Lee Mack: From Bingo Halls to BAFTA-Winning Comic Genius
As a teenage stable boy, he picked a horse at random for his first ever ride and ended up on the legendary Red Rum. That chaotic, working-class luck would later power one of British television's sharp...
23 Jun 19min
Lillian Hellman: Defiant Playwright Who Rewrote Her Own Truth
Every word she writes is a lie, including and the. That televised insult from Mary McCarthy sparked a multi-million-dollar lawsuit, and it captures the central paradox of a playwright who treated real...
23 Jun 22min
Mack Sennett: The King of Comedy Who Built the Fun Factory
He gave the world the pie in the face and the on-screen car chase, built Hollywood's first enclosed film stage, and launched Chaplin and Keaton. Then he lost it all, going bankrupt as much of his life...
23 Jun 23min
Madam C.J. Walker: Wash Tub to Self-Made Millionaire Empire
An orphaned laundress scrubbing clothes for barely a dollar a day became a self-made millionaire building a 34-room mansion beside the Rockefellers, and she made that leap in just 14 years. The receip...
23 Jun 21min
The Real Madam C.J. Walker: America's First Self-Made Tycoon
How does a woman born to formerly enslaved parents, orphaned by seven and widowed by twenty, build a million-dollar manufacturing and real estate empire in just over a decade? Her true story is more d...
23 Jun 21min
Marc Maron: How a Garage and Radical Honesty Built WTF
A twice-divorced recovering addict, freshly fired from talk radio for the third time, retreats to a cluttered Los Angeles garage full of stray cats and starts talking into a microphone out of pure des...
23 Jun 15min
Maria Bamford: Turning Mental Illness Into Comedy Genius
Declared the funniest woman in the world, she filmed her big stand-up special not in an arena but in her own living room, for an audience of exactly two: her parents on a couch. It was a mission state...
23 Jun 18min
Marianne Moore: The Poet Who Named the Edsel Utopian Turtletop
When Ford needed a name for its secret new car, it didn't hire ad men. It asked a poet, and she answered with Utopian Turtletop, Mongoose Civique, and Resilient Bullet. Ford panicked, picked Edsel, an...
23 Jun 21min
