Browse Movies : Biography : "new york"

Biopic about Alvin Ailey who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City in 1958 and helped popularize modern dance.

The story is set in early 1980s New York as Madonna Louise Ciccone works on her first album, struggling in a business that treats women badly, while also dealing with a burgeoning love life and the first hints of fame.

Gabrielle Hamilton, the youngest of five siblings born to a French mother and an artist father who made the sets for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus, takes an unorthodox trajectory to becoming a chef. She later becomes the owner and chef of New York's Prune restaurant and also a trained writer with an MFA from the University of Michigan.

At age 17, Casey Connor, a promising singer-dancer, put her career aspirations aside to raise her 12-year-old sister following the death of their parents. She winds up accelerating her high school courses to graduate early and runs their mother's daycare center out of their Brooklyn home to pay down the family's debts. Her career dreams take off after a chance encounter with a talent manager lands her spinning gigs at New York City nightclubs and Los Angeles events.

Steve Banerjee goes from pumping gas in Culver City to running a high-end nightclub that evolves into Chippendales. After hiring a New York choreographer to polish the all-male dance troupe, Banerjee becomes wildly rich, as well as unreasonably competitive and paranoid. Banerjee hires a hitman to murder the choreographer when negotiations go sour. After being arrested, Banerjee dies in jail awaiting his trial.

Joan Didion moves to New York when she is in her 20s and lives there until 1964. She and her newlywed husband John Gregory Dunne then move to Los Angeles and thus, begin her writing career as a journalist, essayist, author and screenwriter (with her husband).

The movie will follow the quarterback's career from Bear Bryant's football program at the University of Alabama to the New York Jets of the NFL to his guarantee that his Jet would defeat the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. All this while Broadway Joe battled knee problems so bad that he was actually denied entry into the Vietnam War. Of course, he went on to win the Super Bowl and become a cultural icon.

Former Mayor Ed Koch is the quintessential New Yorker. Still ferocious, charismatic, and hilariously blunt, the now 88-year-old Koch ruled New York from 1978 to 1989—a down-and-dirty decade of grit, graffiti, near-bankruptcy and rampant crime. First-time filmmaker (and former Wall Street Journal reporter) Neil Barsky has crafted a revealing portrait of this intensely private man, his legacy as a political titan, and the town he helped transform. His three terms included a fiercely competitive 1977 election; the burgeoning AIDS epidemic; landmark housing initiatives; and an irreparable municipal corruption scandal. Through candid interviews and rare archival footage, Koch thrillingly chronicles the personal and political toll of running the world’s most wondrous city.

The owner of New York's top escort agency, NY Confidential, lands behind bars because of his highflying lifestyle. He also fell in love with his star employee, to whom he eventually proposed marriage.

William Alexander Morgan, an American, helps Castro and the Cuban rebels overthrow Fulgencio Batista. Morgan reaches the status of Comandante, the sole foreigner other than Argentinian Che Guevara to be so highly regarded. Shortly after, his motives for being there are subject to suspicion and Morgan is imprisoned. He is charged with working for U.S. intelligence and faces a firing squad. At the same time, his exploits as a rebel soldier lead J. Edgar Hoover and everyone else scrambling to sort out his motives and figure out who he is working for.

In 1999, Jack Ma founds the Alibaba website from his garage. The site is a business-to-business portal to connect Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers. In 2014, Ma eventually launches an IPO for Alibaba on the New York Stock Exchange and finishes the day with his company valued at $231 billion — more than Amazon and eBay combined — and making him the richest man in China and among the richest in the world with $26.5 billion.

Raised in a tough area of Detroit, Bart Scott grows up to play football for the Baltimore Ravens as a linebacker and then later signs with the New York Jets for $48 million for six years.

Lenny Dykstra, a key part of the champion 1986 New York Mets, leads a checkered life after retiring from baseball in 1996. He is the subject of multiple investigations into his financial empire, which includes a jet charter company and a magazine marketed to professional athletes. He files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009 and auctions off his World Series ring. Dykstra pleads guilty in 2012 to bankruptcy fraud, concealment of assets and money laundering and is sentenced to six months in prison, 500 hours of community service, and is ordered to pay $200,000 in restitution.

Vince Lombardi, a fiery disciplinarian, seems stuck when he is offensive line coach of a New York Giants team that loses the 1958 championship game. His Giants counterpart on the defense, the cool Tom Landry, is signed to head the Dallas Cowboys after being widely courted. Lombardi practically has to beg to run a Packers team so dismal that other team owners want to fold the franchise. Lombardi turns the team into perennial winners, and gets his showdown with Landry in the 1967 league championship game, known as the Ice Bowl because it is played in 13 below zero temperatures. The Packers win.

After being threatened by Boko Haram, the Adewumi family flees Nigeria and escapes terrorism in their home country. They seek and receive asylum in America, and — against all odds — find a welcoming new home in New York. Living in a homeless center on religious asylum, their 8-year-old son, Tani, wins the 2019 New York State chess championship, despite only being introduced to the game two years prior.

After Lauren Fern Watt, a 25-year-old New Yorker, discovers her beloved 160-pound English Mastiff, Gizelle has terminal bone cancer, she sets out to take him on a series of special adventures in his final few months. They canoe, go to Times Square, find the best donuts in the world, sit on the beach in winter and people-watch in Washington Square Park.

In the 1950s, Reuben Sturman begins selling "girlie magazines" in Ohio, imports porn from Europe and brings peep shows to America. Despite legal challenges, he becomes a billionaire in the 1970s but gets into business with the Gotti mob in New York, ends up in jail and dies penniless.

Johnny Thunders is the guitarist for the influential 1970s punk bands the New York Dolls and the Heartbreakers. He later dies in New Orleans in 1991.

A fact-based crime drama about New York City District Attorney chief investigator Andy Rosenzweig's struggle to solve the 27-year-old murder of a friend … even though the case seems as cold and dead as a frozen corpse.

Huguette Clark is the youngest daughter of W.A. Clark, who was born in a log cabin but becomes a powerful mining and banking magnate after discovering copper in Montana following the Civil War. He rises to such wealth and prominence that he helps to found Las Vegas. Huguette is born in Paris and lives a very interesting life. She grows up in the largest house in New York City — a mansion of 121 rooms for a family of four. She owns paintings by Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned Stradivarius violin, and a vast collection of antique dolls and beautifully crafted dollhouses. Huguette lives out the last two decades of her life in the Beth Israel Hospital, dishing out $400,000 per year to live there but is never in the VIP section. She is a generous woman who appreciates art and the simple acts of giving. Huguette is often taken advantage of because of her kindness. She dies in 2011 at 104, leaving behind an over $310 million fortune.