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His grim, beady-eyed, sharp-nosed, weatherbeaten face was always familiar despite the small roles he appeared in. Every once in a while character actor Russell Simpson would stand out in a small scene, but his main purpose seemed to be adding rustic authenticity to his westerns or small-town dramas. Born on June 17, 1880 in San Francisco, California, Simpson was involved in the Alaska gold rush as a teenager before settling upon an acting career. A member of a number of touring companies, he eventually made it to Broadway. His silent film debut in The Virginian (1914) was unbilled, but he went on to appear in occasional leads and top support roles in many others, with such roles as Trampas in the remake of The Virginian (1923) and President Andrew Jackson in The Frontiersman (1927) highlighting his silent era. Simpson's parts grew smaller with the advent of sound and his gents grew increasingly grizzled, stubborn and cranky. In the late 1930s he became a stock player in director John Ford's company of actors, which culminated in one of his finest roles as Pa Joad in the classic The Grapes of Wrath (1940). He appeared in other Ford pictures, including Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), Tobacco Road (1941), They Were Expendable (1945), My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953). He would continue acting to the very end, making his last film (naturally) for Ford: The Horse Soldiers (1959). Appearing in hundreds of films over a span of four decades, he graced TV westerns as well with roles on The Lone Ranger (1949) and Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (1951) to his credit. His more than 40-year marriage to Gertrude Aller produced a daughter, Roberta. Simpson passed away on December 12, 1959 of natural causes in Woodland Hills, California at the age of 79.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Character actor Milburn Stone, the beloved "Doc Adams" on TV's long-running western classic Gunsmoke (1955), was born in Kansas on July 5, 1904. Acting must have been in his blood as the nephew of Broadway comedian Fred Stone for Milburn left home as a teenager to find work with touring repertory troupes. Emulating his famous uncle Fred, he appeared in vaudeville as part of a song-and-dance team called "Stone and Strain."
Following a minor appearance on Broadway in "The Jayhawkers," Milburn moved to Los Angeles in 1935 to try his luck in films. He toiled for years in mostly unbilled parts for 'poverty row' Monogram Pictures and a few major studios, apprenticing in a number of background roles as both benign fellows (clerks, reporters, sailors, detectives) and bad guys (convicts, robbers, henchmen) in such films as Ladies Crave Excitement (1935), The Fighting Marines (1935), The Princess Comes Across (1936), Banjo on My Knee (1936) and They Gave Him a Gun (1937)
Out of the blue he would occasionally nab a heroic film lead in films as the crime drama Federal Bullets (1937) and The Judge (1949) or serial thrillers as The Great Alaskan Mystery (1944) and The Master Key (1945), then would invariably go right back to unbilled status in his very next role. One memorable featured part (which was also unbilled) was as debater Stephen A. Douglass in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). In addition he played a regular support role as pal/co-pilot "Skeeter Milligan" in the "Tommy Tailspin" airborne film quickies Mystery Plane (1939), Sky Patrol (1939) and Danger Flight (1939).
Other higher visible support roles occurred in such films as the Roy Rogers western Colorado (1940), as well as Captive Wild Woman (1943), The Frozen Ghost (1945), Roadblock (1951), Black Tuesday (1954), Smoke Signal (1955). He also went on to appear in a couple of John Ford's later features such as Simone Bär and The Long Gray Line (1955).
When the crusty but lovable role of "Doc Adams" finally landed at his feet in 1955, Milburn was only too appreciative to experience a steady paycheck. He became an "overnight" star and, along with Matt Dillon's James Arness, earned an Emmy Award for "supporting actor" and stayed a citizen of Dodge City throughout its entire 20-year run (500 episodes). In 1971, Stone was temporarily sidelined by a heart attack and briefly replaced by another "doc" played by Pat Hingle. The ever-durable Stone missed only seven episodes, however, and did return on a more limited basis.
Fully retired to his ranch in 1975 after the show's cancellation, he was eventually awarded an honorary doctorate from St. Mary of the Plains College in (of course) Dodge City, Kansas. Married to Jane Garrison, the 75-year-old veteran died of a heart attack on June 12, 1980 in La Jolla, California. His wife passed away much later in 2002.- Billy Watson was born on 25 December 1923 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was an actor, known for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), In Old Chicago (1938) and Kidnapped (1938). He was married to Sue Watson. He died on 17 February 2022 in Spokane, Washington, USA.
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Delmar Watson was born on 1 July 1926 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was an actor, known for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Heidi (1937) and Clipped Wings (1937). He was married to Antoinette. He died on 26 October 2008 in Glendale, California, USA.- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Jack Pennick was an American film actor, a familiar face, primarily in the movies of John Ford. He was born in Portland, Oregon, the son of gold miner Albert R. and Bessie (Murray) Pennick. After himself working as a gold miner, Pennick joined the U.S. Marine Corps and served, with the Pekin Legation Guard, in China in 1912 and in World War I. He and his first wife, Grechin, had two children by the time he was 20. He had a third child with his second wife, Nona Lorraine. After the First World War, Pennick worked as a horse wrangler and got work as such in various film productions. His rather unforgettably unattractive face caught the attention of filmmakers, particularly Ford, and Pennick began to get work as an actor, as well as occasionally a military technical adviser. Pennick re-enlisted in the navy in 1942, at the age of 46. He served as Chief Petty Officer under Commander John Ford in the Field Photographic Unit and, according to Ford, was decorated with the Silver Star medal for action in which he was wounded at Majaz al Bab, Tunisia during World War II. He continued to appear in films after the war, his career waning simultaneously with Ford's. He died in Manhattan Beach, California, at the age of 68.- Actor
- Soundtrack
A respected stage actor -- he trained at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts -- since the 1920s, birdlike Charles Halton's thinning hair, rimless glasses and officious manner were familiar to generations of moviegoers. Whether playing the neighborhood busybody, a stern government bureaucrat or weaselly attorney, you could count on Halton to try to drive the "immoral influences" out of the neighborhood, foreclose on the orphanage, evict the poor widow and her children from their apartment, or any other number of dastardly deeds, all justified by "I'm sorry but that's my job." His 40-year film career ended with High School Confidential! (1958), after which he retired.- Actor
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Gruff, burly American character actor. Born in 1903 in Benkelman, Nebraska (confirmed by Social Security records; sources stating 1905 or Denver, Colorado are in error.) Bond grew up in Denver, the son of a lumberyard worker. He attended the University of Southern California, where he got work as an extra through a football teammate who would become both his best friend and one of cinema's biggest stars: John Wayne. Director John Ford promoted Bond from extra to supporting player in the film Salute (1929), and became another fast friend. An arrogant man of little tact, yet fun-loving in the extreme, Bond was either loved or hated by all who knew him. His face and personality fit perfectly into almost any type of film, and he appeared in hundreds of pictures in his more than 30-year career, in both bit parts and major supporting roles. In the films of Wayne and Ford, particularly, he was nearly always present. Among his most memorable roles are John L. Sullivan in Gentleman Jim (1942), Det. Tom Polhaus in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and the Rev. Capt. Samuel Johnson Clayton The Searchers (1956). An ardent but anti-intellectual patriot, he was perhaps the most vehement proponent, among the Hollywood community, of blacklisting in the witch hunts of the 1950s, and he served as a most unforgiving president of the ultra-right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. In the mid-'50s he gained his greatest fame as the star of TV's Wagon Train (1957). During its production, Bond traveled to Dallas, Texas, to attend a football game and died there in his hotel room of a massive heart attack.- Actor
- Soundtrack
One Hollywood stalwart whose screen incarnations more than lived up to his name was bald-domed character actor Donald Meek, forever typecast as mousy, timorous or browbeaten Casper Milquetoasts. He stood at 5 ft. 6 in. in his boots and weighed a mere 81 pounds. However, the little Glaswegian's personal history rather belied his gormless image on the silver screen. By the age of fourteen, Donald had joined an acrobatic team ("The Marvells") on the piano wire as a top mounter. He accompanied the troupe on their tour of the U.S. but sustained several compound fractures in a fall and had to quit. After spending six months on crutches, he joined the U.S. 6th Pennsylvania Regiment and saw action during the Spanish-American War in Cuba, was wounded and lost his hair after a bout of yellow fever. This did not deter him from re-enlisting at the onset of World War I. He went on to serve with the Canadian Highlanders as a corporal, but, to his consternation, never got any further than Toronto.
Donald had been infatuated with acting since early childhood. At the age of eight, he first performed publicly in the comic pantomime "Le Voyage en Suisse". Later, he toured Australia, South Africa, India and England in "Little Lord Fauntleroy". During his wartime sojourn in Cuba he had learned to "listen to those Yankees" and imitated their manner of speech, losing his Scottish accent in the process. When he was forced to abandon his career as an acrobat, he devoted more time to acting with various traveling stock companies and in New York. He made the first (of many) appearances on Broadway in 1903. Until the late 1920s, Donald remained quite gainfully employed in droll comical roles. Having flirted with screen acting since 1923, he made the move to the celluloid media by the end of the decade. Filmed at the Warner Brothers Eastern Vitaphone Studio in Brooklyn, he found himself an unlikely star, as amateur sleuth Dr. Amos Crabtree in The Clyde Mystery (1931), the first of eleven detective two-reelers, averaging just over twenty minutes in length. In 1933, Donald and wife Belle relocated to Hollywood.
Moving from studio to studio (his only long-tern tenure was at MGM from 1940 to 1944), Donald Meek quickly emerged as one of the most prolific, sought-after character players in the business. Invariably, he was respectability personified, all prim and proper. The role of eccentric toy maker Mr. Poppins in You Can't Take It with You (1938) was specially written for him. Other memorable performances included the nervy little whiskey salesman Samuel Peacock, losing his samples to Thomas Mitchell in Stagecoach (1939) ("the cutest coach rider in the wagon", according to a New York Times review); shady gambler Amos Budge in My Little Chickadee (1940); Mr. Wiggs thinking himself to sleep in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1934); the eccentric little bee-keeper Bartholomew, helping the crime fighting exploits of Nick Carter, Master Detective (1939); and the intoxicated food taster and mince-meat enthusiast Hippenstahl of State Fair (1945). On odd occasions, Donald managed to step out of character, notably as the courageous Scottish prospector McTavish standing up to the villains of Barbary Coast (1935); scene-stealing, as miserly financier Daniel Drew in The Toast of New York (1937); as a rather loony citizen determined to collect a reward by unmasking Edward G. Robinson in The Whole Town's Talking (1935); or as tough railroad executive McCoy in Jesse James (1939) and The Return of Frank James (1940).
Donald Meek crammed more than 120 screen roles into a mere one and a half decades. His performances were consistently a joy to watch. He was never able to realise his ambition of retiring to raise hybrid roses, dying in November 1946 at the age of 68. Fourteen years later, he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.- Actor
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Famed actor, composer, artist, author and director. His talents extended to the authoring of the novel "Mr. Cartonwine: A Moral Tale" as well as his autobiography. In 1944, he joined ASCAP, and composed "Russian Dances", "Partita", "Ballet Viennois", "The Woodman and the Elves", "Behind the Horizon", "Fugue Fantasia", "In Memorium", "Hallowe'en", "Preludium & Fugue", "Elegie for Oboe, Orch.", "Farewell Symphony (1-act opera)", "Elegie (piano pieces)", "Rondo for Piano" and "Scherzo Grotesque".- Actor
- Writer
By the time that he was 20, Lewis Stone had turned prematurely grey. He enlisted to fight in the Spanish American War and when he returned, he returned to be a writer. This turned to acting and he began to appear in films during the middle teens. His career was again interrupted by war as he served in the cavalry during World War I. After the war, he returned to films and quickly graduated to lead roles. With his distinguished look and grey hair, he was able to play the roles of well mannered romantic men. In 1921, Lewis starred in Don't Neglect Your Wife (1921). In the next year, he starred with Alice Terry, who played the heroine, and Ramon Novarro in The Prisoner of Zenda (1922) and Scaramouche (1923). In 1924, Metro merged into the new MGM where Lewis remained for the rest of his career. He was busy over the next few years and garnered an Academy Award nomination for The Patriot (1928). In 1928, he appeared in the first of a series of pictures with Greta Garbo. In A Woman of Affairs (1928) he played the older doctor, a friend of the family. But two years later in Romance (1930), he played her lover.
Lewis made the transition from silent to sound with The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929), which starred Norma Shearer. Sound did not cause Lewis any problems and he continued to be busy with his roles as the distinguished lead. The Big House (1930) was highly successful for MGM and he appeared in other popular movies such as The Phantom of Paris (1931) with John Gilbert and Red-Headed Woman (1932) with Jean Harlow. He appeared with Garbo in Inspiration (1931), Mata Hari (1931), Grand Hotel (1932) and Queen Christina (1933). In the late 30s he took on a role for which he was long remembered - the role of Judge James Hardy who had a son named Andy. Judge Hardy was the father audiences wanted in the late 30s early 40s. He was kind, intellectual, fair and as patient as he had to be with Andy, played by Mickey Rooney. This series occupied most of his screen time until it ended and he did slow down during the late 40s. In the 50s he continued to appear in a number of pictures including remakes of the two he had made 30 years before with Alice Terry. He suffered a heart attack and died in 1953 after appearing in over 200 films.- Actor
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Nigel was, from the beginning, typecast as bumbling English aristocrats, military types or drawing room society snobs and, within the narrow parameters of his range, he was very, very good at playing these parts. Nigel Bruce was born in Mexico, where his father, Sir William W. Bruce, worked as an engineer. His family was part of English aristocracy, ever since Charles I. bestowed a baronetcy upon them in 1629 (William's older brother Michael held the hereditary title). Nigel was educated in England at Grange, Stevenage and Abingdon. His first job was at a stockbroker's firm. During World War I, he served in the British Army (like his future co-star, Basil Rathbone) where he received a serious leg wound and was for some time confined to a wheelchair.
Following his discharge, he turned to acting in 1919, but it wasn't until ten years later that he achieved a breakthrough in Noël Coward's 'This was a Man' on Broadway. Then followed the performance which was to set the standard for all his later work in Hollywood: the 1931 comedy "Springtime for Henry". On the strength of his performance as Johnny Jelliwell, Fox offered Nigel the opportunity to reprise his role in the 1934 movie. Soon after that, Nigel was cast to star as British detective Bertram Lynch in a minor thriller, Murder in Trinidad (1934). The contemporary New York Times Review (May 16,1934) was skeptical about the film's merit, but found Nigel's performance 'compelling'. After that followed a gallery of endearingly stereotypical 'Britishers': Squire Trelawny in Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Treasure Island (1934), the Prince of Wales in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), Professor Holly in She (1935) and Sir Benjamin Warrenton in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936). All, without exception, were roles in which Nigel felt perfectly at home.
In 1939, he teamed up with Basil Rathbone for the first two Holmes/Watson movies, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), filmed at 20th Century Fox. Both films had an authentic period feel for Victorian England and the chemistry between the two stars was just right. Three years later, Rathbone was contractually obliged to make a further series of twelve Holmes pictures at Universal, again co-starring Nigel as Dr. Watson. Nigel portrayed his lovable self in two Hitchcock classics Rebecca (1940) (as Major Giles Lacy) and Suspicion (1941) (as 'Beaky').
A prominent member of the resident English colony in Hollywood, Nigel Bruce at one time captained the cricket club established by fellow actor and compatriot C. Aubrey Smith in 1932 (other members included P.G. Wodehouse, Boris Karloff, Ronald Colman and David Niven).- Actress
- Soundtrack
Character actress Beulah Bondi was a favorite of directors and audiences and is one of the reasons so many films from the 1930s and 1940s remain so enjoyable, as she was an integral part of many of the ensemble casts (a hallmark of the studio system) of major and/or great films, including The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Our Town (1940) and Penny Serenade (1941). Highly respected as a first-tier character actress, Bondi won two Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations, for The Gorgeous Hussy (1936) and Of Human Hearts (1938), and an Emmy Award in 1976 for her turn in the television program The Waltons (1972).
She was born Beulah Bondy on May 3, 1888, in Chicago, and established herself as a stage actress in the first phase of her career. She made her Broadway debut in Kenneth S. Webb's "One of the Family" at the 49th Street Theatre on December 21, 1925. The show was a modest hit, racking up 238 performances. She next appeared in another hit, Maxwell Anderson's "Saturday's Children," which ran for 326 performances, before appearing in her first flop, Clemence Dane's "Mariners" in 1927. Philip Barry's and Elmer Rice's "Cock Robin" was an extremely modest hit in 1928, reaching the century mark (100 performances), but it was Bondi's performance in Rice's "Street Scene," which opened at the Playhouse Theatre on Jamuary 10, 1929, that made her career. This famous play won Rice the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was a big hit, playing for 601 performances. Most importantly, though, it brought Bondi to the movies at the advanced age of 43. She made her motion picture debut in 1931 in the movie adaptation (Street Scene (1931)), recreating the role she had originated on the Broadway stage. The talkies were still new, and she had the talent and the voice to thrive in Hollywood.
Bondi appeared in four more Broadway plays from 1931 to 1934, only one of which, "The Late Christopher Bean", a comedy by Sidney Howard, was a hit. Her last appearance on Broadway for a generation was in a flop staged by Melvyn Douglas, "Mother Lode" (she made two more appearances on the Great White Way, in "Hilda Crane" (1950) and "On Borrowed Time" in 1953; neither was a success). For the rest of her professional life, her career lay primarily in film and television.
She was typecast as mothers and, later, grandmothers, and played James Stewart's mother four times, most famously as "Ma Bailey" in It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Her greatest role is considered her turn in Leo McCarey's Depression-era melodrama Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), in which she played a mother abandoned by her children.
Beulah Bondi died on January 1, 1981, from complications from an accident, when she broke her ribs after falling over her cat. She was 92 years old.- Actor
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British-born Henry Travers was a veteran of the English stage before emigrating to the U.S. in 1917. He gained more stage experience there on Broadway working with the Theatre Guild, and began his long film career with Reunion in Vienna (1933). Travers' kindly, grandfatherly demeanor became familiar to filmgoers over the next 25 years, especially in films like High Sierra (1940), where he played Joan Leslie's kindly but slyly observant uncle, and the generous Mr. Bogardus in The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), but it's as the somewhat befuddled angel Clarence Oddbody assigned to James Stewart in the classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946) that Travers will forever be known. After a long and successful career, he retired from the screen in 1949, and died in Hollywood in 1965.- Actor
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Born in Los Angeles almost a year after the start of Great Depression. Bob (whose nickname 'Bobs' was given to him by his father, and for legal and professional reasons he adopted professionally) is from a family of 9 siblings; 6 boys and 3 girls. He made his first on-screen appearance as a (literal) babe in arms in Life Begins (1932). Watson received the sobriquet 'cry-baby' for his ability to cry on-cue. Watson is best known as "Pee Wee" from Boys Town (1938). Later in the mid-late 60's Watson left the film industry entirely and entered the Claremont School of Theology. Later he became a Methodist minister in Burbank and La Canada. Watson retired in 1997 and passed away in 1999, succumbing to prostate cancer- Actor
- Soundtrack
Rambunctious British leading man (contrary to popular belief, he was of Scottish ancestry, not Irish) and later character actor primarily in American films, Victor McLaglen was a vital presence in a number of great motion pictures, especially those of director John Ford. McLaglen (pronounced Muh-clog-len, not Mack-loff-len) was the son of the Right Reverend Andrew McLaglen, a Protestant clergyman who was at one time Bishop of Claremont in South Africa. The young McLaglen, eldest of eight brothers, attempted to serve in the Boer War by joining the Life Guards, though his father secured his release. The adventuresome young man traveled to Canada where he did farm labor and then directed his pugnacious nature into professional prizefighting. He toured in circuses, vaudeville shows, and Wild West shows, often as a fighter challenging all comers. His tours took him to the US, Australia (where he joined in the gold rush) and South Africa. In 1909 he was the first fighter to box newly-crowned heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, whom he fought in a six-round exhibition match in Vancouver (as an exhibition fight, it had no decision). When the First World War broke out, McLaglen joined the Irish Fusiliers and soldiered in the Middle East, eventually serving as Provost Marshal (head of Military Police) for the city of Baghdad. After the war he attempted to resume a boxing career, but was given a substantial acting role in The Call of the Road (1920) and was well received. He became a popular leading man in British silent films, and within a few years was offered the lead in an American film, The Beloved Brute (1924). He quickly became a most popular star of dramas as well as action films, playing tough or suave with equal ease. With the coming of sound, his ability to be persuasively debonair diminished by reason of his native speech patterns, but his popularity increased, particularly when cast by Ford as the tragic Gypo Nolan in The Informer (1935), for which McLaglen won the Best Actor Oscar. He continued to play heroes, villains and simple-minded thugs into the 1940s, when Ford gave his career a new impetus with a number of lovably roguish Irish parts in such films as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Quiet Man (1952). The latter film won McLaglen another Oscar nomination, the first time a Best Actor winner had been nominated subsequently in the Supporting category. McLaglen formed a semi-militaristic riding and polo club, the Light Horse Brigade, and a similarly arrayed precision motorcycle team, the Victor McLaglen Motorcycle Corps, both of which led to conclusions that he had fascist sympathies and was forming his own private army. McLaglen denied espousing the far right-wing sentiments that were often attributed to him. He continued to act in films into his 70s and died, from congestive heart failure, not long after appearing in a film directed by his son, Andrew V. McLaglen.- Director
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Abner Biberman was born on 1 April 1909 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. He was a director and actor, known for His Girl Friday (1940), The Golden Mistress (1954) and Winchester '73 (1950). He was married to Sibil Kamban (editor), Helen Churchill Dalby and Tolbie Snyderman. He died on 20 June 1977 in San Diego, California, USA.- Actor
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Though a native of South Africa, Cecil Kellaway spent many years as an actor, author and director in Australian live theatre until he tried his luck in Hollywood in the 1930s. Finding he could get only gangster bit parts, he got discouraged and returned to Australia. Then William Wyler called and offered him a part in Wuthering Heights (1939). From then on Kellaway was always in demand when the part called for a twinkling, silver-haired leprechaun.- Actor
- Soundtrack
The name may have been forgotten, especially today (seven decades later), but the portly, apoplectic, exasperated figure on the 1930s screen wasn't. While his film career, save a couple of silents, lasted a paltry seven years (1932-1939), character actor Walter Connolly certainly ran the distance. While some film historians complain that a number of his performances were annoying or overbaked, he was for the most part applauded for his zesty contributions to a number of comedy classics. Frank Capra's Lady for a Day (1933), Broadway Bill (1934) and It Happened One Night (1934), not to mention the Carole Lombard/Fredric March screwball farce Nothing Sacred (1937) as news reporter March's hot-headed editor boss are sure-fire examples.
The Cincinnati, Ohio native was born on April 8, 1887 and schooled there. The son of the head of the Western Union relay office, he attended St. Xavier College and the University of Dublin in Ireland before making his New York debut in 1910 in an outdoor presentation of "As You Like It". For the next year or so he was a member of E.H. Sothern's touring company and played supporting roles in a number of Shakespearean shows on the road. After a few silent pictures left him unimpressed with film-making, he turned to the Broadway stage in the 1920s and scored quite well. Somewhat short and tubby, it was not difficult for the jowly, mustachioed actor to seize laughs and he found his share in such outings as "The Talking Parrot" (1923), "Applesauce" (1925), "The Springboard" (1927), "The Happy Husband" (1928), "Stepping Out" (1929), "Your Uncle Dudley" (1930), "Anatol" (1931), "Six Characters in Search of an Author" (1931), "The Good Fairy" (1932) and "The Late Christopher Bean" (1932).
With his talents as a stage farceur firmly established, it was time to make a second attempt at a film career and Hollywood (specifically, Columbia) wisely opened their doors to him. Interestingly, his debut in a full-length talking picture came at age 45 in the form of a drama, Washington Merry-Go-Round (1932), where he was third-billed as a rather benign senator. For the next seven years Connolly, often playing older than he really was, could be found everywhere giving good fluster to the greatest and glossiest of stars -- Janet Gaynor, Carole Lombard, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, Paul Muni, Spencer Tracy, and Ginger Rogers, among hordes of others.
Every now and then he was asked to hold up a film, as with his leading roles in the drama Whom the Gods Destroy (1934), the Hecht/MacArthur comedy/drama Soak the Rich (1936), and the whodunnits Father Brown, Detective (1934) (as the title priest/gumshoe) and The League of Frightened Men (1937) (as supersleuth Nero Wolfe). Connolly's archetypal fuming was on full display in the comedies She Couldn't Take It (1935) with George Raft and Joan Bennett and Fifth Avenue Girl (1939) with Ginger Rogers. His last role was as the great composer himself in the highly fictional The Great Victor Herbert (1939), although it wasn't the leading role.
Connolly married actress Nedda Harrigan in 1920. The two appeared together in the Broadway comedies "Treat 'Em Rough" (1926) and "Merry Andrew" (1929). They had one daughter, actress Ann Connolly (1924-2006), who also appeared on stage and played the grownup Wendy in the 'Mary Martin' /Cyril Ritchard Broadway production of "Peter Pan" in 1954. Ironically, Connolly, whose obesity was probably a contributing factor to his fatal stroke suffered on May 28, 1940, received his final divorce decree on the day he died. He was only 53.- Actor
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On stage since age 15, Roscoe Karns parlayed his machine-gun delivery and street-wise demeanor (although many thought of him as a New Yorker, he was actually from San Bernardino, California) into character roles in dozens of films from the 1920s to the 1960s. His peak period, though, was in the 1930s, where he often played a wisecracking cab driver or a brash newspaper reporter (as in His Girl Friday (1940), usually the friend of the hero who helps him solve the murder/catch the bad guys/find the missing heiress, etc.- Actor
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Beginning his show business career at age 13 as an entertainer on Mississippi riverboats, Guy Kibbee graduated to the legitimate stage and spent many years in the theater. In the 1930s he was signed by Warner Brothers, and became part of what was known as "the Warner Brothers Stock Company", a cadre of seasoned character actors and actresses who enlivened many a Warners musical or gangster film. Kibbee specialized in playing jovial, but not particularly bright, businessmen and government officials. He was memorable as the stuffy lawyer with a secret weakness for showgirls in Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933).- Actor
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American character actor, mainly in Westerns in comic or rustic roles. Born Norton Earl Worden in Rolfe, Iowa, during his parents' visit to a relative's home there, he was raised on a cattle ranch near Glendive, Montana. Educated at Stanford and the University of Nevada as an engineer, he trained as an Army pilot, but washed out of flight school. Worden toured the country in rodeos as a saddle bronc rider and broke his neck in a horse fall in his 20s, but didn't know it until his 40s. Chosen along with Tex Ritter from a rodeo at Madison Square Garden in New York to appear in the Broadway play "Green Grow the Lilacs", the play from which the musical "Oklahoma" was later derived, he afterward drove a cab in New York, then worked on dude ranches as a wrangler and as a guide on the Bright Angel trail of the Grand Canyon. Recommended by Billie Burke to several movie producers, Worden became friends with John Wayne, Howard Hawks, and later John Ford, all of whom provided him with much work. He was married to Louise Eaton, who predeceased him. Following his wife's death, he shared his house with Jim Beaver for several years, thus generously helping the young actor gain a foothold in Hollywood. He died in his sleep at 91, survived by his adopted daughter Dawn Henry.- Actor
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Harry Carey, Jr., had been reliable character actor for decades, mostly in Westerns, before he retired. He is the son of the actor Harry Carey and the actress Olive Carey. He was born on his parents' 1000-acre ranch near Saugus, in the northwestern part of Los Angeles County, which is now next door to Santa Clarita, a large town that certainly did not exist in 1947 or for decades longer. Thus, the young Harry Carey, Jr., grew up among cattle and horses at the ranch. Because of a large group of Navajo Indians who worked on his parents' ranch, he learned to speak the Navajo language at the same time that he was learning to speak English.
During World War II, Carey enlisted in the U.S. Navy, and he served in the Pacific Theater first as a Navy medical corpsman. However, he was transferred back to the United States (against his wishes) to serve under his father's good friend, the director John Ford, in making movies for the Navy (training films)and the O.S.S. (propaganda films).
After World War II ended, Carey tried to make a career in singing, but he was not successful at this. Hence, he moved into acting, and after a couple of small acting parts, he was given a chance to work in a motion picture with his father, the John Wayne film Red River (1948). (However, the father and the son did not have any scenes with one another). After the death of Harry Carey, Sr., in 1946, Mr. Ford gave the younger Carey a leading role in the movie that Ford dedicated to the memory of Harry Carey, Sr., in 1948, 3 Godfathers (1948).
As a full-fledged member of the noted John Ford Stock Company, Carey, Jr., appeared in many of Mr. Ford's epic Westerns during the following two decades. Carey also starred in a series-within-a-series on TV, The Adventures of Spin and Marty (1955), which was shown as a part of The Mickey Mouse Club (1955). Very boyish looks characterized Carey's early years, but he matured into a strong and familiar character actor over the following four decades, and he acted in scores of films and TV programs in his long career. Carey, Jr., is married to Marilyn Fix Carey, the daughter of the actor Paul Fix.- Actress
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A disarming character lady quite capable of scene-stealing, Mildred Natwick was a well-rounded talent with distinctively dowdy features and idiosyncratic tendencies who, over a six-decade period, assembled together a number of unforgettable matrons on stage and (eventually) film and TV. Whimsical, feisty, loony, stern, impish, shrewish, quizzical, scheming -- she greatly enhanced both comedies and dramas and, thankfully, her off-centered greatness was captured perfectly on occasion by such film directors as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Neil Simon.
A short, plumpish, oval-eyed figure with a unique flowery, honey-glazed voice, Natwick was born on June 19, 1905 (some sources list 1908) to Joseph (a businessman) and and Mildred Marion Dawes Natwick. The Baltimore native graduated from both the Bryn Mawr School (in Baltimore) and also from Bennett College in Dutchess County, N.Y., where she majored in drama. Breaking into the professional field touring on stage, Miss Natwick joined the Vagabonds in the late 1920s, a non-professional group from Baltimore. She later became part of the renowned University Players at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, whose rising performers at the time included Henry Fonda, Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart.
Natwick made her Broadway bow in the 1932 melodrama "Carry Nation," directed by Blanche Yurka with Esther Dale in the title role. In the cast was Joshua Logan, whom she befriended and later collaborated with when he turned director. She then continued her momentum on 1930s Broadway with "Amourette" (1933), "Spring in Autumn" (1933), "The Wind and the Rain" (1934), "The Distaff Side" (1934) "End of Summer" (1936), "Love from a Stranger" (1936), "The Star-Wagon" (1937), "Missouri Legend" (1938), "Stars in Your Eyes" (1939) (directed by Logan), and "Christmas Eve" (1939).
Natwick did not come to films until middle age (35) with the John Ford classic The Long Voyage Home (1940), in which she played a Cockney floozie. Despite her fine work in this minor part, she did not make another film until her landlady role five years later in The Enchanted Cottage (1945) supporting Dorothy McGuire and Robert Young. Not a great beauty by Hollywood standards, Natwick learned quickly in Hollywood that if she were to succeed, it would be as a character performer. Ford himself picked up on her versatility and used her repeatedly in several of his post-war classics -- 3 Godfathers (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and The Quiet Man (1952).
Never abandoning the theater for long, Natwick excelled as Miss Garnett in George Bernard Shaw's "Candida" and as the buoyant medium in Noël Coward's "Blithe Spirit". As for the big screen, she was sporadically seen in such films as Yolanda and the Thief (1945), The Late George Apley (1947), A Woman's Vengeance (1948), The Kissing Bandit (1948), Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) and Against All Flags (1952). Making use of even the tiniest of roles, none of them did much to improve her stature in Hollywood. With her delicious turn, however, in Hitchcock's eccentric black comedy The Trouble with Harry (1955), which starred Shirley MacLaine (in her film debut), John Forsythe, Kris Kringle's Edmund Gwenn, little Jerry Mathers (of "Leave It to Beaver"), and another famous Mildred, Mildred Dunnock, Natwick enjoyed one of her best roles ever on film. This was followed by her scheming and furtive sorceress in the Danny Kaye vehicle The Court Jester (1955) in which she, Kaye and Glynis Johns participate in the memorable tongue-twisting "The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle..." comedy routine. This, in turn, led to a couple of more, albeit lesser, films, including Teenage Rebel (1956) and Tammy and the Bachelor (1957).
Preferring the theatre to movies, MIldred received her first Tony nomination for her sharp, astute work in Jean Anouilh's "Waltz of the Toredors" in 1957 and recreated her character in a TV special. She seemed to move effortlessly from the classics ("Medea," "Coriolanus") to chic comedy ("Ladies in Retirement," "The Importance of Being Earnest"). Receiving great applause as the beleaguered, overly-winded mother in Neil Simon's "Barefoot in the Park" on Broadway in 1963, she transferred the role to film four years later. The cinematic Barefoot in the Park (1967) earned Mildred a well-deserved Oscar nomination for "best supporting actress". She switched things up again with Harold Pinter's theatrical "Landscape," and then again in 1971 when she made her debut in a singing role in the John Kander-Fred Ebb musical, "70, Girls, 70" (1971) in which she earned a second Tony nomination. Her last Broadway show came as a replacement in "Bedroom Farce" in 1979.
With only the slightest of gesture, look or tone of voice, Mildred's characters could speak volumes and she became an essential character player during the 1970s as an offbeat friend, relative or elderly on TV and film. She was awarded the Emmy for her playing of one of The Snoop Sisters (1972)_ alongside the equally delightful Helen Hayes in the short-lived TV series. Both played impish Jessica Fletcher-type mystery writers who solve real crimes on the sly. She also played Rock Hudson's quirky mother in McMillan & Wife (1971) and a notable dying grandmother in a guest appearance of the critically-lauded TV series drama Family (1976). Her final film came with a small regal role as Madame de Rosemonde in Dangerous Liaisons (1988) with Glenn Close, John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer.
Never married, Mildred was called "Milly" by close friends and family and was the first cousin of Myron 'Grim' Natwick, the creator of Betty Boop for the Max Fleischer cartoon studio and prime animator for Disney's Snow White character. She died of cancer at age 89 in New York City.- Actor
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Though not as well known as his nearly decade-older brother Barry Fitzgerald, Shields was a talented actor with well over twice the film roles in his career. Fitzgerald was already a well established player at the renowned Dublin Abbey Theater when Shields, also bitten by the acting bug, joined in 1914. He performed but was also out front directing plays. Already he had dabbled in the new medium of Irish film (1910) with two notable examples (1918). There was more to the seemingly mild-mannered Shields than met the eye. His family was Protestant Nationalist and he himself fought in the Easter Uprising of 1916. And he was in fact captured and imprisoned in a camp in North Wales. Late in 1918 he came to the United States and first helped bring Irish comedy and drama to Broadway. He would continue to appear on Broadway for some 24 plays until 1941, especially reviving two Abbey Theater favorites from the hand of Sean O'Casey, "The Plough and the Stars" and "Juno and the Paycock", the latter being produced and staged by him in 1940. Still not settled, Shields was back in Dublin through most of the 1920s but returned to Broadway almost full time in 1932 moving through the repertory of Irish plays. When John Ford finally convinced his brother - and some other Abbey players - to come to Hollywood to do the 1936 film version of "The Plough and the Stars", Broadway veteran Shields was asked to take the pivotal part of Padraic (Patrick) Pearse, perhaps the most important leader of the Easter Rising.
By early 1939 he was finished with his concentration on Broadway and found Ford eager to offer him a part in his Revolutionary period adventure Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) as the matter-of-fact pioneer minister with a good shooting eye Rev. Rosenkrantz. Ministers, reverends, priests, and other assorted clerics would be a Shields staple throughout his career - and he always managed to breath an individual humanity into each and every one. From then on through the 1940s he was in demand as character actor - and not just Irish roles as Fitzgerald with his gravelly, prominent brogue, found himself. Along with the aforementioned men of the cloth, Shields was provided a steady offering of the gamut of Hollywood's character storehouse-Irish and otherwise. And among them were parts for some of Ford's most memorable films: How Green Was My Valley (1941) and especially The Quiet Man (1952). Here again, he was a cleric but a uniquely sympathetic one - the lone Protestant Reverend Dr. Playfair - whom John Wayne affectionately calls "Padre" in the vastly Catholic village of the film. He alone knows the former identity of Wayne and convinces the latter of his final struggle to go on with his new life in Ireland. Enough said - with a wonderful cast of Ford stalwarts and native Irish (including Fizgerald), this was Ford's long awaited crowning achievement.
Though Shields was taking on the occasional film through the 1950s, most of his time was going to television. Along with TV playhouse roles he became a most familiar face of episodic TV with a variety of roles (even the old Mickey Mouse Club Hardy Boy Adventures), especially in the ever-popular TV Western genera. Aside from his numerous appearances in plays throughout his career, all told Arthur Shields screen appearances approached nearly 100 memorable acting endeavors.- Actor
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Paul Fix, the well-known movie and TV character actor who played "Marshal Micah Torrance" on the TV series The Rifleman (1958), was born Peter Paul Fix on March 13, 1901 in Dobbs Ferry, New York to brew-master Wilhelm Fix and his wife, the former Louise C. Walz. His mother and father were German immigrants who had left their Black Forest home and arrived in New York City in the 1870s. (The name "Fix" is of Latin/Germanic origin, and is derived from St. Vitus and means "animated" or "vital").
Besides Peter Paul, the Fix family consisted of two girls and three boys, the youngest of whom was six years older than the future actor. Peter Paul's childhood was a happy one. He and his family lived on the 200-acre property on which the Manilla Anchor Brewery, where his father was brew-master, was situated. Such was the importance of the senior Fix to the brewery that when he died at the age of 62 on the eve of America's entry into the First World War (two years after his 54-year old wife had died), the brewery closed.
The orphaned Peter Paul, who kept to himself a lot and had a vivid imagination, was sent to live with his married sisters, first one who lived nearby in Yonkers, and then to another in Zanesville, Ohio. The just-turned-17-year-old Peter Paul Fix joined the U.S. Navy on March 12, 1918, and spent his state-side service time during World War I in Newport, Rhode Island and Charleston, South Carolina. He first tread the boards as an actor while a sailor stationed in Newport, when the baby-faced salt (who looked much younger than his age) was one of six gobs chosen to play female roles in the Navy Relief Show "HMS Pinafore". The Navy staging of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta was a big hit and chalked up a run of several weeks in Providence and Boston.
Fix was assigned as an able-bodied seaman to the troopship U.S.S. Mount Vernon, which was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of France but did not sink as it was run aground. The rest of Fix's naval career was less exciting, and he was demobilized on September 5, 1919. After his discharge, Fix went back to his girlfriend Frances (Taddy) Harvey, whom he had left behind in Zanesville. He and Taddy were married in 1922 and they moved to California as Fix had always wanted to live in a warm climate.
Fix and his bride settled in Hollywood, not so much because he had set ideas about becoming an actor but because he didn't know what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He liked writing and acting in local plays, and soon became friends with the fellow tyro actor Clark Gable, who was his own age. Fix and Gable were discovered by the stage actress Pauline Frederick, who hired them to be members of her touring troupe that traveled by train the length of the West Coast putting on plays. In all, Fix - who had informally renamed himself Paul Peter - appeared in 20 plays with Gable.
Paul Fix had one of his earliest acting roles on celluloid in the mid-1920s, appearing in a silent Western starring William S. Hart. The Western genre eventually would become the one he was most identified with. He played uncredited bit parts and small roles in silents before getting his first credited role in an early talkie (which was part-silent and part-talking), The First Kiss (1928), which starred future Hollywood superstar Gary Cooper and the dame that drove King Kong ape, Fay Wray. In all, Fix appeared in 300-400 films. The Western programmers of the silent and early talkie days could be shot in less than a week.
In 1925, Taddy gave birth to their daughter Marilyn Carey, who eventually would marry Harry Carey Jr., the son of one of the first great Western superstars. They would have three more children and become part of the extended family gathered around the director John Ford. In his career, Paul Fix would appear with another Western legend, John Wayne, in 26 films, starting in 1931 with Three Girls Lost (1931). Urged on by Loretta Young, Fix became an acting coach for the young actor, and Wayne later paid him back when he became a star by having Fix appear in his movies. (The Duke also was a part of the close-knit group that collected around John Ford). With the Duke's patronage, the kinds of roles that Fix played changed. He had been typed as villains in the 1930s but, in the 40s, he began assaying a better class of character.
Paul Fix was also a screenwriter, and is credited as the writer on three films: Tall in the Saddle (1944), Ring of Fear (1954) and The Notorious Mr. Monks (1958). His favorites parts included playing the stricken passenger in the John Wayne picture The High and the Mighty (1954), Elizabeth Taylor's father in George Stevens' classic Giant (1956), the grandfather of the eponymous The Bad Seed (1956) and the judge in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). His last screen appearance was in the Brooke Shields movie Wanda Nevada (1979), but he is most famous for appearing in the recurring role of "Marshal Micah Torrance" in the popular Western TV series The Rifleman (1958). As of 1981, the 80-year old Fix was still getting mail from all over the world from "Rifleman" fans.
Paul Fix died October 14, 1983 of kidney failure. He was survived by his daughter Marilyn Carey and son-in-law Harry "Dobe" Carey, three grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.- Actor
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Born in Oklahoma, Ben Johnson was a ranch hand and rodeo performer when, in 1940, Howard Hughes hired him to take a load of horses to California. He decided to stick around (the pay was good), and for some years was a stunt man, horse wrangler, and double for such stars as John Wayne, Gary Cooper and James Stewart. His break came when John Ford noticed him and gave him a part in an upcoming film, and eventually a star part in Wagon Master (1950). He left Hollywood in 1953 to return to rodeo, where he won a world roping championship, but at the end of the year he had barely cleared expenses. The movies paid better, and were less risky, so he returned to the west coast and a career that saw him in over 300 movies.- Actor
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William Claude Rains, born in the Clapham area of London, was the son of the British stage actor Frederick Rains. The younger Rains followed, making his stage debut at the age of eleven in "Nell of Old Drury." Growing up in the world of theater, he saw not only acting up close but the down-to-earth business end as well, progressing from a page boy to a stage manager during his well-rounded learning experience. Rains decided to come to America in 1913 and the New York theater, but with the outbreak of World War I the next year, he returned to serve with a Scottish regiment in Europe. He remained in England, honing his acting talents, bolstered with instruction patronized by the founder of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Herbert Beerbohm Tree. It was not long before his talent garnered him acknowledgment as one of the leading stage actors on the London scene. His one and only silent film venture was British with a small part for him, the forgettable -- Build Thy House (1920).
In the meantime, Rains was in demand as acting teacher as well, and he taught at the Royal Academy. Young and eager Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud were perhaps his best known students. Rains did return to New York in 1927 to begin what would be nearly 20 Broadway roles. While working for the Theater Guild, he was offered a screen test with Universal Pictures in 1932. Rains had a unique and solid British voice-deep, slightly rasping -- but richly dynamic. And as a man of small stature, the combination was immediately intriguing. Universal was embarking on its new-found role as horror film factory, and they were looking for someone unique for their next outing, The Invisible Man (1933). Rains was the very man. He took the role by the ears, churning up a rasping malice and volume in his voice to achieve a bone chilling persona of the disembodied mad doctor. He could also throw out a high-pitched maniac laugh that would make you leave the lights on before going to bed. True to Universal's formula mentality, it cast him in similar roles through 1934 with some respite in more diverse film roles -- and further relieved by Broadway roles (1933, 1934) for the remainder of his contract. By 1936, he was at Warner Bros. with its ambitious laundry list of literary epics in full swing. His acting was superb, and his eyes could say as much as his voice. And his mouth could take on both a forbidding scowl and the warmest of smiles in an instant. His malicious, gouty Don Luis in Anthony Adverse (1936) was inspired. After a shear lucky opportunity to dispatch his young wife's lover, Louis Hayward, in a duel, he triumphs over her in a scene with derisive, bulging eyes and that high pitched laugh -- with appropriate shadow and light backdrop -- that is unforgettable.
He was kept very busy through the remainder of the 1930s with a mix of benign and devious historical, literary, and contemporary characters always adapting a different nuance -- from murmur to growl -- of that voice to become the person. He culminated the decade with his complex, ethics-tortured Senator "Joe" Paine in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). That year he became an American citizen. Into the 1940s, Rains had risen to perhaps unique stature: a supporting actor who had achieved A-list stardom -- almost in a category by himself. His some 40 films during that period ranged from subtle comedy to psychological drama with a bit of horror revisited; many would be golden era classics. He was the firm but thoroughly sympathetic Dr. Jaquith in Now, Voyager (1942) and the smoothly sardonic but engaging Capt. Louis Renault -- perhaps his best known role -- in Casablanca (1942). He was the surreptitiously nervous and malignant Alexander Sebastian in Notorious (1946) and the egotistical and domineering conductor Alexander Hollenius in Deception (1946). He was the disfigured Phantom of the Opera (1943) as well. He played opposite the challenging Bette Davis in three movies through the decade and came out her equal in acting virtuosity. He was nominated four times for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar -- but incredibly never won. With the 1950s the few movies left to an older Rains were countered by venturing into new acting territory -- television. His haunted, suicidal writer Paul DeLambre in the mountaineering adventure The White Tower (1950), though a modest part, was perhaps the most vigorously memorable film role of his last years. He made a triumphant Broadway return in 1951's "Darkness at Noon."
Rains embraced the innovative TV playhouse circuit with nearly 20 roles. As a favored 'Alfred Hitchcock' alumnus, he starred in five Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) suspense dramas into the 1960s. And he did not shy away from episodic TV either with some memorable roles that still reflected the power of Claude Rains as consummate actor -- for many, first among peers with that hallowed title.- Actor
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This eminently recognizable, bulbous, beetle-browed character actor left Culver Military Academy and began acting in repertory companies before becoming a Hollywood extra and stunt man. Eugene's father had also been a thespian at one time but eventually ended his career as an insurance salesman. In his younger days, Eugene was apparently of the more slender build since he once managed to hold down a job as a jockey! He spent in total six years with touring companies, briefly worked as a streetcar conductor in Portland and finally found his way to motion pictures. By his own account, he began in films on the East Coast around 1910 or 1911, gravitating to Hollywood by 1913 and appeared in some 100 productions each year for the first four years of his tenure. The majority of this prodigious output was undoubtedly made up of one-reel shorts. Eugene initially played leads in silent feature films and was described as relatively athletic by the time he appeared in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). His career was put on hold while he served with the Flying Corps during the First World War, but just a couple of years after his return to films he started to turn into a compulsive gourmand. His vast appetite for food increased his girth manifold and he steadfastly refused to go on a diet. Consequently, he found himself demoted to supporting roles but still managed to make a decent living out of his unusual appearance and his trademark gravelly bullfrog voice. Sometime in the early 1920s, he began to dabble in Texas oil and first amassed and then lost a fortune within the space of a year.
Eugene remained gainfully employed all through the '20s, '30s, and '40s. He played Aramis to Douglas Fairbankss's D'Artagnan in The Three Musketeers (1921) and appeared as a Hal Roach contract player in the classic Laurel & Hardy short The Battle of the Century (1927). In talkies, he was the truculent police sergeant Heath in five installments of the Philo Vance series at Paramount, starring William Powell. When not used as pinstripe-suited authority figures or Runyonesque characters (Nicely-Nicely Johnson in The Big Street (1942)), he was always diverting in screwball comedies, notably in My Man Godfrey (1936) and Topper (1937). A truly versatile, his gallery of characters ranged from garrulous and witty and ingratiating, to brooding loners, from avuncular to cantankerous. Under contract at Warners, he proved to be the very best ever incarnation of Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and followed this with another priestly effort as Father Felipe in The Mark of Zorro (1940).
Near the end of World War II, Eugene and a business partner acquired a 3500-acre estate and ranch along the Imnaha River in remote Wallowa County, Oregon, complete with a fallout shelter. Allegedly, he lived the life of a semi-recluse for the next four years, anticipating a nuclear attack by stockpiling all manner of essential items in order to become fully self-sufficient. The aforementioned business partner later denied this as a rumor, implying that the ranch was merely a place where Eugene entertained his actor friends (some came to hunt and fish). Whether true or not, Eugene was ultimately forced to sell the property in 1949 due to ill-health (throat cancer, as it turned out). He made his final return to the screen at Poverty Row studio Monogram in Suspense (1946), rounding out his career with a minor film noir set in the skating rink, starring the 'Ice Maiden' Belita. Eugene died eight years later in Los Angeles at the age of 65.- Actor
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Thomas Mitchell was one of the great American character actors, whose credits read like a list of the greatest American films of the 20th century: Lost Horizon (1937); Stagecoach (1939); The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939); Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); Gone with the Wind (1939); It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and High Noon (1952). His portrayals are so diverse and convincing that most people don't even realize that one actor could have played them all. He won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1940 for his role as the drunken Doc Boone in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939).- Henry Byron Warner was the definitive cinematic Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927). He was born into a prominent theatrical family on October 26, 1875 in London. His father was Charles Warner, and his grandfather was James Warner, both prominent English actors. He replaced J.B. Warner as Jesus in The King of Kings (1927) when J.B. died of tuberculosis at age 29. (J.B. was not Henry's brother. J.B. had taken the professional last name "Warner" because Henry's family took him in.)
Henry Warner's family wanted him to become a doctor, and he graduated from London University but eventually gave up his medical studies. The theater was in his blood, and he studied acting in Paris and Italy before joining his father's stock company, making his debut in the English production of "Drink." It was from his father that he honed his craft.
Warner made it to the United States in the early 1900s, after touring the British Empire. Billed as Harry Warner, he made his Broadway debut in the US colonial drama "Audrey" at Hoyt's Theatre on November 24, 1902, starring James O'Neill, the father of playwright Eugene O'Neill. He was billed as H.B. Warner in his next appearance on Broadway, in the 1906 comedy "Nurse Marjorie." He appeared in 13 more Broadway productions in his career, from the twin-bill of "Susan in Search of a Husband" & "A Tenement Tragedy" (also 1906) to "Silence" in 1925.
He moved into motion pictures, making his debut in the Mutual short Harp of Tara (1914). Also in 1914, he appeared in a film written by Cecil B. DeMille for Famous Players Lasky, The Ghost Breaker (1914), in which he had played on Broadway the year before. Warner became a leading man and a star in silent pictures, reaching the zenith of his career playing Jesus in DeMille's The King of Kings (1927). His excellent performance was actually enhanced by the silent screen, allowing the audience to imagine how Jesus would sound. Warner could be extremely moving in silent pictures, notably in the melodrama Sorrell and Son (1927) as a war veteran father who sacrifices all for his son.
When talkies arrived, he became a busy supporting player. A favorite of Frank Capra, appeared in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). Cast again by Capra, he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in Lost Horizon (1937). He also appeared in You Can't Take It with You (1938), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Other major talkies included The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) and Topper Returns (1941). Other than Jesus, the role he is best remembered role for today is in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), in which he played Mr. Gower, the druggist who is saved from committing a lethal medication error by the young George Bailey (the James Stewart character as a child). H.B. Warner appeared in Sunset Boulevard (1950) as himself. His last credited role was as Amminadab in DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956), a remake of the earlier silent The Ten Commandments (1923). He last role was an uncredited bit part in Darby's Rangers (1958).
Henry Warner died on December 21, 1958 in Woodland Hills, California. He was 82 years old. - Actor
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Born in New York City to a Judge of Special Sessions who was also president of a sewing machine company. Grew up on City Island, New York. Attended Hamilton Military Academy and turned down an appointment to West Point to attend New York Law School, where his law school classmates included future New York City mayor James J. Walker. After a boating accident which led to pneumonia, Carey wrote a play while recuperating and toured the country in it for three years, earning a great deal of money, all of which evaporated after his next play was a failure. In 1911, his friend Henry B. Walthall introduced him to director D.W. Griffith, for whom Carey was to make many films. Carey married twice, the second time to actress Olive Fuller Golden (aka Olive Carey, who introduced him to future director John Ford. Carey influenced Universal Studios head Carl Laemmle to use Ford as a director, and a partnership was born that lasted until a rift in the friendship in 1921. During this time, Carey grew into one of the most popular Western stars of the early motion picture, occasionally writing and directing films as well. In the '30s he moved slowly into character roles and was nominated for an Oscar for one of them, the President of the Senate in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). He worked once more with Ford, in The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), and appeared once with his son, Harry Carey Jr., in Howard Hawks's Red River (1948). He died after a protracted bout with emphysema and cancer. Ford dedicated his remake of 3 Godfathers (1948) "To Harry Carey--Bright Star Of The Early Western Sky."- Actress
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Feisty, ebullient character comedienne who, for three decades, enlivened Hollywood films with her drollery and quick-fire repartee. The daughter of a newspaper editor and music critic, Ruth made her stage debut in the chorus of the touring production 'The Quaker Girl' in 1913. Four years later, she had made it to Broadway, playing a telephone operator in 'The Scrap of Paper' at the Criterion Theatre. She then appeared for ten months in the musical farce 'Going Up' (1917-18), which starred Frank Craven and a young Ed Begley. Some of her biggest comic successes were in plays by George M. Cohan, notably 'A Prince There Was' (1918-19) and 'The Meanest Man in the World' (1920-21).
Ruth appeared on screen, first in a small part in Rubber Heels (1927). Not until the Wall Street crash of 1929 was she tempted to pursue a career in Hollywood, rather than on Broadway. For most of her time in the movies, she played acidulous secretaries, wisecracking friends of the heroine, or shrewish wives. She gave excellent support as Mary Brian's domineering mother in Hard to Handle (1933) and was excellent as Edward G. Robinson's wife in the Runyonesque comedy A Slight Case of Murder (1938). There were many other good roles as comedy relief from Hands Across the Table (1935), with Carole Lombard to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936),with Gary Cooper); and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),with James Stewart.. She was versatile enough to handle dramatic roles, playing a worldly nun in The Bells of St. Mary's (1945) and one of the asylum inmates of The Snake Pit (1948).
Except for a handful of TV guest appearances, Ruth essentially retired after her last film, The Way to the Gold (1957), and lived for the remainder of her life at the Wellington Hotel in Manhattan. She was for many years married to Basil de Guichard, an airline executive.- Actor
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You would think stage and film veteran Grant Mitchell was born to play stern authoritarians; his father after all was General John Grant Mitchell. But Mitchell would actually be better known for his portrayals of harangued husbands, bemused dads and bilious executives in 30s and 40s films. Born in Columbus, Ohio and a Yale post graduate at Harvard Law, Mitchell gave up his law practice to become an actor and made his stage debut at age 27. He appeared in many leads on Broadway in such plays as "It Pays to Advertise," "The Champion," "The Whole Town's Talking" and "The Baby Cyclone," the last of which was specially written for him by George M. Cohan (see "Other Works"). Mitchell's screen career officially got off the ground with the advent of sound, though he did show up in a couple of silents. The beefy, balding actor appeared primarily in "B" films, and actually had a rare lead in the totally forgotten Father Is a Prince (1940). From time to time, however, he enjoyed being a part of "A" quality classic films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941), Laura (1944) and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). Unmarried, he died at age 82 in 1957.- Actor
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Mean, miserly and miserable-looking, they didn't come packaged with a more annoying and irksome bow than Charles Lane. Glimpsing even a bent smile from this unending sourpuss was extremely rare, unless one perhaps caught him in a moment of insidious glee after carrying out one of his many nefarious schemes. Certainly not a man's man on film or TV by any stretch, Lane was a character's character. An omnipresent face in hundreds of movies and TV sitcoms, the scrawny, scowling, beady-eyed, beak-nosed killjoy who usually could be found peering disdainfully over a pair of specs, brought out many a comic moment simply by dampening the spirit of his nemesis. Whether a Grinch-like rent collector, IRS agent, judge, doctor, salesman, reporter, inspector or neighbor from hell, Lane made a comfortable acting niche for himself making life wretched for someone somewhere.
He was born Charles Gerstle Levison on January 26, 1905 in San Francisco and was actually one of the last survivors of that city's famous 1906 earthquake. He started out his working-class existence selling insurance but that soon changed. After dabbling here and there in various theatre shows, he was prodded by a friend, director Irving Pichel, to consider acting as a profession. In 1928 he joined the Pasadena Playhouse company, which, at the time, had built up a solid reputation for training stage actors for the cinema. While there he performed in scores of classical and contemporary plays. He made his film debut anonymously as a hotel clerk in Smart Money (1931) starring Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney and was one of the first to join the Screen Actor's Guild. He typically performed many of his early atmospheric roles without screen credit and at a cost of $35 per day, but he always managed to seize the moment with whatever brief bit he happened to be in. People always remembered that face and raspy drone of a voice. He appeared in so many pictures (in 1933 alone he made 23 films!), that he would occasionally go out and treat himself to a movie only to find himself on screen, forgetting completely that he had done a role in the film. By 1947 the popular character actor was making $750 a week.
Among his scores of cookie-cutter crank roles, Lane was in top form as the stage manager in Twentieth Century (1934); the Internal Revenue Service agent in You Can't Take It with You (1938); the newsman in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); the rent collector in It's a Wonderful Life (1946); the recurring role of Doc Jed Prouty, in the "Ellery Queen" film series of the 1940s, and as the draft board driver in No Time for Sergeants (1958). A minor mainstay for Frank Capra, the famed director utilized the actor's services for nine of his finest films, including a few of the aforementioned plus Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and State of the Union (1948).
Lane's career was interrupted for a time serving in the Coast Guard during WWII. In post-war years, he found TV quite welcoming, settling there as well for well over four decades. Practically every week during the 1950s and 1960s, one could find him displaying somewhere his patented "slow burn" on a popular sitcom - Topper (1953), The Real McCoys (1957), The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959), Mister Ed (1961), Bewitched (1964), Get Smart (1965), Gomer Pyle: USMC (1964), The Munsters (1964), Green Acres (1965), The Flying Nun (1967) and Maude (1972). He hassled the best sitcom stars of the day, notably Lucille Ball (an old friend from the RKO days with whom he worked multiple times), Andy Griffith and Danny Thomas. Recurring roles on Dennis the Menace (1959), The Beverly Hillbillies (1962) and Soap (1977) made him just as familiar to young and old alike. Tops on the list had to be his crusty railroad exec Homer Bedloe who periodically caused bucolic bedlam with his nefarious schemes to shut down the Hooterville Cannonball on Petticoat Junction (1963). He could also play it straightforward and serious as demonstrated by his work in The Twilight Zone (1959), Perry Mason (1957), Little House on the Prairie (1974) and L.A. Law (1986).
A benevolent gent in real life, Lane was seen less and less as time went by. One memorable role in his twilight years was as the rueful child pediatrician who chose to overlook the warning signs of child abuse in the excellent TV movie Sybil (1976). One of Lane's last on-screen roles was in the TV-movie remake of The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1995) at age 90. Just before his death he was working on a documentary on his long career entitled "You Know the Face".
Cinematically speaking, perhaps the good ones do die young, for the irascible Lane lived to be 102 years old. He died peacefully at his Brentwood, California home, outliving his wife of 71 years, former actress Ruth Covell, who died in 2002. A daughter, a son and a granddaughter all survived him.- Actor
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A stocky, serious-looking character, Carl William Demarest started off in vaudeville in 1905 along with two older brothers. At one time he also performed in a stage act with his wife Estelle Collette (billed as 'Demarest and Collette') and then moved on to Broadway. He entered movies in 1926 and first appeared in Vitaphone one-reelers and in films for Warner Brothers, which included the first sound picture, The Jazz Singer (1927). In his later years, he became a household name on TV as retired sea captain Uncle Charley, replacing a seriously ill William Frawley in My Three Sons (1960). However, Demarest was truly at his best during the 1940s as a member of Preston Sturges's unofficial stock company of players, noted for his trademark deadpan or exasperated expressions. He made his reputation in eccentric comic supporting roles, invariably seen as pushy, wary or droll cops, business guys or wisecracking, jaundiced friends of the hero with names like Mugsy, Kockenlocker or Heffelfinger. The Great McGinty (1940), Sullivan's Travels (1941) and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943) are often cited as his best films. When movie offers began to diminish, Demarest segued into television work with many guest spots and a regular co-starring role as a ranch foreman in the western series Tales of Wells Fargo (1957). As a character actor, his quiet intensity and comic timing kept him in demand well into his eighties. Nominated just once for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor in the biopic The Jolson Story (1946), he lost out to Harold Russell for his performance in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).- Actor
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When Jack Carson arrived in Hollywood in 1937, he found work at RKO as an extra. His first major acting role came alongside Humphrey Bogart in the romantic comedy Stand-In (1937). After a few years, he developed into a popular character actor who would be seen in a large number of comedies, musicals and a few westerns. Not happy with the direction his career was heading, he went to Warner Brothers in 1941, where the quality of his supporting roles improved. It also did not hurt to be in films that starred James Cagney, such as The Strawberry Blonde (1941) and The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941).
After three years, he starred with Jane Wyman in Make Your Own Bed (1944) and, again, in The Doughgirls (1944). Carson would play the nice guy with the heart of gold who was still a nice guy even when he was angry. He would take the double take and the quizzical look to a higher level, but he could also act in dramas. He provided a good portrayal of "Albert" in The Hard Way (1943) and was acclaimed for his performance in Mildred Pierce (1945). However, it was comedies that provided most of his work. He teamed up with his old friend, Dennis Morgan, for several films in the tradition of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. It was in the 1940s that Carson would become popular as a wisecracking comedian on radio. This would lead him to television work in the 1950s, where he was one of 4 rotating hosts on All Star Revue (1950), until 1951, when he had left the show and the title was changed to "All Star Revue".
He hosted and performed on The Colgate Comedy Hour (1950) from 1952-55. He would also help host The U.S. Royal Showcase (1952). He would appear on a number of shows during the 1950s, one of his most remembered being an episode of The Twilight Zone (1959), where he played a somewhat shady used-car salesman who came into possession of an old Model-A Ford that was "haunted" in that whoever owned it had to tell the truth, whether he wanted to or not. Although his movie career slowed in the 1950s, he still appeared in a number of prestige pictures, such as A Star Is Born (1954) with Judy Garland, The Tarnished Angels (1957) with Rock Hudson and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) with Paul Newman.
Collapsed in August 1962 while in rehearsal for the play "Critic's Choice." An early diagnosis deemed it a stomach "disorder," but two months later, cancer was discovered while he was undergoing an unrelated operation.- An American character actor who specialized in "average joes", often timid or down-on-their-luck, Louis Jean Heydt was born in Montclair, New Jersey, and educated at Worcester Academy and Dartmouth College. He intended a career in journalism and worked as a reporter for the old New York World, but developed an interest in acting and landed a number of roles on the New York stage (active there from 1927-48). In the mid-'30s he traveled to Hollywood and quickly established himself as a reliable supporting player. He played dozens of roles in many fine films including Gone with the Wind (1939), They Were Expendable (1945) and The Big Sleep (1946), and although his face is exceptionally familiar to viewers of that period's films, his name never quite broke through. He remained a pleasant presence in scores of films of the 1940s and 1950s while continuing to work on the stage and on television. He died backstage at the Colonial Theatre in Boston during an out-of-town try-out performance of the play "There Was a Little Girl" in 1960.
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Dub Taylor was born on 26 February 1907 in Richmond, Virginia, USA. He was an actor and director, known for The Getaway (1972), The Wild Bunch (1969) and You Can't Take It with You (1938). He was married to Florence Gertrude Heffernan. He died on 3 October 1994 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- For over two decades, Porter Hall made a career out of playing villains and pompous, unpleasant people. His movie career was not a mirror of his real life, however. Mr. Hall was well known as a generous and outgoing person who was well-liked by almost everybody he knew. It is ironic that the role he is most often seen in today is that of an atheist in Going My Way (1944) - ironic because Hall was a deacon in his church. Hall, who didn't make his first movie until he was 43, remained active until his death in 1953.
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Iowa-born Chester Conklin was raised in a coal-mining area by a devoutly religious father who hoped that his son would go into the ministry. However, Chester got the performing bug one day when he gave a recitation at a community singing festival and won first prize. Knowing his father would never approve of his desire to become a comedian, he left home. One night in St. Louis he caught a vaudeville act by the famous team of Joe Weber and Lew Fields, who were doing what was called at the time a "Dutch" act. Conklin thought that he could do that act himself, and better, so he decided to develop a character patterned after his boss at the time, a German baker named Schultz. Schultz had a thick accent and a very bushy "walrus"-type mustache, which Conklin appropriated for his new character. He managed to break into vaudeville with this act and spent several years on tour with various stock companies. Eventually he secured a job as a clown with a traveling circus. After seeing several of Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops shorts in theaters, Conklin went to the Sennett studio and applied for a job there. Sennett hired him as a Keystone Kop (at $3 a day). He stayed with Sennett for six years, and became famous for his pairing with burly comic Mack Swain in a series of "Ambrose and Walrus" shorts and appeared in several of Charles Chaplin's shorts for the studio (Chaplin adapted Conklin's "walrus" mustache as part of the costume for his "Little Tramp" character). Conklin was approached by Fox Films to do a series of comedy shorts, and when Sennett refused to match the offer Fox made, Conklin left Sennett and signed with Fox. He stayed with Fox for several years, then freelanced for several independent producers in a series of comedy shorts. Conklin worked steadily into the sound era, and retired from the screen in 1966. His last movie was the well-received Western comedy A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966), in which his character was named "Chester."- Actor
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Jovial, somewhat flamboyant Frank Morgan (born Francis Wuppermann) will forever be remembered as the title character in The Wizard of Oz (1939), but he was a veteran and respected actor long before he played that part, and turned in outstanding performances both before and after that film. One of 11 children of a wealthy manufacturer, Morgan followed his older brother, Ralph Morgan (born Raphael Wuppermann) into the acting profession, making his Broadway debut in 1914 and his film debut two years later. Morgan specialized in playing courtly, sometimes eccentric or befuddled but ultimately sympathetic characters, such as the alcoholic telegraph operator in The Human Comedy (1943) or the shop owner in The Shop Around the Corner (1940). He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for The Affairs of Cellini (1934). Frank Morgan died at age 59 of a heart attack on September 18, 1949 in Beverly Hills, California.- Actor
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An imposing Austrian import-turned-matinée idol on the silent screen, Hollywood actor Joseph Schildkraut went on to conquer talking films as well -- with Oscar-winning results. Inclined towards smooth, cunning villainy, his Oscar came instead for his sympathetic portrayal of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in The Life of Emile Zola (1937). His most touching role on both stage and screen would come as the Jewish father-in-hiding, Otto Frank, in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).
Born on March 22, 1895, in Vienna, Austria, Joseph was the son of famed European/Yiddish stage actor Rudolph Schildkraut and his wife, the former Erna Weinstein. Nicknamed "Pepi" as a boy, the affectionate tag remained with him throughout his life. The family moved to Hamburg, Germany, when Joseph was 4. Joseph studied the piano and violin and grew inspired with his father's profession. On stage (with his father) from age 6, the family again relocated to Berlin where his father built a strong association with famed theatrical director Max Reinhardt.
Following Joseph's graduation from Berlin's Royal Academy of Music in 1911, the family migrated to America and settled in New York in 1912. His father continued making his mark in America's Yiddish theater while Joseph was accepted into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Offered lucrative theatre work back in Germany, Rudolf and family returned to Europe where Joseph began to grow in stature on the stage with the help of mentor Albert Bassermann. Joseph, like his father, would become well known not only for his prodigious talents on stage, but his marriage-threatening, Lothario-like behavior off-stage.
World War I and a call to the Austrian Army could have interrupted his career but his theatrical connections helped exempt him from duty. A thriving member of the Deutsches Volkstheatre (1913-1920), work became difficult to find in the post-war years so once again the family returned to America in 1920. Now an established stage player, Joseph was handed the title role in the Guild Theatre production (and American premiere) of "Liliom" opposite his leading lady of choice Eva Le Gallienne. It made stars out of both actors and both revisited their parts together on stage many years later in 1932.
Having appeared in a few silent pictures in Germany and Austria, Joseph was handed a prime role in the silent screen classic Orphans of the Storm (1921) starring the Gish sisters. This alone established him as an exotic matinée figure along the lines of a Valentino and Navarro. Preferring the stage, he nevertheless continued making films while conquering (on screen) Hollywood's loveliest of actresses, including Norma Talmadge in The Song of Love (1923), Seena Owen in Shipwrecked (1926), Marguerite De La Motte in Meet the Prince (1926), Bessie Love in Young April (1926) (which also co-starred father Rudolf), Lya De Putti in The Heart Thief (1927), and Jetta Goudal in The Forbidden Woman (1927). Most notable was his participation in the Cecil B. DeMille epics The Road to Yesterday (1925) and The King of Kings (1927), the latter co-starring as Judas Iscariot, with father Rudolf playing the high priest Caiaphas.
Joseph met his first wife, aspiring actress Elise Bartlett, during a herald run as "Peer Gynt" (1923) on Broadway. The impulsive romantic swept her off her feet, proposed to her on the day he met her, and married her the following week. The couple separated a few years later and his first wife fell to drink, dying at a fairly young age of an alcohol-related illness. His second marriage to Marie McKay was much happier and lasted almost three decades.
The actor's sturdy voice and strong command of the stage led to an easy transition into talking films. Among others, Joseph won the role of Gaylord Ravenal in the Kern and Hammerstein musical Show Boat (1929) opposite Laura La Plante as Magnolia. Despite his preference for the theater, Depression-era finances forced him to relocate to Los Angeles for more job security. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Joseph evolved into one of Hollywood's most distinctive character actors.
He played Wallace Beery's nemesis, General Pascal in MGM's Viva Villa! (1934), King Herod opposite Claudette Colbert in DeMille's Cleopatra (1934), and stole scenes as the cunning and underhanded Conrad, Marquis of Montferratin, in DeMille's The Crusades (1935). Joseph received his Oscar for his portrayal of Captain Dreyfus, a proud and robust French Jew wrongly convicted of treason and subsequently exiled to Devil's Island, in the biopic The Life of Emile Zola (1937). He soon became a Hollywood fixture appearing in everything from sumptuous costumers (Marie Antoinette (1938), The Three Musketeers (1939), The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), Monsieur Beaucaire (1946)), to action adventure (Lancer Spy (1937), Suez (1938)) to potent drama (The Rains Came (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1940)). His film output slowed down considerably at the outbreak of WWII in 1941, however; nevertheless he continued to show vitality on the stage with notable successes in "Clash by Night" (1941) with Tallulah Bankhead, "Uncle Harry" (1942) and "The Cherry Orchard" (1944) (again with Eva Le Gallienne).
His Hollywood downfall happened when he signed his career away to the low budget Republic Pictures studio...for financial reasons. The films were unworthy of his participation and his roles secondary in nature to the storyline. His final Broadway appearance and greatest stage triumph would occur in 1955 as Otto Frank and he repeated his role on film but The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). In one of Hollywood's bigger missteps, he was not even nominated for an Academy Award. Sporadic appearances followed on stage and film -- his last movie role wasted on the trivial role of Nicodemus in the epic failure The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). The film was released posthumously. On TV, however, he played Claudius to Maurice Evans' Hamlet in 1953 and filmed a memorable "Twilight Zone" episode in 1961.
Following his beloved second wife's death in 1961, he married one more time, in 1963, to a much younger woman named Leonora Rogers. Joseph died of a heart attack only months later at his New York City home on January 21, 1964, He was 68, almost the exact same age his father Rudolf was when he too suffered a fatal heart attack. Joseph was interred in the Beth Olam Mausoleum of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.- Actress
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Sara Haden was the daughter of silent screen star Charlotte Walker who was also a celebrated beauty in her day. Alas, Sara did not inherit her mother's good looks. She was actually born Catherine Haden in Center Point, Texas, on November 17 1898. There was nothing particularly outstanding about her childhood, except that her mother did not encourage her to become an actress. At least not to begin with. She was educated at the Dominican Convent in Galveston, then began acting in repertory with the James Hayden Players in Galveston and Dallas. She reputedly worked in early radio "as a dog impersonator for her own stories" but in 1921 debuted on Broadway in a rather more serious vein as Macduff's son (!) in "Macbeth". For the next eight years, she alternated between comedy and melodrama, scoring leads in such plays as "Trigger", "Lawful Larceny", "The Wrecker" and "Hot Water". Sara began her screen career in 1934, playing Etta Dawson in Spitfire (1934), thereby reprising her original Broadway performance in "Trigger". However, with her schoolmarmish looks she was quickly typecast as austere spinsters, eccentric aunts and crotchety dowagers. She had a certain knack for playing nasty (especially towards children), but beneath her villainous celluloid reputation lurked a great sense of humour. She was once quoted as saying (about her screen personae) "I'm always mean but there is no monotony about my meanness. I am mean in a great variety of fashions" and "I am glad my dog doesn't go the the movies. Maybe he wouldn't think as much of me if he did". As an MGM contract player from 1938 to 1946, Sara became best known as the starchy, but gentle Aunt Milly Forrest in the popular Andy Hardy series. Ironically, her best scenery-chewing moments came in Universal's cheaply made She-Wolf of London (1946), a typically sinister role for which Sara was paid a princely $2167 per week and (according to her lesser paid co-star June Lockhart) had a turn reminiscent of the Miss Danvers character (Judith Anderson) in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940). Sara remained much in demand as a television actress until her retirement from acting in 1965. She died as Catherine Haden Vandenburg in Woodland Hills, California, in September 1981 at the age of 82.- Actor
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Pittsburgh-born actor William Tracy was born on December 1, 1917, and began performing professionally as a youth. Trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Art, he appeared in musical and comedy roles until his big break arrived in 1937 at age 19 when he took over the role of fidgety military school "plebe" Misto Bottome in the hit Broadway show "Brother Rat." The following year he recreated the role in the film version of Brother Rat (1938) that had him in good standing company alongside up-and-coming Warner Bros. actors Wayne Morris, Priscilla Lane, Eddie Albert (also from the Broadway show) and both Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman, who would marry a short time later. William's second film assignment for Warners was playing 'Pat O'Brien' (I)'s as a young adult in the classic yarn Angels with Dirty Faces (1938).
Hal Roach saw promise in the tousle-haired, innocent-looking youth with the slightly squealy voice and signed him up for a some WWII comedy programmers teamed up with actor Joe Sawyer. He and the tough-looking Sawyer played Sgts. "Dodo" Doubleday and William Ames, respectively, in the flimsy but amusing misadventures of two soldiers at odds with each other. Tracy's character has a photographic memory which steers him into all sorts of unexpected trouble. Audiences took to the harmless escapism and Roach obliged by churning out more of these lowbudgets, recreating the characters in About Face (1942), Hay Foot (1942), Fall In (1942) and Yanks Ahoy (1943).
Tracy is best remembered for playing the lead role in the film adaptation of the popular comic strip Terry and the Pirates (1940). Featured roles in such classics as The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Tobacco Road (1941), Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) and George Washington Slept Here (1942) also endeared him to the public usually enacting an amiable but somewhat dull-witted fellow. Offers started drying up in post war years, however, and an attempt to re-team Tracy and Sawyer's sergeant characters with As You Were (1951) and Mr. Walkie Talkie (1952) fell flat.
Tracy went on to appear on TV and was featured in the series cast of Terry and the Pirates (1952), not as the lead this time but in the role of Hotshot Charlie. From there he faded away into relative obscurity. He died in 1967 at age 49 in Los Angeles.- Actor
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Charles Smith was born on 13 September 1920 in Flint, Michigan, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Everglades! (1961) and Target (1958). He died on 26 December 1988 in Burbank, California, USA.- Actor
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Charles Arnt was born on 20 August 1906 in Michigan City, Indiana, USA. He was an actor, known for Sudan (1945), The Great Gildersleeve (1942) and Dangerous Intruder (1945). He died on 6 August 1990 in Orcas Island, Washington, USA.- Josephine Sherwood changed her name after marrying stage actor Shelly Hull in 1910. She studied drama at Radcliffe College -- much to the dismay of her parents -- and first worked on the stage in a stock company in Boston. Her husband died in 1919, aged 35, of Spanish influenza. Josephine left the stage for three years and never re-married but resumed her theatrical career with renewed vigour from 1923. Short and dumpy of stature and with a distinctively brittle delivery, Josephine possessed an undeniable stage presence as well as exquisite timing. On Broadway, she alternated between comedy and drama. One of her best performances was as a member of the balmy Vanderhof family in You Can't Take It with You (1938) (the film version by Frank Capra came out two years later).
She is most fondly remembered for two indelible theatrical enactments which she would later reprise on screen. First, she was the sweetly homicidal Abby Brewster in the farce 'Arsenic and Old Lace', who, with her sister Martha (Jean Adair), sets about poisoning lonely old men with elderberry wine. The play ran on Broadway for three seasons (1941-44) and was a massive popular and critical hit with 1444 performances. The resulting 1944 motion picture was an equally resounding success and became one of Warner Brothers three biggest money-making films of the year. Josephine's second major role was that of Veta Louise Simmons, perpetually befuddled, beleaguered sister of Elwood P. Dowd (whose best friend is an imaginary rabbit) in Harvey (1950). This delightfully whimsical play by Mary Chase was an even greater smash hit, totalling 1775 performances between November 1944 and January 1949. Again, Josephine reprised her role on screen in 1950 and deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress that year. Critic Bosley Crowther commented "Josephine Hull plays Elwood's sister with such hilarious confusion and daft concern that she brings quite as much to the picture as does Mr.Stewart - or his pal to be sure...and it would be an unhappy screen version that did not contain her rotund frame, her scatter-brained fussing and fluttering and her angelic gentleness of soul" (New York Times, December 22 1950). Hardly surprising, then, that with so many years spent on the stage, Josephine Hull's screen career was not particularly prolific. She even got to first billing in the starring role of the theatrical version of 'The Solid Gold Cadillac' (1953-55), as Laura Partridge (later filmed with Judy Holliday in the lead).
Josephine died in New York in March 1957 of a brain hemorrhage, aged 80. - Actor
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Millard Mitchell was born to American parents in Havana, Cuba. He was a popular stage and radio actor in the 1930's in New York, where he also filmed his first cinema appearances (industrial short features). His first Hollywood role was in Mr. and Mrs. North (1942). After World War II, Mitchell acted in a several movies, often cast as sardonic, yet stolid characters. He was in the highest-grossing movie of 1953, Anthony Mann Western, The Naked Spur (1953), adding his unique style playing an old prospector who falls in with James Stewart. He received top billing in 1952's My Six Convicts (1952), but fans of movie musicals most admired his screen role as movie mogul 'R. F. Simpson' in the classic film Singin' in the Rain (1952). A heavy smoker, Millard died too young - lung cancer ended his life at the age of 50.- Actress
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Jean Shirley Verhagen (later shortened to Hagen) was born in Chicago, Illinois on August 3, 1923. Her father was a Dutch immigrant. Hagen and her family moved to Elkhart, Indiana when she was twelve; she subsequently graduated from Elkhart High School. Afterwards, she graduated from Northwestern University, where she studied drama and was a roommate of fellow actress Patricia Neal.
Hagen began her show business career in the late 1940s, performing in radio programmes. She also dabbled in Broadway plays. She made her film debut in 1949 with a role as a comical femme fatale in the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy pairing Adam's Rib (1949). She had her first leading role the following year, when she starred opposite Sterling Hayden in the film noir classic The Asphalt Jungle (1950), a performance which gained her considerable attention and praise.
The performance for which Hagen is best remembered today came about in 1952, when she lent her support to the classic musical Singin' in the Rain (1952). Hagen's portrayal of the helium-voiced silent film star Lina Lamont earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress; she lost to Gloria Grahame for The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).
Following her 'Singin' in the Rain' success, Ms. Hagen joined the cast of the television sitcom The Danny Thomas Show (1953). She was nominated for three Emmys for her role as Margaret Williams, but grew tired of the role after three seasons and subsequently left the show.
For the rest of her career, Hagen mostly made guest appearances on numerous television shows, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955), The Andy Griffith Show (1960), Wagon Train (1957), and Starsky and Hutch (1975). She also had supporting roles in Sunrise at Campobello (1960) and Dead Ringer (1963).
Sadly, by the 1960s, Ms. Hagen's health had declined and she spent many years under medical care. She died of esophageal cancer on August 29, 1977 at the age of 54.- Actress
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Cyd Charisse was born Tula Ellice Finklea on March 8, 1922, in Amarillo, Texas. Born to be a dancer, she spent her early childhood taking ballet lessons and joined the Ballet Russe at age 13. In 1939, she married Nico Charisse, her former dance teacher. In 1943, she appeared in her first film, Something to Shout About (1943), billed as Lily Norwood. The same year, she played a Russian dancer in Mission to Moscow (1943), directed by Michael Curtiz. In 1945, she was hired to dance with Fred Astaire in Ziegfeld Follies (1945), and that uncredited appearance got her a seven-year contract with MGM. She appeared in a number of musicals over the next few years, but it was Singin' in the Rain (1952) with Gene Kelly that made her a star. That was quickly followed by her great performance in The Band Wagon (1953). As the 1960s dawned, musicals faded from the screen, as did her career. She made appearances on television and performed in a nightclub revue with her second husband, singer Tony Martin. Cyd Charisse died at age 86 of a heart attack on June 17, 2008 in Los Angeles, California.- Actress
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Rita Moreno is one of the very few performers to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony and a Grammy, thus becoming an EGOT. She was born Rosita Dolores Alverío in the hospital in Humacao, Puerto Rico on December 11, 1931 (but raised in nearby, smaller Juncos, which had no hospital), to seamstress Rosa María (Marcano) and farmer Francisco José "Paco" Alverío. Her mother moved to New York City in 1937, taking Rita with her while leaving her reportedly unfaithful husband and Rita's younger brother behind. Rita's professional career began before she reached adolescence.
From the age of nine, she performed as a professional dancer in New York night clubs. At age 11, she landed her first movie experience, dubbing Spanish-language versions of US films. Less than a month before her 14th birthday on November 22, 1945, she made her Broadway debut in the play "Skydrift" at the Belasco Theatre, costarring with Arthur Keegan and a young Eli Wallach. Although she would not appear again on Broadway for almost two decades, Rita Moreno, as she was billed in the play, had arrived professionally. In 1950, she was signed by MGM, but the studio dropped her option after just one year.
The cover of the March 1, 1954, edition of "Life Magazine" featured a three-quarters, over-the-left-shoulder profile of the young Puerto Rican actress/entertainer with the provocative title "Rita Moreno: An Actresses' Catalog of Sex and Innocence". It was sexpot time, a stereotype that would plague her throughout the decade. If not cast as a Hispanic pepper pot, she could rely on being cast as another "exotic", such as her appearance on Father Knows Best (1954) as an exchange student from India. Because of a dearth of decent material, Moreno had to play roles in movies that she considered degrading. Among the better pictures she earned featured roles in were the classic Singin' in the Rain (1952) and The King and I (1956).
Director Robert Wise, who was chosen to co-direct West Side Story (1961) (the film version of the smash Broadway musical, a retelling of William Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet" with the warring Venetian clans the Montagues and Capulets re-envisioned as Irish/Polish and Puerto Rican adolescent street gangs, the Jets and the Sharks), cast Moreno as "Anita", the Puerto Rican girlfriend of Sharks' leader Bernardo, whose sister Maria is the piece's Juliet.
However, despite her talent, roles commensurate with that talent were not forthcoming in the 1960s. The following decade would prove kinder, possibly because the beautiful Moreno had aged gracefully and could now be seen by filmmakers, TV producers and casting directors as something other than the spitfire/sexpot that Hispanic women were supposed to conform to. Ironically, it was in two vastly diverging roles--that of a $100 hooker in director Mike Nichols' brilliant realization of Jules Feiffer's acerbic look at male sexuality, Carnal Knowledge (1971), and Milly the Helper in the children's TV show The Electric Company (1971)--that signaled a career renaissance.
Moreno won a 1972 Grammy Award for her contribution to "The Electric Company"'s soundtrack album, following it up three years later with a Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Musical for "The Ritz" (a role she would reprise in the film version, The Ritz (1976)). She then won Emmy Awards for The Muppet Show (1976) and The Rockford Files (1974).
She has continued to work steadily on screen (both large and small) and on stage, solidifying her reputation as a national treasure, a status that was officially ratified with the award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in June 2004.- Actor
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Born into a vaudeville family, O'Connor was the youthful figure cutting a rug in several Universal musicals of the 1940s. His best-known musical work is probably Singin' in the Rain (1952), in which he did an impressive dance that culminated in a series of backflips off the wall. O'Connor was also effective in comedic lead roles, particularly as the companion to Francis the Talking Mule in that film series.- Actress
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Debbie Reynolds was born Mary Frances Reynolds in El Paso, Texas, the second child of Maxine N. (Harmon) and Raymond Francis Reynolds, a carpenter for the Southern Pacific Railroad. Her film career began at MGM after she won a beauty contest at age 16 impersonating Betty Hutton. Reynolds wasn't a dancer until she was selected to be Gene Kelly's partner in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Not yet twenty, she was a quick study. Twelve years later, it seemed like she had been around forever. Most of her early film work was in MGM musicals, as perky, wholesome young women. She continued to use her dancing skills with stage work.
She was 31 when she gave an Academy Award-nominated performance in The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964). She survived losing first husband Eddie Fisher to Elizabeth Taylor following the tragic death of Mike Todd. Her second husband, shoe magnate Harry Karl, gambled away his fortune as well as hers. With her children as well as Karl's, she had to keep working and turned to the stage. She had her own casino in Las Vegas with a home for her collection of Hollywood memorabilia until its closure in 1997. She took the time to personally write a long letter that is on display in the Judy Garland museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota and to provide that museum with replicas of Garland's costumes. The originals are in her newly-opened museum in Hollywood.
Nearly all the money she makes is spent toward her goal of creating a Hollywood museum. Her collection numbers more than 3000 costumes and 46,000 square-feet worth of props and equipment.
With musician/actor Eddie Fisher, she was the mother of filmmaker Todd Fisher and actress Carrie Fisher. Debbie died of a stroke on December 28, 2016, one day after the death of her daughter Carrie. She was survived by her son and granddaughter, up-and-coming actress Billie Lourd.- Actress
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Spouse: James Lincoln Blake (1 Child)
During World War II, she and her husband, James Lincoln Blake, worked in Utah on construction of the detonator for the atomic bomb and performed such jobs as testing equipment destined for the Manhattan Project. The couple received a citation for their work from the U.S. government.- Actress
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Kathleen Freeman's introduction to show business came very early in life. Her parents were vaudevillians, and she made her debut at age 2 in their act. Later she attended UCLA with intentions of becoming a pianist, but was bitten by the acting bug and never looked back. She gained experience on stage in various stock and repertory companies, and made her film debut in 1948. One of the most memorable character actresses in recent memory, her stocky build, incredibly expressive face and hearty laugh have kept audiences convulsed for decades, playing a variety of neighborhood gossips, busybodies and eccentrics. Memorable as Sister Mary Stigmata ("The Penguin"), Dan Aykroyd's and John Belushi's nemesis, in The Blues Brothers (1980). She was used as a comic foil by Jerry Lewis in many of his films, always to great advantage. She did much television work, playing in everything from The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961) to Gomer Pyle: USMC (1964) to Hogan's Heroes (1965) to Married... with Children (1987), where she was the voice of Peg's monstrous but never-seen mother, Al Bundy's nemesis. She was working on Broadway in a production of "The Full Monty" when she died of lung cancer in 2001.- Julius Tannen was one of the first vaudeville stand-up comedians. He never used props, sets, costumes or stooges. He just put on his hat, walked on stage, took it off, and did his monologue, then put his hat on again and walked off. This was rather revolutionary in his day and Tannen paved the way for many stand-ups to come, such as Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Frank Faye and Jack Benny. Julius Tannen later had a long career as a character actor in Hollywood, and became an invaluable member of the Preston Sturges stock company, giving memorable performances in such Sturges classics as "Christmas in July," "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek," and "Unfaithfully Yours."
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Songwriter ("New York, New York", "The Party's Over", "Just in Time", "Make Someone Happy"), author and actor, educated at City College of New York. While he was a student, he acted with the Washington Square Players and had a part in the road company of "Having a Wonderful Time". A member of The Revuers with Betty Comden (with whom he also appeared on stage in "A Party" and on TV") and Judy Holliday, he appeared with the troupe in night clubs. His Broadway stage score for "Wonderful Town" won Drama Critics and Tony awards in 1953. His other stage scores included "Peter Pan" and "Do Re Mi", and he was the co-librettist for "On the Town", "Billion Dollar Baby", "Two on the Aisle", "Bells Are Ringing", "Subways Are For Sleeping", and "Fade Out - Fade In". His chief collaborator in lyrics, libretto and screenplay work was Betty Comden, and his chief musical collaborators included Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne, André Previn and Morton Gould. His popular-song compositions also included "I Get Carried Away", "I Can Cook, Too", "Some Other Time", "Lonely Town", "Lucky to Be Me", "Bad Timing", "Ohio", "A Little Bit in Love", "It's Love", "A Quiet Girl", "The French Lesson", "If You Hadn't But You Did", "Give a Little, Get a Little", "There Never Was a Baby Like My Baby", "Long Before I Knew You", "Never-Never Land", "Something's Always Happening on the River", "Dance Only With Me", "Adventure", "Fireworks", "Ride Through the Night", "Comes Once in a Lifetime", "I'm Just Taking My Time", "Now", "Fade Out - Fade In", and "Get Acquainted".- Actress
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When Ruth Gordon convinced her father, a sea captain, to let her pursue acting she came to New York and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She acted in a few silents made at Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1915. She made her Broadway debut in "Peter Pan" as Nibs the same year. The next 20 years she spent on stage, even appearing at the Old Vic in London in the successful run of "The Country Wife" in 1936. Nearly 25 years after her film debut, she returned to movies briefly. Her most memorable role during this period in the early 1940s was as Mary Todd in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940).
She left Hollywood to return to theater. Back in New York, she married Garson Kanin in 1942 (her first husband Gregory Kelly, a stage actor, died in 1927). She began writing plays, and, later, her husband and she collaborated on screenplays for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, whose screen relationship was modeled on their own marriage. She returned to film acting during the 1960s. It is during this last period of her career that she became a movie star, with memorable roles in Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Harold and Maude (1971). She wrote several books during the mid-1970s and appeared on TV. She won an Emmy for her role on Taxi (1978) in 1979.- Actor
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Dane Clark was born Bernard Elliot Zanville in Brooklyn, New York City, to Rose (Korostoff) and Samuel Zanville, who were Russian Jewish immigrants. He graduated from Cornell University and St. John's Law School (Brooklyn). When he had trouble finding work in the mid-1930s he tried boxing, baseball, construction, sales and modeling, among other jobs. From there he went into acting on Broadway ("Dead End", "Stage Door", "Of Mice and Men"), which finally brought him to Hollywood. He acted under his own name until 1943 when, as Dane Clark (a name he said was given him by Humphrey Bogart), he took the role of sailor Johnnie Pulaski in Warner's Action in the North Atlantic (1943), a wartime tribute to the Merchant Marine. He was a regular in World War II movies, playing the part of a submariner in Destination Tokyo (1943), an airman in God Is My Co-Pilot (1945) and a Marine in Pride of the Marines (1945).
Though he co-starred with such luminaries as Bogart, Cary Grant, Bette Davis and Raymond Massey, it was his self-described "Joe Average" image that got him his parts: "They don't go much for the 'pretty boy' type [at Warner Brothers]. An average-looking guy like me has a chance to get someplace, to portray people the way they really are, without any frills." He was also proud of his role as Abe Saperstein, who founded the Harlem Globetrotters black basketball team, in Go Man Go (1954), a film he believed pioneered in opposing race hatred.- Sam Levene was the actor who originated "craps-shooter extraordinaire" Nathan Detroit in the seminal American musical "Guys and Dolls" on the Great White Way in the original 1950 production. Levene was not a good singer and had trouble staying in key, so his solo number "Sue Me" had to be written in one octave to compensate for his lack of pipes. Singing great Frank Sinatra played the Nathan Detroit role in the movie version of the musical Guys and Dolls (1955)) after producer Samuel Goldwyn cast non-singer Marlon Brando as Sky Masterston. Many critics noted that Sinatra -- who would not use the character's New York, ethnic accent when singing -- would have been perfect as Sky and rued the lack of "Jewish wry" the Italian-American crooner brought to the role, openly wishing that Levene had been cast as Nathan Detroit to Old Blue Eyes' Masterson. That was not meant to be, although 20 years later he would not be asked to reproduce another of his memorable roles on Broadway.
Born in Russia on August 28, 1905, Sam Levene made his Broadway debut in 1927 in the melodrama "Wall Street", two years before "Variety" noted that the fabled temple of capitalism had "laid an egg". Fifty-four years later he appeared in his 39th and last Broadway show, "Horowitz and Mrs. Washington", a flop that lasted but four performances. Along the way he was nominated for a Tony Award in 1961 as Best Actor in a Play for "The Devil's Advocate." Levene also starred in the original Broadway production of Neil Simon "The Sunshine Boys", playing Al Lewis to Jack Albertson's Willie Clark. However, the role in the 1975 movie (The Sunshine Boys (1975)) originally was earmarked for Jack Benny, who was replaced by his friend George Burns after Benny's death. Burns won an Oscar playing the role, another big one that got away from Levene.
Levene made over 45 movies. He was brought to Hollywood to recreate his stage role as -- fittingly -- a gambler in Three Men on a Horse (1936), following it up with the first of two appearances as San Francisco police Lt. Abrams in the "Thin Man" series: After the Thin Man (1936) and Shadow of the Thin Man (1941). His last film role was in the 1979 film And Justice for All (1979). The highlight of his movie career arguably are his turns in the hard-boiled film noir classics The Killers (1946), Brute Force (1947) and Crossfire (1947). He also appeared in one of the ultimate New York movies, the classic Sweet Smell of Success (1957).
Sam Levene died of a heart attack on December 28, 1980. He was 75 years old. - Actor
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Peter Whitney's over-powering frame, swarthy looks, bushy brows and maniacal look in his eye made him one of the most fearsome character actors to lump around in 1940s-60s film and TV.
Born on May 24, 1916 in New Jersey of German ancestry, Peter King Engle was educated at Exeter Academy. He eventually moved to the Los Angeles area and trained with the Pasadena Community Playhouse, gaining valuable experience in summer stock as well. He made a play for films in the early 1940s, deciding also to use his wife Adrienne's middle name of Whitney for his own stage moniker. He felt his real name of Engle sounded too German and might be detrimental to his WWII-era career. He and Adrienne went on to have three children. His mammoth features and pudding-like puss reminded one easily of a Charles Laughton without table manners.
Whitney started his supporting career off promisingly at Warner Bros. at the outbreak of America's involvement in WWII showing potential in such films as Underground (1941), his debut, Nine Lives Are Not Enough (1941) and Blues in the Night (1941) as assorted henchmen, cronies and just downright mean guys. Taking part in "A" quality casts such as in Action in the North Atlantic (1943) and Mr. Skeffington (1944), Whitney played two of his most notorious roles at war's end, that of murderous hillbilly twins Mert and Bert Fleagle in the riotous Fred MacMurray comedy Murder, He Says (1945) and as Peter Lorre's seedy partner in the film noir Three Strangers (1946). Whitney broke with Warner Bros. in the post-war years but still yielded some fine entertainment with roles in such "B" fare as The Notorious Lone Wolf (1946), Blonde Alibi (1946), and an odd, romantic turn as Lt. Gates in the creepy Rondo Hatton crimer The Brute Man (1946).
In the mid-1950s, television took over a larger portion of his career. His imposing mug was featured in about every popular western and crime drama there was including "Gunsmoke", "Wagon Train", "Rawhide", "The Rifleman", "Bonanza", "Perry Mason", and "Peter Gunn". He finally cut loose a bit and spoofed his own grubby rube image with guest turns on such bucolic series as "Petticoat Junction", and "The Beverly Hillbillies", the latter playing a greedy ne'er-do-well fellow rustic in four episodes with the name of Lafe Crick. His obesity contributed to an early fatal heart attack at age 55 in 1972, which robbed Hollywood of a wondedes with the rfully unappetizing and scurrilous character actor. In addition to his wife and three children, Whitney was survived by four grandchildren.- Actor
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A minor character actor who appeared in literally hundreds of films, actor Irving Bacon could always be counted on for expressing bug-eyed bewilderment or cautious frustration in small-town settings with his revolving door of friendly, servile parts - mailmen, milkmen, clerks, chauffeurs, cab drivers, bartenders, soda jerks, carnival operators, handymen and docs. Born September 6, 1893 in the heart of the Midwest (St. Joseph, Missouri), he was the son of Millar and Myrtle (Vane) Bacon. Irving first found work in silent comedy shorts at Keystone Studios usually playing older than he was and, for a time, was a utility player for Mack Sennett in such slapstick as A Favorite Fool (1915). Irving made an easy adjustment when sound entered the pictures and after appearing in the Karl Dane and George K. Arthur two-reel comedy shorts such as Knights Before Christmas (1930), began to show up in feature-length films. He played higher-ups on occasion, such as the Secretary of the Navy in Million Dollar Legs (1932), police inspector in The House of Mystery (1934), mayor in Room for One More (1952), and judge in Ambush at Cimarron Pass (1958), but those were exceptions to the rule. Blending in with the town crowd was what Irving was accustomed to and, over the years, he would be glimpsed in some of Hollywood's most beloved classics such as Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), San Francisco (1936), You Can't Take It with You (1938) and A Star Is Born (1954). Trivia nuts will fondly recall his beleaguered postman in the Blondie (1938) film series that ran over a decade.
Irving could also be spotted on popular '50s and '60s TV programs such as the westerns Laramie (1959) and Wagon Train (1957), and "comedies December Bride (1954) and The Real McCoys (1957). He can still be seen in a couple of old codger roles on I Love Lucy (1951). One was as a marriage license proprietor and the other as Vivian Vance's doting dad from Albuquerque, to whom she paid a visit on her way to Hollywood with the Ricardos. Irving died on February 5, 1965, having clocked in over 400 features.- Minor Watson was a jovial, grandfatherly actor specializing in playing warm-hearted doctors, affable small-town businessmen, concerned army officers and other such characters. Watson wasn't as prolific as many other actors of his type; while he made slightly more than 100 films, his colleagues such as Russell Hicks and Pierre Watkin had over 300 to their credit, although Watson usually brought a warmth and a good humor to his roles that the others often didn't. While Hicks' and Watkin's characters commanded respect, Watson's soft Southern drawl (he was from Arkansas), engaging manner and soothing demeanor made his characters both liked and respected. He was especially effective as Col. Grayson, the commander of the Marines hitting the beach, in Guadalcanal Diary (1943).
- George Offerman Jr. was born on 14 March 1917 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was an actor, known for A Walk in the Sun (1945), Jalna (1935) and Night Club Scandal (1937). He died on 14 January 1963 in New York City, New York, USA.
- Born in Austria in 1883, Ludwig Stossel was an established theater presence (from age 17) in both his homeland and in Germany for decades, performing at one time or another for both Max Reinhardt and Otto Preminger. He made a handful of German silents beginning in 1926 and had moved with ease into sound pictures.
The Nazi invasion of Austria forced Stossel to emigrate to the United Kingdom in 1938. He rekindled his film career there but moved to America within a couple years. Many German and Austrian actors left their countries because of the Nazi takeover and emigrated to the US, winding up in Hollywood where they formed a sort of "colony", often being used in war-themed dramas to play either refugees or Nazi officers and officials. Stossel found a plethora of work that made use of his thick accent and benevolent countenance, his balding characters often accompanied by a monocle and handlebar mustache. He provided secondary but memorable foreign characters in such WWII classics as Casablanca (1942), Kings Row (1942), and the Lou Gehrig biopic The Pride of the Yankees (1942) as Gehrig's (Gary Cooper) father.
Firmly established in Hollywood, the amiable Stossel continued playing sweet and wise old souls throughout the remainder of his career. Particularly outstanding was his role as Albert Einstein in The Beginning or the End (1947). He also worked on TV in the 1950s and is perhaps best remembered for his long series of commercials for Italian Swiss Colony wine in which he played "that little old winemaker, me!" in Swiss costume. Married to actress Eleanore Stossel, he died in 1973 at age 89 in Beverly Hills, California. - Actor
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Alan Hale decided on a film career after his attempt at becoming an opera singer didn't pan out. He quickly became much in demand as a supporting actor, starred in several films for Cecil B. DeMille and directed others for him. With the advent of sound, Hale played leads in a few films but soon settled down into a career as one of the busiest character actors in the business. He was one of the featured members of what became known as the "Warner Brothers Stock Co.", a corps of character actors and actresses who appeared in scores of Warner Bros. films of the 1930s and 1940s. Hale's best-known role is probably in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), one of several films he made with his friend Errol Flynn, in which he played Little John, a role he played in two other films: Robin Hood (1922) and Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950).- Actor
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Alec Craig was born on 30 March 1884 in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland, UK. He was an actor, known for Northern Pursuit (1943), They Made Her a Spy (1939) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). He died on 25 June 1945 in Glendale, California, USA.- Actress
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This alluring hazel-eyed 1940s leading lady was born Ardis Ankerson on the Philippine island of Negros, one of two siblings. Her father was Otto Peter Ankerson who held an important position as overseer of a large sugar plantation. Following the premature death of her mother in 1925, Ardis and her sister were packed off to San Antonio to complete their education. Ardis was voted Freshman Class Beauty of 1934 at Texas State College, acted in amateur dramatics and worked hard on diction and improvisation. By then, she was clearly determined to become a professional actress. Following her graduation, she moved to New York where she studied drama under the tuition of actor Richard Gaines (and eventually married him in 1936). Gaines helped her secure acting work in stock companies under the Federal Theatre Project, sponsored by the Works Progress Administration as part of the New Deal. While in New York, Ardis successfully auditioned for Paramount, but studio executives dropped the option to sign her due to what they deemed her excessive salary demands. Warner Brothers viewed the screen test some time later and proved less squeamish about picking her up. With the inevitable name change prompted by the studio, 'Brenda Marshall' went Hollywood. During her tenure in Tinseltown, she made it clear to friends and co-workers alike, that she be addressed not by her studio-fabricated cognomen, but by her given name (with the addition of her married name of Gaines).
Brenda made an almost immediate impact in her fourth outing for Warners as Doña Maria, providing the romantic interest in Errol Flynn's classic swashbuckler The Sea Hawk (1940). This should have established the brunette beauty as a tangible box office attraction. Alas, only routine material followed and Brenda saw out the remainder of her contract as exotic leads in second features like East of the River (1940), South of Suez (1940) and Singapore Woman (1941). There were to be two more A-grade productions, but Brenda ended up playing second fiddle to James Cagney's aviation heroics in Captains of the Clouds (1942) and was overshadowed in the charisma department by Joan Fontaine and Alexis Smith in The Constant Nymph (1943). By 1950, she quit the acting profession and devoted herself to other causes. A year after her divorce from Gaines in 1940, Brenda had wed the actor William Holden in Las Vegas. She was of help to him in setting up the Mt. Kenya Safari Club as a means of protecting African wildlife. The couple seemed content for a while. However, the marriage proved to be increasingly volatile and began to unravel by 1963, ending up in divorce eight years later. Brenda died from throat cancer in Palm Springs in 1992 at the age of 76.- Actor
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White-haired London-born character actor, a familiar face in Hollywood for more than five decades. He was born George William Crisp, the youngest of ten siblings, to working class parents James Crisp and his wife Elizabeth (nee Christy). Despite his humble beginnings, Donald was educated at Oxford University. He saw action with the 10th Hussars of the British Army at Kimberley and Ladysmith during the Boer War and subsequently moved to the United States to begin a new life as an actor.
Arriving in New York in 1906 he began as a singer in Grand Opera with the company of impresario John C. Fisher. By 1910, he had climbed his way up the ladder to become stage manager for George M. Cohan. He was a member of D.W. Griffith's original stock company in the early days of the film industry, beginning with Biograph in New Jersey and featured in The Birth of a Nation (1915) (as General Ulysses S. Grant), Intolerance (1916) and Broken Blossoms (1919). He later joined Famous Players Lasky (subsequently Paramount) and turned with some success to directing in the 1920s, on occasion also appearing in his films (as for example in Don Q Son of Zorro (1925), as Don Sebastian). By the early 30s, Crisp concentrated exclusively on acting and became one of the more prolific Hollywood character players on the scene. Though he was actually a cockney, he -- for unknown reasons -- invented a Scottish ancestry for himself early on, claiming that he was born in Aberfeldy and affected a Scottish accent throughout his career. Crisp's particular stock-in-trade types were crusty or benevolent patriarchs, stern military officers, doctors and judges. He had lengthy stints under contract at Warner Brothers (1935-42) and MGM (1943-51) with an impressive list of A-grade output to his credit: Burkitt in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Colonel Campbell in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Maitre Labori in The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Phipps in The Dawn Patrol (1938), General Bazaine in Juarez (1939), Francis Bacon in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) and Sir John Burleson in The Sea Hawk (1940). He is perhaps most fondly remembered as the famous canine's original owner in Lassie Come Home (1943), Elizabeth Taylor's dad Mr. Brown in National Velvet (1944), and, above all, as the head of a Welsh mining family in How Green Was My Valley (1941) (the role which won him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor). In a less sympathetic vein, Crisp gave a sterling performance as a ruthless tobacco planter in the underrated Gary Cooper drama Bright Leaf (1950).
Donald Crisp died in May 1974 in Van Nuys, California, at the age of 91. He is commemorated by a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Vine Street.- Actress
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Flora Robson knew she was no beauty, but her wise and sympathetic face would become a familiar - indeed, shining - ornament of the 1930s and '40s silver screen. Though not sure of acting as a career in her early years, she first appeared on stage when 5 years old. She was educated at Palmer's Green High School and went on still in her teens to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, winning a Bronze Medal in 1921. Between 1921-23 she performed in London and Oxford, but both uncertainty and the unstable income of acting convinced her to spend the next few years working at a factory welfare officer in east London.
Still, her versatility, even in her youth, as a budding character actress of the first water, was noticed. In 1929 a friend urged her to join the Cambridge Festival Theatre where she remained two years.
By 1931 she was in residence at the Old Vic with as varied roles as Herodias in "Salome" (1931), a drunken prostitute in Bridie's "The Anatomist", Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth in "Macbeth", and Gwendolen in "The Importance of Being Earnest" (both in 1933).
She stayed with the Old Vic until 1934, but she was already turning to the film with her debut in A Gentleman of Paris (1931).
Her dexterity as screen monarchs began shortly thereafter as Russian Empress Elisabeth in The Rise of Catherine the Great (1934). Flora even had a place in television history in the pre-WWII British TV production of Anna Christie (1937).
She was a forceful Livia in Josef von Sternberg's ill-fated and unfinished I, Claudius (1937), but gave a hint of her future potential with her rousing Queen Elizabeth I in Alexander Korda's Fire Over England (1937) with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.
The year 1939 was extremely busy for Robson. It marked her first association with British director Michael Powell in his The Lion Has Wings (1939) and Smith (1939) and the unsurprising call from Hollywood.
There she was lauded quickly for 2 roles that year: as the domineering wife of Paul Muni in We Are Not Alone (1939) and opposite fellow British stars Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, and David Niven as narrator and housekeeper Ellen Dean in the haunting Wuthering Heights (1939). Her compelling Elizabeth marked her for a reprise of the role in the Errol Flynn swashbuckler The Sea Hawk (1940) in which she played the role to the hilt.
Among early screen Elizabeth standouts, Florence Eldridge in Mary of Scotland (1936) resembled the historical queen and the more famous Bette Davis displayed the manner and temperament with her usual command (though it is hard not to feel it's Bette playing her - albeit - brilliant self and not Elizabeth) in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), but Robson seemed to best personify the total person and spirit of 'good Queen Bess'.
Flora's film career was marked with a character versatility which had and continued to mark precious time for stage work (as in her murderess Ellen Creed in "Ladies in Retirement" (Broadway, 1950). In 1941, she returned to war-torn London to boldly continue theater performances to a grateful country. After the war, it was a full life of crisscrossing the Atlantic. Though some British critics were not impressed with her return to Hollywood to play the overly protective mulatto servant of Ingrid Bergman in Saratoga Trunk (1945), it was an outstanding tour-de-force character performance honored with an Oscar nomination.
Among other memorable roles in the late 1940s, even her reflective Anglican Sister Philippa in Powell's visually stunning and provocative Black Narcissus (1947) displays her depth as a solid character actress. Another quarter of a century of roles was accented with memorable theatrical performances as Lady Macbeth on Broadway (1949) and as Paulina in Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale" (1951), production by John Gielgud, to add to a kaleidoscope mix of movies from 1948 to 1981 and a sprinkling of character pieces on British TV, when she retired from the stage in 1969.
The material success of Hollywood played a part in her much deserved honor as Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1952 and her ascension as Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1960. Kenneth Barrow wrote a biography Flora: The Life of Dame Flora Robson (1981). Flora had the further honor of rating 2 portraits in London's National Portrait Gallery for her full and distinguished life.- Actress
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Delightful character actress who held her own against such acting heavyweights as Charles Laughton, Boris Karloff, Tyrone Power, Barbara Stanwyck, and Sydney Greenstreet. Often cast by studio heads as comic relief thanks to her thick Irish accent and rubber-faced expressions, most notably in Universal's horror classics, Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and The Invisible Man (1933). Her final role was as the devoted housekeeper in Billy Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution (1957), a role she originated on stage. Her hilarious testimony during the trial is one of the film's highlights.- One of Hollywood's greatest screen villains, Charles Henry Pywell Daniell was born in London, England, the son of Elinor Mary (Wookey) and Henry Pyweh Daniell, L.R.C.P. He had the profound misfortune to make his professional theatrical debut on the eve of World War I. His life thus interrupted, he served in the trenches on the Western Front with the 2nd Battalion of the British Army's Norfolk Regiment. Wounded in action, he was invalided out of service in 1915 and spent much of the next few years on the West End stage without rising to particular prominence. In 1921, he made his way to the U.S. and worked hard to establish himself as a character player on Broadway, beginning with his role as Prince Charles de Vaucluse in "Claire de Lune". He enjoyed critical acclaim in only his third performance on the 'Great White Way', co-starring with Ethel Barrymore in "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" (1924). For the remainder of the decade, Daniell alternated touring on both sides of the Atlantic, before making his first appearance on screen in 1929. Daniell's lean physique, sardonic, almost reptilian features, cold voice and incisive manner made him ideally cast as icy, austere aristocrats or as insidious, manipulating evil masterminds in period drama.
His most famous role was as the duplicitous Lord Wolfingham in The Sea Hawk (1940), though Daniell's inexperience as a swordsman compelled Warner Brothers to use a stuntman for the climactic fight scene with Errol Flynn. The previous year, Daniell had essayed the conspiratorial Sir Robert Cecil, spy master to Elizabeth I, with equal verve in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). Under contract to MGM (1936-37), he also excelled as the erstwhile mentor of Greta Garbo's Camille (1936), the Baron de Varville. Their vitriolic exchanges are a highlight of the film and belie the fact that Daniell was fretfully nervous acting opposite Garbo. His other, invariably unsympathetic, portrayals include the scheming La Motte in Marie Antoinette (1938), the hypocritical clergyman Henry Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre (1943) and the gleefully villainous Regent in The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (1946). By the 1940's, Daniell popped up more and more in lower budget productions, yet managed to deliver two of his finest performances to date: the first, as Professor Moriarty, arch nemesis of Sherlock Holmes (played by his real-life friend Basil Rathbone) in The Woman in Green (1945); the second, as Dr. Wolfe MacFarlane, a 19th century Edinburgh surgeon employing the grave-robbing services of Boris Karloff in The Body Snatcher (1945), a Faustian parable in which any semblance of morality and virtue is sacrificed to the pursuit of scientific knowledge. In the end, Gray (Karloff), the instrument of MacFarlane's machinations becomes "a canker in his body", but even his killing cannot assuage the surgeon's guilty conscience and he is eventually hounded to death by visions of the latter's corpse. This was a rare leading role for Daniell whose scenes with Karloff are among the most chilling of any in this genre. For a change of pace -- or, perhaps, to change his image -- Daniell did the occasional comedic turn, most notably in Charles Chaplin's Third Reich parody The Great Dictator (1940), as 'Garbitsch', a none too thinly disguised caricature of Joseph Goebbels.
On stage, he enjoyed his most successful run (344 performances) as the avaricious Henri Trochard in "My 3 Angels" at the Morosco Theatre in 1953. The play was filmed two years later as We're No Angels (1955), with, who else, but Basil Rathbone, in the part.
Daniell died after being stricken with a heart attack at his home, a few hours after filming a scene for his final film, My Fair Lady (1964). - Actor
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Montague Love - certainly an intriguing name - but his own - started his working life as a newspaper man in London. His primary expertise centered on being a field illustrator and cartoonist who covered the Boer War (1899-1902). His realistic battle sketches gained him popularity among readers, but he was bound for a different career. He decided to become an actor. A robust man with a massive head of noble bearing and brooding lower lip, these were ingredients well suited to this goal. Love honed basic stage talents in London, and then made an early departure for the US in 1913 with a road-company production of Cyril Maude's "Grumpy." An early stop was Broadway, and he returned many times to appear in a laundry list of important plays from 1913 to 1934.
Silent film studios of the early days were originally based in the East, and Love started his film career at World Studios, New Jersey in 1914. His silent career alone was prodigious-nearly a hundred films. His look and bearing were perfect for authoritative figures. And, though certainly taking on a whole spectrum of roles (sultan, native chiefs, many a doctor and military officer, among many others) he became famous for his bad guy characterizations through the 1920s. Some historians credit him as the best villain of the silent era.
In 1926 he was nemesis to Rudolf Valentino in The Son of the Sheik (1926) and 'John Barrymore' in Don Juan (1926). The latter movie had the particular fame of sporting the longest sword duel in silent history between Love's Count Giano Donati and Barrymore's Don Juan. The fight filming was unique and realistic with middle and close shots looking directly at the individual combatants-with the appropriate blood in their eyes. The duel was all the more complex choreography for being one with swords and daggers (historically correct but rarely seen in film history). But Love was just as effective as the Roman centurion in The King of Kings (1927) by 'Cecil B DeMille'. Starting with Synthetic Sin (1929), Love's movies followed the trend of an increasing number of silent films using recorded music and some snatches of dialogue or background sound with the several incipient audio systems. Some movies originally issued as silent were released again with the process added. `Sin' was one of 11 films of 1929 featuring Love given the semi-sound treatment. The last of these was Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island (1929), very loosely adapted to the point of being hokey, but one of the first films also using the primitive two-color process.
Love had a commanding, puckered-lip British delivery of speech which he could believably weld to any part, but it particularly fit characters of authority, as in the silent era. Into the 1930s, these were increasingly benign rather than despotic-always colonels and generals, prime ministers, American presidents - even Zorro's father. Perhaps his best known character tour de force displaying his genuine acting power was his Henry VIII in Prince and the Pauper (1937). It is hard to forget him in purple as the Bishop of the Black Canons in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Sometimes, as with other veteran character actors, his roles were almost as featured extra-but his very costumed presence was all that was needed to lend realism. A very apt example was his Detchard, noble henchmen to 'Raymond Massey', in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), in which he has little more than one line. He was still in demand in the early 1940s - ten roles in 1940 alone. But these slowed into the war years. By his passing in 1943, an actor who was considered as noble on screen as off, he had lent his voice as well as virtuoso acting skills to eighty-one additional films.- Actor
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Born at Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-on-Avon, Halliwell Hobbes could perhaps not aspire to anything else but to be an actor. He made his stage debut in 1898 playing Shakespearean repertory with the famous acting company of Sir Frank Benson throughout England. Among others he played opposite Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Ellen Terry. Hobbes came to the American and Broadway as early as 1906, doing performing and some directing until early 1929 when he came to Hollywood as an elderly actor to launch a long career of memorable character roles. In those first years he seemed to be either a lord or a butler. But by 1931 he was much in demand, lending his distinctive and dignified nasal voice to nearly ten films per year through most of the 1930s. Moving from one studio to another, he was doctors, diplomats, more lords, and some very memorable clerics-especially the staid archbishop reduced to laughter in The Prince and the Pauper (1937). The roles were scarcer through the 1940s, but he was back on Broadway by mid 1940 playing Capulet in "Romeo and Juliet." Still that distinctive voice graced over 100 films by 1949. He turned to the richly diverse American TV playhouse format by 1950 and continued with roles through the decade along with a continued presence on Broadway until late 1955. Although he was sometimes uncredited in films, his roles were no less a recorded legacy of a dedicated acting talent.- Actor
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At the age of seven, he and his family moved to Oregon. After studying at the University of Oregon, he followed in his father's footsteps and became a dentist, graduating from North Pacific Dental College. From 1929 to 1937, he practiced oral surgery in Eugene, Oregon. He then moved his practice to Altadena, CA. There he joined the Pasadena Community Playhouse, eventually giving up dentistry at the age of 36 to become an actor. He made his film debut in 1939. His chubby face and gravelly voice were featured in over 100 films, but he is perhaps best known for TV roles in Hopalong Cassidy (1952), Judge Roy Bean (1955), Petticoat Junction (1963), and Cade's County (1971).- Actor
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The athletic William Lundigan stood 6' 2" and weighed 170 pounds. He played football, basketball and tennis at Syracuse (NY) University. He was discovered by Charles R. Rogers, head of production at Universal Studios. Rogers happened to tune into radio station WFBL in Syracuse. He was so intrigued by a voice he heard reading a commercial that he gave instructions for the speaker to be located, brought to New York and tested for movie possibilities. The speaker, of course, was Lundigan. He had gotten the announcing job because his father owned the building that housed WBFL. Later in his career Lundigan was successful as the host of the CBS programs Climax! (1954) and Shower of Stars (1954). For these programs he delivered on-air commercials for their sponsor, Chrysler Motors. Off screen he traveled as a goodwill ambassador for the company, covering over 100,000 miles on the road and visiting 560,000 people in 90 weeks.- Actor
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David Bruce was born on 6 January 1916 in Kankakee, Illinois, USA. He was an actor, known for The Mad Ghoul (1943), Sergeant York (1941) and Lady on a Train (1945). He was married to Cynthia Sory. He died on 3 May 1976 in Hollywood, California, USA.- Actor
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Clifford Brooke was born on 31 March 1873 in London, England, UK. He was an actor, known for A Woman's Face (1941), The Sea Hawk (1940) and Wilson (1944). He was married to Edith Mildred Drake. He died on 28 December 1951 in Santa Monica, California, USA.- Actress
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Ann Sheridan won the "Search for Beauty" contest which carried with it a Paramount screen test. Signed to a contract at 18, she was put into a number of small roles under her real name of Clara Lou Sheridan. As she got better, her name was changed to Ann. In 1936, after two dozen films, she went to Warner Brothers, which billed her as the "Oomph Girl," a name she despised -- although she certainly looked the part. She was allowed to mature into a leading star who could be the girl next door or the tough-as-nails dame. She was in a lot of comedies and a number of forgettable movies, but the public liked her, and her career flourished. She also gave great performances such as the singer in Torrid Zone (1940) and the waitress in They Drive by Night (1940). In 1948, she was dropped by Warner Bros., but came back in Howard Hawks' comedy I Was a Male War Bride (1949) with Cary Grant. She continued to make films into the 1950s but retired before the end of the decade. She starred in the soap opera Another World (1964) and the western series Pistols 'n' Petticoats (1966). Unfortunately, just as her career was reviving with this series, she died of cancer.- Actor
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Hollywood stalwart Bruce Cabot's main claim to fame, other than rescuing Fay Wray from King Kong (1933), is that he tested for the lead role of The Ringo Kid in John Ford's Western masterpiece Stagecoach (1939). John Wayne got the role and became the most durable star in Hollywood history, while Cabot (eventually) found himself a new drinking partner when the two co-starred in Angel and the Badman (1947). In the latter stages of his career, Cabot could rely on Wayne for a supporting part in one of the Duke's movies.
It wasn't always so. In the 1930s Cabot's star shone bright. He was born with the unlikely name Etienne Pelissier Jacques de Bujac in Carlsbad, New Mexico, the son of French Col. Etienne de Bujac and Julia Armandine Graves, who died shortly after giving birth to the future Bruce Cabot. After leaving the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, the future thespian hit the road, working a wide variety of jobs including sailor and insurance salesman, and doing a stint in a knacker's yard. In 1931 he wound up in Hollywood and appeared in several films in bit parts.
The young Monsieur de Bujac met David O. Selznick, then RKO's central producer (a job akin to Irving Thalberg's at MGM), at a Hollywood party, which led to an uncredited bit part as a dancer in Lady with a Past (1932) and a supporting role in The Roadhouse Murder (1932). On a parallel career track at the time, Marion Morrison (John Wayne) had failed to follow up on his audacious debut in Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930) (the Duke had appeared in 18 movies previously but had only been billed in one, as "Duke Morrison" in the unlikely John Wayne vehicle Words and Music (1929)). Cabot and Wayne eventually appeared in 11 films together.
Although Cabot was prominently featured in the blockbuster "King Kong" in 1933, he never did make the step to stardom, though he enjoyed a thriving career as a supporting player. He was a heavy in the 1930s, playing a gangster boss in Let 'em Have It (1935) and the revenge-minded Native American brave Magua after Randolph Scott's scalp in The Last of the Mohicans (1936); over at MGM, he ably supported Spencer Tracy as the instigator of a lynch mob in Fritz Lang's indictment of domestic fascism, Fury (1936). A freelancer, he appeared in movies at many studios before leaving Hollywood for military service. Cabot worked for Army intelligence overseas during World War II; after the war, he continued to work steadily, with and without his friend and frequent co-star, the Duke.
Bruce Cabot died in 1972 of lung and throat cancer. He was 68 years old.- Actor
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The parents of Frank McHugh ran their own stock company and he was on the stage as a child. When he was 10 he was part of an act that include his brother Matt McHugh and sister Kitty McHugh. After vaudeville and other stock companies, Frank debuted on Broadway "The Fall Guy" (1925). In 1930 he was hired at Warner Brothers as a contract player. Frank would usually play the sidekick to the lead actor and would provide the comedy relief in tense situations - if it were called for. With his nervous laugh and hangdog look, he appeared in over 90 movies in the first dozen years he worked at Warners. He would also appear with another very busy character actor, Allen Jenkins, in a dozen or so films. McHugh would be a mechanic, a song plugger, a pilot, a baseball player or a newspaperman, and would either be married or get the girl only if the girl was not the one the hero was interested in. Over the years he would work with most of the stars that Warners employed. By the early 1950s his film career started winding down. From 1964 to 1965 he played the role of Willis Walter on The Bing Crosby Show (1964).- Actor
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John Litel's tough, no-nonsense demeanor on screen was not entirely due to his skill as an actor--when World War I broke out he enlisted in the French army, not wanting to wait until the US entered, and was twice decorated for bravery. Returning to the US after the war, he enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and toured with various stage companies, making his film debut in 1929. He was one of what was called the "Warner Bros. Stock Company" in the 1930s--with such character actors as Ward Bond, Frank McHugh, Joan Blondell, George Tobias, Henry O'Neill and Alan Hale, among others--and he appeared in dozens of films there, often as a tough police captain, hard-nosed district attorney, no-nonsense business executive and other such authority figures. He could also convincingly play villains, as when he played the evil "Scorpion" in the classic serial Don Winslow of the Navy (1942). Always a solid, dependable character actor, Litel appeared in more than 200 films, sometimes playing leads but mainly as a supporting actor. From 1952-53 he played Robert Cummings' brooding boss Mr. Thackery in the NBC-TV sitcom My Hero (1952).- Actor
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Suave, well-mannered, silvery-haired character actor Henry (Joseph) O'Neill played top supports in hundreds of films, often as a benign, wise, sensible father, judge, doctor, minister, general, executive or lawyer. Much of his patrician career was split between two studios: Warner Bros in the 1930s and MGM in the 1940s.
O'Neill was born in Orange, New Jersey on August 10, 1891, and dropped out of college to join a traveling theatre troupe. World War I military service intervened but he quickly returned to acting in 1919 upon his discharge and joined, at different times, the Provincetown Players and the Celtic Players acting companies. Making his Broadway debut at age 30 with "The Spring," he continued on Broadway for over a decade in such plays as Mr. Faust (as the Holy One) 22, "The Hairy Ape" (1922), "The Ancient Mariner" (1924), "The Fountain" (1925), "The Squall" (1926), "Jarnegan" (1928), "The Last Mile" (1930), "Old Man Murphy" (1931), "I Loved You Wednesday (1932) and, his last, "Shooting Star" (1933). His prematurely gray hair lent an air of pride and confidence in his many distinctive stage roles, particularly the works of playwright Eugene O'Neill.
In 1933, O'Neill made a solid, unerring switch to feature films and settled in for the duration of his career as a minor character. Although he was typically cast in agreeable roles, he certainly had it in him to be an urbane villain when the call came in. Films on both sides of the fence included his debut, the romantic drama I Loved a Woman (1933) starring Kay Francis and Edward G. Robinson, as well as many others, the more popular being. -- Fog Over Frisco (1934), Madame Du Barry (1934), The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (1934), Oil for the Lamps of China (1935), The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), Anthony Adverse (1936), The Great O'Malley (1937), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938), Brother Rat (1938), Dodge City (1939), Juarez (1939), Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), Four Wives (1939), Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940), Billy the Kid (1941), Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), Two Girls and a Sailor (1944), Anchors Aweigh (1945), The Beginning or the End (1947) and Alias Nick Beal (1949)
In the 1950's due to failing health, Henry spaced out his feature work with sporadic filming in such movies as The People Against O'Hara (1951), Scarlet Angel (1952), The Wings of Eagles (1957) and, his last, an uncredited bit in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). A one-time member of the board of directors of the Screen Actors Guild, he later earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
He died on May 18, 1961, and was survived by his longtime wife (since 1924) Anna and one child, Patricia He was interred at San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Mission Hills, California.- Actor
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The son of a rancher-turned-politician, Guinn Williams was given the nickname "Big Boy" (and he was, too - 6' 2" of mostly solid muscle from years of working on ranches and playing semi-pro and pro baseball) by Will Rogers, with whom he made one of his first films, in 1919. Although his father wanted him to attend West Point (he had been an officer in the Army during World War I), Williams had always wanted to act and made his way to Hollywood in 1919. His experience as a cowboy and rodeo rider got him work as a stuntman, and he gradually worked his way up to acting. He became friends with Rogers and together they made around 15 films. Additionally,in a film that has recently received critical acclaim, he appeared alongside Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor in the silent film Lucky Star (1929), playing a brute vying for the affections of Janet Gaynor in competition with a returning war veteran, played by Charles Farrell. He then easily made the transition from silents to talkies. Although he also starred in a series of low-budget westerns in the early and mid-1930s, he really came into his own as a supporting player in the late 1930s and early 1940s, especially at Warner Bros., where he appeared in such resoundingly successful westerns as Dodge City (1939) and Santa Fe Trail (1940) with his friends Errol Flynn and Alan Hale. Williams specialized in the somewhat dim and quick-tempered but basically decent sidekick, a role he would play for the next 20 years or so. He also made sound films other than westerns, and was in, for example, A Star Is Born (1937). Late in his career, he won the hearts of TV viewers in a regular role as Pete, the comedic roadie in Circus Boy (1956). In the early 1960s Williams' health began to deteriorate, which was noticeable in his last film, The Comancheros (1961), in which he had a small part and, sadly, did not look well at all. He died of uremic poisoning shortly afterwards.- Actor
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Herbert Marshall had trained to become a certified accountant, but his interest turned to the stage. He lost a leg while serving in World War I and was rehabilitated with a wooden leg. This did not stop him from making good his decision to make the stage his vocation. He used a very deliberate square-shouldered and guided walk, largely unnoticeable, to cover up his disability. He spent 20 years in distinguished stage work in London before entering films. He almost made the transition from the stage directly to sound movies except for one silent film, Mumsie (1927), produced in Great Britain. His wonderfully mellow baritone and British accent rolled out with a minimum of mouth movement and a nonchalant ease that stood out as unique. His rather blasé demeanor could take on various nuances, without overt emotion, to fit any role he played, whether sophisticated comedy or drama, and the accent fit just as well. He filled the range from romantic lead, with several sympathetic strangers thrown in, to dignified military officer to doctor to various degrees of villainy, his unemotional delivery meshing with the cold, impassive criminal character.
He was almost 40 when he appeared in his first picture in Hollywood, The Letter (1929), a film worthy of comparison (but for the primitive sound recording) to the more famous second version (The Letter (1940)) with Bette Davis. Marshall is the murder victim in 1929 and the betrayed husband in 1940. He was heavily in demand in the 1930s, sometimes in five or six pictures a year. Perhaps his best suave comedic role was in Trouble in Paradise (1932), the first non-musical sound comedy by producer-director Ernst Lubitsch--to some, Lubitsch's greatest film. That same year, Marshall did one of his most warmly human, romantic roles in the marvelously erotic Blonde Venus (1932), with the captivating Marlene Dietrich.
Through the '40s, his roles were more of the character variety, but always substantial. He was deviously subtle as the pre-World War II peace leader actually working against peace for a veiled foreign power (Germany) in Foreign Correspondent (1940). The film was one of Alfred Hitchcock 's earliest Hollywood films and definitely an under-rated thriller. Who could forget Marshall's small but standout performance as "Scott Chavez", who at the beginning of Duel in the Sun (1946), with typical Marshall nonchalance, calmly shoots his Indian cantina-entertainer wife for her cheating ways? By the '50s, Marshall was doing fewer movies, but still in varied genres. His voice was perfect to lend credence to some early sci-fi classics, such as Riders to the Stars (1954) and Gog (1954) and the The Fly (1958). He was also busy honing his considerable talent with various early-TV playhouse programs. He also fit comfortably into episodic TV, including a rare five-episode run as a priest on 77 Sunset Strip (1958). All told, Herbert Marshall graced nearly 100 movie and TV roles with an aplomb that remains a rich legacy.- Actress
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The possessor of one of Hollywood's gentlest faces and warmest voices, and about as sweet as Tupelo honey both on-and-off camera, character actress Spring Byington was seldom called upon to play callous or unsympathetic (she did once play a half-crazed housekeeper in Dragonwyck (1946)). Although playing the part of Mrs. March in Little Women (1933) was hardly what one could call a stretch, it did ignite a heartwarming typecasting that kept her employed on the screen throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Her first name said it all: sunny, sparkling, flowery, energetic, whimsical, eternally cheerful. She was a wonderfully popular and old-fashioned sort. By the 1950s, Spring had sprung on both radio and TV. The petite, be-dimpled darling became the star of her very own sitcom and, in the process, singlehandedly gave the term "mother-in-law" a decidedly positive ring.
She was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on October 17, 1886 (some sources list the year as 1893), one of two daughters born to a college professor/school superintendent. Her father Edwin died when she was quite young, and mother Helene placed the children with their maternal grandparents while she studied to become a doctor. Spring developed an early interest in the theater as a high-school teenager and ambitiously put together an acting company that toured mining camps in the Colorado Springs area. Her professional career materialized via the stock company circuit in both the U.S. and Canada. At the onset of WWI she joined a repertory company that left for Buenos Aires. There she married the company's manager, Roy Carey Chandler, and had two children by him: Phyllis and Lois. The couple remained in South America and Spring learned fluent Spanish there. About four years into the marriage, the couple divorced and Spring returned to New York with her children. She never married again.
Spring took her first Broadway bow at age 31 with a role in the comedy satire "A Beggar on Horseback", a show that lasted several months in 1924. She returned to the show briefly the following year. Other New York plays came and went throughout the 1920s, but none were certifiable hits. She did, however, gain a strong reputation playing up her fluttery comic instincts. Other shows included "Weak Sister" (1925), "Puppy Love" (1926), "Skin Deep" (1927), "To-night at Twelve" (1928) and "Be Your Age" (1929). She also played the role of Nerissa in "The Merchant of Venice" on Broadway alongside George Arliss and Peggy Wood in the roles of Shylock and Portia, respectively.
By the 1930s, Spring had established herself as a deft comedienne on stage but had made nary a dent in film. In early 1933, following major hits on Broadway with "Once in a Lifetime" (1930) and "When Ladies Meet" (1932), Spring was noticed by RKO, which had begun the casting for one of its most prestigious pictures of the year, Louisa May Alcott's classic Little Women (1933). As a testament to her talents and graceful appeal, the studio took a chance on her and gave her the role of Marmee. As mother to daughters Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Jean Parker and Frances Dee in what is still considered the best film version of the novel, Spring was praised for her work and became immediately captivated by this medium. She never returned to Broadway.
She became the quintessentially wise, concerned and understanding mother/relative in scores of films, often to her detriment. The roles were so kind, polite and conservative that it was hard for her to display any of her obvious scene-stealing abilities. As a result, she was often overlooked in her pictures. Her best parts came as a bewildered parent, snooty socialite, flaky eccentric, inveterate gossip or merry mischief-maker. From 1936 to 1939, she did a lot of mothering in the popular "Jones Family" feature film series from 1936 to 1940. but the flavorful roles she won came with her more disparate roles in Dodsworth (1936), Theodora Goes Wild (1936), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) (as the Widow Douglas), When Ladies Meet (1941) (in which she recreated her Broadway triumph), and Roxie Hart (1942) (in which she played the sob sister journalist). Spring's only Oscar nomination came with her delightful portrayal of eccentric Penny Sycamore in You Can't Take It with You (1938).
Throughout the war years, she lent her patented fluff to a number of Hollywood's finest comedies, including The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), Rings on Her Fingers (1942) and Heaven Can Wait (1943). Her career began to die down in the 1950s, and, like many others in her predicament, she turned to TV. Her sparkling performance in the comedy Louisa (1950), in which she played an older lady pursued by both Edmund Gwenn and Charles Coburn, set the perfect tone and image for her Lily Ruskin radio/TV character. December Bride (1954) was initially a popular radio program when it transferred to TV. The result was a success, and Spring became a household name as everybody's favorite mother-in-law. As a widow who lived with her daughter and son-in-law, complications ensued as the married couple tried to set Lily up for marriage--hence the title. Brash and bossy Verna Felton and the ever-droll Harry Morgan were brought in as perfect comic relief.
The show ran for a healthy five seasons, and Spring followed this in 1961 with the role of Daisy Cooper, the chief cook and surrogate mother to a bunch of cowpokes in the already established western series Laramie (1959). Making her last film appearance in the comedy Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960) as, of course, a spirited mom (this time to Doris Day), Spring, now in her 70s, started to drop off the acting radar. She eventually retired to her Hollywood Hills home after a few guest spots on such '60s shows as Batman (1966) (playing a wealthy socialite named J. Pauline Spaghetti) and I Dream of Jeannie (1965) (as Larry Hagman's mother). A very private individual in real life, Spring enjoyed traveling and reading during her retirement years. She passed away in 1971 from cancer and was survived by her two daughters, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.- Richard Gaines was born on 23 July 1904 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA. He was an actor, known for Double Indemnity (1944), Ace in the Hole (1951) and The More the Merrier (1943). He was married to Brenda Marshall. He died on 20 July 1975 in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA.
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His mother was the French Lady Comynyplatt Henrietta de Gacher, his father was the British Lieutenant William Graham Niven, who died in the war when David was six years old. Niven was considered a difficult child to educate and had to change schools often until he finally went to Sandhurst Military Academy. He came to Malta as a soldier, left the army here and went to Canada, where he worked as a lumberjack, bridge builder, journalist and whiskey salesman. After detours via New York and Cuba, Niven settled in California in 1934, where he had his first roles as an extra. He appeared in smaller films until the Second World War and then had to go to war for the British army.
In between, he also starred in propaganda films. Niven fought on the British front at Dunkirk and was promoted to colonel in 1944. General Eisenhower decorated him with the medals of the American Legion of Merit. From his first marriage to Primula Rollo, whom he married in 1940, Niven had two sons, David and Jamie. After his wife died in an accident in 1946, he married the Swede Hjordis Tersmeden in 1948, and his daughters Kristine and Fiona came from this marriage. In 1952, Niven founded the television production "Four Star TV" with Charles Boyer and other colleagues and starred in the self-produced series "The David Niven Show" and "Rogues Against Crooks". He had already been successful as an actor for a long time.
Niven starred in the 1946 English production of Error in the Afterlife and then returned to Hollywood. He celebrated successes with "The Virgin on the Roof", "Bonjour Tristesse", "The Guns of Navarone", "55 Days in Peking", "The Pink Panther", "Lady L." and with "Casino Royale". In 1959 he reached the peak of his success when he was honored with the Oscar for Best Actor for Separated from Table and Bed. His most beautiful film role was that of "Phileas Fogg" in the Jules Verne film adaptation "Around the World in 80 Days". Niven later demonstrated his enormous skills in many other films. In the 1970s and 1980s he starred in "Vampira", "A Corpse for Dessert", "Death on the Nile", "The Lion Shows its Claws" and in "Grandpa Seldom Comes Alone".
In 1982 and 1983 he had his last two roles in "The Pink Panther is Hunted" and "The Curse of the Pink Panther". Niven retired and lived on the Cote d'Azur and in Switzerland.
David Niven died on July 29, 1983 in Switzerland as a result of the nervous disease ALS. He made part of his inheritance available to medical research.- Actor
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Born George Melville Cooper on October 15, 1896, in Birmingham England, he was the son of non-professionals W.C.J. and Frances (Brennan) Cooper, and attended various English public schools, including King Edward's School in Birmingham. Attracted to the stage as a teenager, he made his debut at Stratford-on-Avon at age 18, but his young career was interrupted by World War I. Serving in a Scottish regiment on the Western Front, he was captured and made prisoner of war for a time by the Germans.
Following the war Cooper returned to the theatre and earned good reviews in the play "The Farmer's Wife" in 1921. He made his official London debut with a production of "Back to Methuselah in 1924, and furthered his career on stage with roles in "The Third Finger" (1927) and "Journey's End" (1929). He turned to films in middle age with the English entry Black Coffee (1931) and, after supporting roles in the popular costumers The Private Life of Don Juan (1934) and The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), decided to cross the waters to seek work in America. Taking his first Broadway curtain call with "Laburnum Grove" (1935), he also appeared in "Jubilee" (1935) and "Tovarich" (1937) and subsequently became a sometime stage director, as in the case of the 1947 production of "We Love a Lassie."
In Hollywood Cooper was effectively cast as ineffectual types and played in a number of "A" pictures. Giving great snob appeal, he made a most reliable and disdainful butler, chauffeur or doorman in such films as The Bishop Misbehaves (1935), Four's a Crowd (1938), Too Many Husbands (1940), And Baby Makes Three (1949) and The Petty Girl (1950). More quality roles, however, wormed their way outside this stereotype with his blundering and cowardly Sheriff of Nottingham opposite dashing Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938); conman sidekick to Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve (1941); portentous Mr. Collins whom Greer Garson nearly married in Pride and Prejudice (1940); and Mr. Tringle, the wedding supervisor, in Father of the Bride (1950) being particular standouts.
Cooper made an active jaunt into TV roles in the 1950s but returned strongly to the stage after biding farewell to films in 1958. In the 1960s he enjoyed such scene-stealing theatrical roles as Colonel Pickering in "My Fair Lady," Pellinore in "Camelot" and Reverend Chasuble in "The Importance of Being Earnest". He made one last return to Broadway playing (what else?) a valet in a short-run revival of the farcical comedy "Charley's Aunt" in 1970, which co-starred Rex Thompson, Louis Nye and 'Maureen O'Sullivan'. Married three times, his first was to London-born actress Rita Page who had a bit part in one of his films This Above All (1942), and died in 1954. They had one daughter, Valerie. The 76-year-old Cooper died in Los Angeles of cancer in 1973, and was survived by third wife Elizabeth.- Actor
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One of Hollywood's finest character actors and most accomplished scene stealers, Barry Fitzgerald was born William Joseph Shields in 1888 in Dublin, Ireland. Educated to enter the banking business, the diminutive Irishman with the irresistible brogue was bitten by the acting bug in the 1920s and joined Dublin's world-famous Abbey Players. He subsequently starred in the Abbey Theatre production of Sean O'Casey's Juno And The Paycock, a role that he recreated in his film debut for director Alfred Hitchcock in 1930. He was coaxed to the U.S. in 1935 by John Ford to appear in Ford's film adaptation of another O'Casey masterpiece, The Plough and the Stars (1936). Fitzgerald took up residence in Hollywood and went on to give outstanding performances in such films as The Long Voyage Home (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), None But the Lonely Heart (1944), And Then There Were None (1945), Two Years Before the Mast (1946) and what is probably the role for which he is most fondly remembered, The Quiet Man (1952). He won the Academy Award For Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of gruff, aging Father Fitzgibbon in Going My Way (1944). He was also nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for the same role and was the only actor to ever be so honored. Barry Fitzgerald died in his beloved Dublin in 1961.- Actor
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Ralph Bellamy was a veteran actor who was so well-liked and respected by his peers that he was the recipient of an honorary Oscar in 1987 for his contributions to the acting profession.
Ralph Rexford Bellamy was born June 17, 1904 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Lilla Louise (Smith), originally from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and Charles Rexford Bellamy, who had deep roots in New England. Bellamy began his career as a player right out of high school in 1922, joining a traveling company that put on Shakespearean plays. For the next five years he appeared with stock companies and repertory theaters associated with the Chautauqua Road Co., which brought culture to the hinterlands. He not only learned his craft but by 1927 wound up owning his own theatrical troupe. Two years later he made his Broadway theatrical debut in "Town Boy" (29 years later he would win a Tony Award).
Bellamy made the first of his over 100 films in 1933, appearing as a gangster in The Secret 6 (1931). While he never became a major star or played many leads in "A" pictures, he made a career out of playing second-leads in major productions before developing into a character actor. In his heyday he typically played a rich but dull character who is jilted by the leading lady (he won his only Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor, for just such a role in the 1937 comedy The Awful Truth (1937), in which he lost Irene Dunne to Cary Grant). He also specialized in redoubtable detectives who always find their man (he starred as Ellery Queen in a series of four "B" movies) and as slightly sinister yet stylish villains (such typecasting reaching its apogee with his turn as the not-so-kindly doctor in the horror classic Rosemary's Baby (1968)).
Bellamy's greatest role was as Franklin D. Roosevelt in Dore Schary's play "Sunrise at Campobello," for which he won a 1958 Best Actor-Dramatic Tony Award. He also reprised his portrayal of Roosevelt in Schary's 1960 movie adaptation of his play Sunrise at Campobello (1960), which brought his co-star Greer Garson a Golden Globe award and a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for playing Eleanor Roosevelt.
To play F.D.R. and show his struggle with the onset of polio, Bellamy studied up on Roosevelt as both man and politician, gaining an insight into the future president's psyche. Like Method actors Marlon Brando and Jon Voight, who prepared for their portrayals of paraplegic war veterans in the movies The Men (1950) and Coming Home (1978) by living in veterans hospitals with paraplegics, Bellamy tried to understand the trauma that F.D.R. underwent and the challenges he faced. Bellamy spent a considerable amount of time at a rehabilitation center learning how to master leg braces, crutches and a wheelchair to increase the verisimilitude of his portrayal of Rosevelt. So successful was his portrait of Roosevelt that he was called upon a generation later to recreate F.D.R. for the blockbuster TV miniseries War and Remembrance (1988) (ironically, Voight himself would later play F.D.R. in the movie Pearl Harbor (2001)).
Bellamy also had a prolific career on television, beginning with his 1948 debut in The Philco Television Playhouse (1948). He starred in one of the first TV police shows, Man Against Crime (1949), which was on the air from 1949-54, and later had roles in several other TV series, including The Eleventh Hour (1962), The Survivors (1969) and The Most Deadly Game (1970). He also appeared in countless TV-movies and tele-plays, and was three times nominated for an Emmy Award.
Known as a champion of actors' rights, Bellamy was one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild, and also served four terms as President of Actors' Equity from 1952 to 1964. He took office during some of the darkest days of McCarthyism, but positioned Actors' Equity and thus, the Broadway theater to the left of Hollywood by resisting blacklisting. Many of those blacklisted in Hollywood found homes in the theater. Under Bellamy, Actors Equity established standards to protect members against charges of Communist Party membership or "exhibiting left-wing sympathies". (One of the charges levied against legendary stage and film director Elia Kazan, including Rod Steiger at the time Kazan received an honorary Oscar, was that he should have defied the House Un-American Activities Committee and not have named names because he could have remained employed in the theater even if he had been blacklisted in Hollywood.)
Under Bellamy's leadership, Actor's Equity managed to double its assets within the first six years of his presidency and was successful in establishing the first pension fund for actors. It was for his services to the acting community that he was the recipient of an honorary Academy Award in 1987.
Ralph Bellamy died on November 29, 1991 in Santa Monica, California. He was 87 years old.- Actress
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Cecil Cunningham was born on 2 August 1880 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. She was an actress, known for The Awful Truth (1937), Playboy of Paris (1930) and Daughter of Shanghai (1937). She was married to Jean C. Havez. She died on 17 April 1959 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actress
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Esther Dale was born on November 10, 1885 in Beaufort, South Carolina. She attended Leland and Gray Seminary in Townsend, Vermont, then studied music in Berlin, Germany and had a successful career as a lieder singer. Later, she became an actress in summer stock. She had the title role on Broadway of Carrie Nation in 1933, which also starred James Stewart, Mildred Natwick, and Joshua Logan. Her first film was Crime Without Passion (1934) in 1934, followed by many, many roles in movies and television. Her husband, writer/director Arthur J. Beckhard was her manager. He died in March 1961 and she died a few months later, after surgery, in Queen of Angels Hospital in Hollywood, California.- Mary Forbes was born on 1 January 1883 in Hornsey, Middlesex [now in Haringey, London], England, UK. She was an actress, known for You Can't Take It with You (1938), The Awful Truth (1937) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). She was married to Wesley Wall, Charles Quatermaine and Ernest J. Taylor. She died on 22 July 1974 in Beaumont, California, USA.
- Skippy is known for Tim Tyler's Luck (1937).
- Paul Stanton was born on 21 December 1884 in Sterling, Illinois, USA. He was an actor, known for Bachelor Mother (1939), Across the Pacific (1942) and It Could Happen to You (1937). He died on 9 October 1955 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
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Wendy Barrie was born in Hong Kong to an English-Irish father and a Russian Jewish mother. Her dad was the distinguished King's Counsel F.C. Jenkins which ensured that the family was well off. Wendy received her education at a convent school in England and a finishing school in Switzerland. After working in beauty parlors for a brief period she set her sights on the stage and made her first foray into acting at the London Savoy Theatre in "Wonder Bar" (1930). Two years later, she was "discovered" by producer Alexander Korda while lunching at the Savoy Grill. Having successfully auditioned for the part she was famously cast as Jane Seymour, the third of the six wives at the center of The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), starring Charles Laughton. Hollywood soon beckoned and Wendy left England for America in 1934. During the next decade and a bit, she found regular employment at Paramount (1935), Universal (1936-38) and RKO (1938-42). A blonde, vivacious lass with a certain innocent charm and an instinctive acting ability, she tended to play mostly ingenue roles in minor films and often rose above her material. This led to her being given a grittier role in the social drama Dead End (1937) and Wendy's career henceforth alternated between supporting roles in bigger pictures and leads in B-movies.
From the late 1930s her parts became more varied, ranging from a gangster's moll in the crime melodrama I Am the Law (1938) to a plane crash victim in Five Came Back (1939) and Richard Greene's love interest in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), with Basil Rathbone as "Sherlock Holmes". By the 1940s, Wendy's star began to fade. This was in no small part due to the bad publicity generated by her real-life role as mistress of notorious underworld figure Bugsy Siegel. As her pickings became ever slimmer she found herself relegated to perfunctory leads in various entries of "The Saint" and "Falcon" series at RKO. After appearing in a string of other decidedly mediocre productions she decided to embark on what turned out to be a successful new career as television host of her own pioneering talk show, Picture This (1948) (1948-50). Her relaxed, informal style brought her great popularity and plaudits from television critics like Jack Gould of the New York Times. Wendy's other claim to fame was as one of the first celebrities to make television commercials, famously with Revlon on 'The $64,000 Question'. During the 1960s, she also broadcast her own radio interview show from the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. She was actively involved in various charities and was known to attend as guest speaker at philanthropic functions, freely giving of her time without remuneration. In the mid '70s, Wendy suffered a stroke which affected her mental state and she spent the last years of her life at a nursing home in Englewood, New Jersey, where she died in February 1978, aged 65.- Actress
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Claire Trevor was born Claire Wemlinger in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York, the only child of Fifth Avenue merchant-tailor Noel Wemlinger, an immigrant Frenchman from Paris who lost his business during the Depression, and his Belfast-born wife, Benjamina, known as "Betty". Young Claire's interest in acting began when she was 11 years old. She attended high school in Mamaroneck, Westchester County, New York. After starting classes at Columbia University, she spent six months at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, also in New York. Her adult acting experience began in the late 1920s in several stock productions; she appeared with Robert Henderson's Repertory Players in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1930. That same year, aged 20, she signed with Warner Bros. Not too far from her home haunts was Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn, the last and best of the early sound process studios, which had been acquired by Warner Bros. in 1925 to become Vitaphone. Trevor appeared in several of the nearly 2000 shorts cranked out by the studio between 1926 and 1930. Then she was sent west to do ten weeks of stock productions with other contract players in St. Louis. In 1931 she did summer stock with the Hampton Players in Southampton, Long Island. Finally, she debuted on Broadway in 1932 in "Whistling in the Dark".
Trevor moved to the silver screen, debuting in the western Life in the Raw (1933). There would be three more films (one more western) that year and six or more through the 1930s. Although she had been typed playing gun molls and hard-case women of the world, she displayed her already considerable versatility in these early films, often playing competent, take-charge professional women as well as "shady" ladies. There was a disappointed-pout-vulnerability in her face and that famous slightly New York-burred voice that cracked with a little cry when heightened by emotion that quickly revealed an unusual and sensitive performer. Many of her early films were "B" potboilers, but she worked with Spencer Tracy on several occasions, notably Dante's Inferno (1935).
Hollywood finally took notice of her talents by nominating her for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her standout performance as a slum girl forced by poverty into prostitution in Dead End (1937), opposite Humphrey Bogart. That same year she did the radio drama "Big Town" with Edward G. Robinson, then teamed with he and Bogart again for the slightly hokey but entertaining The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938). Director John Ford tapped her for his first big sound Western film, Stagecoach (1939), the film that made a star of John Wayne. All her abilities to bring complexity to a character showed in her kicked-around dance hall girl "Dallas", one of the great early female roles. She and Wayne were electric, and they were paired in three more films during their careers.
In the 1940s, Trevor began appearing in the genre that brought her to true stardom: "film noir". She started in a big way as killer Ruth Dillon in Street of Chance (1942) with Burgess Meredith. She was equally convincing as the more complex but nonetheless two-faced Mrs. Grayle in the Philip Marlowe vehicle Murder, My Sweet (1944). However, she was something very different and quite extraordinary as washed-up, hopelessly alcoholic former nightclub singer and moll Gaye Dawn in Key Largo (1948), for which she won an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress, again working with Bogart and Robinson. Her pitiful rendition of the torch song "Moanin' Low", which her character was forced to sing, humiliatingly, for the sadistic crime boss played by Robinson (to whom she is, figuratively speaking, permanently tethered) in exchange for a desperately needed drink. There were more quality movies and an additional Academy nomination (The High and the Mighty (1954)) into the 1950s,, but she also was doing work on stage and in television.
She was enthusiastic about live TV and appeared on several famous shows by the mid-1950s. She won an Emmy for Best Live Television Performance by an Actress as the flighty wife of Fredric March in NBC's Dodsworth (1956). She alternated her career among film, stage and TV roles. As she aged she easily transitioned into "distinguished matron" and mother roles, one of her most unusual ones being the murderous Ma Barker in Ma Barker and Her Boys (1959). Her final film role was as Sally Field's mother in Kiss Me Goodbye (1982).
Trevor and her third husband, producer Milton H. Bren, had long been residents of tony Newport Beach, California, to which they returned when she finally retired from screen work. However, she did maintain an active interest in stage work, and became associated with the University of California-Irvine's School of Arts. She and her husband contributed some $10 million to further its development for the visual and performing arts (that included three endowed professorships). After her passing in April 2000 at 90 years of age, the University renamed the school The Claire Trevor School of the Arts. Her presence on the UCI campus is in more than spirit alone. She donated her Oscar and her Emmy to UCI; both are on display in the arts plaza at the campus theatre that bears her name.- Actor
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Both of Allen Jenkins' parents were musical comedy performers, and he entered the theater as a stage mechanic after World War I, after having spent time working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Although his screen persona was that of a not-too-bright Brooklyn tough guy, Jenkins attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and appeared in many Broadway plays before making his film debut in 1931. He found his niche at Warner Brothers, where he perfected his slow-witted but good-natured gangster/taxi driver/cop/etc. character. In the latter part of his career he appeared frequently on TV, and was a regular on the TV series Hey, Jeannie! (1956). He is probably best remembered by "baby boomers" as the voice of the put-upon cop Officer Dibble in the popular cartoon series Top Cat (1961).
He died in Santa Monica, CA, in 1974 after undergoing surgery.- Actress
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Her father was a minister, and when she joined a local stock company as a youngster she changed her name to avoid embarrassing her family. She worked in vaudeville and debuted on Broadway in 1916. Her film debut was in A House Divided (1931). She repeated her stage role in Dead End (1937) as Baby Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart)'s mother, which led to a number of slum mother parts. She played very strong role of Lucy, the dude ranch operator in The Women (1939). She achieved popularity as a comedienne in six 1940s movies made with Wallace Beery e.g., Barnacle Bill (1941). The character which would dominate her remaining career was established when she played Ma Kettle in The Egg and I (1947), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. She began her co-starring series with Percy Kilbride the following year in Feudin', Fussin' and A-Fightin' (1948) and continued through seven more. Her last movie was a "Kettle" without Kilbride: The Kettles on Old MacDonald's Farm (1957).