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- Actor
- Producer
- Writer
Michael Landon was born Eugene Maurice Orowitz, on Saturday, October 31st, 1936, in
Forest Hills, Queens, New York. In 1941, he and his family moved to
Collingswood, New Jersey.
When Eugene was in high school, he participated -- and did very well --
in track and field, especially javelin throwing, and his athletic
skills earned him a scholarship to USC. However, an accident injured
his arm, ending his athletic career -- and his term at USC -- and he
worked a number of odd jobs and small roles to make ends meet and
decided that acting was for him. However, he thought that his real name
was not a suitable one for an aspiring actor, and so "Michael Landon"
was born.
Two of his first big roles were as Tony Rivers in
I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)
and as Tom Dooley in the western
The Legend of Tom Dooley (1959).
That same year he was approached by producer
David Dortort to star in a pilot called
The Restless Gun (1957),
which was renamed when the series was picked up to
Bonanza (1959). Landon played Little
Joe Cartwright, the youngest of the three Cartwright brothers, a cocky
and somewhat rebellious youth nevertheless had a way with the ladies.
For 14 years, Landon became the heart and soul of the show, endearing
himself to both younger and older viewers, and he became a household
name during the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1968, after almost ten years of playing Little Joe, he wanted an
opportunity to direct and write some episodes of the show. After the
season finale in 1972, Dan Blocker, who
played his older brother Hoss and was also a close friend, died from a
blood clot in his lung, after gall bladder surgery, but Michael decided
to go back to work, revisiting his own character in a two-part episode
called "Forever."
Bonanza (1959) was finally canceled
in early 1973, after 14 years and 430 episodes. Michael didn't have to
wait long until he landed another successful role that most TV
audiences of the 1970s would thoroughly enjoy, his second TV western,
for NBC,
Little House on the Prairie (1974).
That show was based on a popular book written by
Laura Ingalls Wilder, and he played
enduring patriarch and farmer Charles Ingalls. Unlike
Bonanza (1959), where he was mostly
just a "hired gun," on this show he served as the producer, writer,
director, and executive producer. By the end of its eighth season in
1982, Landon decided to step down from his role on "Little House" as he
saw his TV children grown up and moved out of their father's house, and
a year later, the show was canceled. After 14 years on
Bonanza (1959) and 8 years on
Little House on the Prairie (1974),
it was about time to focus on something else, and once again, he didn't
have to wait too long before
Highway to Heaven (1984)
came along. Unlike the western shows that he did for 23 years, this NBC
fantasy/drama show focused on Jonathan Smith, an angel whose job was to
save peoples' lives and work for God, his boss.
Victor French played ex-cop Mark Gordon,
who turned down a fortune but had redeemed himself by meeting Jonathan.
By the end of the fifth season in 1989, French was diagnosed with lung
cancer and died in June of that same year. Landon was devastated by the
loss and pulled the plug on
Highway to Heaven (1984).
In early 1991, after 35 years of working on NBC, he was axed by the
network, so he moved to CBS to star in the pilot of a two-hour movie,
Us (1991), in which he played Jeff
Hayes, a man freed from prison by new evidence after 18 years
wrongfully spent inside. This was going to be another one of Landon's
shows but, in April 1991, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He
later appeared on
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962)
to talk about his battle with the disease, and many people in the
audience were affected by the courage and energy he showed.
Unfortunately, he was already terminally ill by that time, and on Monday, July
1st, 1991, after a three-month battle, he finally succumbed to the
disease. His family, his colleagues, and his children were all by his
side. His life-time: Saturday, October 31st, 1936 to Monday, July 1st, 1991, was 19,966 days, equaling 2,852 weeks & 2 days.- Actress
- Soundtrack
With prominent cheekbones, luminous skin and the most crystalline green eyes of her day, Gene Tierney's striking good looks helped propel her to stardom. Her best known role is the enigmatic murder victim in Laura (1944). She was also Oscar-nominated for Leave Her to Heaven (1945). Her acting performances were few in the 1950s as she battled a troubled emotional life that included hospitalization and shock treatment for depression.
Gene Eliza Tierney was born on November 19, 1920 in Brooklyn, New York, to well-to-do parents, Belle Lavinia (Taylor) and Howard Sherwood Tierney. Her father was a successful insurance broker and her mother was a former teacher. Her childhood was lavish indeed. She also lived, at times, with her equally successful grandparents in Connecticut and New York. She was educated in the finest schools on the East Coast and at a finishing school in Switzerland.
After two years in Europe, Gene returned to the US where she completed her education. By 1938 she was performing on Broadway in What a Life! and understudied for the Primrose Path (1938) at the same time. Her wealthy father set up a corporation that was only to promote her theatrical pursuits. Her first role consisted of carrying a bucket of water across the stage, prompting one critic to announce that "Miss Tierney is, without a doubt, the most beautiful water carrier I have ever seen!" Her subsequent roles Mrs O'Brian Entertains (1939) and RingTwo (1939) were meatier and received praise from the tough New York critics. Critic Richard Watts wrote "I see no reason why Miss Tierney should not have a long and interesting theatrical career, that is if the cinema does not kidnap her away."
After being spotted by the legendary Darryl F. Zanuck during a stage performance of the hit show The Male Animal (1940), Gene was signed to a contract with 20th Century-Fox. Her first role as Barbara Hall in Hudson's Bay (1940) would be the send-off vehicle for her career. Later that year she appeared in The Return of Frank James (1940). The next year would prove to be a very busy one for Gene, as she appeared in The Shanghai Gesture (1941), Sundown (1941), Tobacco Road (1941) and Belle Starr (1941). She tried her hand at screwball comedy in Rings on Her Fingers (1942), which was a great success. Her performances in each of these productions were masterful. In 1945 she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Ellen Brent in Leave Her to Heaven (1945). Though she didn't win, it solidified her position in Hollywood society. She followed up with another great performance as Isabel Bradley in the hit The Razor's Edge (1946).
In 1944, she played what is probably her best-known role (and, most critics agree, her most outstanding performance) in Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), in which she played murder victim named Laura Hunt. In 1947 Gene played Lucy Muir in the acclaimed The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947). By this time Gene was the hottest player around, and the 1950s saw no letup as she appeared in a number of good films, among them Night and the City (1950), The Mating Season (1951), Close to My Heart (1951), Plymouth Adventure (1952), Personal Affair (1953) and The Left Hand of God (1955). The latter was to be her last performance for seven years. The pressures of a failed marriage to Oleg Cassini, the birth of a daughter with learning disabilities in 1943, and several unhappy love affairs resulted in Gene being hospitalized for depression. When she returned to the the screen in Advise & Consent (1962), her acting was as good as ever but there was no longer a big demand for her services.
Her last feature film was The Pleasure Seekers (1964), and her final appearance in the film industry was in a TV miniseries, Scruples (1980). Gene died of emphysema in Houston, Texas, on November 6, 1991, just two weeks shy of her 71st birthday.- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Considering the kind of scruffy, backwoods, uneducated, Deep-South
hillbilly types he played, many people would be surprised to hear that
Ken Curtis wasn't actually born in the south but in the small town of
Las Animas, Colorado, the son of the town sheriff. They would probably
be even more surprised to learn that he began his show business career
as a singer in the big-band era, and was a vocalist in the legendary
Tommy Dorsey orchestra. He entered films in
the late 1940s at the tail-end of the singing-cowboy period in a series
of low-budget Westerns for Columbia Pictures. When that genre died out,
Curtis turned to straight dramatic and comedy parts and became a
regular in the films of director
John Ford (who was his father-in-law).
Curtis branched out into film production in the 1950s with two
extremely low-budget monster films,
The Killer Shrews (1959) and
The Giant Gila Monster (1959),
but he is best known for his long-running role as Festus Hagen, the
scruffy, cantankerous deputy in the long-running TV series
Gunsmoke (1955).- Actress
- Soundtrack
Lee Remick was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, to Gertrude Margaret (Waldo), an actress, and Francis Edwin Remick, a department store owner. She had Irish and English ancestry. Remick was educated at Barnard College, studied dance and worked on stage
and TV, before making her film debut as a sexy Southern majorette in
Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957). Her next role was also southern: Eula Varner in
The Long, Hot Summer (1958). She emerged as a real star in the role of an apparent rape
victim in Anatomy of a Murder (1959). And she won an Academy Award nomination for her role
as the alcoholic wife of Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses (1962). After more work in TV and
movies, she moved to England in 1970, making more movies there. In 1988
she formed a production company with partners James Garner and
Peter K. Duchow.- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
This African American actor attended Penn Hills High School in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He started his junior year at 6' 5" and
finished it at 6' 9"! He played basketball throughout his high-school
years and won a scholarship. He averaged 18 points a game and 10
rebounds! He played basketball during college, but not when it would
interfere with his major at George Washington University in Washington,
DC, which was Theatrical Arts. During his college years, he met
Jay Fenichel with whom he would later make
musical productions. Upon graduation, Fenichel moved to Los Angeles and
Hall moved to Venezuela to play basketball.
After a year, Hall lost interest and relocated to Los Angeles,
California. Along with Fenichel, the duo put together two night-club
acts/musicals. One was a semi-autobiographical two-man musical, "In
Five," and the other was a two-man show called "The Worst of Friends,"
both of which played in night clubs throughout the LA area. They also
had a promotional business where they did promotional acts in
department stores for new products.
While working on the set of the series
227 (1985), he met his co-star,
Alaina Reed-Hall, who played Rose Lee
Holloway. They married--both on the set, and in real life. Predator 2 (1990) was
released December 1990, and in April 1991, he died of AIDS, which he
contracted through a blood transfusion a few months before.- Actor
- Writer
- Additional Crew
Klaus Kinski was born as Klaus Günter Karl Nakszynski in Zoppot, Free City of Danzig (now Sopot, Poland), to Susanne (Lutze), a nurse, and Bruno Nakszynski, a pharmacist. He grew up in Berlin, was drafted into the German army in 1944 and captured by British forces in Holland. After the war he began acting on the stage, quickly gaining a reputation for a ferocious talent and an equally ferocious temper. He started acting in films shortly afterward, showing an utter disregard for the quality of the productions he appeared in and churning out so many that a complete filmography is almost impossible to assemble.
However, he did turn out memorable work for director Werner Herzog, a similarly driven and obsessive character. Herzog and Kinski pushed each other to extremes over a 15-year working relationship, which finally ended after filming Cobra Verde (1987), a production plagued by volcanic clashes between the star and director, involving--among other things--violent physical altercations and mutual death threats. He subsequently directed and starred in the notorious Paganini (1989), his only film as director and which was marked by (again) clashes between Kinski and his producers, who accused him of turning their movie into a pornographic film and sued him in court. His autobiography, "All I Need is Love", a vicious attack on the film industry, was withdrawn for legal reasons and subsequently re-released as "Kinski Uncut" in the US & UK, "Ich brauche Liebe" in Germany, and in various other languages.- Actor
- Soundtrack
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.- Editor
- Director
- Writer
An important British filmmaker, David Lean was born in Croydon on March 25, 1908 and brought up in a strict Quaker family (ironically, as a child he wasn't allowed to go to the movies). During the 1920s, he briefly considered the possibility of becoming an accountant like his father before finding a job at Gaumont British Studios in 1927. He worked as tea boy, clapper boy, messenger, then cutting room assistant. By 1935, he had become chief editor of Gaumont British News until in 1939 when he began to edit feature films, notably for Anthony Asquith, Paul Czinner and Michael Powell. Amongst films he worked on were Pygmalion (1938), Major Barbara (1941) and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942).
By the end of the 1930s, Lean's reputation as an editor was very well established. In 1942, Noël Coward gave Lean the chance to co-direct with him the war film In Which We Serve (1942). Shortly after, with the encouragement of Coward, Lean, cinematographer Ronald Neame and producer 'Anthony Havelock-Allan' launched a production company called Cineguild. For that firm Lean first directed adaptations of three plays by Coward: the chronicle This Happy Breed (1944), the humorous ghost story
Blithe Spirit (1945) and, most notably, the sentimental drama Brief Encounter (1945). Originally a box-office failure in England, "Brief Encounter" was presented at the very first Cannes film festival (1946), where it won almost unanimous praises as well as a Grand Prize.
From Coward, Lean switched to Charles Dickens, directing two well-regarded adaptations: Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). The latter, starring Alec Guinness in his first major movie role, was criticized by some, however, for potential anti-Semitic inflections. The last two films made under the Cineguild banner were The Passionate Friends (1949), a romance from a novel by H.G. Wells, and the true crime story Madeleine (1950). Neither had a significant impact on critics or audiences.
The Cineguild partnership came to an end after a dispute between Lean and Neame. Lean's first post-Cineguild production was the aviation
drama The Sound Barrier (1952), a great box-office success in England and his most spectacular movie so far. He followed with two sophisticated comedies based on theatrical plays: Hobson's Choice (1954) and the Anglo-American co-production Summertime (1955). Both were well received and "Hobson's Choice" won the Golden Bear at the 1954 Berlin film festival.
Lean's next movie was pivotal in his career, as it was the first of those grand-scale epics he would become renowned for. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) was produced by Sam Spiegel from a novel by 'Pierre Boulle', adapted by blacklisted writers Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman. Shot in Ceylon under extremely difficult conditions, the film was an international success and triumphed at the Oscars, winning seven awards, most notably best film and director.
Lean and Spiegel followed with an even more ambitious film, Lawrence of Arabia (1962), based on "Seven Pillars of Wisdom", the autobiography of T.E. Lawrence. Starring relative newcomer Peter O'Toole, this film was the first collaboration between Lean and writer Robert Bolt, cinematographer Freddie Young and composer Maurice Jarre. The shooting itself took place in Spain, Morocco and Jordan over a period of 20 months. Initial reviews were mixed and the film was trimmed down shortly after its world première and cut even more during a 1971 re-release. Like its predecessor, it won seven Oscars, once again including best film and director.
The same team of Lean, Bolt, Young and Jarre next worked on an adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel "Dr. Zhivago" for producer Carlo Ponti. Doctor Zhivago (1965) was shot in Spain and Finland, standing in for revolutionary Russia and, despite divided critics, was hugely successful, as was Jarre's musical score. The film won five Oscars out of ten nominations, but the statuettes for film and director went to The Sound of Music (1965).
Lean's next movie, the sentimental drama Ryan's Daughter (1970), did not reach the same heights. The original screenplay by Robert Bolt was produced by old associate Anthony Havelock-Allan, and Lean once again secured the collaboration of Freddie Young and Maurice Jarre. The shooting in Ireland lasted about a year, much longer than expected. The film won two Oscars; but, for the most part, critical reaction was tepid, sometimes downright derisive, and the general public didn't really respond to the movie.
This relative lack of success seems to have inhibited Lean's creativity for a while. But towards the end of the 1970s, he started to work again with Robert Bolt on an ambitious two-part movie about the Bounty mutiny. The project fell apart and was eventually recuperated by Dino De Laurentiis. Lean was then approached by producers John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin to adapt E.M. Forster's novel "A Passage to India", a book Lean had been interested in for more than 20 years. For the first time in his career; Lean wrote the adaptation alone, basing himself partly on Santha Rama Rau's stage version of the book. Lean also acted as his own editor. A Passage to India (1984) opened to mostly favourable reviews and performed quite well at the box-office. It was a strong Oscar contender, scoring 11 nominations. It settled for two wins, losing the trophy battle to Milos Forman's Amadeus (1984).
Lean spent the last few years of his life preparing an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's meditative adventure novel "Nostromo". He also participated briefly in Richard Harris' restoration of "Lawrence of Arabia" in 1988. In 1990, Lean received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement award. He died of cancer on April 16, 1991 at age 83, shortly before the shooting of "Nostromo" was about to begin.
Lean was known on sets for his extreme perfectionism and autocratic behavior, an attitude that sometimes alienated his cast or crew. Though his cinematic approach, classic and refined, clearly belongs to a bygone era, his films have aged rather well and his influence can still be found in movies like The English Patient (1996) and Titanic (1997). In 1999, the British Film Institute compiled a list of the 100 favorite British films of the 20th century. Five by David Lean appeared in the top 30, three of them in the top five.- Born in Florida in 1949, Brad Davis moved to Georgia after graduating
from high school to pursue an acting career. From there, he moved to
New York City, twice, to find work. By the early 1970s Davis was acting
in off-Broadway plays while studying acting at the Academy of Dramatic
Arts. His stage work led to his movie debut and to television shows
such as the hit Sybil (1976) and the mini-series Roots (1977). His biggest
success was in 1978 with the lead role in Midnight Express (1978) where he played Billy
Hayes, a young American imprisoned in Turkey for drug smuggling. It won
him a Golden Globe award.
Another memorable movie role in 1982 was playing the title character of
Querelle (1982), a ruggedly lethal sailor who seduces and sets both men and
women's hearts aflutter.
Davis contracted AIDS in 1979 apparently from his one-time cocaine addiction, but in response to the anti-AIDS hysteria in Hollywood,
Davis kept his illness a secret for a number of years and continued to act. His later years had him finally revealing that he had AIDS by the late 1980s and he became an AIDS activist in bashing the Hollywood industry and US government for ignoring and shunning victims suffering from the hideous disease. Brad Davis died in 1991 at age 41. His widow, Susan Bluestein, continues
his activist work in the fight against AIDS. - Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Fred MacMurray was likely the most underrated actor of his generation. True, his earliest work is mostly dismissed as pedestrian, but no other actor working in the 1940s and 50s was able to score so supremely whenever cast against type.
Frederick Martin MacMurray was born in Kankakee, Illinois, to Maleta Martin and Frederick MacMurray. His father had Scottish ancestry and his mother's family was German. His father's sister was vaudeville performer and actress Fay Holderness. When MacMurray was five years old, the family moved to Beaver Dam in Wisconsin, his parents' birth state. He graduated from Beaver Dam High School (later the site of Beaver Dam Middle School), where he was a three-sport star in football, baseball, and basketball. Fred retained a special place in his heart for his small-town Wisconsin upbringing, referring at any opportunity in magazine articles or interviews to the lifelong friends and cherished memories of Beaver Dam, even including mementos of his childhood in several of his films. In "Pardon my Past", Fred and fellow GI William Demarest are moving to Beaver Dam, WI to start a mink farm.
MacMurray earned a full scholarship to attend Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin and had ambitions to become a musician. In college, MacMurray participated in numerous local bands, playing the saxophone. In 1930, he played saxophone in the Gus Arnheim and his Coconut Grove Orchestra when Bing Crosby was the lead vocalist and Russ Columbo was in the violin section. MacMurray recorded a vocal with Arnheim's orchestra "All I Want Is Just One Girl" -- Victor 22384, 3/20/30. He appeared on Broadway in the 1930 hit production of "Three's a Crowd" starring Sydney Greenstreet, Clifton Webb and Libby Holman. He next worked alongside Bob Hope in the 1933 production of "Roberta" before he signed on with Paramount Pictures in 1934 for the then-standard 7-year contract (the hit show made Bob Hope a star and he was also signed by Paramount). MacMurray married Lillian Lamont (D: June 22, 1953) on June 20, 1936, and they adopted two children.
Although his early film work is largely overlooked by film historians and critics today, he rose steadily within the ranks of Paramount's contract stars, working with some of Hollywood's greatest talents, including wunderkind writer-director Preston Sturges (whom he intensely disliked) and actors Humphrey Bogart and Marlene Dietrich. Although the majority of his films of the 30's can largely be dismissed as standard fare there are exceptions: he played opposite Claudette Colbert in seven films, beginning with The Gilded Lily (1935). He also co-starred with Katharine Hepburn in the classic, Alice Adams (1935), and with Carole Lombard in Hands Across the Table (1935), The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936) -- an ambitious early outdoor 3-strip Technicolor hit, co-starring with Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney directed by Henry Hathaway -- The Princess Comes Across (1936), and True Confession (1937). MacMurray spent the decade learning his craft and developing a reputation as a solid actor. In an interesting sidebar, artist C.C. Beck used MacMurray as the initial model for a superhero character who would become Fawcett Comics' Captain Marvel in 1939.
The 1940s gave him his chance to shine. He proved himself in melodramas such as Above Suspicion (1943) and musicals (Where Do We Go from Here? (1945)), somewhat ironically becoming one of Hollywood's highest-paid actors by 1943, when his salary reached $420,000. He scored a huge hit with the thoroughly entertaining The Egg and I (1947), again teamed with Ms. Colbert and today largely remembered for launching the long-running Ma and Pa Kettle franchise. In 1941, MacMurray purchased a large parcel of land in Sonoma County, California and began a winery/cattle ranch. He raised his family on the ranch and it became the home to his second wife, June Haver after their marriage in 1954. The winery remains in operation today in the capable hands of their daughter, Kate MacMurray. Despite being habitually typecast as a "nice guy", MacMurray often said that his best roles were when he was cast against type by Billy Wilder. In 1944, he played the role of "Walter Neff", an insurance salesman (numerous other actors had turned the role down) who plots with a greedy wife Barbara Stanwyck to murder her husband in Double Indemnity (1944) -- inarguably the greatest role of his entire career. Indeed, anyone today having any doubts as to his potential depth as an actor should watch this film. He did another stellar turn in the "not so nice" category, playing the cynical, spineless "Lieutenant Thomas Keefer" in the 1954 production of The Caine Mutiny (1954), directed by Edward Dmytryk. He gave another superb dramatic performance cast against type as a hard-boiled crooked cop in Pushover (1954).
Despite these and other successes, his career waned considerably by the late 1950s and he finished out the decade working in a handful of non-descript westerns. MacMurray's career got its second wind beginning in 1959 when he was cast as the dog-hating father figure (well, he was a retired mailman) in the first Walt Disney live-action comedy, The Shaggy Dog (1959). The film was an enormous hit and Uncle Walt green lighted several projects around his middle-aged star. Billy Wilder came calling again and he did a masterful turn in the role of Jeff Sheldrake, a two-timing corporate executive in Wilder's Oscar-winning comedy-drama The Apartment (1960), with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon -- arguably his second greatest role and the last one to really challenge him as an actor. Although this role would ultimately be remembered as his last great performance, he continued with the lightweight Disney comedies while pulling double duty, thanks to an exceptionally generous contract, on TV.
MacMurray was cast in 1961 as Professor Ned Brainerd in Disney's The Absent Minded Professor (1961) and in its superior sequel, Son of Flubber (1962). These hit Disney comedies raised his late-career profile considerably and producer Don Fedderson beckoned with My Three Sons (1960) debuting in 1960 on ABC. The gentle sitcom staple remained on the air for 12 seasons (380 episodes). Concerned about his work load and time away from his ranch and family, Fred played hardball with his series contract. In addition to his generous salary, the "Sons" contract was written so that all the scenes requiring his presence to be shot first, requiring him to work only 65 days per season on the show (the contract was reportedly used as an example by Dean Martin when negotiating the wildly generous terms contained in his later variety show contract). This requirement meant the series actors had to work with stand-ins and posed wardrobe continuity issues. The series moved without a hitch to CBS in the fall of 1965 in color after ABC, then still an also-ran network with its eyes peeled on the bottom line, refused to increase the budget required for color production (color became a U.S. industry standard in the 1968 season). This freed him to pursue his film work, family, ranch, and his principal hobby, golf.
Politically very conservative, MacMurray was a staunch supporter of the Republican Party; he joined his old friend Bob Hope and James Stewart in campaigning for Richard Nixon in 1968. He was also widely known one of the most -- to be polite -- frugal actors in the business. Stories floated around the industry in the 60s regarding famous hard-boiled egg brown bag lunches and stingy tips. After the cancellation of My Three Sons in 1972, MacMurray made only a few more film appearances before retiring to his ranch in 1978. As a result of a long battle with leukemia, MacMurray died of pneumonia at the age of eighty-three in Santa Monica on November 5, 1991. He was buried in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Nancy Kulp wore many hats: Publicity person, actress, linguist, would-be politician,
and teacher. Originally from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Kulp attended college in Florida,
then headed for Hollywood to work in publicity for the movies, not star in them. Soon
after arriving in Hollywood, Kulp was convinced by director George Cukor and
casting director Billy Gordon that she should be in front of the camera, not
behind the scenes. She then began a solid career as a character actress in films and
television, including two memorable roles: on The Bob Cummings Show (1955) as bird-loving
"Pamela Livingstone", and on The Beverly Hillbillies (1962) as the long-suffering, lovesick, and
bird-loving "Miss Jane Hathaway". After the Hillbillies ended its 9-year run, Kulp found
work in theater, Broadway, and television, and dabbled in politics, making an unsuccessful
1984 run for Congress in Pennsylvania. Later, she taught acting and retired to a farm in
Connecticut and, later, Palm Springs, where she died of cancer in 1991.- Handsome, rugged American leading man John Russell (whose credits are
often confused with those of child actor Johnny Russell) attended the
University of California, where he was a student athlete. Serving in
the US Marine Corps in WW II, he earned a battlefield commission and
decorations for valor at Guadalcanal. His dark good looks brought him
to the attention of a talent scout after the war and he began playing
second leads and occasional heavies in major productions. In the 1950s,
he branched into television and starred in several popular series, most
notably Lawman (1958). His appearances were sporadic after the 1960s, though
he was a memorable villain in Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider (1985). - Actress
- Soundtrack
This marvelous screen comedienne's best asset was only muffled during
her seven years' stint in silent films. That asset? It was, of course,
her squeaky, frog-like voice, which silent-era cinema audiences had
simply no way of perceiving, much less appreciating. Jean Arthur, born
Gladys Georgianna Greene in upstate New York, 20 miles south of the
Canadian border, has had her year of birth cited variously as 1900,
1905 and 1908. Her place of birth has often been cited as New York
City! (Herein we shall rely for those particulars on Miss Arthur's
obituary as given in the authoritative and reliable New York Times. The
date and place indicated above shall be deemed correct.) Following her
screen debut in a bit part in John Ford's Cameo Kirby (1923), she spent several
years playing unremarkable roles as ingénue or leading lady in comedy
shorts and cheapie westerns. With the arrival of sound she was able to
appear in films whose quality was but slightly improved over that of
her past silents. She had to contend, for example, with the
consummately evil likes of Dr. Fu Manchu (played by future "Charlie
Chan" Warner Oland). Her career bloomed with her appearance in Ford's
The Whole Town's Talking (1935), in which she played opposite Edward G. Robinson, the latter in a dual
role as a notorious gangster and his lookalike, a befuddled,
well-meaning clerk. Here is where her wholesomeness and flair for
farcical comedy began making themselves plain. The turning point in her
career came when she was chosen by Frank Capra to star with Gary Cooper in the
classic social comedy Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). Here she rescues the hero - thus herself
becoming heroine! - from rapacious human vultures who are scheming to
separate him from his wealth. In Capra's masterpiece Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), she again
rescues a besieged hero (James Stewart), protecting him from a band of
manipulative and cynical politicians and their cronies and again she
ends up as a heroine of sorts. For her performance in George Stevens' The More the Merrier (1943),
in which she starred with Joel McCrea and Charles Coburn, she received a Best
Actress Academy Award nomination, but the award went to Jennifer Jones in
The Song of Bernadette (1943) (Coburn, incidentally, won for Best Supporting Actor). Her
career began waning toward the end of the 1940s. She starred with
Marlene Dietrich and John Lund in Billy Wilder's fluff about post-World War II Berlin,
A Foreign Affair (1948). Thereafter, the actress would return to the screen but once,
again for George Stevens but not in comedy. She starred with Alan Ladd and
Van Heflin in Stevens' western Shane (1953), playing the wife of a besieged
settler (Heflin) who accepts help from a nomadic gunman (Ladd) in the
settler's effort to protect his farm. It was her silver-screen
swansong. She would provide one more opportunity for a mass audience to
appreciate her craft. In 1966 she starred as a witty and sophisticated
lawyer, Patricia Marshall, a widow, in the TV series The Jean Arthur Show (1966). Her time
was apparently past, however; the show ran for only 11
weeks.- Cassandra Harris was born on 15 December 1942 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. She was an actress, known for For Your Eyes Only (1981), Remington Steele (1982) and Rough Cut (1980). She was married to Pierce Brosnan, Dermot Harris and William Firth. She died on 28 December 1991 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Actor
- Additional Crew
A prolific character actor on British television for three decades, Ronald Lacey was born on June 18, 1935 in the suburbs of London. He
began his career in 1961 after compulsory National Service. He
attended The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. His first
notable performance was delivered on stage in 1962 at The Royal Court Theatre in "Chips
With Everything". Lacey had an unusual pug look with beady eyes and
cherub's cheeks which landed him repeatedly in bizarre roles on both
stage and screen. However it was his unforgettable demonic smile and
peculiar Peter Lorre mannerisms that would bring Lacey a short period of
fame in Hollywood.
After performing on British television throughout
the 1960's and 1970's, Lacey finally landed the role for which these
characteristics could be used to full advantage. In 1981 he was cast as
the villainous Nazi henchman in 'Steven Spielberg' 's widescreen
blockbuster Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) He followed this with a series of various
villainous roles for the next five to six years: Firefox (1982) with 'Clint
Eastwood', Sahara (1983) with Brooke Shields, and Red Sonja (1985) with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Lacey turned
in two hilarious cinematic performances in full drag (Disney's Trenchcoat (1983)
with Margot Kidder from 1982 and Invitation to the Wedding (1983) from 1985 - in which he played a
husband/wife couple!).
Lacey died in London of liver failure on May 15, 1991. A
tremendous talent with great depth and many facets, Ronald Lacey will
probably be remembered best for his small but significant role as the dapper yet
psychotic Nazi in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Bert Convy was born on 23 July 1933 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He was an actor and producer, known for The Cannonball Run (1981), Hero at Large (1980) and Weekend Warriors (1986). He was married to Catherine Hall and Anne Anderson. He died on 15 July 1991 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Dean Jagger was born in Lima, Ohio, on November 7, 1903. He dropped out
of high school twice before finally graduating from Wabash College.
Working first as a school teacher, he soon became interested in acting
and enrolled at Chicago's "Lyceum Art Conservatory". Mr. Jagger made
his first movie and only silent film,
The Woman from Hell (1929)
in 1929, starring Mary Astor. During 1929 he also appeared in the film
Handcuffed (1929). He quickly found
his niche as a character actor and the highlight of his career was
winning an Oscar for "Best Supporting Actor," in the 1949 movie
Twelve O'Clock High (1949).
Dean played Principal Albert Vane on TV for the 1963-1964 season of
Mr. Novak (1963). Dean Jagger died
in Santa Monica, California, on February 5, 1991.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Tall, luminous and leonine, the legendary Colleen Dewhurst must go down as one of the theater's finest contemporary tragediennes of the late 1900s. With trademark dusky tones and a majestically careworn appearance, she possessed an inimitable down-to-earth fierceness that not only earned her the title "Queen of Off-Broadway" but allowed her to put a fiery and formidable stamp on a number of Eugene O'Neill's heroines. She was no slouch in the on-camera department, either, reaping trophies for a host of wryly comedic and electrifying dramatic turns on TV. While most of her towering achievements occurred in mid- to late career, she quickly made up for lost time. In addition, she and two-time actor/husband George C. Scott became an acting force together throughout much of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Colleen Rose Dewhurst was born on June 3, 1924, in Montreal, Quebec, the only child of Ferdinand Augustus "Fred" Dewhurst, a hockey and football player who later became sales manager of a lighting concern to support his family. Her mother, Frances Marie (nee Woods), a homemaker, was a Christian Science practitioner. Raised in the United States from the age of 13 (mostly in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin), she graduated from Riverside High School in Milwaukee in 1942 and then enrolled at Milwaukee's Downer College for Young Ladies. Working such odd jobs as a receptionist and elevator operator in between summer-stock engagements, she prepared for the stage in New York at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she met and later married fellow acting student James Vickery in 1947. She also took up studies with such illustrious teachers as Harold Clurman and Tyrone Guthrie.
Dewhurst played Julia Cavendish in "The Royal Family" while a student at Carnegie Lyceum in 1946. However, it took six years for her to make her professional debut at the ANTA in New York with a small dancing role in O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms" (1952). In 1963, she won an Obie Award in the same play's leading role, Abbie. She built up her esteemed resumé gradually. In 1956 Joseph Papp featured her strongly at his New York Shakespeare Festival with roles in "Tamburlaine the Great", "Titus Andronicus", "Camille" (title part), "The Taming of the Shrew" (as Kate), and "The Eagle Has Two Heads". She won another Obie Award for her combined performances in the last three productions mentioned. The following year she portrayed Lady Macbeth in "Macbeth" and Mrs. Squeamish in "The Country Wife".
Dewhurst divorced her first husband, actor James Vickery in 1959 after meeting George C. Scott during the 1958 run of Broadway's "Children of Darkness", for which she won a Theatre World Award. Scott divorced his wife to marry Dewhurst in 1960 (ex-husband Vickery later married actress Diana Muldaur). Scott and Dewhurst had two children, Alexander Robert Scott ("Alex") and Campbell Scott.
Dewhurst's signature O'Neill role was that of Irish-American Josie Hogan in "The Moon for the Misbegotten". She first played the part in 1958 in Italy, then tackled the role again in 1965 in a production in Buffalo, New York. The third time was the charm when she recreated the role on Broadway in December of 1973 at age 49, not only earning the coveted Tony Award (her second), but the Los Angeles Drama Critics and Sarah Siddons awards as well. Over the years, O'Neill's plays would benefit greatly from her searing, impassioned performances, which included Sara in "More Stately Mansions," Christine Mannon in "Mourning Becomes Electra," Mary Tyrone in "Long Day's Journey Into Night," Essie Miller in "Ah, Wilderness!" and, of course, Abbie Putnam in "Desire Under the Elms". In 1987, she portrayed Carlotta Monterey O'Neill (Eugene's wife) in an acclaimed one-woman show, "My Gene", in New York.
Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Dewhurst became a frequent contender at the Tony Awards ceremonies. She won her first Tony for James Agee's "All the Way Home" in 1960, and went on to be nominated for "Great Day in the Morning" (1962), "The Ballad of the Sad Café" (1963), "More Stately Mansions" (1967), "All Over" (1971), "Mourning Becomes Electra" (1972) and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1976). One of her few career failures was directing the Broadway production of "Ned & Jack", which opened and closed the same night on November 8, 1981. Very much a theater activist, she joined several advisory boards in her time and became president of the Actor's Equity Association in 1985, serving until her death six years later.
While Dewhurst and then-husband Scott were heralded for their explosive appearances together on stage ("Desire Under the Elms" [both won Obies], "Antony and Cleopatra," "The Lion in Winter"), film (The Last Run (1971)) and TV (The Crucible (1967)), the couple's personal relationship was equally turbulent. Separated in 1963 and divorced in 1965, they remarried two years later. After appearing together in "The Last Run", Scott and Dewhurst parted ways again when he took up with another actress from the movie, Trish Van Devere, whom he later married. Scott and Dewhurst had two sons together and remained amicable.
Preferring the stage, Dewhurst was vastly underused on the big screen. Despite showing Hollywood her potential on film with a small but spectacular, spine-tingling role as an asylum patient who nearly does in poor Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story (1959), she offered only a sprinkling of film roles over the years--Man on a String (1960), A Fine Madness (1966), The Cowboys (1972), McQ (1974), Ice Castles (1978), When a Stranger Calls (1979), Tribute (1980), The Dead Zone (1983), The Boy Who Could Fly (1986), Termini Station (1989) and Dying Young (1991).
Better utilized on TV, the multiple Emmy Award winner appeared delightfully as Candice Bergen's brash worldly mother on the popular Murphy Brown (1988), earning two of her Emmy statuettes. The other two came for her strong supporting performances in the mini-movies Between Two Women (1986) and Those She Left Behind (1989). In 1985, she played Marilla Cuthbert in Kevin Sullivan's strong adaptation of Anne of Green Gables (1985) and continued her role in the mini-movie Anne of Avonlea (1987). She graced Sullivan's series Avonlea (1990) with the same character in a recurring format. Sadly, Dewhurst died before her role could be written out of the show properly. A touching death scene was edited into one episode as a tribute.
Diagnosed with cervical cancer, Colleen's fervent Christian Science beliefs led her to refuse any kind of surgical treatment. She died at age 67 at the pet-friendly South Salem, New York, farmhouse she shared with her companion (since 1974), producer Ken Marsolais on August 22, 1991. Two months later, her ex-husband George C. Scott starred in and directed a production of "On Borrowed Time", dedicating the show to her memory. Both of their sons, Alexander Robert Scott ("Alex") and Campbell Scott entered the entertainment field. Alex became a theatrical manager and writer, while Campbell has appeared on stage and in films. He appeared with his mother on Broadway in "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and "Ah, Wilderness!" (both by Eugene O'Neill) in the late 1980s, and in the film "Dying Young (1991)" (one of her last performances).
Her autobiography, incomplete at the time of her death (she had been working on it for nearly 15 years), finally arrived in bookstores in 1997, six years after her death.- Actress
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Natalie Schafer got her start doing Broadway plays then making the move
to the big screen. Even before
Gilligan's Island (1964),
she was typecast in roles as society women, or elegant, fashionable
ladies. It was her role as "Eunice 'Lovey' Wentworth Howell" wife of
multi-millionaire Thurston Howell III, that she was best known for.
After the show ended its run in 1967, Schafer did a few guest
appearances on shows, most notably
The Brady Bunch (1969).- Actor
- Soundtrack
John McIntire possessed the requisite grit, craggy features and crusty,
steely-eyed countenance to make for one of television and film's most
durable supporting players of western settings. Born in Spokane,
Washington in 1907 and the son of a lawyer, he grew up in Montana where
he learned to raise and ride broncos on the family homestead. After two
years at USC, he spent some time out at sea before turning his
attentions to entertainment and the stage. As a radio announcer, he
gained quite a following announcing on the "March of Time" broadcasts.
In the late 1940s, John migrated west and found a niche for himself in
rugged oaters and crimers. Normally the politicians, ranchers and
lawmen he portrayed could be counted on for their integrity, maturity
and worldly wise, no-nonsense approach to life such as in
Black Bart (1948),
Down to the Sea in Ships (1949),
The Asphalt Jungle (1950),
Saddle Tramp (1950) and
The World in His Arms (1952).
However, director Anthony Mann
tapped his versatility and gave him a few shadier, more interesting
villains to play in two of his top-notch western films:
Winchester '73 (1950) and
The Far Country (1954) and a kindhearted role in
The Tin Star (1957).
Television helped John gain an even stronger foothold in late 1950s
Hollywood. Although his character departed the first season of the
Naked City (1958) program, he
became a familiar face in two other classic western series. He won the
role of Christopher Hale in 1961 after
Wagon Train (1957) series' star
Ward Bond died, and then succeeded the late
Charles Bickford in
The Virginian (1962) in 1967
playing Bickford's brother, Clay Grainger, for three years.
John's deep, dusty, resonant voice was utilized often for narratives
and documentaries. In the ensuing years, he and his longtime wife,
actress Jeanette Nolan, became the
Ossie Davis and
Ruby Dee of the sagebrush set,
appearing together as the quintessential frontier couple for decades
and decades. They were married for 56 years until John's death of
emphysema in 1991. They both outlived their son,
Tim McIntire, a strapping, imposing
actor himself, who died in 1986 of heart problems.- Actress
- Additional Crew
Oona O'Neil was born in Warwick Parish, Bermuda, the daughter of famed American playwright Eugene O'Neill and English-born socialite Agnes Boulton. Oona had a fairly happy childhood, although she rarely saw her busy father. During her teens Oona attended boarding school in New York where she met Gloria Vanderbilt and Carol Marcus, and in 1941 Oona was named one of the most sought-after débutantes of the social season. Oona felt it was only natural that she become an actress, since she was the daughter of a playwright and the granddaughter of James O'Neill, a noted theater actor during the late 19th century.
Oona traveled to Hollywood in 1942, where she met silent film legend Charles Chaplin at the home of her agent. Chaplin began courting Oona after she auditioned for a film he was directing, and the pair married in 1943. He was 54; she was just 18. Oona scrapped plans to become an actress, opting instead to raise a family of what would be eight children with Charlie. Although Oona was content with her life, she was deeply troubled by the failed relationship with her father, who disowned her and cut communication with Oona when she married Chaplin.
During the height of McCarthyism 1952, Chaplin sailed to England to promote a film. En route, Chaplin learned that he would not be allowed to return to the U.S. unless he would submit to inquires regarding his morality. Refusing to do so, he and his family eventually ended up in Vevey, Switzerland.
Oona spent the rest of her life in Vevey, leaving only a few times after Charlie died in 1977 at the age of 88. (Oona was only 51.) Oona developed a few close relationships with Hollywood icons, like actor Ryan O'Neal, but she never married again. She died in Vevey from pancreatic cancer on September 27th, 1991.- Actor
- Soundtrack
British character actor of wry charm, equally at home in amused or
strait-laced characters. A native of Bourton-on-the-Water in
Gloucestershire, he attended Marlborough College and the Royal Academy
of Dramatic Arts. His stage debut came in 1922, and by 1925 he was a
busy London actor. He married actress Blanche Glynne (real name:
Blanche Hope Aitken) and in 1932 toured South Africa in plays. Alleged
to have been spotted by George Cukor during a performance in Aldritch,
Hyde-White (with or without Cukor's help) made his film debut in 1934.
He often appeared under the name Hyde White in these early films. He
continued to act upon the stage, playing opposite Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh
in "Caesar and Cleopatra" and "Antony and Cleopatra" in 1951. With
scores of films to his credit, he will always be remembered for one,
My Fair Lady (1964), in which he played Colonel Pickering.
Active into his ninth decade, Hyde-White died six days before his 88th
birthday. He was survived by his second wife, Ethel, and three
children.- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
John Hoyt was born on 5 October 1905 in Bronxville, New York, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for When Worlds Collide (1951), Spartacus (1960) and Brute Force (1947). He was married to Dorothy Marion Oltman and Marion Virginia Burns. He died on 15 September 1991 in Santa Cruz, California, USA.- Actor
- Producer
- Writer
James Grover Franciscus graduated magna cum laude from Yale University
in 1957 with a B.A. in English and theater. His father, John Allen
Franciscus, was a pilot killed in action during WWII. His mother was
named Loraine (nee Grover) and he had one sibling, a brother named
John. Mr. Franciscus is best known for his work in television,
including Naked City (1958),
The Investigators (1961),
Mr. Novak (1963) and
Longstreet (1971). He also made
numerous guest appearances in other popular television programs,
starred in numerous television movies, and appeared in numerous feature
films. In the mid 1980s, he became dissatisfied with the roles offered
to him and turned his attention to screen writing. As co-founder of
Omnibus Productions, he produced many classic films, such as
Heidi (1968),
Jane Eyre (1970),
David Copperfield (1970),
Kidnapped (1971), and
The Red Pony (1973). An
avid tennis player, he founded the James Franciscus Celebrity Tennis
Tournament in the mid 1970s to raise money for multiple sclerosis
research and victims (his mother suffered from this disease). He also
enjoyed sky diving and scuba diving. He married
Kathleen 'Kitty' Wellman,
daughter of director
William A. Wellman, on March 28,
1960, and fathered four daughters (Jamie, Kellie, Corie and Jolie). A
devoted family man, his contracts often stipulated that he not be
required to work past 6:00 pm. After his divorce from Wellman, he
married second wife Carla in 1980 and continued to live on his two acre
North Hollywood estate until his death.- Director
- Writer
- Producer
One of seven children, Frank Capra was born on May 18, 1897, in
Bisacquino, Sicily. On May 10, 1903, his family left for America aboard
the ship Germania, arriving in New York on May 23rd. "There's no
ventilation, and it stinks like hell. They're all miserable. It's the
most degrading place you could ever be," Capra said about his Atlantic
passage. "Oh, it was awful, awful. It seems to always be storming,
raining like hell and very windy, with these big long rolling Atlantic
waves. Everybody was sick, vomiting. God, they were sick. And the poor
kids were always crying."
The family boarded a train for the trip to California, where Frank's
older brother Benjamin was living. On their journey, they subsisted on
bread and bananas, as their lack of English made it impossible for them
to ask for any other kind of foodstuffs. On June 3, the Capra family
arrived at the Southern Pacific station in Los Angeles, at the time, a
small city of approximately 102,000 people. The family stayed with
Capra's older brother Benjamin, and on September 14, 1903, Frank began
his schooling at the Castelar Elementary school.
In 1909, he entered Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School. Capra made
money selling newspapers in downtown L.A. after school and on
Saturdays, sometimes working with his brother Tony. When sales were
slow, Tony punched Frank to attract attention, which would attract a
crowd and make Frank's papers sell quicker. Frank later became part of
a two-man music combo, playing at various places in the red light
district of L.A., including brothels, getting paid a dollar per night,
performing the popular songs. He also worked as a janitor at the high
school in the early mornings. It was at high school that he became
interested in the theater, typically doing back-stage work such as
lighting.
Capra's family pressured him to drop out of school and go to work, but
he refused, as he wanted to partake fully of the American Dream, and
for that he needed an education. Capra later reminisced that his family
"thought I was a bum. My mother would slap me around; she wanted me to
quit school. My teachers would urge me to keep going....I was going to
school because I had a fight on my hands that I wanted to win."
Capra graduated from high school on January 27, 1915, and in September
of that year, he entered the Throop College of Technology (later the
California Institute of Technology) to study chemical engineering. The
school's annual tuition was $250, and Capra received occasional
financial support from his family, who were resigned to the fact they
had a scholar in their midst. Throop had a fine arts department, and
Capra discovered poetry and the essays of Montaigne, which he fell in
love with, while matriculating at the technical school. He then decided
to write.
"It was a great discovery for me. I discovered language. I discovered
poetry. I discovered poetry at Caltech, can you imagine that? That was
a big turning point in my life. I didn't know anything could be so
beautiful." Capra penned "The Butler's Failure," about an English
butler provoked by poverty to murder his employer, then to suicide."
Capra was singled out for a cash award of $250 for having the highest
grades in the school. Part of his prize was a six-week trip across the
U.S. and Canada. When Capra's father, Turiddu, died in 1916, Capra
started working at the campus laundry to make money.
After the U.S. Congress declared War on Germany on April 6, 1917, Capra
enlisted in the Army, and while he was not a naturalized citizen yet,
he was allowed to join the military as part of the Coastal Artillery.
Capra became a supply officer for the student soldiers at Throop, who
have been enrolled in a Reserve Officers Training Corps program. At his
enlistment, Capra discovered he was not an American citizen; he became
naturalized in 1920.
On September 15, 1918, Capra graduated from Throop with his bachelor's
degree, and was inducted into the U.S. Army on October 18th and shipped
out to the Presidio at San Francisco. An armistice ending the fighting
of World War One would be declared in less than a month. While at the
Presidio, Capra became ill with the Spanish influenza that claimed 20
million lives worldwide. He was discharged from the Army on December
13th and moved to his brother Ben's home in L.A. While recuperating,
Capra answered a cattle call for extras for
John Ford's film "The
The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1919)
(Capra, cast as a laborer in the Ford picture, introduced himself to
the film's star, Harry Carey. Two decades
later, Capra, designated the #1 director in Hollywood by "Time"
magazine, would cast Carey and his movie actress wife Olive in
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
for which Carey won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination).
While living at his mother's house, Capra took on a wide variety of
manual laboring jobs, including errand boy and ditch digger, even
working as an orange tree pruner at 20 cents a day. He continued to be
employed as an extra at movie studios and as a prop buyer at an
independent studio at Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, which later
became the home of Columbia Pictures, where Capra would make his
reputation as the most successful movie director of the 1930s. Most of
his time was spent unemployed and idle, which gave credence to his
family's earlier opposition to him seeking higher education. Capra
wrote short stories but was unable to get them published. He eventually
got work as a live-in tutor for the son of "Lucky" Baldwin, a rich
gambler. (He later used the Baldwin estate as a location for
Dirigible (1931)).
Smitten by the movie bug, in August of that year, Capra, former actor
W. M. Plank, and financial backer Ida May Heitmann incorporated the
Tri-State Motion Picture Co. in Nevada. Tri-State produced three short
films in Nevada in 1920,
Don't Change Your Husband (1919),
The Pulse of Life (1917), and
The Scar of Love (1920), all directed by Plank, and possibly based on
story treatments written by Capra. The films were failures, and Capra
returned to Los Angeles when Tri-State broke up. In March 1920, Capra
was employed by CBC Film Sales Co., the corporate precursor of Columbia
Films, where he also worked as an editor and director on a series
called "Screen Snapshots." He quit CBC in August and moved to San
Francisco, but the only jobs he could find were that of bookseller and
door-to-door salesman. Once again seeming to fulfill his family's
prophecy, he turned to gambling, and also learned to ride the rails
with a hobo named Frank Dwyer. There was also a rumor that he became a
traveling salesman specializing in worthless securities, according to a
"Time" magazine story "Columbia's Gem" (August 8, 1938 issue, V.32, No.
6).
Still based in San Francisco in 1921, producer
Walter Montague hired Capra for $75 per
week to help direct the short movie
The Ballad of Fisher's Boarding House (1922),
which was based on a poem by
Rudyard Kipling. Montague, a former
actor, had the dubious idea that foggy San Francisco was destined to
become the capital of movies, and that he could make a fortune making
movies based on poems. Capra helped Montague produced the one-reeler,
which was budgeted at $1,700 and subsequently sold to the Pathe
Exchange for $3,500. Capra quit Montague when he demanded that the next
movie be based upon one of his own poems.
Unable to find another professional filmmaking job, Capra hired himself
out as a maker of shorts for the public-at-large while working as an
assistant at Walter Ball's film lab. Finally, in October 1921, the Paul
Gerson Picture Corp. hired him to help make its two-reel comedies,
around the time that he began dating the actress Helen Edith Howe, who
would become his first wife. Capra continued to work for both Ball and
Gerson, primarily as a cutter. On November 25, 1923, Capra married
Helen Howell, and the couple soon moved to Hollywood.
Hal Roach hired Capra as a gag-writer
for the "Our Gang" series in January, 1924. After writing the gags for
five "Our Gang" comedies in seven weeks, he asked Roach to make him a
director. When Roach refused (he somewhat rightly felt he had found the
right man in director Bob McGowan),
Capra quit. Roach's arch rival Mack Sennett
subsequently hired him as a writer, one of a six-man team that wrote
for silent movie comedian
Harry Langdon, the last major star
of the rapidly disintegrating Mack Sennett Studios, and reigning
briefly as fourth major silent comedian after
Charles Chaplin,
Buster Keaton, and
Harold Lloyd. Capra began working
with the Harry Langdon production
unit as a gag writer, first credited on the short
Plain Clothes (1925).
As Harry Langdon became more
popular, his production unit at Sennett had moved from two- to
three-reelers before Langdon, determined to follow the example of
Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, went into features. After making his first
feature-length comedy,
His First Flame (1927) for
Sennett, Langdon signed a three-year contract with
Sol Lesser's First National Pictures to
annually produce two feature-length comedies at a fixed fee per film.
For a multitude of reasons Mack Sennett was
never able to retain top talent. On September 15, 1925,
Harry Langdon left Sennett in an
egotistical rage, taking many of his key production personnel with him.
Sennett promoted Capra to director but fired him after three days in
his new position. In addition to the Langdon comedies, Capra had also
written material for other Sennett films, eventually working on
twenty-five movies.
After being sacked by Sennett, Capra was hired as a gag-writer by
Harry Langdon, working on
Langdon's first First National feature-length film,
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926).
The movie was directed by
Harry Edwards who had directed all
of Harry Langdon's films at
Sennett. His first comedy for First National,
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926)
did well at the box office, but it had ran over budget, which came out
of Langdon's end. Harry Edwards was sacked, and for his next picture,
The Strong Man (1926), Langdon
promoted Capra to director, boosting his salary to $750 per week. The
movie was a hit, but trouble was brewing among members of the
Harry Langdon company. Langdon was
increasingly believing his own press.
His marriage with Helen began to unravel when it is discovered that she
had a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy that had to be terminated. In
order to cope with the tragedy, Capra became a work-a-holic while Helen
turned to drink. The deterioration of his marriage was mirrored by the
disintegration of his professional relationship with
Harry Langdonduring the making of
the new feature, Long Pants (1927).
The movie, which was released in March 1927, proved to be Capra's last
with Harry Langdon, as the
comedian soon sacked Capra after its release. Capra later explained the
principle of Langdon comedies to James Agee,
"It is the principal of the brick: If there was a rule for writing
Langdon material, it was this: his only ally was God.
Harry Langdon might be saved by a
brick falling on a cop, but it was verboten that he in any way
motivated the bricks fall."
During the production of
Long Pants (1926), Capra had a falling
out with Langdon. Screenwriter
Arthur Ripley's dark sensibility
did not mesh well with that of the more optimistic Capra, and
Harry Langdon usually sided with
Ripley. The picture fell behind schedule and went over budget, and
since Langdon was paid a fixed fee for each film, this represented a
financial loss to his own Harry Langdon Corp. Stung by the financial
set-back, and desiring to further emulate the great Chaplin,
Harry Langdon made a fateful
decision: He fired Capra and decided to direct himself. (Langdon's next
three movies for First National were dismal failures, the two surviving
films being very dark and grim black comedies, one of which,
The Chaser (1928), touched on the
subject of suicide. It was the late years of the Jazz Age, a time of
unprecedented prosperity and boundless bonhomie, and the critics, and
more critically, the ticket-buying public, rejected Harry. In 1928,
First National did not pick up his contract. The Harry Langdon Corp.
soon went bankrupt, and his career as the "fourth major silent
comedian" was through, just as sound was coming in.)
In April of 1927, Capra and his wife Helen split up, and Capra went off
to New York to direct
For the Love of Mike (1927)
for First National, his first picture with
Claudette Colbert. The
director and his star did not get along, and the film went over budget.
Subsequently, First National refused to pay Capra, and he had to
hitchhike back to Hollywood. The film proved to be Capra's only genuine
flop.
By September 1927, he was back working as a writer for
Mack Sennett, but in October, he was hired
as a director by Columbia Pictures President and Production Chief
Harry Cohn for $1,000. The event was
momentous for both of them, for at Columbia Capra would soon become the
#1 director in Hollywood in the 1930s, and the success of Capra's films
would propel the Poverty Row studio into the major leagues. But at
first, Cohn was displeased with him. When viewing the first three days
of rushes of his first Columbia film,
That Certain Thing (1928),
Cohn wanted to fire him as everything on the first day had been shot in
long shot, on the second day in medium shot, and on the third day in
close-ups.
"I did it that way for time," Capra later recalled. "It was so easy to
be better than the other directors, because they were all dopes. They
would shoot a long shot, then they would have to change the setup to
shoot a medium shot, then they would take their close-ups. Then they
would come back and start over again. You lose time, you see, moving
the cameras and the big goddamn lights. I said, 'I'll get all the long
shots on that first set first, then all the medium shots, and then the
close-ups.' I wouldn't shoot the whole scene each way unless it was
necessary. If I knew that part of it was going to play in long shot, I
wouldn't shoot that part in close-up. But the trick was not to move
nine times, just to move three times. This saved a day, maybe two
days."
Cohn decided to stick with Capra (he was ultimately delighted at the
picture and gave Capra a $1,500 bonus and upped his per-picture
salary), and in 1928, Cohn raised his salary again, now to to $3,000
per picture after he made several successful pictures, including
Submarine (1928).
The Younger Generation (1929),
the first of a series of films with higher budgets to be directed by
Capra, would prove to be his first sound film, when scenes were reshot
for dialogue. In the summer of that year, he was introduced to a young
widow, Lucille Warner Reyburn (who became Capra's second wife
Lou Capra). He also met a transplanted stage
actress, Barbara Stanwyck, who had been
recruited for the talkie but had been in three successive unsuccessful
films and wanted to return to the New York stage.
Harry Cohn wanted Stanwyck to appear
in Capra's planned film,
Ladies of Leisure (1930), but
the interview with Capra did not go well, and Capra refused to use her.
Stanwyck went home crying after being dismissed by Capra, and her
husband, a furious Frank Fay, called Capra up.
In his defense, Capra said that Stanwyck didn't seem to want the part.
According to Capra's 1961 autobiography, "The Name Above the Title,"
Fay said, "Frank, she's young, and shy, and she's been kicked around
out here. Let me show you a test she made at Warner's." After viewing
her Warners' test for The Noose (1928),
Capra became enthusiastic and urged Cohn to sign her. In January of
1930, Capra began shooting
Ladies of Leisure (1930) with
Stanwyck in the lead. The movies the two made together in the early
'30s established them both on their separate journeys towards becoming
movieland legends. Though Capra would admit to falling in love with his
leading lady, it was Lucille Warner Reyburn who became the second Mrs.
Capra.
"You're wondering why I was at that party. That's my racket. I'm a
party girl. Do you know what that is?"
Stanwyck played a working-class "party girl" hired as a model by the
painter Jerry, who hails from a wealthy family. Capra had written the
first draft of the movie before screenwriter
Jo Swerling took over. Swerling thought the
treatment was dreadful. According to Capra, Swerling told
Harry Cohn, when he initially had
approached about adapting the play "Ladies of the Evening" into Capra's
next proposed film, "I don't like Hollywood, I don't like you, and I
certainly don't like this putrid piece of gorgonzola somebody gave me
to read. It stunk when Belasco produced it as
Ladies of Leisure (1930), and
it will stink as Ladies of Leisure, even if your little tin Jesus does
direct it. The script is inane, vacuous, pompous, unreal, unbelievable and incredibly dull."
Capra, who favored extensive rehearsals before shooting a scene,
developed his mature directorial style while collaborating with
Stanwyck, a trained stage actress whose performance steadily
deteriorated after rehearsals or retakes. Stanwyck's first take in a
scene usually was her best. Capra started blocking out scenes in
advance, and carefully preparing his other actors so that they could
react to Stanwyck in the first shot, whose acting often was
unpredictable, so they wouldn't foul up the continuity. In response to
this semi-improvisatory style, Capra's crew had to boost its level of
craftsmanship to beyond normal Hollywood standards, which were forged
in more static and prosaic work conditions. Thus, the professionalism
of Capra's crews became better than those of other directors. Capra's
philosophy for his crew was, "You guys are working for the actors,
they're not working for you."
After "Ladies of Leisure," Capra was assigned to direct
Platinum Blonde (1931) starring
Jean Harlow. The script had been the
product of a series of writers, including
Jo Swerling (who was given credit for
adaptation), but was polished by Capra and
Robert Riskin (who was given
screen credit for the dialogue). Along with
Jo Swerling, Riskin would rank as one of
Capra's most important collaborators, ultimately having a hand in 13
movies. (Riskin wrote nine screenplays for Capra, and Capra based four
other films on Riskin's work.)
Riskin created a hard-boiled newspaperman, Stew Smith for the film, a
character his widow, the actress Fay Wray, said
came closest to Riskin of any character he wrote. A comic character,
the wise-cracking reporter who wants to lampoon high society but finds
himself hostage to the pretensions of the rich he had previously mocked
is the debut of the prototypical "Capra" hero. The dilemma faced by
Stew, akin to the immigrant's desire to assimilate but being rejected
by established society, was repeated in
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)
and in Meet John Doe (1941).
Capra, Stanwyck, Riskin and Jo Swerling all
were together to create Capra's next picture,
The Miracle Woman (1931), a
story about a shady evangelist. With
John Meehan, Riskin wrote the play
that the movie is based on, "Bless You, Sister," and there is a
possibly apocryphal story that has Riskin at a story conference at
which Capra relates the treatment for the proposed film. Capra,
finished, asked Riskin for his input, and Riskin replied, "I wrote that
play. My brother and I were stupid enough to produce it on Broadway. It
cost us almost every cent we had. If you intend to make a picture of
it, it only proves one thing: You're even more stupid than we were."
Jo Swerling adapted Riskin's play, which he
and his brother Everett patterned after
Sinclair Lewis' "Elmer Gantry." Like the
Lewis novel, the play focuses on the relationship between a lady
evangelist and a con man. The difference, though, is that the nature of
the relationship is just implied in Riskin's play (and the Capra film).
There is also the addition of the blind war-vet as the moral conscience
of the story; he is the pivotal character, whereas in Lewis' tale, the
con artist comes to have complete control over the evangelist after
eventually seducing her. Like some other Capra films,
The Miracle Woman (1931) is
about the love between a romantic, idealizing man and a cynical, bitter
woman. Riskin had based his character on lady evangelist Uldine Utley,
while Stanwyck based her characterization on
Aimee Semple McPherson.
Recognizing that he had something in his star director,
Harry Cohn took full advantage of the
lowly position his studio had in Hollywood. Both Warner Brothers and
mighty MGM habitually lent Cohn their troublesome stars -- anyone
rejecting scripts or demanding a pay raise was fodder for a loan out to
Cohn's Poverty Row studio. Cohn himself was habitually loathe to sign
long-term stars in the early 1930s (although he made rare exceptions to
Peter Lorre and
The Three Stooges) and was delighted
to land the talents of any top flight star and invariably assigned them
to Capra's pictures. Most began their tenure in purgatory with
trepidation but left eagerly wanting to work with Capra again.
In 1932, Capra decided to make a motion picture that reflected the
social conditions of the day. He and Riskin wrote the screenplay for
American Madness (1932), a
melodrama that is an important precursor to later Capra films, not only
with
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
which shares the plot device of a bank run, but also in the depiction
of the irrationality of a crowd mentality and the ability of the
individual to make a difference. In the movie, an idealistic banker is
excoriated by his conservative board of directors for making loans to
small businesses on the basis of character rather than on sounder
financial criteria. Since the Great Depression is on, and many people
lack collateral, it would be impossible to productively lend money on
any other criteria than character, the banker argues. When there is a
run on the bank due to a scandal, it appears that the board of
directors are rights the bank depositors make a run on the bank to take
out their money before the bank fails. The fear of a bank failure
ensures that the failure will become a reality as a crowd mentality
takes over among the clientèle. The board of directors refuse to pledge
their capital to stave off the collapse of the bank, but the banker
makes a plea to the crowd, and just like George Bailey's depositors in
It's a Wonderful Life (1946),
the bank is saved as the fears of the crowd are ameliorated and
businessmen grateful to the banker pledge their capital to save the
bank. The board of directors, impressed by the banker's character and
his belief in the character of his individual clients (as opposed to
the irrationality of the crowd), pledge their capital and the bank run
is staved off and the bank is saved.
In his biography, "The Name Above the Picture," Capra wrote that before
American Madness (1932), he had
only made "escapist" pictures with no basis in reality. He recounts how
Poverty Row studios, lacking stars and production values, had to resort
to "gimmick" movies to pull the crowds in, making films on au courant
controversial subjects that were equivalent to "yellow journalism."
What was more important than the subject and its handling was the
maturation of Capra's directorial style with the film. Capra had become
convinced that the mass-experience of watching a motion picture with an
audience had the psychological effect in individual audience members of
slowing down the pace of a film. A film that during shooting and then
when viewed on a movieola editing device and on a small screen in a
screening room among a few professionals that had seemed normally paced
became sluggish when projected on the big screen. While this could have
been the result of the projection process blowing up the actors to such
large proportions, Capra ultimately believed it was the effect of mass
psychology affecting crowds since he also noticed this "slowing down"
phenomenon at ball games and at political conventions. Since
American Madness (1932) dealt
with crowds, he feared that the effect would be magnified.
He decided to boost the pace of the film, during the shooting. He did
away with characters' entrances and exits that were a common part of
cinematic "grammar" in the early 1930s, a survival of the "photoplays"
days. Instead, he "jumped" characters in and out of scenes, and
jettisoned the dissolves that were also part of cinematic grammar that
typically ended scenes and indicated changes in time or locale so as
not to make cutting between scenes seem choppy to the audience.
Dialogue was deliberately overlapped, a radical innovation in the early
talkies, when actors were instructed to let the other actor finish his
or her lines completely before taking up their cue and beginning their
own lines, in order to facilitate the editing of the sound-track. What
he felt was his greatest innovation was to boost the pacing of the
acting in the film by a third by making a scene that would normally
play in one minute take only 40 seconds.
When all these innovations were combined in his final cut, it made the
movie seem normally paced on the big screen, though while shooting
individual scenes, the pacing had seemed exaggerated. It also gave the
film a sense of urgency that befitted the subject of a financial panic
and a run on a bank. More importantly, it "kept audience attention
riveted to the screen," as he said in his autobiography. Except for
"mood pieces," Capra subsequently used these techniques in all his
films, and he was amused by critics who commented on the "naturalness"
of his direction.
Capra was close to completely establishing his themes and style. Justly
accused of indulging in sentiment which some critics labeled
"Capra-corn," Capra's next film,
Lady for a Day (1933) was an
adaptation of Damon Runyon's 1929 short
story "Madame La Gimp" about a nearly destitute apple peddler whom the
superstitious gambler Dave the Dude (portrayed by Warner Brothers star
Warren William) sets up in high style so
she and her daughter, who is visiting with her finance, will not be
embarrassed. Dave the Dude believes his luck at gambling comes from his
ritualistically buying an apple a day from Annie, who is distraught and
considering suicide to avoid the shame of her daughter seeing her
reduced to living on the street. The Dude and his criminal confederates
put Annie up in a luxury apartment with a faux husband in order to
establish Annie in the eyes of her daughter as a dignified and
respectable woman, but in typical Runyon fashion, Annie becomes more
than a fake as the masquerade continues.
Robert Riskin wrote the first four
drafts of Lady for a Day (1933),
and of all the scripts he worked on for Capra, the film deviates less
from the script than any other. After seeing the movie, Runyon sent a
telegraph to Riskin praising him for his success at elaborating on the
story and fleshing out the characters while maintain his basic story.
Lady for a Day (1933) was the
favorite Capra film of John Ford, the
great filmmaker who once directed the unknown extra. The movie cost
$300,000 and was the first of Capra's oeuvre to attract the attention
of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, getting a Best
Director nomination for Capra, plus nods for Riskin and Best Actress.
The movie received Columbia's first Best Picture nomination, the studio
never having attracted any attention from the Academy before
Lady for a Day (1933). (Capra's
last film was the flop remake of
Lady for a Day (1933) with
Bette Davis and
Glenn Ford,
Pocketful of Miracles (1961))
Capra reunited with Stanwyck and produced his first universally
acknowledged classic,
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932),
a film that now seems to belong more to the oeuvre of
Josef von Sternberg than it does to
Frank Capra. With "General Yen," Capra had consciously set out to make
a movie that would win Academy Awards. Frustrated that the innovative,
timely, and critically well-received
American Madness (1932) had not
received any recognition at the Oscars (particularly in the director's
category in recognition of his innovations in pacing), he vented his
displeasure to Columbia boss Cohn.
"Forget it," Cohn told Capra, as recounted in his autobiography. "You
ain't got a Chinaman's chance. They only vote for that arty junk."
Capra set out to boost his chances by making an arty film featuring a
"Chinaman" that confronted that major taboo of American cinema of the
first half of the century, miscegenation.
In the movie, the American missionary Megan Davis is in China to marry
another missionary. Abducted by the Chinese Warlord General Yen, she is
torn away from the American compound that kept her isolated from the
Chinese and finds herself in a strange, dangerous culture. The two fall
in love despite their different races and life-views. The film ran up
against the taboo against miscegenation embedded in the Motion Picture
Producers and Distributors Association's Production Code, and while
Megan merely kisses General Yen's hand in the picture, the fact that
she was undeniably in love with a man from a different race attracted
the vituperation of many bigots.
Having fallen for Megan, General Yen engenders her escape back to the
Americans before willingly drinking a poisoned cup of tea, his
involvement with her having cost him his army, his wealth, and now his
desire to live.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932)
marks the introduction of suicide as a Capra theme that will come back
repeatedly, most especially in George Bailey's breakdown on the snowy
bridge in
It's a Wonderful Life (1946).
Despair often shows itself in Capra films, and although in his
post-"General Yen" work, the final reel wraps things up in a happy way,
until that final reel, there is tragedy, cynicism, heartless
exploitation, and other grim subject matter that Capra's audiences must
have known were the truth of the world, but that were too grim to face
when walking out of a movie theater. When pre-Code movies were
rediscovered and showcased across the United States in the 1990s, they
were often accompanied by thesis about how contemporary audiences
"read" the films (and post-1934 more Puritanical works), as the movies
were not so frank or racy as supposed. There was a great deal of
signaling going on which the audience could read into, and the same
must have been true for Capra's films, giving lie to the fact that he
was a sentimentalist with a saccharine view of America. There are few
films as bitter as those of Frank Capra before the final reel.
Despair was what befell Frank Capra, personally, on the night of March
16, 1934, which he attended as one of the Best Director nominees for
Lady for a Day (1933). Capra had
caught Oscar fever, and in his own words, "In the interim between the
nominations and the final voting...my mind was on those Oscars." When
Oscar host Will Rogers opened the
envelope for Best Director, he commented, "Well, well, well. What do
you know. I've watched this young man for a long time. Saw him come up
from the bottom, and I mean the bottom. It couldn't have happened to a
nicer guy. Come on up and get it, Frank!"
Capra got up to go get it, squeezing past tables and making his way to
the open dance floor to accept his Oscar. "The spotlight searched
around trying to find me.
'Over here!' I waved. Then it suddenly swept
away from me -- and picked up a flustered man standing on the other
side of the dance floor -
Frank Lloyd!"
Frank Lloyd went up to the dais to
accept HIS Oscar while a voice in back of Capra yelled, "Down in
front!"
Capra's walk back to his table amidst shouts of "Sit down!" turned into
the "Longest, saddest, most shattering walk in my life. I wished I
could have crawled under the rug like a miserable worm. When I slumped
in my chair I felt like one. All of my friends at the table were
crying."
That night, after Lloyd's
Cavalcade (1933), beat
Lady for a Day (1933) for Best
Picture, Capra got drunk at his house and passed out. "Big 'stupido,'"
Capra thought to himself, "running up to get an Oscar dying with
excitement, only to crawl back dying with shame. Those crummy Academy
voters; to hell with their lousy awards. If ever they did vote me one,
I would never, never, NEVER show up to accept it."
Capra would win his first of three Best Director Oscars the next year,
and would show up to accept it. More importantly, he would become the
president of the Academy in 1935 and take it out of the labor relations
field a time when labor strife and the formation of the talent guilds
threatened to destroy it.
The International Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences had been
the brainchild of Louis B. Mayer in 1927
(it dropped the "International" soon after its formation). In order to
forestall unionization by the creative talent (directors, actors and
screenwriters) who were not covered by the Basic Agreement signed in
1926, Mayer had the idea of forming a company union, which is how the
Academy came into being. The nascent Screen Writers Union, which had
been created in 1920 in Hollywood, had never succeeded in getting a
contract from the studios. It went out of existence in 1927, when labor
relations between writers and studios were handled by the Academy's
writers' branch.
The Academy had brokered studio-mandated pay-cuts of 10% in 1927 and
1931, and massive layoffs in 1930 and 1931. With the inauguration of
President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 4, 1933, Roosevelt took no
time in attempting to tackle the Great Depression. The day after his
inauguration, he declared a National Bank Holiday, which hurt the movie
industry as it was heavily dependent on bank loans.
Louis B. Mayer, as president of the
Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc. (the co-equal arm of the
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association charged with
handling labor relations) huddled with a group from the Academy (the
organization he created and had long been criticized for dominating, in
both labor relations and during the awards season) and announced a 50%
across-the-board pay cut. In response, stagehands called a strike for
March 13th, which shut down every studio in Hollywood.
After another caucus between Mayer and the Academy committee, a
proposal for a pay-cut on a sliding-scale up to 50% for everyone making
over $50 a week; which would only last for eight weeks, was
inaugurated. Screen writers resigned en masse from the Academy and
joined a reformed Screen Writers Guild, but most employees had little
choice and went along with it. All the studios but Warner Bros. and Sam
Goldwyn honored the pledge to restore full salaries after the eight
weeks, and Warners production chief
Darryl F. Zanuck resigned in protest
over his studio's failure to honor its pledge. A time of bad feelings
persisted, and much anger was directed towards the Academy in its role
as company union.
The Academy, trying to position itself as an independent arbiter, hired
the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse for the first time to inspect
the books of the studios. The audit revealed that all the studios were
solvent, but Harry Warner refused to budge and Academy President
'Conrad Nagel' resigned, although some said he was forced out after a
vote of no-confidence after arguing Warner's case. The Academy
announced that the studio bosses would never again try to impose a
horizontal salary cut, but the usefulness of the Academy as a company
union was over.
Under Roosevelt's New Deal, the self-regulation imposed by the National
Industrial Relations Act (signed into law on June 16th) to bring
business sectors back to economic health was predicated upon
cartelization, in which the industry itself wrote its own regulatory
code. With Hollywood, it meant the re-imposition of paternalistic labor
relations that the Academy had been created to wallpaper over. The last
nail in the company union's coffin was when it became public knowledge
that the Academy appointed a committee to investigate the continued
feasibility of the industry practice of giving actors and writers
long-term contracts. High salaries to directors, actors, and screen
writers was compensation to the creative people for producers refusing
to ceded control over creative decision-making. Long-term contracts
were the only stability in the Hollywood economic set-up up creative
people,. Up to 20%-25% of net earnings of the movie industry went to
bonuses to studio owners, production chiefs, and senior executives at
the end of each year, and this created a good deal of resentment that
fueled the militancy of the SWG and led to the formation of the Screen
Actors Guild in July 1933 when they, too, felt that the Academy had
sold them out.
The industry code instituted a cap on the salaries of actors,
directors, and writers, but not of movie executives; mandated the
licensing of agents by producers; and created a reserve clause similar
to baseball where studios had renewal options with talent with expired
contracts, who could only move to a new studio if the studio they had
last been signed to did not pick up their option.
The SWG sent a telegram to FDR in October 1933 denouncing this policy,
arguing that the executives had taken millions of dollars of bonuses
while running their companies into receivership and bankruptcy. The SWG
denounced the continued membership of executives who had led their
studios into financial failure remaining on the corporate boards and in
the management of the reorganized companies, and furthermore protested
their use of the NIRA to write their corrupt and failed business
practices into law at the expense of the workers.
There was a mass resignation of actors from the Academy in October
1933, with the actors switching their allegiance to SAG. SAG joined
with the SWG to publish "The Screen Guilds Magazine," a periodical
whose editorial content attacked the Academy as a company union in the
producers' pocket. SAG President Eddie Cantor, a friend of Roosevelt
who had bee invited to spend the Thanksgiving Day holiday with the
president, informed him of the guild's grievances over the NIRA code.
Roosevelt struck down many of the movie industry code's anti-labor
provisions by executive order.
The labor battles between the guilds and the studios would continue
until the late 1930s, and by the time Frank Capra was elected president
of the Academy in 1935, the post was an unenviable one. The Screen
Directors Guild was formed at King Vidor's house on January 15, 1936,
and one of its first acts was to send a letter to its members urging
them to boycott the Academy Awards ceremony, which was three days away.
None of the guilds had been recognized as bargaining agents by the
studios, and it was argued to grace the Academy Awards would give the
Academy, a company union, recognition. Academy membership had declined
to 40 from a high of 600, and Capra believed that the guilds wanted to
punish the studios financially by depriving them of the good publicity
the Oscars generated.
But the studios couldn't care less. Seeing that the Academy was
worthless to help them in its attempts to enforce wage cuts, it too
abandoned the Academy, which it had financed. Capra and the Board
members had to pay for the Oscar statuettes for the 1936 ceremony. In
order to counter the boycott threat, Capra needed a good publicity
gimmick himself, and the Academy came up with one, voting
D.W. Griffith an honorary Oscar,
the first bestowed since one had been given to
Charles Chaplin at the first Academy
Awards ceremony.
The Guilds believed the boycott had worked as only 20 SAG members and
13 SWG members had showed up at the Oscars, but Capra remembered the
night as a victory as all the winners had shown up. However, 'Variety'
wrote that "there was not the galaxy of stars and celebs in the
director and writer groups which distinguished awards banquets in
recent years." "Variety" reported that to boost attendance, tickets had
been given to secretaries and the like.
Bette Davis and
Victor McLaglen had showed up to accept
their Oscars, but McLaglen's director and screenwriter,
John Ford and
Dudley Nichols, both winners like
McLaglen for The Informer (1935),
were not there, and Nichols became the first person to refuse an
Academy Award when he sent back his statuette to the Academy with a
note saying he would not turn his back on his fellow writers in the
SWG. Capra sent it back to him. Ford, the treasurer of the SDG, had not
showed up to accept his Oscar, he explained, because he wasn't a member
of the Academy. When Capra staged a ceremony where Ford accepted his
award, the SDG voted him out of office.
To save the Academy and the Oscars, Capra convinced the board to get it
out of the labor relations field. He also democratized the nomination
process to eliminate studio politics, opened the cinematography and
interior decoration awards to films made outside the U.S., and created
two new acting awards for supporting performances to win over SAG.
By the 1937 awards ceremony, SAG signaled its pleasure that the Academy
had mostly stayed out of labor relations by announcing it had no
objection to its members attending the awards ceremony. The ceremony
was a success, despite the fact that the Academy had to charge
admission due to its poor finances. Frank Capra had saved the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and he even won his second Oscar
that night, for directing
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936).
At the end of the evening, Capra announced the creation of the
Irving Thalberg Memorial Award to honor
"the most consistent high level of production achievement by an
individual producer." It was an award he himself was not destined to
win.
By the 1938 awards, the Academy and all three guilds had buried the
hatchet, and the guild presidents all attended the ceremony: SWG
President Dudley Nichols, who finally had
accepted his Oscar, SAG President Robert Montgomery, and SDG President
King Vidor. Capra also had introduced the
secret ballot, the results of which were unknown to everyone but the
press, who were informed just before the dinner so they could make
their deadlines. The first Irving Thalberg Award was given to long-time
Academy supporter and anti-Guild stalwart
Darryl F. Zanuck by
Cecil B. DeMille, who in his
preparatory remarks, declared that the Academy was "now free of all
labor struggles."
But those struggles weren't over. In 1939, Capra had been voted
president of the SDG and began negotiating with AMPP President 'Joseph
Schenck', the head of 20th Century-Fox, for the industry to recognize
the SDG as the sole collective bargaining agent for directors. When
Schenck refused, Capra mobilized the directors and threatened a strike.
He also threatened to resign from the Academy and mount a boycott of
the awards ceremony, which was to be held a week later. Schenck gave
in, and Capra won another victory when he was named Best Director for a
third time at the Academy Awards, and his movie,
You Can't Take It with You (1938),
was voted Best Picture of 1938.
The 1940 awards ceremony was the last that Capra presided over, and he
directed a documentary about them, which was sold to Warner Bros' for
$30,000, the monies going to the Academy. He was nominated himself for
Best Director and Best Picture for
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),
but lost to the
Gone with the Wind (1939)
juggernaut. Under Capra's guidance, the Academy had left the labor
relations field behind in order to concentrated on the awards
(publicity for the industry), research and education.
"I believe the guilds should more or less conduct the operations and
functions of this institution," he said in his farewell speech. He
would be nominated for Best Director and Best Picture once more with
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
in 1947, but the Academy would never again honor him, not even with an
honorary award after all his service.
(Bob Hope, in contrast, received four
honorary awards, including a lifetime membership in 1945, and the Jean
Hersholt Humanitarian award in 1960 from the Academy.) The SDG
(subsequently renamed the Directors Guild of America after its 1960
with the Radio and Television Directors Guild and which Capra served as
its first president from 1960-61), the union he had struggled with in
the mid-1930s but which he had first served as president from 1939 to
1941 and won it recognition, voted him a lifetime membership in 1941
and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1959.
Whenever Capra convinced studio boss
Harry Cohn to let him make movies
with more controversial or ambitious themes, the movies typically lost
money after under-performing at the box office.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932)
and Lost Horizon (1937) were both
expensive, philosophically minded pictures that sought to reposition
Capra and Columbia into the prestige end of the movie market. After the
former's relative failure at the box office and with critics, Capra
turned to making a screwball comedy, a genre he excelled at, with
It Happened One Night (1934).
Bookended with
You Can't Take It with You (1938),
these two huge hits won Columbia Best Picture Oscars and Capra Best
Director Academy Awards. These films, along with
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936),
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),
and
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
are the heart of Capra's cinematic canon. They are all classics and
products of superb craftsmanship, but they gave rise to the canard of
"Capra-corn." One cannot consider Capra without taking into account
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932),
American Madness (1932), and
Meet John Doe (1941), all three
dark films tackling major issues, Imperialism, the American plutocracy,
and domestic fascism. Capra was no Pollyanna, and the man who was
called a "dago" by Mack Sennett and who
went on to become one of the most unique, highly honored and successful
directors, whose depictions of America are considered Americana
themselves, did not live his cinematic life looking through a
rose-colored range-finder
In his autobiography "The Name Above the Title," Capra says that at the
time of American Madness (1932),
critics began commenting on his "gee-whiz" style of filmmaking. The
critics attacked "gee whiz" cultural artifacts as their fabricators
"wander about wide-eyed and breathless, seeing everything as larger
than life." Capra's response was "Gee whiz!"
Defining Hollywood as split between two camps, "Mr. Up-beat" and "Mr.
Down-beat," Capra defended the up-beat gee whiz on the grounds that,
"To some of us, all that meets the eye IS larger than life, including
life itself. Who ca match the wonder of it?"
Among the artists of the "Gee-Whiz:" school were
Ernest Hemingway,
Homer, and
Paul Gauguin, a novelist who lived a heroic
life larger than life itself, a poet who limned the lives of gods and
heroes, and a painter who created a mythic Tahiti, the Tahiti that he
wanted to find. Capra pointed to Moses and the apostles as examples of
men who were larger than life. Capra was proud to be "Mr. Up-beat"
rather than belong to "the 'ashcan' school" whose "films depict life as
an alley of cats clawing lids off garbage cans, and man as less noble
than a hyena. The 'ash-canners,' in turn, call us Pollyannas, mawkish
sentimentalists, and corny happy-enders."
What really moves Capra is that in America, there was room for both
schools, that there was no government interference that kept him from
making a film like
American Madness (1932). (While
Ambassador to the Court of St. James,
Joseph P. Kennedy had asked
Harry Cohn to stop exporting
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
to Europe as it portrayed American democracy so negatively.) About Mr.
Up-beat and Mr-Downbeat and "Mr. In-between," Capra says, "We all
respect and admire each other because the great majority freely express
their own individual artistry unfettered by subsidies or strictures
from government, pressure groups, or ideologists."
In the period 1934 to 1941, Capra the created the core of his canon
with the classics
It Happened One Night (1934),
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936),
You Can't Take It with You (1938),
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
and Meet John Doe (1941), wining
three Best Director Oscars in the process. Some cine-historians call
Capra the great American propagandist, he was so effective in creating
an indelible impression of America in the 1930s. "Maybe there never was
an America in the thirties,"
John Cassavetes was quoted as
saying. "Maybe it was all Frank Capra."
After the United States went to war in December 1941, Frank Capra
rejoined the Army and became an actual propagandist. His "Why We Fight"
series of propaganda films were highly lauded for their remarkable
craftsmanship and were the best of the U.S. propaganda output during
the war. Capra's philosophy, which has been variously described as a
kind of Christian socialism (his films frequently feature a male
protagonist who can be seen a Christ figure in a story about redemption
emphasizing New Testament values) that is best understood as an
expression of humanism, made him an ideal propagandist. He loved his
adopted country with the fervor of the immigrant who had realized the
American dream. One of his propaganda films,
The Negro Soldier (1944), is a
milestone in race relations.
Capra, a genius in the manipulation of the first form of "mass media,"
was opposed to "massism." The crowd in a Capra film is invariably
wrong, and he comes down on the side of the individual, who can make a
difference in a society of free individuals. In an interview, Capra
said he was against "mass entertainment, mass production, mass
education, mass everything. Especially mass man. I was fighting for, in
a sense, the preservation of the liberty of the individual person
against the mass."
Capra had left Columbia after "Mr. Smith" and formed his own production
company. After the war, he founded Liberty Films with
John Ford and made his last
masterpiece,
It's a Wonderful Life (1946).
Liberty folded prior to its release (another Liberty film,
William Wyler's masterpiece,
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
was released through United Artists). Though Capra received his sixth
Oscar nomination as best director, the movie flopped at the box office,
which is hard to believe now that the film is considered must-see
viewing each Christmas. Capra's period of greatness was over, and after
making three under-whelming films from 1948 to '51 (including a remake
of his earlier
Broadway Bill (1934)), Capra didn't
direct another picture for eight years, instead making a series of
memorable semi-comic science documentaries for television that became
required viewing for most 1960's school kids. His last two movies,
A Hole in the Head (1959) and
Pocketful of Miracles (1961)
his remake of
Lady for a Day (1933) did little
to enhance his reputation.
But a great reputation it was, and is. Capra's films withstood the test
of time and continue to be as beloved as when they were embraced by the
movie-going "masses" in the 1930s. It was the craftsmanship: Capra was
undeniably a master of his medium. The great English novelist Graham
Greene, who supported himself as a film critic in the 1930s, loved
Capra's films due to their sense of responsibility and of common life,
and due to his connection with his audience. (Capra, according to the
1938 "Time" article, believed that what he liked would be liked by
moviegoers). In his review of
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936),
Greene elucidated the central theme of Capra's movies: "Goodness and
simplicity manhandled in a deeply selfish and brutal world."
But it was Capra's great mastery over film that was the key to his
success. Comparing Capra to Dickens in a not wholly flattering review
of
You Can't Take It with You (1938),
Green found Capra "a rather muddled and sentimental idealist who feels
-- vaguely -- that something is wrong with the social system" (807).
Commenting on the improbable scene in which Grandpa Vanderhof persuades
the munitions magnate Anthony P. Kirby to give everything up and play
the harmonica, Greene stated:
"It sounds awful, but it isn't as awful as all that, for Capra has a
touch of genius with a camera: his screen always seems twice as big as
other people's, and he cuts as brilliantly as Eisenstein (the climax
when the big bad magnate takes up his harmonica is so exhilarating in
its movement that you forget its absurdity). Humour and not wit is his
line, a humor that shades off into whimsicality, and a kind of popular
poetry which is apt to turn wistful. We may groan and blush as he cuts
his way remorselessly through all finer values to the fallible human
heart, but infallibly he makes his appeal - to that great soft organ
with its unreliable goodness and easy melancholy and baseless optimism.
The cinema, a popular craft, can hardly be expected to do more."
Capra was a populist, and the simplicity of his narrative structures,
in which the great social problems facing America were boiled down to
scenarios in which metaphorical boy scouts took on corrupt political
bosses and evil-minded industrialists, created mythical America of
simple archetypes that with its humor, created powerful films that
appealed to the elemental emotions of the audience. The immigrant who
had struggled and been humiliated but persevere due to his inner
resolution harnessed the mytho-poetic power of the movie to create
proletarian passion plays that appealed to the psyche of the New Deal
movie-goer. The country during the Depression was down but not out, and
the ultimate success of the individual in the Capra films was a bracing
tonic for the movie audience of the 1930s. His own personal history,
transformed on the screen, became their myths that got them through the
Depression, and when that and the war was over, the great filmmaker
found himself out of time. Capra, like
Charles Dickens, moralized political and
economic issues. Both were primarily masters of personal and moral
expression, and not of the social and political. It was the emotional
realism, not the social realism, of such films as
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),
which he was concerned with, and by focusing on the emotional and moral
issues his protagonists faced, typically dramatized as a conflict
between cynicism and the protagonist's faith and idealism, that made
the movies so powerful, and made them register so powerfully with an
audience.- Director
- Producer
- Editorial Department
Don Siegel was educated at Cambridge University, England. In Hollywood
from the mid-'30s, he began his career as an editor and second unit
director. In 1945 he directed two shorts
(Hitler Lives (1945) and
Star in the Night (1945)) which
both won Academy Awards. His first feature as a director was 1946's
The Verdict (1946). He made his
reputation in the early and mid-'50s with a series of tightly made,
expertly crafted, tough but intelligent "B" pictures (among them
The Lineup (1958),
Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954),
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)),
then graduated to major "A" films in the 1960s and early 1970s. He made
several "side trips" to television, mostly as a producer. Siegel
directed what is generally considered to be
Elvis Presley's best picture,
Flaming Star (1960). He had a long
professional relationship and personal friendship with
Clint Eastwood, who has often said that
everything he knows about filmmaking he learned from Don Siegel.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Carol White was born on 1 April 1943 in Hammersmith, London, England, UK. She was an actress, known for Poor Cow (1967), The Wednesday Play (1964) and Some Call It Loving (1973). She was married to Mike King, Stuart Lerner and Mike Arnold. She died on 16 September 1991 in Miami, Florida, USA.- Actor
- Writer
- Additional Crew
Redd Foxx began doing stand-up comedy on the infamous "Chitlin'
Circuit" in the 1940s and 1950s. Foxx was one of the premier "blue
humor" comedians. Blue humor was very dirty, too dirty for white
audiences. For years his party albums were not available in white
record stores. In the 1960s his records became available, although
marginally in white record stores, leading to minor comedy work on
The Ed Sullivan Show (1948)
(aka "The Ed Sullivan Show") and
The Red Skelton Hour (1951),
among other classic variety shows of the time. Foxx developed a fan
base in the 1960s that led to increased notoriety. He received his own
television series in 1972 called
Sanford and Son (1972), which
was a reworking of the British sitcom
Steptoe and Son (1962).
Foxx's character, Fred Sanford (was actually Foxx's brother's name),
was a cranky old man who was set in his ways and would insult both
friends and strangers at the drop of a hat. He ran a junkyard in Watts,
a bad neighborhood in Los Angeles, with his son Lamont (played by
Demond Wilson). The show broke
down racial stereotypes and was a huge success, making Foxx and the
show household names. Foxx fought a very public battle with the writers
and producers of the show, claiming that they did not do enough to
promote the black experience, and in general complained there were not
enough black writers or producers in the entertainment industry. These
highly publicized disputes led to the show faltering artistically, but
not in the ratings. Foxx left the show in 1977 to accomplish his dream
on ABC: his own variety show, which lasted less than a year. He also
starred in the controversial film
Norman... Is That You? (1976).
Foxx's trouble with the law and the Internal Revenue Service hampered
his career in the early 1980s. He flopped yet again with the sitcom
The Redd Foxx Show (1986)
on ABC. He did, however, find success playing a ghost in the TV movie
Ghost of a Chance (1987),
with Dick Van Dyke. The late 1980s found
Foxx on a rebound, as he starred with
Richard Pryor and
Eddie Murphy in the popular
Harlem Nights (1989), which
showcased the three premiere black comedians of their respective
generations. A whole new generation of comedians begin claiming Redd
Foxx as a major influence on their careers, including Murphy and Pryor.
Foxx looked like he was finding success 20 years after
Sanford and Son (1972) with
The Royal Family (1991).
However, we will never know if the show would have been a
success--while rehearsing for an episode, Foxx collapsed and was rushed
to a hospital. He died in October of 1991. Redd Foxx will be remembered
as a pioneering comedian who influenced generations of comedians and
helped break down racial barriers in the the entertainment industry.
His influence seems as strong as ever.- Director
- Producer
- Writer
The son of a Shipley chemist he was initially connected with the stage first with the post war Shipley Young Theatre then with the Bradford Civic Theatre where he came into contact with the Bradford born author J B Priestley who recognising his potential commissioned him to write a TV documentary. from where it was a short step to directing films. His close association with another novelist, John Osborne resulted in him directing Look Back in Ange in 1959 and The Entertainer in 1960 where the location scenes were shot in Morecambe where his parents had made their home in retirement. Following the great success of Tom Jones, particularly in America and his marriage to Vanessa Redgrave having ended he moved there and co wrote the film Dead Cert. The last film he made was The Hotel New Hampshire.- Actress
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
Eleanor Audley was an American actress, with a distinctive voice that helped her find work as a voice actress in radio and animation. She is primarily remembered as the first actress to voice Lady Tremaine and Maleficent, two of the most memorable Disney villains.
Audley's real name was Eleanor Zellman, and she was from New York City. She was Jewish, but little is known about her family background and she apparently never married.
She made her acting debut in 1926, aged 20, at the Broadway production of "Howdy, King". She remained primarily a theatrical actress through the 1920s and the 1930s. During the 1940s, Audley started playing a number of prominent roles in radio serials. Among them was mother-in-law Leticia Cooper in "My Favorite Husband" (1948-51), receptionist Molly Byrd in "The Story of Dr. Kildare" (1949-51), and neighbor, Elizabeth Smith in "Father Knows Best" (1949-54).
Audley was hired by Disney to play the role of wealthy widow Lady Tremaine in the animated feature film "Cinderella" (1950). Audley was also used as the live-action model of the character, and her facial features were used by the animators who designed the character. In the film, Lady Tremaine is depicted as the abusive stepmother of Cinderella (voiced by Ilene Woods) and the domineering mother of Anastasia Tremaine (voiced by Lucille Bliss) and Drizella Tremaine (voiced by Rhoda Williams). The film was a box office hit, and its profits helped rescue the Disney studio from a financial decline that had lasted for almost a decade.
For the rest of the decade, Audley appeared regularly in supporting roles in film, and guest roles in television. She returned to animation when hired to voice the evil fairy Maleficent in "Sleeping Beauty" (1959). As before, Audley was also used as a live-action model for the character. During the film's production, Audley was struggling with tuberculosis, While nominally the villain, Maleficent received more screen-time in the finished film than titular protagonist Princess Aurora (voiced by singer Mary Costa).
"Sleeping Beauty" had box office receipts of more than $51 million in the U.S. and Canada, against a budget of $6 million. It finished the year second in ticket sales, behind the number one film, "Ben-Hur." Audrey was not invited to voice other villains. The film earned critical and popular acclaim through later re-releases, and Maleficent has been revived many times by Disney. But never with her original voice actress.
In the 1960s, Audley played supporting roles in then-popular television series. Among her most prominent roles were Irma Lumpk in "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis", Peggy Billings in "The Dick Van Dyke Show", Millicent Schuyler-Potts in "The Beverly Hillbillies" , Aunt Martha in "Mister Ed", Jenny Teasley in "Pistols 'n' Petticoats", Eunice Douglas in "Green Acres", and Beatrice Vincent in "My Three Sons".
Audley worked with Disney again to voice psychic medium Madame Leota in the Haunted Mansion attractions in Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Leota is depicted as a ghost who communicates with the living, and other actresses have since voiced the character.
Her long career ended prematurely in the 1970s, due to increasingly poor health. She lived in retirement until her death in 1991, at the age of 86. The cause of death was respiratory failure. Audley was interred at the Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. Her character of Madame Leota received its own tombstone in 2001. The epitaph reads: "Dear sweet Leota, beloved by all. In regions beyond now, but having a ball."- Actress
- Soundtrack
Massachusetts-born Jean Rogers had hoped to study art in New York and Europe upon graduation from high school, but her plans changed when she won a national beauty contest in 1933 and was offered a contract by a Hollywood producer. She was soon signed by Warner Bros., and a year later jumped ship to Universal. She began appearing in several of the studios' serials, with 1936's "Flash Gordon" being her most fondly remembered role. Given her delicate blond beauty and the skimpy outfits she wore, it was no wonder she was lusted after so fiercely by archvillain Ming the Merciless (and most of the male audience). Universal took her out of the serial unit and put her in a string of B pictures. Unsatisfied with the way her career was going, and the fact that the studio refused to give her a raise, she left Universal for 20th Century Fox in 1939. Two years later the spunky Rogers left Fox for the same reasons she left Universal, and signed with MGM, where she found the treatment more to her liking. She walked off the Culver City lot in 1943 when studio boss Louis B. Mayer discovered that she planned to get married, and forbade her to do so. Althugh she freelanced over
the next few years, nothing much really came of it, and after making "The Second Woman" in 1951, she retired to raise her family.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Aldo DaRe was born in the borough of Pen Argyl, in Northampton County,
Pennsylvania on 25 September 1926. He attended the University of
California at Berkeley, served as a US Navy frogman during WWII and saw
action on Iwo Jima.
While constable of Crockett, California, he drove his brother Guido to
an audition for the film
Saturday's Hero (1951). Director
David Miller hired him for a small
role as a cynical football player. Ray's husky frame, thick neck and
raspy voice made him perfect for playing tough sexy roles. He was the star of George Cukor's
The Marrying Kind (1952) and
starred opposite Rita Hayworth in
Miss Sadie Thompson (1953).
Ray was the none-too-bright boxer in Cukor's
Pat and Mike (1952) and an escaped
convict in 'Michael Curtiz''s
We're No Angels (1955). His
career started downhill in the 1970s, with him appearing in a string of
low-budget films as a character actor. His last film was
Shock 'Em Dead (1991).
Ray was married three times, with one daughter Claire born in 1951 to
his first wife Shirley Green whom he married on on 20 June 1947. Ray
was then briefly married to actress
Jeff Donnell and then had two sons and a
daughter with his third wife, Johanna Ray, one of whom is the actor
Eric DaRe. Aldo Ray died of throat cancer on
27 March 1991.- Music Artist
- Music Department
- Actor
Freddie Mercury was born on the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar. His parents, Bomi and Jer Bulsara, sent him off
to a private school in India, from 1955 til 1963. In 1964, he and
his family flew to England. In 1966 he started his education at the Ealing College of Art,
where he graduated in 1969. He loved art, and because of that, he often
went along with his friend Tim Staffell, who played in a band called
Smile. Also in this band where
Brian May and
Roger Taylor.
When Staffell left
the band in 1970, Mercury became their new singer. He changed the
band's name into Queen, and they took on a
new bass-player in February 1971, called
John Deacon. Their first album,
"Queen", came out in 1973. But their real breakthrough was "Killer
Queen", on the album "Sheer Heart Attack", which was released in 1974.
They became immortal with the single "Bohemian Rhapsody", on the 1975
album "A Night At The Opera".
After their biggest hit in the USA in 1980 with "Another One Bites The Dust", they had a bad period. Their album
"Flash Gordon" went down the drain, because the movie
Flash Gordon (1980) flunked. Their
next, the disco-oriented "Hot Space", was hated not only by rock critics but also by many hardcore fans. Only the song "Under
Pressure", which they sang together with
David Bowie, made a difference. In
1983, they took a year off. But, in 1984 they came back with
their new album called "The Works". The singles "Radio Ga Ga" and "I Want to Break Free" did very well in the UK but a controversy over the video of the latter in the USA meant it got little exposure and flopped. Plans to tour the USA were cancelled and the band would not recover their popularity there during Mercury's lifetime.
In April 1985, Mercury released his
first solo album, the less rock-oriented and more dance-oriented "Mr. Bad Guy". The album is often considered now to have been a flop, but it actually wasn't. It peaked at number six in the UK and stayed on the chart for 23 weeks, making it the most successful Queen solo project. The band got back
together again after their barnstorming performance at Live Aid (1985) in July 1985. At
the end of the year, they started working on their new album, "A Kind
Of Magic". They also held their biggest ever world tour, the "Magic
Tour". They played Wembley Stadium twice and held their very last concert
in Knebworth, in front of 125.000 people.
After 1986, it went silent
around Queen. In 1987, he was diagnosed with AIDS but he kept working at a pace. He released a cover of the 1950s song "The Great
Pretender", which went into the UK top ten. After that, he flew to Spain, where he
made the magnificent album "Barcelona", together with
Montserrat Caballé, whom he saw
performing in 1983. Because Mercury loved opera, he became a huge fan
of her. For him, this album was like a dream becoming reality. The
single "Barcelona" went huge, and was also used as a theme song for the
1992 Olympics in Barcelona.
After "Barcelona", he started working with
the band again. They made "The Miracle", which was released in early 1989. It
was another success, with hits such as "Breakthru", "I Want It All", "The
Invisible Man" and the title track. At this point, Mercury told the band he had
AIDS, meaning that a tour of the album was out of the question. After Mercury told the band, he
refused to talk about it anymore. He was afraid that people would buy
their records out of pity. He said he wanted to keep making music as
long as possible. And he did. After "The Miracle", Mercury's health got worse. They
wanted to do one more album, called "Innuendo." They worked on it in
1990 and early 1991. Every time when Mercury would feel well, he came
over to the studio and sang. After "Innuendo" was released in January
1991, they made two video clips. The first one was the video clip of
"I'm Going Slightly Mad", shot in March 1991. Because Mercury was very
thin, and had little wounds all over his body, they used a lot of
make-up. He wore a wig, and the clip was shot in black and white.
Mercury's final video clip was released in June 1991. The clip, "These
Are The Days Of Our Lives", later turned out to be his goodbye song,
the last time he appeared on film. You could clearly see he was ill,
but he still hadn't told the world about his disease. Rumours went
around that he some kind of terrible disease. This rumor was confirmed
by Mercury himself, one day before he passed on. His death was seen as a
great loss for the world of popular music.- Actor
- Art Department
- Script and Continuity Department
Keye Luke was born in Canton, China. He grew up in Seattle, Washington,
and entered the film business as a commercial artist and a designer of
movie posters. He was hired as a technical advisor on several
Asian-themed films, and made his film debut in
The Painted Veil (1934). It
seemed that he appeared in almost every film that called for Chinese
characters, usually in small parts but occasionally, as in
The Good Earth (1937), in a
meatier, more substantial role. In addition, he played Dr. Kildare's
rival at the hospital in the Dr. Kildare series at MGM, but it was as
Charlie Chan's #1 son in that series that Luke achieved his greatest
recognition. In the 1970s a new generation was made aware of his
talents by virtue of his recurring role in the TV series
Kung Fu (1972).- Producer
- Actor
- Writer
Known primarily as a TV actor, he starred as a nightclub singer on the
popular
The Danny Thomas Show (1953).
He also served TV behind the cameras partnering with
Sheldon Leonard and
Aaron Spelling to create such shows as
Dick Van Dyke's show,
The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961),
The Andy Griffith Show (1960)
and Mod Squad (1968).
He was also dedicated to building the St. Jude's Children's Research
Hospital in Memphis, which he founded in 1962.- Writer
- Producer
- Additional Crew
While in junior high school, he became interested in science fiction, and years later while reading a copy of 'Astounding Stories' when he was working as an airline pilot, he decided to give it up and become a writer. He moved West and joined the Los Angeles police force to gain experience that would help him toward a writing career in Hollywood. He began selling scripts for television shows such as 'Dragnet' and 'Naked City'. He was head writer on 'Have Gun Will Travel' for two years, winning the 'Writer's Guild Award' for 'Best Script'. He created and produced 'The Lieutenant' followed by 3 years of the 'Star Trek' television series and produced the films 'Pretty Maids All in a Row', the first 'Star Trek' film and was executive consultant on the following two.- Ben Piazza was born on 30 July 1933 in Little Rock, Arkansas, USA. He was an actor, known for The Blues Brothers (1980), Mask (1985) and Guilty by Suspicion (1991). He was married to Dolores Dorn. He died on 7 September 1991 in Sherman Oaks, California, USA.
- Actor
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Thalmus Rasulala was born on 15 November 1939 in Miami, Florida, USA. He was an actor and assistant director, known for New Jack City (1991), Above the Law (1988) and The Last Hard Men (1976). He was married to Shirlyn Mozingo and Martha Roberts. He died on 9 October 1991 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Diane Brewster was born on March 11, 1931, in Kansas City, Missouri.
She was largely a character actress in both motion pictures and
television. She was 24 years old when she began acting on TV. Her first
role was in a few episodes of the westerns
Cheyenne (1955) and
Zane Grey Theatre (1956).
Her first motion picture roles was as Sylvia Quentin in
Pharaoh's Curse (1957) in 1956.
However, most older viewers remember her as the attractive grade school
teacher Miss Canfield on the popular TV comedy series
Leave It to Beaver (1957).
While her last big screen appearance was as Kate Lawrence in
The Young Philadelphians (1959)
in 1959, Diane made one more TV appearance on
Family Affair (1966) in 1966.
Afterwards, Diane retired from the camera. Diane died of heart failure
on November 12, 1991. She was 60 years old.- Actor
- Sound Department
- Additional Crew
Yves Montand was born on 13 October 1921 in Monsummano Terme, Tuscany, Italy. He was an actor, known for Jean de Florette (1986), Z (1969) and The Wages of Fear (1953). He was married to Simone Signoret. He died on 9 November 1991 in Senlis, Oise, France.- With a mysterious past and a mouth marred by burns, Reggie Nalder has a unique, if under appreciated, place in the history of cinema.
Nalder was born Alfred Reginald Natzler in Vienna, Austria, the son of Ida (Herzog), from Safov, and Sigmund Natzler. His parents were from Jewish families The year of his birth has been a matter of speculation. While his obituary in the New York Times claimed 1922, photographic evidence has revealed that it was significantly earlier; most sources now cite 1911. Little is known about his early years. His mother was a beautiful actress who appeared in German films between 1919 and 1929. Nalder himself was an Apache dancer and stage actor in the 1920s and 1930s, and the anecdotes he occasionally shared with friends hint at a colorful career even before his life in films. Photos of Nalder from this period, which surfaced after his death, reveal a handsome young man in his early 20s, almost unrecognizable as the man we know from celluloid.
The burns that scarred the lower third of his face and forever cast him as a villain are also a source of uncertainty; Nalder had at least three different explanations for them. Whatever the true cause, it was this disfigurement which bestowed upon him a permanent place in the annals of film. His career was punctuated by two definite high points. The first was his role as Rien, the leering assassin of Hitchcock's 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). His second great triumph was as the horrifyingly effective vampire Barlow in the TV mini-series Salem's Lot (1979). In between he had some memorable film and television appearances -- the cold Russian operative in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), the yellow-jacketed gunman in Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), a part written especially for him, the lecherous witch-hunter Albino in Adrian Hoven's notorious Mark of the Devil (1970), the title character in the The Return of Andrew Bentley (1961), and the alien Shras, Andorian ambassador, in the classic Star Trek episode Journey to Babel (1967).
Though small, Nalder's role in Fellini's Casanova (1976) was also a source of personal pride. Along the way were many forgotten roles, and a few of which he himself was embarrassed (he insisted on being credited as Detlef Van Berg in the sex films Dracula Sucks (1978) and Blue Ice (1985)). However dubious the quality of some of the films in which he appeared, his gaunt face, expressive eyes, and soft, haunting voice never fail to absorb. In real life, Nalder was soft-spoken man of considerable culture and taste who knew four languages and enjoyed the opera ("Tosca" was reputedly his favorite). He died of bone cancer at a Santa Monica nursing home on November 11, 1991. With him went the truth behind "The Face That Launched a Thousand Trips" and the keys to much of his mystery-shrouded past.
Reggie Nalder may be far from a household name, and he may have appeared in many films of questionable artistic merit. But he has provided film buffs with indelible cinematic images and characterizations for which he was singularly well-equipped. Whether you were chilled by the methodical killer behind the curtain at the Albert Hall in "The Man Who Knew Too Much" or terrified by the shining eyes of the vampire of "Salem's Lot," you -- along with cinema-goers the world over -- have felt the icy touch of Reggie Nalder. - Actor
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Soundtrack
This boyish-looking New York-born actor of film and (especially) TV was
born in 1928 and signed by Columbia at the onset of his teen career.
Also known as Donald Dubbins, he started off playing earnest young
cadet types in the war films
From Here to Eternity (1953)
(as a young bugler) and
The Caine Mutiny (1954). It was
superstar James Cagney who took a distinct
liking to the rookie actor and prominently displayed him in two of his
subsequent films. In
These Wilder Years (1956),
Dubbins played Cagney's long-lost adopted son and, in the western
Tribute to a Bad Man (1956),
he forms an unlikely romantic triangle with cattle boss Cagney and
senorita Irene Papas. He also was at the
mercy of Jack Webb's title character
as a private in the Dragnet-styled military film
The D.I. (1957). He subsequently played
a frequent suspect on several episodes of the
Dragnet 1967 (1967) series.
Finishing up the 1950s, he was a part of the cast in the
Jules Verne sci-fi picture
From the Earth to the Moon (1958).
Although Dubbins never became a box office name, he certainly was a
reliable asset on TV and was seen in a host of character roles over the
years, not to mention a good number of smaller parts in such films as
The Prize (1963) and
The Learning Tree (1969). A
character player adept at both good guys and bad guys, he retired
completely in the late 1980s after filming episodes of
Dynasty (1981),
Highway to Heaven (1984)
and Knots Landing (1979). He
succumbed to cancer less than a decade later in 1991 at the age of 63.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Pittsburgh-born and -raised character actor Regis Toomey, of Irish
descent, took an early interest in the performing arts and initially
studied drama at the university of his home town. One of four children
of Francis X. and Mary Ellen Toomey, John Regis Toomey initially
pondered a law career, but acting won out and he gradually established
himself as a musical stage performer. Dropping his first name for
acting purposes, he was touring in a production of "Little Nellie
Kelly" in England when he developed an acute case of laryngitis. The
severity of the problem forced a serious rethinking of his career
goals.
With the birth of sound pictures, Toomey made an auspicious debut with
Alibi (1929) starring
Chester Morris where a climactic
death scene sparked controversy--and a movie career that would include
almost 200 pictures and a number of other notorious death scenes. His
lead/second lead status opposite such stars as
Clara Bow,
Constance Bennett,
Barbara Stanwyck and
Evelyn Brent fell away within a few years,
and he found more work in streetwise character roles. Fast-paced crime
action was his forte and he was prevalent throughout the 1930s and
1940s. He appeared in many classic films including
'G' Men (1935),
Meet John Doe (1941),
The Big Sleep (1946),
Rachel and the Stranger (1948)
and Spellbound (1945). In 1955 he
played Uncle Arvide of The Salvation Army in
Guys and Dolls (1955) alongside
Marlon Brando,
Frank Sinatra,
Jean Simmons and
Vivian Blaine, a role for which he
is still well remembered.
In the 1950s he found employment on TV as a good guy, typically playing
judges, sheriffs, businessmen and police sergeants. He was a regular on
The Mickey Rooney Show (1954).
Fellow one-time singer Dick Powell
became a friend and Powell, having turned producer, saw to it that
Toomey had involving roles on a couple of his TV series such as
Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1957)
and Burke's Law (1963). He was
later a regular on
Petticoat Junction (1963).
Toomey played roles well past his 80th year.
His marriage (from 1925) to Kathryn Scott produced two children. They
met in 1924 when he appeared in a musical production of "Rose Marie"
that Kathryn assistant choreographed. Toomey died of natural causes on
October 12, 1991, at the Motion Picture Country House in Woodland
Hills, California at age 93.- Born and educated in the well-to-do Alamo Heights area of San Antonio,
Texas, Berry Kroeger first acted in local theatrical productions at the
San Pedro Playhouse. His silky voice seemed tailor-made for a lengthy
career on radio. By 1931, he was active both as announcer and purveyor
of dramatic exploits and crime detection on network serials. After
being signed by CBS in 1936 he carved out a very lucrative career on
the airwaves in anthologies like "Inner Sanctum" and
Orson Welles's "Mystery Theatre of the
Air", in addition to starring as suave private eye "The Falcon" (the
role played on the screen by Tom Conway).
Kroeger made his theatrical bow on Broadway in a 1943 play by
Nunnally Johnson, entitled "The World's
Full of Girls". In the course of the next decade he balanced his radio work with
performing in classical plays opposite stars like
Ingrid Bergman and
Helen Hayes, but did not appear in
the movies until 1948. When he finally did, it was -- invariably -- as
venomous, sneering or smarmy villains. A burly, narrow-eyed and physically
imposing character, he simply oozed menace. As his hair receded and
turned white already in his twenties, he often tended to play men much
older than their years. He tended to be less typecast on the small screen which
permitted him to exhibit another side of his acting range. Kroeger
adroitly parodied his sinister screen personae by caricaturing
Sydney Greenstreet -- whom he somewhat
resembled at this stage of his life -- in an episode of
Get Smart (1965) ('Maxwell Smart,
Private Eye'). Like many other 'professional screen villains', Kroeger
was in private life rather the antithesis of the parts he essayed on
screen. - Actress
- Additional Crew
Julie Bovasso was born on 1 August 1930 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA. She was an actress, known for Saturday Night Fever (1977), The Verdict (1982) and My Blue Heaven (1990). She was married to Len Wayland and George Earl Ortman. She died on 14 September 1991 in New York City, New York, USA.- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Teddy Wilson was born on 10 December 1943 in New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for Good Times (1974), Blood In, Blood Out (1993) and Life Stinks (1991). He was married to Joan Pringle. He died on 21 July 1991 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
- Additional Crew
Small in stature at only 2' 11", but big in demand onscreen, the diminutive Angelo Rossitto was one of Hollywood's busiest "small" actors and appeared in over 70 feature films between 1927 until 1987.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska in February 1908, Rossitto first appeared in silent films alongside stars such as Lon Chaney and John Barrymore. In subsequent years Rossitto also regularly popped up alongside Bela Lugosi in villainous roles, and was a stunt double for Shirley Temple.
Angelo portrayed dwarfs, midgets, gnomes and pygmies as well as aliens and monsters in film productions ranging from woeful to wonderful. Probably best remembered as one of the circus members in the highly controversial Tod Browning film Freaks (1932), as shoeshine man / street informer, "Little Moe", the friend of Robert Blake in the police drama TV series Baretta (1975), and then at age 77 and nearly blind, Rossitto co-starred as the megalomaniacal scientist "Master Blaster" in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985).
He died in September 1991 from complications during surgery.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Jacques Aubuchon was born on 30 October 1924 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, USA. He was an actor, known for The Silver Chalice (1954), Thunder Road (1958) and Man Against Crime (1949). He was married to Denise Caubisens. He died on 28 December 1991 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Thomas Glenn Langan spent most of his early life in his home town of
Denver, Colorado. After completing his education he acted in local
repertory companies before moving to New York. In 1942, he appeared on
Broadway opposite Luise Rainer in
J.M. Barrie's "Kiss for Cinderella". He
garnered good critical reviews which led to a contract with 20th
Century Fox the following year. With many top leading men of the era
away on wartime duties, the tall, muscular Langan filled the gap in
several A-grade productions.
Langan was usually seen in the role of the stalwart professional man,
appearing to best advantage as a French professor in the romantic
Margie (1946), a devoted young doctor
protecting Gene Tierney from the evil
machinations of Vincent Price in
Dragonwyck (1946), and as one of the
psychiatrists looking after demented patient
Olivia de Havilland in the
The Snake Pit (1948). Langan was
also gainfully employed in escapist adventure, essaying a square-jawed
privateer captain in
Forever Amber (1947) and starring
as Edmund Dantes -- descendant of the original protagonist of
Alexandre Dumas -- in the
updated and modernised,
Treasure of Monte Cristo (1949).
In spite of these boosts to his career, his sturdy good looks and rugged appeal, Langan's popularity gradually waned
by the early
1950s. He spent the next decade appearing on various television episodes and eventually achieved a kind of cult status as the irradiated 60-foot hero of Bert I. Gordon's
often hilarious schlock sci-fi
The Amazing Colossal Man (1957).
After winding down his screen career in the
60s, Langan re-invented himself as a successful real estate salesman. He was married for forty years to the actress Adele Jergens. - Actress
- Soundtrack
Blond, blue-eyed Joan Caulfield was born on June 1 1922 in Orange, New Jersey, one of three daughters to Henry R. Caulfield, an aircraft company administrator based in Manhattan. She received a private education and enrolled in Columbia University in late 1940. Her early forays into acting with the Morningside Players acting troupe did not appear to suggest any special talents in that direction, so she turned her ambitions towards a modelling career. Joan's exceptional looks and demure personality soon secured her top fashion shoots through the Harry Conover Agency, including the May 11 1942 cover of Life magazine. This, in turn, caught the attention of renowned Broadway producer George Abbott who asked her to audition for a small part (as Veronica, a dumb blonde) in his upcoming production of "Beat the Band". While the musical was poorly received, critics singled out for praise Joan's "decidedly winsome" looks and her budding comedic talent. Abbott, to his credit, stuck with her and cast her as the female lead in his 1943 comedy "Kiss and Tell", co-starring as her brother a young Richard Widmark. This time, Joan attracted rave reviews for her "natural and endearing" performance and was voted most promising actress in the New York Drama Critics annual poll. After fourteen months and 480 shows, Joan quit the cast of "Kiss and Tell" in early 1944 (the play went on for 962 performances, was filmed twice and turned into a TV and radio series as Meet Corliss Archer (1954)).
Though initially reluctant to forsake the stage for motion pictures, Joan succumbed to an offer from Paramount in early 1944. Her contract even included a special clause permitting her to work on Broadway for six months each year. During her tenure with the studio (1944-50), she appeared in eleven films (including a couple of loan-outs to Warner Brothers and Universal, respectively). As a leading lady, she was genteel, cultured and alluring, without exuding too much overt sex appeal. Often, she was merely decorative. As love interest to both Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby (with whom she was rumoured to have had an affair) in Blue Skies (1946), Bosley Crowther of the New York Times considered her "most lovely and passive". Nevertheless, the picture was a huge hit and Joan found herself in number ten spot on Variety's list of 1946 top-grossing actresses, despite the inescapable fact, that, as a dancing partner to Astaire, she was barely adequate. In the course of her later films, it also transpired that she was not particularly convincing as a dramatic actress. Joan did, however, come into her own in breezy comedy roles, point in case her chambermaid in Monsieur Beaucaire (1946) (Crowther calling her performance "delightfully nimble"). The highlight of her Hollywood career was a starring role (opposite William Holden) in the wholesome family comedy Dear Ruth (1947), which did for Joan what Gilda (1946) did for Rita Hayworth. From the play by Norman Krasna and allegedly based on the household of Groucho Marx, the picture was box office gold. Joan was to be typecast in peaches and cream roles thereafter. The law of diminishing returns applied.
Following her loan-out to Warner Brothers for the mystery thriller The Unsuspected (1947) (a victory of style over content, thanks mainly to taut direction by Michael Curtiz), Joan was cast in the all-star musical jamboree Variety Girl (1947), getting rather lost among the more extrovert performers. Her other loan-out was to Universal for Larceny (1948), in which she played a naive widow, conned by a hustler (John Payne) out of a large sum of money for erecting a bogus monument to her late husband. There was also a sequel to "Dear Ruth" (Dear Wife (1949)), chiefly enjoyable for the histrionics of that excellent character actor, Edward Arnold, but otherwise unremarkable. By this time, Joan had come to reject her wholesome image, referring to George Abbott who had once quipped that "she looked better on a tennis court than in bed". Increasingly dissatisfied with her assignments, Joan later claimed to have been poorly advised by drama coaches, agents and studio executives alike. She also blamed herself for some of her choices, "copying the mannerisms of other stars", "striking poses", etcetera. Her contract was not renewed in 1949 and Joan free-lanced from then on, but choice roles in films remained elusive. The Petty Girl (1950) , The Lady Says No (1951) and The Rains of Ranchipur (1955) were all decidedly trite, lacklustre affairs, later to be followed by a trio of dismal low-budget westerns. Television anthologies offered her some relief from typecasting. Joan starred in her own NBC comedy series, Sally (1957). It was produced by her then-husband, Frank Ross, and boasted an impressive supporting cast, including Gale Gordon, Arte Johnson and Marion Lorne (who received an Emmy nomination). As fortunes would have it, the series fared poorly in the ratings because of its unfortunate time slot which put it up against top-ranking shows like Maverick (1957) and Bachelor Father (1957). Yet another setback to her career was the 1963 play "She Didn't Say Yes" which folded before making it to Broadway.
In the end, Joan Caulfield reinvented herself as a business woman with considerable financial acumen on the stock exchange, becoming vice president of Lustre Shine Co. Inc., a company which produced and installed self polishing machines in airports and hotels. There were also two divorces and several law suits which kept her name in the public consciousness. In 1971, she received some good notices for performing in Neil Simon's play "Plaza Suite" at the Showboat Dinner Theatre in Florida. Joan made several more guest appearances on television, her last in an episode of Murder, She Wrote (1984). She fittingly commented on her show business career, saying: "Before 1952, I was just playing myself, then I learned to be an actress" (The Evening Independent, June 5 1971).