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Ryan White (1971-1990)

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Birthplace:
Kokomo, Indiana, USA

Born:
December 6, 1971

Died:
April 8, 1990

Biography from TheMovieDB

Ryan White was born in Kokomo, Indiana in 1971. A hemophiliac, Ryan regularly needed injections of blood products to survive. In 1985 at the age of 13, it was discovered that Ryan contracted the AIDS virus sometime during the previous year from tainted blood. His case got national attention when his school expelled him when they learned about his disease. Not wanting to lie down and die that easily, Ryan and his parents took the school to court where they won the right for him to return to class. As a result of Ryan's courage and outspokeness to take on his own school board, be became one of the USA's most visible spokesperson on the AIDS crisis. During 1985-1989 he appeared at schools and AIDS fundraisers throught the country and gave moving testimony before the President's Commission on AIDS. He was befriended by many celebrities including Michael Jackson, Elton John, Phil Donahue and Elizabeth Taylor, AIDS activists themselves. Despite overwhelming international attention, Ryan never lost his sense of priorites with his schoolwork or life in general. AIDS finally claimed Ryan's life on April 8, 1990 at the age of 18.

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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).

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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.