Home

Dante (1883-1955)

Alias:
Dante the Magician
Dante, King of Magicians
Harry August Jansen
Harry August Jensen

Birthplace:
Copenhagen, Denmark

Born:
October 1, 1883

Died:
June 15, 1955

Biography from TheMovieDB

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia  Dante was born Harry August Jansen in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1883. Jansen's first glimpses of magic were a distance from his home in New York, in Chicago, where, from the galleries of the McVicker's Theatre, he saw the Great Herrmann, rival and later friend of Harry Kellar. Several illusions were pioneered during Jansen's early career, including "Sawing a woman in half" and several of the illusions of his soon to be successors Thurston and Kellar. Howard Thurston hired Jansen in 1922 to tour and run Thurston's second unit. After many years of performing to average crowds under the name "The Great Jansen", Thurston suggested to Jansen that he change his name to Dante, after the great magician "Dante the Great," Oscar Eliason, who was a very popular magician in the late 1800's. In July of 1927, Thurston flew with Dante to Puerto Rico where Thurston told him that he was to be his successor in the Royal Dynasty's lineage.   Although Dante was mainly an illusionist, his list of achievements does not end there. Jansen was often featured on radio and appeared in several movies, including A-Haunting We Will Go (1942), featuring Laurel and Hardy, and Bunco Squad. Dante semi-retired in the late 1940's and would eventually pass his mantle to Lee Grabel in 1954.   Description above from the Wikipedia article Harry August Jansen, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Click the heading above to show or hide the text.

Additional information:

The Search Form


Film Performances

Click the heading above to show or hide the list.

About the Movie Section

Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.

Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

Regarding profile removals and data corrections:

  • If you would like your profile removed from this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's gone from their site, it should soon be gone from this site.
  • If you would like to correct movie data on this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's corrected on their site, it should soon be corrected on this site.
  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.