Howard Hughes

Hughes married twice, first to Ella Rice and then actress Jean Peters. He dated many famous women, including Billie Dove, Bette Davis, Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers and Gene Tierney.

As early as the 1930s, he displayed signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder which only worsened with time. The numerous aircraft crashes left him in pain and physically dependent. He became very reclusive and eccentric towards his end.

In 2004, his early life was depicted in the feature film The Aviator, played by Leonardo DiCaprio who was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of the aviator.

Howard Robard Hughes, Jr was born on December 24, 1905 to Howard R. Hughes, Sr., and Allene Stone Gano who were industrialists. His birthplace is uncertain recorded as either Humble or Houston, Texas.

As a boy, he showed a great inclination towards engineering and built Houston’ first radio transmitter and a motorized bicycle before he was12. He liked math, flying and took flying lessons at 14.

He lost his mother in 1922 and father two years later and inherited 75 percent of the family fortune. On his 19th birthday, he took complete control of his legacy.

Hughes moved to Los Angeles, where he hoped to make a name for himself making movies. When his first attempt failed, he hired Noah Dietrich to head the movie subsidiary of his tool company.

His first two films, Everybody's Acting and Two Arabian Knights, were financial successes - the latter (directed by Lewis Milestone in 1928), won an Academy Award for Best Comedy Direction.

He produced the crime film ‘The Racket’ in 1928 and ‘The Front Page’, a comedy film, three years later. Both the films were nominated for the Oscars.

He spent US$3.8 million to make the 1930 flying film, Hell’s Angels, and earned nearly $8 million above production and advertising costs. It received one Academy Award nomination, and its aviation sequences remain unequaled.

In 1932, he founded the Hughes Aircraft Company in Glendale, California. Under the pseudonym "Charles Howard" he got a job as a baggage handler for American Airlines and became a co-pilot within weeks.

In 1947, Hughes proved skeptics wrong with a surprise test flight of the HK-1 in The Long Beach, California, lasting less than sixty seconds, one of the most famous flights ever.

In 1953, he launched the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Miami, Florida, with the express goal of basic biomedical research, including trying to understand, in Hughes' words, the "genesis of life itself."