On the 22nd of April, revered actor and filmmaker Jack Nicholson turns 81. Having performed for more than 60 years as a lead or secondary character in a large variety of films, he has garnered a panoply of nominations and awards that make him the most nominated male thespian in the Academy’s history. To wish him a happy birthday, we created the Jack Nicholson Timeline, which illustrates a few major life events and the most celebrated movies in which he was cast.

After training to be an actor with the Players Ring Theater, a 26-year-old Nicholson debuted in a low-budget noir crime flick (The Cry Baby Killer). This was followed by a series of small parts that gave the young starter a sense of no progress in his career.

It was the performance in the road movie Easy Rider that turned the odds in Nicholson’s favor and marked his breakthrough within the industry. With his interpretation of the alcoholic lawyer George Hanson, not only did he receive his first Oscar nomination for a supporting role, but he also became an overnight representative of the anti-hero image and developed a strong cult following.

Taking advantage of his big break, the talented actor gained momentum and landed leading roles one after another, each bringing him a new nomination and a richer range of acting skills.

He won his first Oscar for Best Actor in 1975 with his role as Randle McMurphy in Academy-award sweeping movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, the second one for Best Supporting Actor as a retired astronaut in “Terms of Endearment” in 1983, and the third one for the leading role in “As Good as It Gets” in 1997.

Even though his representation of Jack Torrance in The Shining didn’t bring him any awards, it nevertheless remains one of his most memorable roles. Stanley Kubrick, the director of the classic horror film, considered Nicholson to be the first choice for the lead character and often encouraged him to improvise on the set. This is how the actor came with the now famous line “Here’s Johnny!” which went beyond the script, along with other scenes.

The Jack Nicholson chronology was created with Office Timeline, a simple yet efficient PowerPoint plugin that enables you to easily build smart timelines, project schedules, Gantt charts and other similar graphics. The image is free to copy, reproduce and share, and you can quickly update or restyle it using the Plus version of the tool.

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April 15, 2018, marks 566 years since the birth of Italian polymath of the Renaissance era Leonardo da Vinci. Best known today as one of the greatest painters in the history of art, with The Last Supper and Mona Lisa as his most famous works, he was also an architect, engineer and inventor. An avid and self-educated explorer of many other areas of interest such as music, anatomy, botany, geology and cartography, he is widely regarded as the epitome of the Renaissance Man or the Universal Genius. It is because of this abundance of diverse pursuits that his artistic output was quite small. However, recent research on his work has raised awareness and admiration for him as a scientist and humanist as well.

To celebrate the visionary mind whom some historians consider as one of the most multi-talented individuals to have ever lived, we created the Leonardo da Vinci Timeline, which overviews his life and most famous paintings, as his overall legacy is yet to be unraveled.

For da Vinci, art was inextricably linked to science and nature, which channeled his curiosity and inventive imagination into filling dozens of notebooks with observations, scientific diagrams and theories about a wide range of subjects. Fusing art and natural philosophy, his eclectic manuscripts are written in mirror-image cursive. Some account secrecy for this style of writing, whereas others think it was more of a practical expediency for the left-handed Leonardo. The notebooks, which remained unpublished during his lifetime, are now housed in several museum collections such as the Louvre in Paris, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, and the British Library in London.

Encrypting information was a practice that Leonardo used not only for his journals, but for his paintings and drawings as well. All of his famous works include detailed elements of geometry and anatomy. This feature, along with innovative painting techniques, subtle gradation of tone and rendering of human emotions, made his work unique and reproduced by generations of artists.

Even half a millennium after his death, Leonardo da Vinci continues to fascinate art critics and scholars. In November 2017, a recently discovered painting attributed to him, Salvador Mundi, was sold for the world record sum of $450.3 million.

The Leonardo da Vinci chronology was designed with Office Timeline, a simple to use PowerPoint add-in that helps you easily create professional-looking timelines, project plans and other similar visuals. The slide, which can be copied and shared for free, is easily editable using the Plus version of the tool.

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Today, American author and civil rights activist Maya Angelou would have been 90. Born in 1928, she became a writer 31 years later, after a variety of prior occupations, including cable car conductor (San Francisco’s first African American woman to do so), dancer, cast member of opera “Porgy and Bess”, and journalist in Egypt and Ghana. Spanning over 50 years, her writing career adds up to seven autobiographies, three volumes of essays, several books of poetry, as well as a list of plays and screenplays.

To honor one of the most influential voices of the past century, we have designed the Maya Angelou Timeline, which chronologically overviews her life and published autobiographies.

During her career as a journalist, Ms. Angelou took her activist role in earnest and became close friends with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, whom she supported in their civil rights endeavors. After Martin Luther King was murdered on her 40th birthday (1968), she experienced a severe depression which, however, was to fuel her spirit and creative genius. It was a year later that she published her first autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, which narrated her life up to the age of 17 and publicly addressed themes such as racism, family and identity. With the publication of this memoir, she challenged the common structure of this literary genre and gained international recognition and acclaim as an advocate of black culture.

She continued to write articles, short stories, poems, TV scripts and documentaries until her death in 2014 and served as a Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University, despite having no bachelor’s degree.

The Maya Angelou chronology was created with Office Timeline, a simple to use PowerPoint plugin that quickly and efficiently generates professional-looking timelines, Gantt charts, project plans and other similar visuals. The slide is free to copy and share and can be edited or restyled using the Plus version of the tool.

Download the Maya Angelou Timeline here.

This Sunday, on the 1st of April, multinational technology giant Apple Inc. celebrates 42 years of existence. Initially targeting the computer hardware and software market, the enterprise was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne with the purpose of developing and selling Apple I, Wozniak’s personal computer model. Gradually expanding its range of products to consumer electronics and online services, it took the pioneering venture less than half a century to become the world’s largest IT company by revenue and the second largest smartphone manufacturer after Samsung.

To wish happy anniversary to the creators of game-changing devices like the Mac, iPhone and iPod, lets retrace the major milestones of their journey since establishment till present.

The Apple Inc. Timeline overviews the important events in the history of the business, including releases of their main products and services. The identity behind one of the world’s most profitable brands emerged in the garage of Steve Jobs’ childhood home, after he came up with the idea of selling Steve Wozniak’s hand-built computer Apple 1. To finance the creation of the device, Jobs sold his VW Kombi van and Wozniak his HP-65 calculator. The prototype was released on the 11th of April 1976, demonstrated 4 months later at the Homebrew Computer Club, and sold at the introductory price of $666 (the equivalent of $2,867 in 2017).

Four years after its foundation, Apple Computer Inc. went public at $22 per share, which generated the greatest capital that any IPO had done since Ford Motor Company in 1956, making 300 people millionaires overnight. Throughout its activity, the company has seen numerous executive job shuffles, with all three co-founders leaving the board in the early stages and only Jobs to return in 1997 and oversee the rebuilding and consolidation of Apple’s status.

The Apple Inc. chronology was built with Office Timeline, an easy-to-use PowerPoint add-in that creates professional timelines, visual plans, Gantt charts and other similar graphics with only a few clicks. You can further modify our slide using the Plus version of the tool.

Download the Apple Inc. Timeline for PowerPoint here.

This Saturday marks the 144th birthday of Harry Houdini, the world-famous escape artist whose sensational stunts made his audience wait for the denouement with bated breath. Despite the long way that his posthumous fellow magicians have covered in terms of performance intricacy and special effects, Mr. Houdini is still regarded as one of the greatest illusionists of all time. To bring an homage to the legacy of the one dubbed The Handcuff King by his contemporaries, we give you The Harry Houdini Timeline, which summarizes his life and most notable acts.

Born in Hungary as Erik Weisz, he moved with his family to the US and made his public debut as a trapeze artist at the tender age of 9, calling himself ‘Ehric, the Prince of the Air’. It was in 1894 that he began his career as a magician and renamed himself Harry Houdini, after the French illusionist J.E. Robert-Houdin, whom he admired. Initially revolving around card tricks, his shows had little success, so he introduced feats of escape involving handcuffs, which soon drew manager Martin Beck’s attention and ultimately brought his big break. From then on, his rise to stardom was meteoric, reaching its pinnacle in 1912, when he inaugurated the Chinese Water Torture Cell. The performance enthralled the crowds so much that it stayed a recurring act until his death in 1926.

Expanding his repertoire with increasingly dangerous escape challenges, Houdini quickly sued anyone who imitated his stunts. He also indulged in other passions such as aviation, setting out to be the first to fly a plane over Australia in 1910. However, it is said that he was beaten to the draw just a few months earlier by Capt. Colin Defries.

The Harry Houdini chronology was designed with Office Timeline, an intuitive PowerPoint plugin that helps you easily create timelines, schedules, Gantt charts or other similar visual plans. You can copy and share our slide for free, and further modify it using the Plus version of the tool.

Download the Harry Houdini Timeline for PowerPoint here.