What Would the Wood Do? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Ronnie Wood

Best known as a member of the Rolling Stones, Ronald David Wood was an accomplished musician before he joined the band in 1975. He joined the Birds in 1964, and then Creation before joining the Jeff Beck Group in 1967 as a bass player. This group split in 1969, and he and Rod Stewart joined Small Faces' members Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagan, and Kenney Jones to form Faces where he sang and played guitar. As a side project he contributed to Rod Stewart's solo projects. When Mick Taylor left the Rolling Stones, good mate Keith Richards asked Wood to join, which he did as a temporary member, not becoming a financial partner until 1993. He had numerous solo projects during this period, including "I've Got My Own Album to Do" in 1974.

He married for the third time in 2012 and has six children. He has struggled with alcoholism but declared he had been sober for ten years in 2021. He has beaten cancer twice.

Answer: Grant Wood

Grant Wood was a born and bred Iowan, who was known for his paintings about the rural Mid-West of the United States. He was a chief proponent of Regionalism, a modern art movement that included paintings and murals showing realistic portraits of rural America mainly in the Midwest. It started in in the 1930s as a response to the Great Depression, and ended due to a lack of development because of WWII.

Between 1922 to 1928, he traveled to Europe four times, where he studied numerous styles of painting, but especially Impressionism and post-Impressionism, yet he always came back to Iowa and depicted his subjects, landscapes, and artefacts in the Regionalism style. His best known painting is "American Gothic", where his sister was one of the people in the painting. Wood taught art at the University of Iowa's School of Art from 1934 to 1941. He died from pancreatic cancer, aged 51.

SS Grant Wood, a WWII cargo ship was named in his honor in 1943. Grant Wood was awarded the Iowa Prize which is the state's highest citizen honour in 2009.

Answer: Evan Rachel Wood

Evan Rachel Wood made her TV debut in 1994, aged seven, and her first significant role was in the TV series, "American Gothic", a year later. She made her big screen debut in 1997 in "Digging to China", but shot to stardom in 2003 in "Thirteen". She is a regularly seen actress in both television and film. In 2011, she was nominated for an Emmy and Golden Globe for "Mildred Pierce".

She is an accomplished singer, hitting the Billboard Hot 100 when she sang in a duet with Idina Manzel with "Show Yourself" from the "Frozen II" soundtrack. Wood married actor Jamie Bell in 2012 and had a son in 2013. The couple announced their separation in 2014. Ms Wood's humanitarian work includes extensive work in the field of domestic violence.

Answer: Henry Wood

Sir Henry Joseph Wood was an English conductor and organist, best known for conducting an annual series of promenade concerts (Proms) in London for nearly 50 years.

He was born in a musical family, but learned the organ whilst at primary school. He earned a place in the Royal Academy of Music, aged 17, and studied harmony, composition, organ, and piano. He graduated and taught singing lessons, something he continued to do his entire life. He was then employed as an accompanist at the Royal English Opera House and soon was promoted to Conductor. He was invited to conduct ten-week season of promenade concerts which lasted 50 years.

His knighthood was bestowed in 1911, and he became a Companion of Honour in 1944. He was awarded the Order of the Crown in 1920 from Belgium and Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1926 from France. He was bestowed with five honorary doctorates from English universities. He was a fellow of both the Royal Academy of Music (1920) and the Royal College of Music (1923).

Answer: Robert W. Wood

Robert Williams Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts and was keen to to study for the priesthood until he saw an aurora in the night sky as a teenager and studied physics instead, graduating with degrees from Harvard and MIT.

He discovered many physical manifestations including a surface plasmon polariton (SPP), an electromagnetic wave excited at metal surfaces, Wood's glass (opaque to visible but not UV or IR light) and a UV light now found in every physics laboratory called a Wood's light. He discovered an albedo, an area where most of the ultraviolet light was absorbed, on the moon. This was later called Wood's Spot. He was a pioneer in photographing sound waves and investigating ultrasonics.

He won many awards and honorary university degrees but he never, surprisingly, won a Nobel Prize.

Answer: Leanne Wood

Leanne Wood is a Welsh politician who was elected to the Senedd (National Assembly for Wales) in 2003 as a member of the Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales). In 2022 this party held three seats in the UK parliament and 13/60 seats in the Senedd. The party's platform is one of an independent and bilingual Wales, economic prosperity and social justice. Leanne Wood was elected leader in 2012, serving six years as leader before losing her position in 2018.

In 2021 she was defeated in her constituency of Rhondda in south Wales. Ms Wood identifies as a socialist, republican, and supporter of Welsh independence.

Answer: Kingsley Wood

A noted conservative Party politician who qualified as a solicitor, Wood made a name from himself as an insurance law specialist, which helped him become elected to the London County Council in 1911. His professional standing facilitated a knighthood at the very young age of 36. He was elected to Parliament in 1918, and introduced legislation for daylight savings in 1918. He served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education and after the 1931 election, he was promoted to Postmaster General, where he reorganised the post office from a bureaucracy into a business. He served as Minister for Health and Secretary of State.

It was Mr Wood who persuaded Neville Chamberlain to resign as Prime Minister and encouraged Winston Churchill to stand as PM against Lord Halifax. He was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer by Churchill and held the key war time role for 40 months. He devised a pay as you earn (PAYE) system of paying taxes, a world wide model now, but unheard of at the time. However he died suddenly on the day he was meant to announce PAYE in the House of Commons.

Answer: James Woods

James Woods wanted to be an eye surgeon, but dropped out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology one semester before graduating to pursue acting. He was an established on- and off- Broadway actor before he made his film debut in 1972 in "The Visitors", and his TV debut in a miniseries called "Holocaust" alongside Meryl Streep in 1978. He earned a nomination for a Golden Globe for his role in "The Onion Field" (1978). In 1986, he received his first Academy Award nomination for "Salvador", and another for Best Supporting Actor for "Ghosts of Mississippi" in 1996. Mr Woods earned critical acclaim for his role in the 2021 TV mini-series, "Coma".

He plays poker professionally. He was married twice in the 80s, but neither marriage lasted long.

Answer: Natalie Wood

Natalie Wood (born Natalie Zacharenko) was an American actress, who began her career in film as a child and continued her trade successfully into her adulthood before she died unexpectedly in 1981 from drowning.

Ms. Wood was born in San Francisco in 1938 to Russian immigrants and began performing when only four years old. She became a child star, aged eight, when she co-starred in 1947 in " Miracle on 34th Street". She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955), and for an Academy Award for Best Actress in "Splendor in the Grass"(1961) and "Love with the Proper Stranger" (1963).

She did not work much in the 70s, with only a few small roles in television and TV movies, as she had had two daughters with two husbands, Robert Wagner and Richard Gregson.

Her death from drowning on a boat moored off Catalina Island near Los Angeles was suspicious and changed to "drowning and other undetermined factors" in 2012.

Answer: Elijah Wood

Mr Wood made his film debut in "Back to The Future II" in 1989, aged eight. He was a noted child actor with major credits in five movies including "The Good Son" (1993). As a teenager, he starred in six movies, including "The Ice Storm" (1997), "Deep Impact" (1998), and "The Faculty" (1998). He is best known for anchoring the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy between 1999 and 2003.

To avoid being typecast as Frodo he subsequently took several, perhaps controversial, roles in movies such as "Sin City" (2005) and the "Oxford Murders" (2008). In 2019, Mr Wood and Danish film producer Mette-Marie Kongsved became parents when their son Evan was born.