The 2005 Common Wealth Awards of Distinguished Service will be presented tonight to five renowned achievers at a special ceremony here honoring the individuals and their outstanding contributions to the world community.
(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050423/CLSA001 ) Winners of the 2005 Common Wealth Awards are: - Gen. Colin L. Powell, USA (Ret.), former Secretary of State and respected leader, diplomat and soldier, for Government; - David Mamet, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Hollywood screenwriter and pre-eminent dramatist, for Dramatic Arts; - Tim Berners-Lee, visionary inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web consortium, for Mass Communications; - Amy Tan, best-selling novelist whose stories explore family ties, heritage and the Asian-American experience, for Literature; - Kip Thorne, foremost American researcher of black holes and gravitational waves, for Science and Invention.
The honorees will receive a shared prize of $250,000 at tonight's gala ceremony, hosted by PNC Bank, Delaware at the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington.
The Common Wealth Awards of Distinguished Service were first presented in 1979 by the Common Wealth Trust, created under the will of the late Ralph Hayes, an influential business executive and philanthropist. Hayes conceived the awards to reward and encourage the best of human performance worldwide. Now in their 26th year, the awards have conferred more than $3.5 million in prize money to 153 honorees of international renown. The awards are funded by the Common Wealth Trust.
The final selection of the honorees is the decision of the Executory of the Common Wealth Trust. PNC Bank, Delaware has been trustee and administrator for the Common Wealth Awards since their inception. PNC Bank, Delaware is a member of The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. (NYSE: PNC).
"The 2005 Common Wealth Award honorees are global voices whose achievements resonate in the arts, science and the political arena," said Connie Bond Stuart, chairman, president and chief executive officer of PNC Bank, Delaware. "They have educated, entertained and enlightened people the world over. In these gifted achievers, we see the richness of talent and the passion for excellence that inspired Ralph Hayes to create the Common Wealth Awards."
Hayes served on the board of directors of PNC Bank Delaware's predecessor banks from 1935 to 1965. In creating the Common Wealth Awards, he sought to recognize outstanding achievement in seven disciplines: dramatic arts, literature, science and invention, mass communications, public service, government, and sociology. The awards also provide an incentive for people to make future contributions to the world community.
The Common Wealth Award roster of honorees reads like a "Who's Who" of modern history. Among the past winners are 11 Nobel laureates, including human rights leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former statesman Henry Kissinger and author Toni Morrison. Other winners include actor and advocate for the disabled, the late Christopher Reeve; dance legend Mikhail Baryshnikov; primatologist Jane Goodall; former First Lady Betty Ford; ocean explorer Robert Ballard; actress Meryl Streep; television journalist Walter Cronkite; and DuPont scientist, Stephanie Kwolek, the Delaware resident who helped invent Kevlar.
The 2005 winners continue the Common Wealth legacy of excellence and achievement.
General Colin L. Powell, USA (Ret.)
Leader, diplomat, statesman and soldier, General Colin L. Powell, USA (Ret.), 68, has dedicated his life to the service of his country. He wins the 2005 Common Wealth Award for Government. Powell's personal integrity and pragmatic leadership have earned him the esteem of the American people and a place in history as an American icon. Powell was a professional soldier in the U.S. Army for 35 years and rose to the rank of four-star general. He went on to serve as National Security Advisor, becoming the first African-American to hold the position, as he has been in every office he has held since. He served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military's top post, and distinguished himself during the successful Desert Shield and Desert Storm operations. In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Powell 65th Secretary of State. Powell proved himself an influential statesman as he worked to build coalitions, forge alliances and spread the universal values of democracy and freedom across the globe. Powell served a four-year term as Secretary of State, and stepped down from office on January 26, 2005.
David Mamet
David Mamet, 57, winner of the 2005 Common Wealth Award for Dramatic Arts, is renowned as a playwright, screenwriter, movie director and author. Over the past 30 years, he has achieved international stature as one of the most influential and original voices in the history of American drama. Mamet's critically acclaimed plays include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo, Speed the Plow and Oleanna. As a screenwriter, he earned Oscar nominations for The Verdict and Wag the Dog. Other successful screenplays include The Untouchables, House of Games, which marked his directorial debut, The Spanish Prisoner and Spartan. Mamet's plays are noted for their gritty reality as they examine the struggles of working-class characters in a morally bereft and predatory society. A signature element of Mamet's writing is his sparse, staccato dialogue, which one reviewer described as "poetic impression of streetwise jargon." His newest play, Romance, made its world premiere in February 2005 at Off-Broadway's Atlantic Theater Company, a repertory company he co-founded in 1985. A Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross began April 8.
Tim Berners-Lee
British computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, 49, revolutionized modern communication with his landmark invention of the World Wide Web. He wins the 2005 Common Wealth Award for Mass Communications. Berners-Lee envisioned a global information space where documents stored on computers everywhere could be interconnected and available to everyone. He developed a global hypertext system to retrieve and access information using the power of the Internet. He wrote the underlying technical codes-URLs, HTTP and HTML-created the first Web server software and the original browser program. Berners-Lee dubbed his new creation the World Wide Web. In 1991, he posted the Web software on the Internet-creating the first Web site-and made it freely available to the world. He has never sold or patented the Web for his personal profit. Berners- Lee is director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he guides the Web's on-going development. He is now spearheading work on the "Semantic Web," a universal medium that will make information understandable by machines as well as humans.
Amy Tan
Best-selling novelist, Amy Tan, 53, is a critically acclaimed and significant voice in modern Asian-American literature. She wins the 2005 Common Wealth Award for Literature. Tan's popular stories are informed by her Chinese-American heritage as they explore family ties and understanding, memory and inheritance, generational tensions and conflicting cultures. Her first book, The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989, tells the poignant tales of four Chinese women and their American-born daughters. The book became an immediate literary sensation, spending nine months on the New York Times bestseller list. Her subsequent novels, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses and The Bonesetter's Daughter further distinguished Tan as one of America's most gifted fiction writers. Tan has also published her memoirs, titled The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's, The New Yorker and others. Her essay, "Mother Tongue," which is included in The Opposite of Fate, was chosen for Best American Essays in 1991 and has been widely anthologized.
Kip Thorne
For four decades, astrophysicist Kip Thorne, 64, has been opening new windows on the universe for scientists and lay audiences alike. He receives the 2005 Common Wealth Award for Science and Invention. Thorne is the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1966. He is acclaimed worldwide for his mentoring of young scientists and his groundbreaking work in applying general relativity to astrophysics. His innovative research has elucidated gravitational waves, black holes, neutron stars and the nature of space, time and gravity. Thorne has been at the vanguard of researchers studying gravitational waves, hypothetical ripples in space produced by disturbances in the universe. He was one of three renowned scientists who conceived and founded LIGO--the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Using LIGO's instruments, physicists hope to detect and measure gravitational waves and use them to probe the nature of gravity and the dark side of the universe. Thorne co- authored the classic textbook, Gravitation, and he authored the bestseller for lay readers, Black Holes and Time Warps, Einstein's Outrageous Legacy.
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SOURCE: The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc.
CONTACT: Mary E. Biddle of The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc.,
+1-302-429-7130, or mary.biddle@pnc.com
Web site: http://www.pnc.com/
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