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The Chairman and CEO of JP Morgan, the largest bank in the US, which is heavily involved in the Crash of 2008 as a Savior of Last Resort for the US banking system, is Greek-American Jamie Dimon. JP Morgan, in 2008, acquired investment bank Bear Stearns and mortgage bank Washington Mutual, to avert their collapse. Dimon is the grandson of a Greek from Smyrna (in today's Turkey), a stockbroker who emigrated to the US and led his son, Dimon's father, in the stock broking trade. In his early career, Dimon helped Sandy Weill build Citigroup into its current size, then got fired by his mentor, became CEO of BancOne, in Chicago, and returned to New York when JP Morgan Chase acquired BancOne in 2003, to become the leader of the combined bank.
Other Greek-Americans, directly or indirectly, involved in the financial turmoil that erupted in mid-2007 are Jim Chanos, the founder and Chairman of short hedge fund Kynikos Associates, Pete Peterson, the co-founcer of giant private equity company Blackstone Group, and Zoe Cruz, the laid off CFO of Morgan Stanley, who was born in Thessaloniki.
Tina Fey, the American comedian who won an Emmy for creating the hit television series 30 Rock and took the world by storm in September 2008 with her incredible portrayal, on NBC's Saturday Night Live, of Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, was born Elizabeth Stamatina Fey, daughter of Greek Zenobia Xenakes and Donald Fey, in Upper Darby, PA, a Philadelphia suburb.
Nicholas Sarkozy, the President of the French Republic, is the grandson of Thessaloniki Jews, on his mother's side. His maternal grandfather, who raised him, moved to France around the turn of the 20th century, in pursuit of commercial interests. His Greek family, the Mallahs, was a prominent family in Thessaloniki's social and political life, until it was almost completely wiped out during the Holocaust of Thessaloniki's Jewish community.
John Dimitri Negroponte, the first US National Intelligence Director, appointed by President George W. Bush and approved by the Senate in 2005, is the son of Greek immigrants to the United States.
The former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, George Tennet, was also son of Greek immigrants to the US. Greek Americans will have been running the US intelligence community for about 10 years by the time Negroponte's term comes up for renewal.
American politics in the last 30 years has seen quite a few Greek American protagonists (Greek for "leading men"), including President Nixon's Vice President Spiro Agnew, 1988 Democratic Presidential candidate and Governor of Massachussetts Michael Dukakis, President Clinton's top political advisor George Stephanopoulos, the senior Senator from Maryland Democrat Paul Sarbanes, and the junior Senator from Maine Republican Olympia Snowe.
Nicholas Negroponte, the brother of the new US intelligence chief, is the celebrity Massachussetts Institute of Technology computer science professor and founder of the path-breaking MIT Media Lab, and one of the technology leaders of the world. His book "Digital Being" was translated in more than 40 languages.
Harry andSally spent their honeymoon in Santorini and Mykonos. This detail is not included in the regular release of the 1989 Rob Reiner romantic classic "When Harry met Sally", starring Meg Ryan as Sally Albright and Billy Crystal as Harry Burns. The DVD release of the movie, however, includes a deleted section from the final scene of the film, where Harry and Sally sit on a sofa and describe their wedding cake ("coconut with chocolate sauce on the side"), in which they reveal that Harry organized a surprise honeymoon trip to Santorini and Mykonos. Check it out.
Kalamata olives are called that because they come from the Messinia olive oil-producing region of the Peloponese, whose capital is Kalamata.
The Pap smear test is named after Greek-born doctor George Papanicolaou (1883-1962), who emigrated to the United States in the late 1910s, pursued a brilliant medical research career at the Cornell University Medical Center in New York, and invented the famous Pap smear cervical cancer detection test.
Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh and the husband of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, was born Prince of Greece and Denmark, in Corfu, on 10 June 1921, the only son of Prince Andrew of Greece, and is a member of the former Greek royal family.
Hollywood actor Tom Hanks is the most famous living Greek Orthodox. Mr Hanks was not born a Greek Orthodox, of course, but he converted to Orthodoxy in order to marry his wife Rita Wilson, who is an Orthodox Greek American. The couple spend a good deal of vacation time in Greece in the summer.
Maria Callas was born in New York of Greek parents, moved to Greece as an infant, and studied music at the Athens Conservatory, in the 1940s.
Jennifer Aniston, the star of the television show "Friends" and former wife of Brad Pitt, is a Greek American who spent her childhood summers in Greece. Brad Pitt starred as ancient Greek hero Achilles in the motion picture Troy, on the Trojan War, shot by director Wolfgang Petersen.
Other famous Hollywood celebrities of Greek parentage include Olympia Dukakis (among other roles, the mother of Cher's character in Academy Award winner Moonstruck), Melina Kanakaredes (Robert DeNiro's girlfriend in 15 Minutes), Elias Koteas (among others, Thin Red Line), the directors Elia Kazan, Costa-Gavras, and John Cassavetes, the Academy Award winning costume designer Theone Vachlioti-Aldridge, andthe Academy Award winning composer Vangelis (Chariots of Fire, Blade Runner, etc.).
The final scene of The Bourne Identity, starring Matt Damon, was filmed at the Sea Satin Restaurant, at Mykonos Town's Little Venice neighborhood.
The city of Ypsilanti, in Michigan, is named after one of the leaders of the Greek War of Independence of 1821. In 1825, three prominent settlers, Judge Augustus Woodward, John Stewart and William Harwood, combined portions of their own land to form the settlement that was named for the Greek patriot General Demetrius Ypsilanti who was admired by Americans for his part in a struggle for freedom so like their own.
