Willi Forst

Willi Forst, born Wilhelm Anton Frohs (7 April 1903 – 11 August 1980) was an Austrian actor, screenwriter, film director, film producer and singer. As a debonair actor he was a darling of the German-speaking film audiences, as a director, one of the most significant makers of the Viennese period musical melodramas and comedies of the 1930s known as Wiener Filme. From the mid-1930s he also recorded many records, largely of sentimental Viennese songs, for the Odeon Records label owned by Carl Lindström AG.

Biography

His first major role was opposite Marlene Dietrich in the silent film Café Elektric in 1927. He was best known, however, for his characters in light musicals, which rapidly made him a star. He developed the genre of the Viennese Film with writer Walter Reisch in the 1930s, beginning with the Franz Schubert melodrama Leise flehen meine Lieder (1934) which became an iconic role for actor Hans Jaray and Maskerade (1934), which launched his fame as a significant director and brought Paula Wessely to international fame. He founded his own film company, Willi Forst-Film, in 1937 and considered a move to Hollywood the same year.

Mir

Mir (Russian: Мир, IPA: [ˈmʲir]; lit. Peace [homonym: world]) was a space station that operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001, owned by the Soviet Union and later by Russia. Mir was the first modular space station and was assembled in orbit from 1986 to 1996. It had a greater mass than any previous spacecraft. Until 21 March 2001 it was the largest artificial satellite in orbit, succeeded by the International Space Station after Mir's orbit decayed. The station served as a microgravity research laboratory in which crews conducted experiments in biology, human biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology and spacecraft systems with a goal of developing technologies required for permanent occupation of space.

Mir was the first continuously inhabited long-term research station in orbit and held the record for the longest continuous human presence in space at 3,644 days until 23 October 2010 when it was surpassed by the ISS. It holds the record for the longest single human spaceflight, with Valeri Polyakov spending 437 days and 18 hours on the station between 1994 and 1995. Mir was occupied for a total of twelve and a half years out of its fifteen-year lifespan, having the capacity to support a resident crew of three, or larger crews for short visits.

Miré

Miré is a commune in the Maine-et-Loire department in western France.

See also

References

Mir (title)

Mir (مير) (is a title which is derived from the Arabic title Emir). It is an aristocratic title generally used to refer to a person who is a descendant of a commander in medieval Muslim tradition.

It was adopted in many languages under Islamic influence, such as Balochi, Ottoman Turkish,Persian, Turkish, Pashto, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Sindhi and Bengali meaning leader of a group or tribe. According to the book Persian Inscriptions on Indian Monuments, Mir is most probably an Arabized form of Pir. Pir in Old Persian and Sanskrit means the old, the wise man, the chief and the great leader. It was Arabized as Mir then, with Al(A) (Arabic definite article), it was pronounced as Amir.

Title

Mir was also subsequently used as an honor rank. (See: Mirza).

Amongst Muslims, mir/meer has become an interchangeable synonym of sayyid (or syed), meaning "relative of prophet Muhammad".

(The last name Mirpourian is a present day example of sayyid, a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad.)

In Muslim princely states very few formal mirs have actually reached the level of salute state, notably in present Pakistan, where only two of the six have been entitled to a gun salute and the attached His Highness. The highest-ranking are the Amir of Bahawalpur), the Mir of Khairpur (17 guns) and the Mir of Hunza (15 guns).