Jean-Claude Van Damme just turned forty-seven or ninety-four, depending on whether you subscribe to Nugent's Law, which states that anyone who's starred as identical twin brothers in a movie has to age for both of them. To celebrate the occasion, one of our favorite party planners, Grady Hendrix, pays appropriate tribute to the birthday boy in Slate. "Jean-Claude Van Damme started out in life as a baby, which was tremendously frustrating for him because babies are, by their very nature, skinny and weak. In adolescence, a thick pair of enormous glasses were added to the equation, and in photos of him at this age he looks like an annoyed duck. Finally, his dad couldn't take it anymore and enrolled him in karate classes. Jean-Claude trained fanatically, took up bodybuilding, and then, realizing that he would never be as big as the other karate students, he trumped them by becoming more flexible, and he took up ballet." From there it was a hop, skip, and a pirouette to movies, though some might say that, as an actor, Kid Flexible has a limited range: "Jean-Claude has three expressions: worried, charming, and doing a split. Of the three, doing a split is the most convincing." — Phil Nugent