t Buy Me Love” (1)
2. “Twist and Shout” (2)
3. “She Loves You” (3)
4. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (4)
5. “Please Please Me” (5)
6. “I Saw Her Standing There” (31)
7. “From Me to You” (41)
8. “Do You Want to Know a Secret” (46)
9. “All My Loving” (58)
10. “You Can’t Do That” (65)
11. “Roll Over Beethoven” (68)
12. “Thank You Girl” (79)

The following week, two additional songs made the chart (“Love Me Do” and “There’s a Place”), giving The Beatles FOURTEEN singles in the Hot 100! They also held the top two slots on the album charts that week.
(source)

In Shakespeare’s time, women were banned from the stage.

Thus, in a play like “Romeo and Juliet” the parts of both Romeo AND Juliet would have been male actors! This was a customary practice the stems all the way to Ancient Greece. In fact, crossdressing in theater is so commonplace throughout history that ancient societies all over the world considered it the norm. Barring women from public performance art like theater and opera was seen as a way to protect them from becoming unchaste.

After being the norm for millennia, this was still a common practice in Shakespeare’s time. To his credit, while abiding by these rules, still found time to make light of them within his plays. For instance, the original performances of Twelfth Night featured a male actor playing a woman pretending to man. Strangely enough, some modern performances of Shakespeare’s plays still abide by this practice for “historical authenticity”.

Learn more about cross-dressing throughout entertainment history here.

Of course, while we're on the subject of drag and Shakespeare, we should mention the Reduced Shakespeare Company, where all the roles, men and women are played by the same 3-4 guys.

Simpsons creator Matt Groening planned on making a live-action “Krusty the Clown” spinoff.

The show would star Dan Castellaneta as the disgruntled clown. You may recognize Castellaneta as the voice of Krusty (and Homer, Barney, Mayor Quimby, and tons of other characters) on The Simpsons. The show's premise would be Krusty moving to Los Angeles to host a talk show.

The script called for Krusty to live in a house that's on stilts, with a running gag about beavers chewing on the stilts. Strangely enough, a sitcom script that involves training live beavers or constructing animatronic beavers turned out to be prohibitively expensive, and the project was scrapped. Groening instead channeled his focus into working on Futurama.

The show was shelved but not fully abandoned, so we may still see it some day. It's certainly not the worst sitcom idea out there (they made a sitcom about the Geico cavemen!). Plus, with modern technology, Groening could probably get George Lucas to produce some CGI beavers for less than the cost of paying Charlie Sheen to sit on a couch reciting one-liners.

Brendan Gleeson (Mad-Eye Moody) is the Hogwarts professor who has been a teacher in real life.

Gleeson, a versatile Irish actor, portrays the gruff Auror in the fourth, fifth, and seventh Harry Potter films. A veteran of the London stage, he did not actually begin his film career until the age of 34! Since that time, he has starred in dozens of movies, including Braveheart, Gangs of New York, and 28 Days Later. Between his stage and film career, Gleeson returned to Dublin to teach high schoolers at Belmont College (note: not a college in the American sense!), which closed back in 2004. There he taught Physical Education, Irish, and English. In his free time, he was also active in the Dublin Shakespeare Festival.

Another fun film connection - his son Domhnall plays Bill Weasley in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Parts I & II! Crazy!

If you think you may have seen him in another film, heck out his biography on IMDB and find out for yourself!

Before becoming a beloved children’s author, Shel Silverstein worked for the magazine Playboy.

Here's Shel with Playboy founder Hugh Hefner!

Before becoming a beloved children’s author, Shel Silverstein worked for the magazine Playboy.

In the late 1950s, Silverstein was one of the magazine’s top cartoonists, though I wouldn’t recommend any of his work to the faint of heart! His future career choice seemed just as unlikely when he was in college, considering the first cartoon he had published in the school newspaper featured a naked student confronting a professor about the anti-smoking policy on campus. What’s more, Shel made no secret of the fact that he HATED children’s literature!

Okay, he didn’t hate kids or anything...he just did not approve of the condescending manner in which most children’s books were written. He would even write fake parody children's stories while working for Playboy with Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book: A Primer for Tender Young Minds, a book spoofing "Dick and Jane"-style literature. Eventually, a couple friends within the genre managed to convince him that the best way to change such stereotypes would be to write his own material! Within a decade, Silverstein had published two books (Where the Sidewalk Ends & The Giving Tree) that would eventually be listed among the top 20 best-selling children’s books of all time!

You can read more about Silverstein's unusual past in this article. There's even a story about how one of his cartoons offended the military so much that he was nearly courtmartialed!