WILMINGTON, Del. (Map) - WILMINGTON, Del., March 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Four internationally renowned leaders and achievers will be honored for their lifetime accomplishments with the 29th annual Common Wealth Awards of Distinguished Service. These prestigious awards recognize individuals who have advanced and enriched society through their life's work.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080304/NETU033-a ) (Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080304/NETU033-b ) (Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080304/NETU033-c ) (Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080304/NETU033-d ) The 2008 Common Wealth Award winners are: -- Glenn Close, celebrated actress of stage, screen and television, for Dramatic Arts; -- John Howard, four-term prime minister of Australia, for Government; -- Ann Curry, news anchor of NBC's Today, co-anchor of Dateline NBC, for Mass Communications; -- James Hansen, preeminent climate scientist, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, for Science.

The honorees will receive a shared prize of $200,000 at the Common Wealth Awards ceremony, hosted by PNC Bank, Delaware, April 5 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.

In their 29-year history, the Common Wealth Awards have conferred $4.4 million in prize money to 165 honorees of international renown. The awards are funded by the Common Wealth Trust.

Ralph Hayes served on the board of directors of PNC Bank, 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.

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 2008 Common Wealth Award winners are among the most accomplished and admired men and women of our time," said Connie Bond Stuart, president of PNC Bank, Delaware. "Through their work and their achievements, these individuals have influenced the way we think, live and feel. In the spirit of the Common Wealth Awards, we honor these remarkable achievers for the legacy they have contributed and the possibilities yet to be realized."

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 authors Gabriel Garcia Marquez and 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 stars Sidney Poitier and Meryl Streep; astronaut John Glenn; primatologist Jane Goodall; ocean explorer Robert Ballard; television journalists Walter Cronkite and Cokie Roberts; and World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.

(Biographies for each honoree are included with this release.) Glenn Close

Glenn Close, the versatile and critically acclaimed star of the big screen, television and Broadway, wins the 2008 Common Wealth Award for Dramatic Arts.

The Emmy, Golden Globe and Tony Award-winning actress headlined her first television series as high-stakes litigator Patty Hewes in the original legal thriller Damages for FX, which premiered in July 2007 and will return for two more seasons. For her role, Ms. Close was just honored with the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Series Drama as well as a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. Her return to FX followed her rave reviews and Emmy nomination for her portrayal of Captain Monica Rawling in a season-long story arc on the network's Emmy-winning series The Shield.

Glenn Close made her feature film debut in The World According to Garp, earning awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Board of Review as well as an Academy Award nomination. She was subsequently Oscar-nominated for her performances in The Big Chill, The Natural, the smash hit Fatal Attraction, and Dangerous Liaisons.

Close's other films include Jagged Edge, Reversal of Fortune, Hamlet, Meeting Venus, The Paper, 101 Dalmatians, 102 Dalmatians, Air Force One, Cookie's Fortune, The Safety of Objects, Le Divorce, Heights, Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, Nine Lives, and Evening.

She has been nominated nine times for the Golden Globe Award, winning for her performance in the television adaptation of The Lion in Winter (which also earned her a Screen Actors Guild Award) as well as for Damages.

The latter is among the television projects that have brought her ten Emmy Award nominations, with a win for her portrayal of real-life hero Margarethe Cammermeyer in Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story, which Close executive produced.

Her other notable films for television include The Elephant Man, Something About Amelia, Stones for Ibarra and In the Gloaming. She executive produced and starred in the Sarah, Plain and Tall trilogy, The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, and the musical remake of South Pacific.

Glenn Close made her professional theater and Broadway debut in Love for Love. Other early stage credits include The Crucifer of Blood and The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, for which she won an Obie Award. Close's first Tony Award nomination came for her role in the musical Barnum, and she subsequently won Tony Awards for her performances in The Real Thing and Death and the Maiden.

For her portrayal of Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Sunset Boulevard, Close won a Tony Award, a Drama Desk Award, a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award and a Dramalogue Award. She would later reteam with the show's director, Trevor Nunn, in London for his Royal National Theatre revival of A Streetcar Named Desire.

She has been honored with a Crystal Award from Women in Film; a GLAAD Media Award; a People's Choice Award; the National Association of Theatre Owners' Female Star of the Year award at ShoWest and a Gotham Award for her contributions to the New York independent filmmaking community.

Close is a trustee emeritus of The Sundance Institute, with which she has been associated for more than 17 years. She is also a trustee of The Wildlife Conservation Society and volunteers at Fountain House in New York City, a facility dedicated to the recovery of men and women who suffer with mental illness.

Close was born March 19, 1947 in Greenwich, Connecticut. She graduated from the College of William and Mary with a degree in drama and anthropology.

John Howard

The Honorable John Winston Howard, 25th Prime Minister of Australia and respected world leader, wins the 2008 Common Wealth Award for Government.

Serving from March 1996 until November 2007, Howard has been Australia's second longest serving Prime Minister. He led the center/right Liberal Party of Australia for a total of 16 years and was a member of the House of Representatives for 33 years. Prior to becoming Prime Minister, Mr. Howard had extensive senior experience in both government and opposition. He served as Treasurer (finance minister) in a previous government and led his party in opposition for a number of years.

A conservative on social policy, Mr. Howard pursued broadly pro-market economic policies in his time as Prime Minister. During his period in office, Australia experienced continued economic growth averaging 3.6% per annum.

The federal government budget of Australia was in heavy deficit when Mr. Howard's government came to power. That deficit was eliminated and 10 of the 12 annual budgets produced by the Howard government during its almost 12 years of government were in surplus. In that time, $96 billion of federal government debt was repaid. The Australian government now has no net debt.

As well as fiscal consolidation, the Howard government undertook major reform of the Australian taxation system through the introduction of a goods and services tax, which was accompanied by reductions in personal income tax and corporate tax rates. He also substantially reformed Australia's labor laws through a freer and less regulated labor market. Australia's unemployment rate is now at a 33-year low of 4.3%.

In the field of foreign policy, Australia, under Mr. Howard's government, was both a strong and close ally of the United States as well as expanding very extensive links with the nations of Asia. A particular feature of the Howard government's time in power was the development of the relationship with China, which is now Australia's largest export market. Under John Howard's leadership, Australian forces joined the coalition of the willing in Iraq in March 2003. Some 1,400 Australian military personnel remain in the Iraqi theatre. Australia has strongly supported the war against terrorism with her forces continuing to serve alongside American and other coalition forces in Afghanistan.

John Howard was in Washington on an official visit at the time of the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. He addressed a joint sitting of Congress in 2002. He currently serves as Chairman of the International Democratic Union -- an international grouping of center/right parties including the Republican Party.

Mr. Howard's government was also responsible for major reforms in social policy, including measures to move people from welfare payments into paid work, the involvement of faith-based and other non- government organizations in the provision of certain welfare services and a strengthening of Australia's universal Medicare system.

Shortly after Mr. Howard came to power, he responded to the massacre of 35 people by a lone gunman at Port Arthur in Tasmania with the implementation of national gun control laws, which drastically curtailed the possession of many firearms.

John Howard was born in Sydney, Australia, on July 26, 1939. He graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Laws in 1961 and was admitted as a Solicitor of the New South Wales Supreme Court in July 1962. Prior to his election to Parliament, he was a partner in a Sydney firm of solicitors.

Ann Curry

Ann Curry, award-winning television journalist and news anchor, wins the 2008 Common Wealth Award for Mass Communications.

Curry was named co-anchor of Dateline NBC in May 2005 and news anchor for NBC News' Today in March 1997.

Curry has distinguished herself in global humanitarian reporting. From March 2006 to March 2007, she traveled three times to Sudan to report on the violence and ethnic cleansing taking place in Darfur and Chad. While there, she provided in-depth reports focusing on the victims who have been caught in the deadly conflict in that region, and she also conducted exclusive interviews with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and Chadian President Idrsiss Deby. In July 2006, Curry reported on the Israel-Lebanon war, and she was one of the only American reporters to file stories on both sides of the conflict from Beruit and Northern Israel.

In the summer of 2005, Curry traveled with First Lady Laura Bush throughout Africa to discuss issues that plague the continent such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic and women's rights and education. She was the first network news anchor to report from inside the tsunami zone in Southeast Asia, filing live and taped reports from Sri Lanka for Dateline, Today and NBC Nightly News. She was also the first network news anchor to report on the humanitarian refugee crisis caused by the genocide in Kosovo, reporting for NBC News from Albania and Macedonia.

In the first two weeks following the attacks of September 11, Curry reported live from ground zero every day. When the United States bombed Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan in November 2001, she reported extensively from the USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea and landed the first exclusive interview with the war's military commander, General Tommy Franks. Curry reported from Baghdad in the weeks leading up to the war in Iraq and then from the USS Constellation as the war began, interviewing fighter pilots who flew the first wave of bombing runs over Iraq. She also filed reports from inside Iraq, from Qatar, and Kuwait during the first weeks of the war.

Curry first joined NBC News in August 1990 as a Chicago-based correspondent. In 1992 she was named anchor of NBC News at Sunrise. She later helped launch MSNBC and then became news anchor at Today. Before coming to NBC, Ms. Curry was a reporter for KCBS in Los Angeles. In 1981, she was a reporter and anchor for KGW, the NBC affiliate in Portland, Oregon.

Curry began her broadcasting career as an intern in 1978 at KTVL, in Medford Oregon, near her hometown, rising to become that station's first female news reporter.

Curry has earned two Emmys, four Golden Mikes, several Associated Press Certificates of Excellence, two Gracies, and an award for Excellence in Reporting from the NAACP. In June 2007, she was honored with the Simon Wiesenthal Medal of Valor for her reporting in Darfur. She has been awarded by Americares, the Anti-Defamation League as a Woman of Achievement, and the Asian American Journalists Association, receiving its National Journalism Award in 2003. She has also won numerous awards for her charity work, primarily for breast cancer research.

Curry was born November 19, 1956 in Guam. She graduated from the University of Oregon School of Journalism in 1978.

James E. Hansen

Dr. James Hansen, preeminent climate scientist, wins the 2008 Common Wealth Award for Science. He is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and Adjunct Professor of Earth Sciences at Columbia University's Earth Institute.

In his early research, Hansen used telescopic observations of Venus to extract detailed information on the physical properties of the cloud and haze particles that veil Venus.

Since the mid-1970s, Hansen has focused on studies and computer simulations of the Earth's climate for the purpose of understanding the human impact on global climate. He is best known for his testimony on climate change to Congress in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue.

In recent years, Hansen has drawn attention to the danger of passing climate tipping points, producing irreversible climate impacts that would yield a different planet from the one on which civilization developed. Hansen disputes the contention of fossil fuel interests and governments that support them that it is an almost god-given fact that all fossil fuels must be burned with their combustion products discharged into the atmosphere. Instead, Hansen has outlined steps that are needed to stabilize climate, with a cleaner atmosphere and ocean, and he emphasizes the need for the public to influence government and industry policies.

Hansen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995. In 2001, he received the Heinz Award for environment and the American Geophysical Union's Roger Revelle Medal. Hansen received the World Wildlife Federation's Conservation Medal from the Duke of Edinburgh in 2006 and was designated by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2006. In 2007 Hansen won the Dan David Prize in the field of Quest for Energy, the Leo Szilard Award of the American Physical Society for Use of Physics for the Benefit of Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility.

Hansen was born March 29, 1941 in Denison, Iowa. He trained in physics and astronomy in the space science program of Dr. James Van Allen at the University of Iowa, receiving his bachelor's degree with highest distinction in physics and mathematics, master's degree in astronomy, and Ph.D. in physics in 1967.

Hansen was a visiting student at the Institute of Astrophysics, University of Kyoto, and Department of Astronomy, Tokyo University, Japan from 1965-1966. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Iowa in 1967. Except for 1969, when he was an NSF post-doctoral scientist at Leiden Observatory under Prof. H.C. van de Hulst, Hansen has spent his post-doctoral career at NASA GISS.