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Spacey, Goodwin, Aldrin, DeLillo join roster of Common Wealth Award laureates

2009 awardees lauded for their professional and artistic endeavors.

WILMINGTON, Del., April 29, 2009 – Four renowned leaders and achievers who have influenced modern society through their work and their accomplishments were honored with the 30th Annual Common Wealth Awards of Distinguished Service. The awards recognize and encourage outstanding achievement worldwide in designated fields of human endeavor. The 2009 Common Wealth Award winners are: • Kevin Spacey, Academy Award-winning actor and artistic director of London’s Old Vic Theatre Company, for Dramatic Arts; • , presidential historian and -winning author, for Mass Communications; • Col. Buzz Aldrin, USAF (Ret.), Sc.D., legendary astronaut and lunar explorer, for Science; • Don DeLillo, preeminent American novelist and a leading figure of postmodern literature, for Literature. The honorees were recognized at the April 25th Common Wealth Awards ceremony, hosted by PNC Bank, Delaware, at the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington. Connie Bond Stuart, president of PNC Bank, Delaware, presented the awards. “The 2009 Common Wealth honorees have risen to prominence through their literary, scientific and artistic endeavors,” said Stuart. “In them we see the power of an individual to contribute, to effect change and to enrich the common good.” 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. In their 30-year history, the Common Wealth Awards have conferred $4.6 million in prize money to 169 honorees of international renown. The awards are funded by the Common Wealth Trust. The honorees received a shared prize of $200,000 and a sculpted trophy during the ceremony.

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More than 500 invited guests attended the Common Wealth Awards ceremony, including Delaware’s leaders from the business community, government and elected office, education, the arts and community service. 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). Ralph Hayes served on the board of directors of PNC Delaware’s predecessor banks from 1935 to 1965. Through the Common Wealth Awards, he sought to recognize outstanding achievement in eight disciplines: dramatic arts, literature, science, 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 roster of past honorees reveals the caliber of talent and the global scope of the awardees and their achievements. 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 former Secretary of State Colin Powell; children’s television icon, the late Fred Rogers; Queen Noor of Jordan; stage and screen director Mike Nichols; primatologist Jane Goodall; ocean explorer Robert Ballard; actress Meryl Streep; television journalists Walter Cronkite and Cokie Roberts; and World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.

2008 Common Wealth Award Winners Kevin Spacey, esteemed actor and director, has crafted an impressive and eclectic career on stage, screen and television. His film triumphs include his Oscar-winning performances in The Usual Suspects and American Beauty and an Emmy-nominated turn in the television film, Recount. Spacey’s stellar stage work includes Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Iceman Cometh and his Tony Award-winning role in Lost in Yonkers. Since 2003, Spacey has continued his theatrical endeavors as artistic director of London’s famous Old Vic Theatre Company. He received the 2008 Evening Standard Theatre Award for infusing new life into the Old Vic.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, world-renowned historian and presidential biographer, has been reporting on politics and baseball for over two decades. Her best-selling books include No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Home Front During World War II, which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for history. Her 2005 book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, was number one on best-seller list and won the 2006 Lincoln Prize. Goodwin appears regularly on network television programs and was an on-air consultant for several PBS documentaries, including Ken Burns’ The History of Baseball.

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Buzz Aldrin, heroic pioneer of American space exploration, was selected by NASA in 1963 into the third group of astronauts. In 1966, on the Gemini 12 orbital mission, he performed the world’s first successful spacewalk. Then, on July 20, 1969, Aldrin and Neil Armstrong made their historic Apollo 11 moonwalk, becoming the first two humans to set foot on another world. Aldrin devised the docking and rendezvous techniques for spacecraft in Earth and lunar orbit, which are still used today. His many awards and honors include the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Air Force Distinguished Flying Cross.

Don DeLillo has distinguished himself as one of America’s most influential and original postmodern writers. He is the author of 14 novels, including White Noise, Libra and Falling Man and three stage plays. His 1997 epic, Underworld--possibly the most acclaimed book of the decade--is widely considered his masterpiece. DeLillo’s stories explore the history, politics and paranoia of American life in the late 20th and 21st centuries. His works have gained literary stature and international popularity, garnering many awards including the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Howells Medal.

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Kevin Spacey

Two-time Oscar winner, Kevin Spacey, is acclaimed as both an actor and director. He receives the 2009 Common Wealth Award for Dramatic Arts.

Spacey is artistic director of The Old Vic Theatre Company. He directed its inaugural production Cloaca, before appearing in National Anthems, The Philadelphia Story, Richard II, A Moon for the Misbegotten, which subsequently transferred to Broadway, and most recently, Speed-the-Plow, with Jeff Goldblum, directed by Matthew Warchus.

Previous theatre includes The Iceman Cometh (Evening Standard and Olivier Awards for Best Actor) directed by Howard Davies (Almeida, Old Vic and Broadway); Lost in Yonkers (Tony Award, Best Supporting Actor); Long Day’s Journey into Night, with Jack Lemmon, directed by Jonathan Miller (Broadway and West End) and The Seagull (Kennedy Center).

Films include Superman Returns, Beyond the Sea (director and actor), The Usual Suspects (Academy Award, Best Supporting Actor), American Beauty (Academy and BAFTA Awards, Best Actor), Swimming with Sharks, Se7en, LA Confidential, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Negotiator, Hurlyburly, K-Pax and The Shipping News.

Spacey’s production company Trigger Street has produced the films The United States of Leland, The Big Kahuna, 21 for Sony Pictures, Bernard And Doris, starring Ralph Fiennes and Susan Sarandon, which was nominated for 10 Emmy Awards and three Golden Globes. Their current feature, Fanboys, was released in February 2009.

His latest film, Shrink, with Robin Williams, premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. In addition he will be seen in Nick Moran’s film Telstar opposite Colm O’Neil and Pam Ferris, which debuted at the London Film Festival.

He was most recently nominated for an Emmy and Golden Globe Award as Best Actor for his performance as Ron Klain in Recount, a co-production between Trigger Street and HBO, a behind-the- scenes account of the 36-day battle for the presidency in 2000 between Bush and Gore, which won the Emmy for Best Film of the Year.

Spacey is currently Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford University. He was recently honored with a special Evening Standard Theatre Award for bringing new life to the Old Vic.

Spacey was born July 26, 1959 in South Orange, New Jersey.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Doris Kearns Goodwin, world-renowned historian and presidential biographer, receives the 2009 Common Wealth Award for Mass Communications.

Goodwin has been reporting on politics and baseball for over two decades. She is the author of several books and has written for leading national publications. She appears regularly on network television programs and was an on-air consultant for PBS documentaries on Lyndon B. Johnson, the Kennedy Family, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ken Burns’ The History of Baseball. She was the first female journalist to enter the Red Sox locker room.

Goodwin was born January 4, 1943 and was raised on Long Island, New York. She received her B.A. from Colby College, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude. While at Colby, she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, the international honor society. She received her Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, where she taught Government including a course on the American Presidency. Following her tenure at Harvard, Goodwin served as an assistant to Lyndon Johnson in his last year in the White House. She later assisted Johnson in the preparation of his memoirs.

In 1976, Goodwin authored Lyndon Johnson & The American Dream, which became a New York Times best seller. She followed up in 1987 with the political biography, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, which stayed on the New York Times Best-Seller List for five months. In 1990, it was made into a six- hour ABC miniseries. Her next book, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Home Front During World War II, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in April 1995, as well as the Harold Washington Literary Award, the New England Bookseller Association Award, the Ambassador Book Award, and the Washington Monthly Book Award. It was a New York Times best seller for six months.

Goodwin’s book, Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir, published in 1997, is about growing up in the 1950’s in love with the Brooklyn Dodgers. It has been a New York Times best seller, as well as a Book of the Month Club selection. A Washington Post reviewer wrote, “This is a book in the grand tradition of girlhood memoirs, dating from Louisa May Alcott to Carson McCullers and Harper Lee.”

Her most recent work, a monumental history of Abraham Lincoln entitled Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, published in October 2005, joined the best-seller lists on its first week in publication, and soon reached number one on the New York Times Best-Seller List. Team of Rivals won the 2006 Lincoln Prize for an outstanding work about the president and/or the Civil War, the inaugural New York Historical Society Book Prize, the Richard Nelson Current award and the New York State Archives History Makers Award. Steven Spielberg is developing a feature film about the book, set to star Liam Neeson as Lincoln and Sally Field as Mary.

Goodwin is married to Richard Goodwin, who worked in the White House under both Kennedy and Johnson. Mr. Goodwin’s experience as the investigator who uncovered the quiz show scandals of the 1950s was captured in the Academy Award-nominated movie Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford. The Goodwins have three sons. Buzz Aldrin

Buzz Aldrin, heroic pioneer of American space exploration, receives the 2009 Common Wealth Award for Science.

Aldrin was born in Montclair, New Jersey on January 20, 1930. His mother, Marion Moon, was the daughter of an Army Chaplain. His father, Edwin Eugene Aldrin, was a Colonel in the Air Force, an Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and an aviation pioneer.

Aldrin was educated at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, graduating third in his class with a B.S. in mechanical engineering. He then joined the Air Force where he flew F86 Sabre Jets in 66 combat missions in Korea, shot down two MIG-15s, and was decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross. After a tour of duty in Germany flying F100’s, he went on to earn his Doctorate of Science in Astronautics at MIT and wrote his thesis on Manned Orbital Rendezvous.

Selected by NASA in 1963 into the third group of astronauts, Aldrin was the first with a doctorate and became known as “Dr. Rendezvous.” The docking and rendezvous techniques he devised for spacecraft in Earth and lunar orbit became critical to the success of the Gemini and Apollo programs, and are still used today. He also pioneered underwater training techniques, as a substitute for zero gravity flights, to simulate spacewalking. In 1966 on the Gemini 12 orbital mission, Aldrin performed the world’s first successful spacewalk, overcoming prior difficulties experienced in all American and Russian extra- vehicular activity (EVA), and set a new EVA record of 5 ½ hours. Then, on July 20, 1969, Aldrin and Neil Armstrong made their historic Apollo 11 moonwalk, becoming the first two humans to set foot on another world. They spent 21 hours on the lunar surface and returned with 46 pounds of moon rocks. An estimated 600 million people – the world’s largest television audience in history – witnessed this unprecedented heroic endeavor.

Upon returning from the moon, Aldrin was decorated with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest American peacetime award. A 45-day international goodwill tour followed, where he received numerous distinguished awards and medals from 23 other countries. Named after Buzz are Asteroid “6470 Aldrin” and the “Aldrin Crater” on the moon. Aldrin and his Apollo 11 crew have four “stars” on each corner of Hollywood and Vine streets on the renowned Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Since retiring from NASA and the Air Force, Col. Aldrin has remained at the forefront of efforts to ensure America’s continued leadership in human space exploration. He devised a master plan for missions to Mars – the “Aldrin Mars Cycler” – a spacecraft transportation system with perpetual cycling orbits between Earth and Mars. Aldrin has received two US patents for his schematics of a permanent space station and multi-crew modules for space flight. He founded Starcraft Boosters, Inc., a rocket design company, and the ShareSpace Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to advancing space education, exploration and affordable space flight experiences for all. Aldrin also promotes his Rocket Hero brand launched in 2008 through his newest entity, StarBuzz Enterprises LLC.

Aldrin inspires today’s youth with his illustrated children’s books: Reaching for the Moon, a New York Times bestseller, and Look to the Stars, due out in 2009. He has also authored two space science-fact- fiction novels: The Return and Encounter with Tiber. His non-fiction works include the bestselling historical documentary, Men from Earth, and an early 1970’s autobiography, Return to Earth. Aldrin has penned his memoir in his newest book, Magnificent Desolation – The Long Journey Home from the Moon, to be published by Harmony Books/Crown Publishers in June 2009.

On Valentine's Day 1988, Aldrin married Lois Driggs of Phoenix, Arizona. She is a Stanford University graduate, an active community leader in Southern California and co-chairman of StarBuzz. Their combined family includes six adult children from previous marriages and one grandson. Sharing a similar passion for adventure, their worldwide business travels include leisure time ocean scuba diving and winter mountain skiing.

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo has distinguished himself as one of America’s most influential and original postmodern novelists. He receives the 2009 Common Wealth Award for Literature.

In a literary career spanning nearly 40 years, DeLillo has authored fourteen novels, including White Noise, Libra and Falling Man, and three stage plays. His work has won many honors in this country and abroad – among them the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His novel Underworld won the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

If DeLillo’s work has a recurring theme, it is that we are living in dangerous times. He has said that he doesn’t think his novels could have been written in the world that existed before the assassination of President Kennedy. Page by page, book by book, his work has dealt with powerful narratives—terrorism, social disruption, decades of cold war, a sense of the secret manipulation of history.

But before history and politics, there is language. And as a young man reading Faulkner, Hemingway and Joyce, DeLillo began to understand the beauty and fervor of words. The language of his novels has been called “defiantly, radiantly American.”

DeLillo was born November 20, 1936 in .