Multiple Oscar winner Katharine Hepburn (right), pioneering black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, and cowboys Gene Autry, William S. Hart, Tom Mix and Roy Rogers will be featured on US postage stamps in 2010.
Until early 2000, Katharine Hepburn held the actors' record for most Academy Award nominations: 12. That year, Meryl Streep tied with Hepburn, and in early 2003 surpassed her. Hepburn, however, still holds the record for most wins by an actor: four in all, for Morning Glory (1932-33*), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968, tied with Barbra Streisand), and On Golden Pond (1981).
Oscar Micheaux made more than 40 films, nearly all of them between 1920 and 1940. His most celebrated efforts are the silent dramas Within Our Gates (1920) and Body and Soul (1925), the latter starring Paul Robeson.
Though never a top attraction in major urban centers, singing cowboy Gene Autry was huge in small towns throughout the United States. The same went for Roy Rogers and screen partner (and real-life wife) Dale Evans.
The stoic William S. Hart was a major box-office attraction in the 1910s, while the flashier Tom Mix became the top cowboy star of the 1920s. In his day, Hart was so big he was to have been one of the founders of United Artists, along with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith, but he bowed out before the deal was finalized.
Others to be featured in next year's US stamps are Nobel Prize winner Mother Teresa, cartoonist Bill Mauldin, and singer Kate Smith.
Every year, the US post office releases a series of commemorative stamps featuring people, places and institutions. These stamps remain on sale for only a limited period, thus becoming collectors' items.
* From Aug. 1932 to early Jan. 1934. Only in the early 1940s would the Oscar eligibility period match the calendar year.