The Legendary Norman Lear Celebrates 100-Years of Life Today!
Norman Lear contributed to our society in a funny entertaining way that is part of American cultural. “All in the Family” is now in repeats on my television.
Born in 1922 in New Haven, Connecticut, Lear attended Emerson College before flying 52 combat missions over Europe during World War II. Upon his return, Norman began a successful career writing and producing programs like The Colgate Comedy Hour, and The Martha Raye Show — ultimately leading to Lear captivating 120 million viewers per week with his iconic shows of the 1970s and ‘80s —
All in the Family, Maude, Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, One Day at a Time, and The Nancy Walker Show.
As Lear began witnessing the rise of the radical religious right, he put his television career on hold in 1980 to found People For The American Way. Today, the organization is over one million members and activists strong and continues to fight right-wing extremism while defending constitutional values like free expression, religious liberty, equal justice under the law, and the right to meaningfully participate in our democracy.
In 2000, the Norman Lear Center was dedicated at the USC Annenberg School for Communication for the study of entertainment, media and society.
One of the few surviving original copies of the Declaration of Independence was purchased by Lyn and Norman Lear in 2001, and during the decade that followed, they shared it with the American people by touring it to all 50 states through their Declaration of Independence Road Trip. Lear launched Declare Yourself, a nonpartisan youth voter initiative that registered over four million new, young voters in the 2004, 2006, and 2008 elections.
Lear is a 2017 Kennedy Center Honoree; a recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 1999, the Peabody Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016; and a proud member of the inaugural group of inductees to the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1984. He has won six Primetime Emmys and a Golden Globe. In 2021 the Hollywood Foreign Press Association awarded him the Carol Burnett Award for Achievement in Television. When President Clinton bestowed the National Medal of Arts on Lear in 1999, he noted that “Norman Lear has held up a mirror to American society and changed the way we look at it.”
Norman Lear is married to Lyn Davis Lear, and is the father to six and the grandfather to four.
Sources:
normanlear.com
Variety
IMDb
Coast Contact 