Film Noir Blacklisted
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John Garfield was born Jacob Julius Garfinkle on the Lower East Side of New York City, to Hannah Basia (Margolis) and David Garfinkle, who were Jewish immigrants from Zhytomyr (now in Ukraine). Jules was raised by his father, a clothes presser and part-time cantor, after his mother's death in 1920, when he was 7. He was sent to a special school for problem children, where he was introduced to boxing and drama. He won a scholarship to Maria Ouspenskaya's drama school. He joined the Civic Repertory Theatre in 1932, changing his name to Jules Garfield and making his Broadway debut in that company's Counsellor-at-Law. Joined the Group Theatre company, winning acclaim for his role in Awake and Sing. Embittered over being passed over for the lead in Golden Boy, which was written for him, he signed a contract with Warner Brothers, who changed his name to John Garfield. Won enormous praise for his role of the cynical Mickey Borden in Four Daughters (1938). Appeared in similar roles throughout his career despite his efforts to play varied parts. Children Katherine (1938-1945), David Garfield (1942-1995) and Julie Garfield (1946-). Active in liberal political and social causes, he found himself embroiled in Communist scare of the late 1940s. Though he testified before Congress that he was never a Communist, his ability to get work declined. While separated from his wife, he succumbed to long-term heart problems, dying suddenly in the home of a woman friend at 39. His funeral was mobbed by thousands of fans, in the largest funeral attendance for an actor since Rudolph Valentino.- Director
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Jules Dassin was an Academy Award-nominated director, screenwriter and actor best known for his films Rififi (1955), Never on Sunday (1960), and Topkapi (1964).
He was born Julius Samuel Dassin on 18 December 1911, in Middletown, Connecticut, USA. He was one of eight children of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Samuel Dassin and Berthe Vogel. Young Dassin grew up in Harlem, and he attended Morris High School in the Bronx, graduating in 1929. After taking acting classes in Europe, he returned to New York. In 1934, he became and actor with the ARTEF Players (Arbeter Teater Farband), and was a member of the troupe until 1939. Dassin played character roles in Yiddish, mainly in the plays by Sholom Aleichem. But upon discovering "that an actor I was not," he switched to directing and writing. At that time, he joined the Communist Party of the United States, but left the party in 1939, he said, disillusioned after the Soviet Union signed a pact with Adolf Hitler.
Dassin came to Hollywood in 1940, and was an apprentice to directors Alfred Hitchcock and Garson Kanin. In 1941, he made his directorial debut at MGM with adaptation of a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Dassin's best directorial works for Hollywood include such criminal dramas as Brute Force (1947) starring Burt Lancaster; The Naked City (1948), one of the first police dramas shot on the streets of New York; and Night and the City (1950) starring Richard Widmark as a hustler in London who is caught up in his own schemes. While he was assigned by producer Darryl F. Zanuck to make the film, Dassin was accused of affiliation with the Communist Party in his past. Zanuck advised Dassin to "shoot the expensive scenes first, to hook the studio" so the film was finished and released in 1951. Dassin was reported to HUAC in a 1951 testimony by directors Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle. That was enough to sink his career in Hollywood. Dassin was subpoenaed by HUAC in 1952 and eventually became blacklisted after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
He left the United States for France in 1953 and struggled during his first years in Paris. He was not fluent in French, and his connections were limited. However, Dassin's low-budget film, Rififi (1955), famous for its long heist sequence that was free of dialog, won him the Best Director Award at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. There, he met the Greek actress Melina Mercouri. Later, Dassin co-starred opposite Mercouri in his film Never on Sunday (1960), which won the Best Film Award at Cannes in 1960. At that time, the anti-Communist witch hunt in America was fading, and Dassin was accepted again. He received two Academy Award-nominations for directing and screen-writing for Topkapi (1964), starring Mercouri, Maximilian Schell, and Peter Ustinov. Dassin also served as member of jury at the Cannes and several other international film festivals.
Jules Dassin was married twice. He had three children with his first wife, violinist Beatrice Launer. His son, Joe Dassin, was a popular French singer in the 1960s and '70s, with such hits as "Bip Bip," "L'Eté Indien" and "Aux Champs-Èlysées." In 1966, Jules Dassin married Mercouri, an ardent anti-fascist who lost her Greek citizenship for opposing the junta, and the couple was living in Manhattan, remaining very active in their efforts to restore democracy in Greece during the dictatorship of the Colonels. After 1974, the couple returned to Greece, Mercouri became a member of the Greek Parliament, and Culture Minister of Greece. While living in Athens, Dassin was active in the effort to bring the 2500-year-old Elgin marbles of the Parthenon back to Athens from their current location at the British Museum in London. In this and other humanitarian causes, Dassin followed the last will of his late wife.
Jules Dassin died of complications caused by a flu, on April 1, 2008, at age 96, at Hygeia Hospital in Athens, Greece. He is survived by two daughters and grandchildren.- Director
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Edward Dmytryk grew up in San Francisco, the son of Ukrainian immigrants. After his mother died when he was 6, his strict disciplinarian father beat the boy frequently, and the child began running away while in his early teens. Eventually, juvenile authorities allowed him to live alone at the age of 15 and helped him find part-time work as a film studio messenger. Dmytryk was an outstanding student in physics and mathematics and gained a scholarship to the California Institute of Technology. However, he dropped out after one year to return to movies, eventually working his way up from film editor to director. By the late 1940s, he was considered one of Hollywood's rising young directing talents, but his career was interrupted by the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a congressional committee that employed ruthless tactics aimed at rooting out and destroying what it saw as Communist influence in Hollywood. A lifelong political leftist who had been a Communist Party member briefly during World War II, Dmytryk was one of the so-called "Hollywood Ten" who refused to cooperate with HUAC and had their careers disrupted or ruined as a result. The committee threw him in prison for refusing to cooperate, and after having spent several months behind bars, Dmytryk decided to cooperate after all, and testified again before the committee, this time giving the names of people he said were Communists. He claimed to believe he had done the right thing, but many in the Hollywood community--even those who came along long after the committee was finally disbanded--never forgave him, and that action overshadowed his career the rest of his life. In the 1970s, as his directing career ground to a halt, Dmytryk recalled some advice once given him by Garson Kanin, and returned to academic life, this time as a teacher. From 1976 to 1981 he was a professor of film theory and production at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 1981, was appointed to a chair in filmmaking at the University of Southern California, a position he held until about two years before his death. During his teaching career, he also authored several books on various aspects of filmmaking, as well as two volumes of memoirs.- Director
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Belonging to an important family clan in Wisconsin, Joseph Losey studied philosophy but was always interested in theater and thus worked together with Bertolt Brecht. After directing some shorts for MGM, he made his first important film, The Boy with Green Hair (1948), for RKO. While he was filming The Prowler (1951) in Italy he was summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the congressional committee charged with "rooting out" Communist "subversion" in the motion picture industry. Unwilling to subject himself to the committee's well-known intimidation tactics, Losey decided to seek exile in Great Britain. In the following years he used a pseudonym--"Joseph Walton"--for his films, which were of minor quality. He regained his prestige with the thrillers Chance Meeting (1959), The Concrete Jungle (1960) and Eva (1962). From that point on his films varied between top-quality work like Accident (1967) and much lower-quality projects such as Modesty Blaise (1966), which was a box-office success, and Galileo (1975), which wasn't.- Director
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The son of a struggling businessman, Cy Endfield--born Cyril Raker Endfield--worked hard to be admitted to Yale University in 1933. While completing his education he became enamored with progressive theatre and appeared in a New Haven production of a minor Russian play in 1934. He was also profoundly influenced by such friends as writer Paul Jarrico, who was in Hollywood and who advocated liberal and leftist views. For several years Endfield worked as a director and choreographer with avant-garde theatre companies in and around New York and Montreal. He led his own repertory company of amateur players in performances of musicals and satirical revue at resorts in the Catskills.
Endfield had another string to his bow, having established a not inconsiderable reputation as master of the art of micro magic, particularly card tricks. In a circuitous way this brought him to Hollywood in 1940. There have been conflicting stories as to how he came to the attention of Orson Welles, who was known to have a long-standing fascination with magic. Endfield first met Welles in a magic shop, but it was his producer and business manager Jack Moss, himself a magician, who hired Endfield for the Mercury Theatre as a "general factotum". Moss wanted to enhance his own skills in order to confound Welles, who had engaged him in the first place as a tutor for performing magic on stage. In return for his expertise, Endfield was permitted to sit in on the making of Journey Into Fear (1943) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), learning valuable lessons in the process. By 1942 he was ready with his first film, a 15-minute-long documentary about the danger of rampant capitalism, entitled Inflation (1943). The witty little piece was a subtle attack on corporate greed and corruption and featured well-known actor Edward Arnold as a devil in businessman garb. An outspoken social critic, who had flirted briefly with the Young Communist League back in his days at Yale, Endfield was from the outset on a collision course with the establishment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce banned his film as "excessively anti-capitalist" and kept it from public view for half a century.
Following wartime service, Endfield wrote several scripts for radio and television. He directed a number of short documentaries for MGM in 1946, and followed this with his motion picture debut, Gentleman Joe Palooka (1946), based on a popular comic strip character, shot in eight days at "Poverty Row" studio Monogram Pictures. He also directed a B-mystery, The Argyle Secrets (1948), from his own earlier radio play, followed by one of the better entries in the "Tarzan" series, Tarzan's Savage Fury (1952). Unfortunately, the picture did poorly at the box office. The reason for this, producer, Sol Lesser suggested later, was because Lex Barker (as "Tarzan") had been given too many lines to speak and "nearly talked himself to death". It was not until Endfield's harrowing indictment of mob rule, The Sound of Fury (1950), that he "arrived" as a director of note. That same year he helmed another independently produced minor masterpiece (on a budget of $500,000), the stylish and moody film noir The Underworld Story (1950). In this scathing attack on unscrupulous journalism, with the lead character being inherently unsympathetic, Endfield elicited one of the finest performances of his career from Dan Duryea.
The ideas and sentiments expressed in these films were ill-timed, in that they drew the attention of HUAC--The House Un-American Activities Committee, which was tasked with rooting out Communists and other "subversives" in the entertainment industry--which particularly denounced "Sound of Fury" as being un-American. Though never a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, Endfield found himself "named" as a sympathizer. Preferring to leave the country rather than inform on others to the FBI, he settled his affairs and left for a new career in Britain in December 1951. To avoid problems with distribution in the US, for the first few years he worked under pseudonyms (such as "Hugh Raker") and on two occasions allowed a friend of his, director Charles de la Tour, to act as a 'front'. He used his own name again for the offbeat action film Hell Drivers (1957). This uncompromisingly tough working-class melodrama featured Stanley Baker, with whom Endfield formed a production company in the 1960s. Baker eventually starred in six of Endfield's films, including the routinely scripted drama Sea Fury (1958) about tugboat sailors and the rather over-the-top Sands of the Kalahari (1965). From the late 1950's, Endfield became also increasingly involved in turning out television commercials. He also worked in the theatre again, directing Neil Simon's play "Come Blow Your Horn" at the West End.
Certainly the most visually impressive and successful of Endfield's films is Zulu (1964), the epic story of the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879 between a small contingent of British troops and a vastly superior force of Zulu tribesmen. The original story was penned by military writer John Prebble and Endfield had written the screenplay as early as 1959. After several abortive attempts, he was able to parlay his way into the offices of producer Joseph E. Levine in Rome and was finally given the go-ahead. Enhanced by John Barry's rousing score, "Zulu" is a supremely well-choreographed "battle ballet"--the battle scenes constitute well over half the screen time), with numerous lateral tracking shots of the main protagonists, which effectively draw the audience into the heart of the action. The social element is concerned with British imperialism and class structure, as two officers from different backgrounds are forced to pull together in order to stay alive. As the supercilious upper-crust Lt. Bromhead, Michael Caine, then relatively unknown, began on his path to fame with an excellent performance, alongside Stanley Baker. Historical incongruities apart, "Zulu" succeeded as pure spectacle, much in the same way as the big-budget Hollywood epics of the same period.
Endfield lost interest in filmmaking after shooting the anti-war movie Universal Soldier (1971). This was in part due to the fact that most of his films had failed to make much money. After the death of his friend Stanley Baker in 1976, Endfield devoted himself to his "technical period". He manufactured a gold-and-silver chess set as commemoration for a famous match between grand masters Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in 1972 (only 100 were ever produced). In 1980 he invented the first pocket word processing system, the "MicroWriter", which had re-chargeable batteries and a 14-character LCD display.
In 1955 Endfield had co-authored a very successful book, "Cy Endfield's Entertaining Card Magic" (with Lewis Ganson), which had been well-received by amateur and professional magicians alike. In fact, one of his admirers, and occasional collaborators, was the famous micro magician Dai Vernon. Many of the sleight-of-hand routines in the book were developed by Endfield himself and related to the reader in a manner befitting a consummate storyteller. Endfield's passion for performing magic remained with him to the end. The multi-talented polymath resided in Britain until his death in April 1995.- Director
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Lewis Milestone, a clothing manufacturer's son, was born in Bessarabia (now Moldova), raised in Odessa (Ukraine) and educated in Belgium and Berlin (where he studied engineering). He was fluent in both German and Russian and an avid reader. Milestone had an affinity for the theatre from an early age, starting as a prop man and background artist before traveling to the US in 1914 with $6.00 in his pocket. After a succession of odd jobs (including as a dishwasher and a photographer's assistant) he joined the Army Signal Corps in 1917 to make educational short films for U.S. troops. Following World War I, having acquired American citizenship, he went on to Hollywood to meet the director William A. Seiter at Ince Studios. Seiter started him off as an assistant cutter. Milestone quickly worked his way up the ranks to become editor, assistant director and screenwriter on many of Seiter's projects in the early 1920s, experiences that would greatly influence his directing style in years to come.
Milestone directed his first film, Seven Sinners (1925), for Howard Hughes and two years later won his first of two Academy Awards for the comedy Two Arabian Knights (1927). He received his second Oscar for what most regard as his finest achievement, the anti-war movie All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque. The film, universally praised by reviewers for its eloquence and integrity, also won the Best Picture Academy Award that year. A noted Milestone innovation was the use of cameras mounted on wooden tracks, giving his films a more realistic and fluid, rather than static, look. Other trademarks associated with his pictures were taut editing, snappy dialogue and clever visual touches, good examples being the screwball comedy The Front Page (1931), the melodrama Rain (1932)--based on a play by W. Somerset Maugham--and an adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1939). When asked in 1979 about the secret behind his success, he simply declared "Arrogance, chutzpah--in the old Hollywood at least that's the thing that gave everybody pause" (New York Times, September 27, 1980). Milestone had a history of being "difficult", having clashed with Howard Hughes, Warner Brothers and a host of studio executives over various contractual and artistic issues. Nonetheless, he remained constantly employed and worked for most of the major studios at one time or another, though never on long-term contracts. While he was not required to testify before HUAC, Milestone was blacklisted for a year in 1949 because of left-wing affiliations dating back to the 1930's. His output became less consistent during the 1950s and his career finished on a low with the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) and its incongruously cast, equally headstrong star Marlon Brando.
Milestone must be credited with a quirky sense of humor: when the producer of "All Quiet on the Western Front", Carl Laemmle Jr., demanded a "happy ending" for the picture, Milestone telephoned, "I've got your happy ending. We'll let the Germans win the war".
Having suffered a stroke, Lewis Milestone spent the last ten years of his life confined to a wheelchair. He died September 25, 1980, at the University of California Medical Center in Los Angeles.- Writer
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Dalton Trumbo, the Oscar-winning screenwriter, arguably the most talented, most famous of the blacklisted film professionals known to history as the Hollywood 10, was born in Montrose, Colorado to Orus Trumbo and his wife, the former Maud Tillery.
Dalton Trumbo was raised at 1124 Gunnison Ave. in Grand Junction, Colorado, where his parents moved in 1908. His father, Orus, worked in a shoe store. Dalton, the first child and only son, was later joined by sisters Catharine and Elizabeth. The young Dalton peddled the produce from his father's vegetable garden around town and had a paper route. While attending Grand Junction High School (Class of 1924), he worked at The Daily Sentinel as a cub reporter. Of his early politics, a much older Dalton Trumbo told how he asked his father for five dollars so he could join the Ku Klux Klan, a mass organization after the First World War. He didn't get the five dollars.
While at university, he realized that his calling was as a writer. He worked on the school's newspaper, humor magazine and yearbook, while also toiling for the Boulder Daily Camera. He left school his first year to follow his family to Los Angeles. The family moved due to financial difficulties after his father had been terminated by the shoe company. In L.A., Dalton enrolled at the University of Southern California but was unable to complete enough credits for a degree. Orus Trumbo died of pernicious anemia in 1926, and Dalton had to take a job to become the breadwinner for his widowed mother and two younger sisters. Dalton Trumbo took on whatever jobs were available, including repossessing motorcycles and bootlegging, which he quit because it was too dangerous. Eventually, Trumbo took a job at the Davis Perfection Bakery on the night shift and remained for nearly a decade. Trumbo continued to write, mostly short stories, becoming more and more anxious and eventually desperate to leave the bakery, fearing that he would never achieve his destiny of becoming an important writer. During this time, he sold several short stories, written his first novel and worked for the "Hollywood Spectator" as a writer, critic and editor. His work also appeared in "Vanity Fair" and "Vogue" magazines. Trumbo's first novel, "Eclipse" (1934), was set in fictional Shale City, Colorado (a thinly veiled Grand Junction) during the 1920s and 1930s, with characters who resembled notable community members. One of its main characters, John Abbott, is modeled after Trumbo's father. Dalton had tried, perhaps unfairly he admitted later, to avenge his father on the town where he had failed.
In 1934, Warner Bros. hired Trumbo as a reader, a job that entailed reading and summarizing plays and novels and advising whether they might be adapted into movies. It lead to a contract as a junior screenwriter at its B-pictures unit. In 1936, the same year he of his first screen credit for the B-move Road Gang (1936), Trumbo met his future soulmate Cleo Fincher and they married two years later. Daughter Nikola was born in 1939 and son Christopher in 1940. A daughter was added, Mitzi, the baby of the family.
He wrote the story for Columbia's Canadian-made Tugboat Princess (1936), clearly influenced by Captain January (1936), which had been made into a silent in 1924 before being remade with superstar Shirley Temple, substituting a tugboat in the original with a lighthouse. His screenplays for such films as Devil's Playground (1937) showed some concern for the plight of the disenfranchised, but the Great Depression still existed, and social commentary was inevitable in all but fantasies and musicals.
After leaving Warners, he worked for Columbia, Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, and beginning in 1937, M.G.M., the studio for which he would do some of his best work in the 1940s. By the late 1930s, he had worked himself up to better assignments, primarily for RKO (though he returned to Warners for The Kid from Kokomo (1939)), and was working on A-list pictures by the turn of the decade. He won his first Oscar nod for RKO's Kitty Foyle (1940), for which Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for best actress as a girl from a poor family who claws her way into the upper middle class via a failed marriage to a Main Line Philadelphia swell.
By the time of America's entry into World War II, Trumbo was one of the most respected, highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood. He had also established a name for himself as a left-wing political activist whose sympathies coincided with those of the American Communist Party (CPUSA), which hewed to the line set by Moscow.
Trumbo was part of the anti-fascist Popular Front coalition of communists and liberals in the late 1930s, at the time of the Spanish Civil War. The Popular Front against Nazism and Fascism was been torn asunder in August 1939 when the USSR signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Many party members quit the CPUSA in disgust, but the true believers parroted the party line, which was now pro-peace and against US involvement in WWII.
Trumbo reportedly did not join the Party until 1943 and harbored personal reservations about its policies as regards enforcing ideological conformity. However, the publication of his anti-war novel "Johnny Got His Gun" in 1939 coincided with the shift of the CPUSA's stance from anti-Hitler to pro-peace, and his novel was embraced by the Party as the type of literature needed to keep the US out of the war. Trumbo agreed with the Party's pro-peace platform. The book, about a wounded World War One vet who has lost his limbs, won the American Book Sellers Award (the precursor to the National Book Award) in 1939. In a speech made in February 1940, four months before the Nazi blitzkrieg knocked France out of the war, Trumbo said, "If they say to us, 'We must fight this war to preserve democracy,' let us say to them, 'There is no such thing as democracy in time of war. It is a lie, a deliberate deception to lead us to our own destruction. We will not die in order that our children may inherit a permanent military dictatorship.'"
His speech was a rebuke to New Deal liberals. The Party began demonizing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who hated Hitler and was pro-British, as a war-monger. The Party ordered its members to henceforth be pro-peace and anti-FDR in their work and statements. In June 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, the CPUSA shifted gears to become pro-war, supportive of FDR's aggressive behavior towards Nazi Germany.
Shortly after the German invasion, Trumbo instructed his publisher to recall all copies of "Johnny Got His Gun" and to cease publication of the book. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war against the U.S. catapulted the U.S. into both the Asian and European theaters of World War II, the book - always popular with peace-lovers and isolationists who opposed America's involvement in foreign wars - suddenly became popular among native fascists, too. However, it proved hard to get a copy of the book during the war years.
Trumbo joined the CPUSA in 1943, the same year Victor Fleming's great patriotic war movie A Guy Named Joe (1943), with a Trumbo screenplay, appeared on screens. In 1944, Original Story was a separate Oscar category and David Boehm and Chandler Sprague were nominated in that category for an Academy Award. Trumbo's screenplay was overlooked. Like other communist screenwriters, he proved to be an enthusiastic writer of pro-war propaganda, though except for the notorious pro-Stalin Mission to Moscow (1943), few films displayed any overt communist ideas or propaganda. One that did was Tender Comrade (1943) , which Trumbo wrote as a Ginger Rogers vehicle for RKO. Directed by his future Hollywood 10 comrade Edward Dmytryk, it depicted a mild form of socialism and collectivization among women working in the defense industry. He also wrote the patriotic classic Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) for M.G.M., which was based on the Doolittle Raid of 1942.
Trumbo voluntarily invited FBI agents to his house in 1944 and showed them letters he had received from what he perceived were pro-fascist peaceniks who had requested copies of "Johnny Got His Gun", then out-of-print due to Trumbo's orders to his publisher. He turned those letters over to the FBI and later kept in contact with the Bureau, a fact that would later haunt blacklisted leftists, urging that the F.B.I. deal with them. His actions conformed to the CPUSA policy of denouncing anyone who opposed the war.
In 1945, the last year of the war, MGM released the Margaret O'Brien / Edward G. Robinson vehicle, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945), penned by Trumbo. Robinson was a future member of the Hollywood "gray-list" with those, like Henry Fonda who were suspected of leftist sympathies or for being Fellow Travelers, but who could not be officially blacklisted. Drawing on his own rural childhood, it was a picture of a young girl's life on a farm in rural Wisconsin. The year 1945 was crucial for Trumbo and other Hollywood party members in terms of the CPUSA's desire to have their work reflect the party's ideological agenda.
HCUA was originally created in 1934 as the Special Committee on Un-American Activities to look into the activities of fascist and pro-Nazi organizations. Then popularly known as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities exposed fascist organizations, including a planned coup d'etat against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the so-called Business Plot. Later on, it became known as the House Un-American Activities Committee or the Dies Committee after the new chairman, Martin Dies. HCUA originally was tasked with investigating the involvement of German Americans with the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
HCUA became a standing committee in 1946, still tasked with investigating suspected threats of subversion or propaganda that attacked "the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution." The focus was solely on the communists and their allies, so-called Fellow Travelers who made common cause with communists during the War Years. Fellow Travelers was a loose term that seemed to embrace many liberal FDR New Deal Democrats.
HCUA subpoenaed suspected communists in the entertainment industry. Trumbo's screenplay for Tender Comrade (1943), which concerned three Army wives who pool their resources while their husbands are away fighting was denounced as communist propaganda. However, writer-producer James Kevin McGuinness, a conservative who was a friendly witness before HCUA, testified that left-wing screenwriters did not inject propaganda into their movie scripts during World War II. McGuiness testified "[The movie industry] profited from reverse lend-lease because during the [war] the Communist and Communist-inclined writers in the motion picture industry were given leave of absence to be patriotic. During that time...under my general supervision Dalton Trumbo wrote two magnificent patriotic scripts, A Guy Named Joe (1943) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)."
Appearing before HCUA in October 1947 with Alvah Bessie, Herbert J. Biberman, Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson, 'Ring Lardner Jr' , Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, and Samuel Ornitz, Trumbo - like the others - refused to answer any questions. In a defense strategy crafted by CPUSA lawyers, the soon-to-be-known-as "Hollywood 10" claimed that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave them the right to refuse to answer inquiries into their political beliefs as well as their professional associations. One line of questioning of HCUA was to ask if the subpoenaed witnesses were members of the Screen Writers Guild in order to smear the SWG. It was a gambit played by the Committee as it knew that which of the 10 were in the unions, and it knew which were communist. As Arthur Miller has pointed out, HCUA left the Broadway theater alone, despite the fact that there were communists working in it, because no one outside of the Northeastern U.S. really cared about theater or knew who theatrical professionals were, and thus, it could not generate the publicity that HCUA members craved and courted through their hearings.
HCUA cited them for contempt of Congress, and the Hollywood 10 were tried and convicted on the charge. All were fined and jailed, with Trumbo being sentenced to a year in federal prison and a fine of $1,000. He served 10 months of the sentence. The Hollywood 10 were blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, a blacklist enforced by the very guilds they helped create. Trumbo and the other Hollywood 10 screenwriters were kicked out of the Screen Writers Guild (John Howard Lawson had been one of the founders of the SWG and its first president), which meant, even if they weren't blacklisted, they could not obtain work in Hollywood. Those who continued to write for the American cinema had to do so under assumed names or by using a "front", a screenwriter who would take credit for their work and pass on all or some of the fee to the blacklisted writer. Later, as one of the Hollywood Ten, Trumbo claimed for himself the mantle of "Martyr for Freedom of Speech" and attacked, as rats, those who became informers for HCUA by naming names. In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., wrote in The Saturday Review of Books, that Trumbo was in fact NOT a free speech martyr since he would not fight for freedom of speech for ALL the people, such as right-wing conservatives, but only for the freedom of speech of CPUSA members. The anti-communist Schlesinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian, thought Trumbo and others like him were doctrinaire communists and hypocrites. In response, Trumbo wrote a scathing letter to The Saturday Review to defend himself, characterizing himself as a paladin championing free speech for all Americans under the aegis of the First Amendment, which the Hollywood 10 claimed gave them the right to refuse to cooperate with HCUA.
After his blacklisting and failure of the Hollywood 10's appeals, the Trumbo family exiled themselves to Mexico. In Mexico, chain-smoking in the bathtub in which he always wrote, usually with a parrot given to him by 'Kirk Douglas' perched on his shoulder, Trumbo wrote approximately thirty scripts under pseudonyms and using fronts who relayed the money to him. His works included the film noir classic Gun Crazy (1950) (AKA Gun Crazy), co-written under the pseudonym Millard Kaufman, Oscar-winning Roman Holiday (1953) (with screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter as a front), and The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955) for director Otto Preminger and upon which blacklisted Oscar-winning screenwriter Michael Wilson also worked).
At the 1957 Academy Awards, Robert Rich won the Oscar for best original story of 1956 for The Brave One (1956). Rich was not present to accept the award, which was accepted on his behalf by Jesse Lasky Jr. of the Screen Writers Guild. When journalists began digging in to the background of the phantom Mr. Rich, they found out he was the nephew of a producer. Suspicion then arose that Rich was a pseudonym for the blacklisted Trumbo.
Though Hollywood has always been inundated with writers, Trumbo, even while blacklisted, was prized as a good writer who was fast, reliable and could write in many genres. Despite being a communist, Trumbo's favorite themes were more in the vein of populism than Marxism. Trumbo celebrated the individual rebelling against the powers that be.
With rumors circulating that Trumbo had written the Oscar-winning The Brave One (1956), it triggered a discussion in the industry about the propriety of the blacklist, since so many screenplays were being written by blacklisted individuals who were being denied screen credit. The blacklist only worked to suppress the prices of screenplays by these talented writers. In 1958, Pierre Boulle won the Oscar for the screenplay adapted from his novel The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which was unusual since Boulle could not speak nor write in English, which may have been the reason he did not attend the awards ceremony to pick up the Oscar in person. It was immediately realized that the screenplay had likely been written by a blacklisted screenwriter. It was - Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman.
Kirk Douglas hired Trumbo to write the script for Spartacus in 1958. In the summer of 1959 Otto Preminger hired Trumbo to write the script for Exodus. On January 20, 1960, the New York Times carried the story that Otto Preminger had hired Dalton Trumbo to write the script for Exodus, and that he would start shooting in April. On August 8, of the same year Kirk Douglas announced in Variety that Trumbo had written the script for Spartacus. Both pictures opened in the winter of 1960.
Trumbo wrote many more screenplays for A-list films, including Lonely Are the Brave (1962), The Sandpiper (1965), Hawaii (1966) , and _Fixer, The (1968). In 1970, he was awarded the Laurel Award for lifetime achievement by the Screen Writers Guild. He made a famous speech that many saw as a reconciliation of the two sides of fight. In 1971, he wrote and directed the movie adaptation of his famous anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun (1971). His last screenwriting credit on a feature film was for Papillon (1973), in which he also had a cameo role.
A six-pack-a-day smoker, he developed lung cancer in 1973. Two years later, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (which had supported the black list), Walter Mirisch, personally delivered a belated Oscar to Trumbo for his The Brave One (1956) script, now officially recognized by AMPAS as his creation. Eighteen years later, AMPAS would award him a posthumous Oscar for Roman Holiday (1953).
Dalton Trumbo died from a heart attack in California on September 10, 1976. At his memorial service, Ring Lardner Jr., his close friend and fellow Hollywood 10 member, delivered an amusing eulogy. "At rare intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not."- Actress
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Stardom somehow eluded this vastly gifted actress. Had it not perhaps been for her low-level profile compounded by her McCarthy-era blacklisting in the early 1950s, there is no telling what higher tier Marsha Hunt might have attained. Perhaps her work was not flashy enough, or too subdued, or perhaps her intelligence too often disguised a genuine sex appeal to stand out among the other lovelies. Two studios, Paramount in the late 1930s and MGM in the early 1940s, failed to complete her star. Nevertheless, her talent and versatility cannot be denied. This glamorous, slimly handsome leading lady offered herself to well over 50 pictures during the 1930s and 1940s alone.
Christened Marcia Virginia Hunt, the Chicago-born actress was the younger of two girls born to an attorney and voice teacher/accompanist. The family relocated to New York when she was quite young and she attended such schools as PS #9 and Horace Mann School for Girls. She developed an interest in acting at an early age (3), performing around and about in school plays and at church functions. Following her high school graduation the young beauty found work as a John Powers model and as a singer on radio, a gift obviously inherited from her mother. Marcia (she later changed the spelling of her first name to Marsha) studied drama at the Theodora Irvine Drama School (one of her fellow students was Cornel Wilde).
Encouraged to try Hollywood by various New York people in the business, the young photogenic hopeful moved there in 1934. She was only 17 but was accompanied by her older sister. It didn't take long for the studios to take an interest in her and she was signed up by Paramount not long after. Marsha's very first movie was in a featured role opposite Robert Cummings and Johnny Downs in the old-fashioned The Virginia Judge (1935). Displaying an innate, fresh-faced sensitivity, she moved directly into her second film, playing the title role in Gentle Julia (1936), this time with Tom Brown as her romantic interest.
Marsha continued to show promise but these well-acted roles were, more often than not, overlooked in mild "B"-level offerings. Appearing in co-starring roles in everything from westerns (Desert Gold (1936) and Thunder Trail (1937)) to folksy or flyweight comedy (Easy to Take (1936) and Murder Goes to College (1937)), she could not find decent enough scripts at Paramount. Though she was once deemed one of the studio's promising starlets, one of her last films there was another prairie flower role--[error]--with cowboys John Wayne and Johnny Mack Brown vying for her attention. At about this time (1938) she married Jerry Hopper, a Paramount film editor who turned to directing in the 1950s. This marriage lasted but a few years.
Freelancing for a time for many studios, Marsha's more noticeable war-era work in sentimental comedy and staunch war dramas came from MGM, and she finally signed with the studio in 1939. The roles offered, which included a featured part as one of the sisters in Pride and Prejudice (1940) starring Greer Garson, and again as a sister to Garson in Blossoms in the Dust (1941), which showed much more promise. Some of her better war-era roles came in the films Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941), Kid Glove Killer (1942) and The Affairs of Martha (1942). During this time she also sang on extended USO tours and stayed busy on radio. Her best known film is arguably The Human Comedy (1943) but she wasn't the star. Other film roles had her in support of others, such as Margaret Sullavan in Cry 'Havoc' (1943), little Margaret O'Brien in Lost Angel (1943) and Garson again in The Valley of Decision (1945). Leading roles did not come in "A" pictures.
Her MGM contract was allowed to lapse in 1945 and a second marriage in 1946, to screenwriter Robert Presnell Jr., became a higher priority. The marriage was long and happy (exactly 40 years) and lasted until his passing in June of 1986. The few pictures she made were, again, uneventful or in support of the star, although she did have a catchy, unsympathetic role in the Susan Hayward starrer Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947) as a scheming secretary. In Raw Deal (1948), starring Dennis O'Keefe, she got the "raw deal" being overshadowed as a "good girl" by the "bad girl" posturings of Claire Trevor. At this point of her career she decided to try the stage and made her Broadway debut in "Joy to the World" (1948). Other plays down the road would include "The Devil's Disciple" with Maurice Evans, "The Lady's Not for Burning" with Vincent Price and "The Little Hut" with Leon Ames. She even had a chance to return to her beloved singing as Anna in a production of "The King and I" and (much later) in productions of "State Fair" and "Meet Me in St. Louis". TV also yielded some new work opportunities, including a presentation of "Twelfth Night" in which she portrayed Viola.
The seams of her film career fell apart in the early 1950s. During the late 1930s and into the 1940s she signed a number of petitions promoting liberal ideals, and was a member of the Committee for the First Amendment. A strong supporter of freedom of speech, these associations led to her name appearing in the pamphlet "Red Channels", a McCarthy-era publication that "exposed" alleged Communists and "subversives". Although she and her husband were never called before the House Un-American Activities Commission, their names were nevertheless smeared all over Hollywood as "Reds". While she still found film work on occasion, it was rare. Although she had worked steadily from 1935 until 1949, appearing in over 50 films, she made only three films in the next eight years. Her screenwriter husband would be credited for only one film from 1948 to 1955.
Semi-retired by the early 1960s, stage and TV became Marsha's focal points. She also devoted herself to civil rights causes and such humanitarian efforts as UNICEF, The March of Dimes and The Red Cross. She became actively involved with the United Nations. On the acting front she appeared only in smaller roles in five films but in numerous TV programs and made-for-TV movies, playing everything from judges to grandmas. She became the Honorary Mayor of Sherman Oaks, California, in 1983, and published a book on fashion entitled "The Way We Wore" in 1993. Widowed in 1986, the ever-vibrant Marsha, in her 90s, continues to serve on the Advisory Board of Directors for the San Fernando Valley Community Mental Health Center, a large non-profit that advocates for adults and children affected by homelessness and mental illness. As recently as 2006, she appeared to good advantage in the movie Chloe's Prayer (2006) and, at age 91, was seen in Empire State Building Murders (2008).- Actor
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The actor and Broadway director Luther Adler was born into a Yiddish theatrical dynasty. One of the six children born to Jacob P. and Sara Adler, he made his debut in the world in New York City, originally billed as Lutha J. Adler. His full siblings Charles, Jay, Julia, and Stella (the famous acting teacher) as well as his half-siblings Celia and Abram Adler all appeared on Broadway, and his father Jacob, the biggest star of the Yiddish-language theater, was considered one of the great American actors.
The Yiddish theater was an important cultural venue in the days when the millions of Jewish immigrants in the greater metropolitan New York area spoke Yiddish as their first (and sometimes only) language. People who trained and appeared in the Yiddish theater were instrumental in the development of the modern American theater and film, and some, including Sidney Lumet, are still active in the 21st century. It was in this cultural milieu that Luther and his siblings got their grounding in acting and the theater.
Jacob Adler owned and operated his own stage in New York's Lower East Side, and Luther began appearing in the family productions at the age of five with the Adler production of "Schmendrick." He made his official debut as an actor at the age of 13 at his father's theater and his Broadway debut at the the age of 18. Billed as Lutha Adler, he appeared in the Provincetown Players' production of Theodore Drieser's "The Hand of the Potter" in December 1921 at the Provincetown Playhouse,
Adler's first Broadway hit was "Humoresque" in 1923, and he appeared regularly in top productions throughout the '20s, including "Street Scene" (1929) and "Red Dust" (1929). Along with his sister 'Stella Adler", Luther Adler was one of the original members of the Group Theatre acting company, which was formed in 1931 by Harold Clurman (his future brother-in-law), Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg. Others who would make their bones in the company were Elia Kazan, Julius "John" Garfield, Howard Da Silva, Franchot Tone, John Randolph, Will Geer, Clifford Odets and Lee J. Cobb.
The Group Theatre was dedicated to bringing realism to the American stage and was instrumental in introducing the Stanislavsky technique into American acting. Most members were leftists if not communists, and the collective wanted to produce plays dealing with social issues. For the Groupe Theatre, Adler appeared in "Night Over Taos" (1932), "Success Story" (1933), "Alien Corn" (1933) and two seminal works of the American stage written by Odets: "Awake and Sing!" (1935) and "Golden Boy" (1937). He played opposite leading ladies Katharine Cornell in "Alien Corn" (1933), his sister Stella in "Gold Eagle Guy "(1934), "Awake and Sing!" and "Paradise Lost" (both 1935), and Frances Farmer in "Golden Boy" (1937).
His appearance as the urban ethnic boxer Joe Bonaparte in Odets' "Golden Boy" arguably was his greatest role, but when the film was made in 1939, he was passed over for the improbably cast Wlliam Holden, a white-bread WASP. Although Adler appeared in many motion pictures, his reputation would remain primarily that of a stage actor.
Adler became a director on Broadway in 1942, though his first staging, "They Should Have Stayed in Bed", was a flop, lasting but 11 performances. He next directed Ben Hecht's pro-Israel propaganda play "A Flag is Born" in 1946, starring the great Paul Muni, a graduate of the Yiddish theater, and newcomer Marlon Brando, an Irish-American born-Protestant who had been trained by his sister Stella. The play, which raised money for Jewsh refugees from the Holocaust seeking sanctuary in Palestine, was a hit, running for 120 performances. He also directed "Angel Street" (1955) and "A View from the Bridge" (1960). He last appeared on Broadway as a replacement in the long running "Fiddler on the Roof."
Adler made his movie debut in Lancer Spy (1937), but he never became a star in that medium. His best roles like "Golden Boy" and "Humoresque" were taken by other actors, including Group Theatre alumnus John Garfield. He had memorable supporting turns in the noir classic D.O.A. (1949), in Joseph Losey's remake of M (1951), in Paul Muni's last film The Last Angry Man (1959), in the Holocaust drama The Man in the Glass Booth (1975), and as Paul Newman's mobster uncle in Absence of Malice (1981). He also worked frequently on television.
From 1938 until 1947, Adler was married to the actress Sylvia Sidney. They had one child, a son, Jacob. Luther Adler died in Kutztown, Pennsylvania on December 8, 1984. He was 81 years old.- Actor
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Howard da Silva was one of 324 actors, writers and directors who fell victim to the Hollywood blacklisting of the early 1950s, and had his career halted in the blink of an eye. Originally was a steelworker before making his stage debut at age 20 in New York. He made a name for himself on Broadway before going to Hollywood, but kept up his stage work after making the move to films. His most memorable performance came in the 1943 Broadway production of Oklahoma!. In Hollywood, he became a well-liked character actor, appearing in such films as Sergeant York (1941), The Big Shot (1942) and The Lost Weekend (1945). In 1947, his career was threatened when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began its investigation into alleged Communist influence of Hollywood. Actor Robert Taylor, called as a "friendly witness", accused many of his fellow actors and writers of either being communists or having communist sympathies. When questioned about da Silva, Taylor said, "I can name a few who seem to sort of disrupt things once in a while. Whether or not they are communists I don't know. One chap we have currently, I think is Howard da Silva. He always seems to have something to say at the wrong time." On November 25, 1947, a meeting of Hollywood executives held in New York released a statement known as the Waldorf Statement, in which they announced a blacklist would be immediately imposed aimed at anyone named or suspected as a communist. "We will forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation those in our employ and we will not re-employ any of the ten until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a communist." Howard appeared in a few more films before he was called before HUAC, refused to answer any of the committee's questions and was promptly blacklisted by the studios. He continued working in the theatre, and once the blacklist was lifted in the early 1960s made a return to film and television. He passed away two years after making his last movie.- Writer
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Herbert J. Biberman, the progressive producer, director and screenwriter now best known as one of the Hollywood Ten who were blacklisted by the American Film Industry for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was born on March 4, 1900 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale, Biberman entered his family's textile business after a journey to Europe. In 1928, Biberman joined the left-wing Theater Guild as an assistant stage manager, beginning his professional career in the arts. He married actress Gale Sondergaard in 1930.
Biberman became a director with the Theater Guild, and entered the movie industry as a dialog director on Colmbia Pictures' Eight Bells (1935) in 1935. He made his first picture that year, directing One-Way Ticket (1935) for B.P. Schulberg Productions and Columbia. Ironically, it would be producer B.P. Schulberg's son Budd Schulberg, an ex-communist, who would be one of his chief accusers in the Hollywood show trials of the late 1940s.
Biberman was arraigned before HUAC in 1947, where he was one of 19 unfriendly witnesses who refused to answer the Committee's inquiry into their political affiliations. The 19 eventually became the Hollywood Ten, as others of the 19 dropped away, including such luminaries as Bertolt Brecht, who left the U.S. for East Germany. Under the advice of lawyers with Communist Party affiliations, the Ten decided to adopt a common front and defy the committee by refusing to or deny the allegations that they were communists. In 1950, Biberman was fined and sentenced to six months in prison for contempt of Congress. Biberman's wife, the Oscar-winner Gale Sondergaard, was similarly accused and refused to testify. She also was blacklisted.
In 1954, Biberman directed the independently produced, left-wing motion picture Salt of the Earth (1954), a fictionalized account of a miners; strike in Grant County, New Mexico. Working with other blacklisted movie professionals, including screenwriters Michael Wilson (who wrote the picture) and Paul Jarrico (who produced it), the film starred such progressive actors as Will Geer. It was made against tremendous odds, including opposition from Hollywood and the government. A chronicle of the terrible working conditions faced by miners in New Mexico, the film had the official backing of the local miner's union and employed real workers and their families. However, other unions, involved in a Cold War fight in the 1950s against communist-dominated domestic unions and Communist Party-affiliated union organizers (a fight that began in Hollywood immediately after World War II, when returning veterans fought back against trade guilds that had become infiltrated by organized crime during their war service), refused to show the film because Biberman was still blacklisted. It was screened only once, in New York, before being blackballed from exhibition in the U.S. for 11 years.
Biberman released the film in Europe where it won awards in France and Czechoslovakia. In 1965, the film was finally released in the U.S. market. "Salt of the Earth" has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Biberman and Sondergaard had two children. They remained married until his death from bone cancer on June 30, 1971. Blacklisted for a quarter-of-a-century, Sondergaard finally found work in Hollywood after her husband's death.- Sly, manipulative, dangerously cunning and sinister were the key words that best described the roles that Gale Sondergaard played in motion pictures, making her one of the most talented character actresses ever seen on the screen. She was educated at the University of Minnesota and later married director Herbert J. Biberman. Her husband went to find work in Hollywood and she reluctantly followed him there. Although she had extensive experience in stage work, she had no intention of becoming an actress in film. Her mind was changed after she was discovered by director Mervyn LeRoy, who offered her a key role in his film Anthony Adverse (1936); she accepted the part and was awarded the very first Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress. LeRoy originally cast her as the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz (1939), but she felt she was not right for that role. Instead, she co-starred opposite Paul Muni in The Life of Emile Zola (1937), a film that won Best Picture in 1937. Sondergaard's most-remembered role was that of the sinister and cunning wife of a husband murdered by Bette Davis' character in The Letter (1940). Sondergaard continued her career rise in films such as Juarez (1939), The Mark of Zorro (1940), The Black Cat (1941), and Anna and the King of Siam (1946). Unfortunately, she was blacklisted when she refused to testify during the McCarthy-inspired "Red Scare" hysteria in the 1950s. She eventually returned to films in the 1960s and made her final appearance in the 1983 film Echoes (1982). Gale Sondergaard passed away of an undisclosed illness at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, at the age of 86.
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Harold Clurman was born on 18 September 1901 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a director, known for Deadline at Dawn (1946), Play of the Week (1959) and All My Sons (1948). He was married to Juleen Compton and Stella Adler. He died on 9 September 1980 in New York City, New York, USA.- Writer
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Dashiell Hammett was born May 27, 1894, in St. Mary's County, Maryland, to Richard Hammett and Mary Bond. He joined the Baltimore branch of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1915. He enlisted in the US Army's Ambulance Corps in June 1918 and was posted to a camp 20 miles from Baltimore, where he caught the flu, which developed into tuberculosis. He was invalided out of the army in July 1919 and returned to Pinkerton's. Hammett entered the veterans hospital near Tacoma, Washington, with tuberculosis in 1920. Upon his release he worked at Pinkerton's Spokane branch. Hospitalized again with tuberculosis, he met and courted a nurse, Josephine Dolan. In February 1921 he was moved to an army hospital near San Diego. After he was released he married a now-pregnant Josie in San Francisco. Hammett worked for the San Francisco branch of Pinkerton's, but left the agency in 1921 or 22 due to ill health. He took a writing course and sold droll vignettes to "The Smart Set" magazine during 1922, and some short stories to other magazines. He began to sell detective stories to "The Black Mask" from 1923. After the birth of the couple's second daughter in 1926, Hammett gave up freelance writing and became an advertising copy writer for the jeweler Albert Samuels, but left after six months due to ill health. Forced by his tuberculosis to live apart from Jose and the children, the marriage eventually broke up. Hammett supported himself through writing, chiefly for "The Black Mask", now under editor Joe Shaw. Hammett's long short stories were republished in novel form by Alfred Knopf. In 1929 Hammett moved to New York. After the success of his novel "The Maltese Falcon", he was engaged as a screenwriter by Paramount Pictures and moved to Hollywood, where he met Lillian Hellman. He returned to New York in 1931, where he wrote "The Glass Key". "The Thin Man" was published as a magazine serial in 1933. Hammett was encouraged by Hearst to write the "Secret Agent X9" comic strip, which ran from 1934-35, his last original work. In 1942 he re-enlisted in the army and was posted to the Aleutian Islands off of Alaska, where he edited The Adakian. When discharged in 1945, he returned to New York and became President of the NY Civil Rights Congress. In July 1951 Hammett was subpoenaed to testify on the Civil Rights Congress' bail fund, and was jailed for refusing to answer questions. Upon his release from jail, he was presented with a bill by the Internal Revenue Service for $111,000 in back taxes. In failing health, he lived off and on with Hellman. In 1961 he was admitted to New York's Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, where he died on January 10.- Actor
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When amiable Columbia Pictures actor Larry Parks was entrusted the role of entertainer Al Jolson in the biopic The Jolson Story (1946), his career finally hit the big time. Within a few years, however, his bright new world crumbled courtesy of the House Un-American Activities Committee after the actor admitted under pressure that he was once affiliated with the Communist Party. Although he unwillingly testified in 1951, he was still (unofficially) blacklisted. Never-say-die Larry managed to continue his career in years to come - both here and abroad, on stage and in nightclubs - alongside steadfast wife Betty Garrett. His film career, however, literally came to a standstill and would never be the same again.
Samuel Klausman Lawrence Parks was born in Olathe, Kansas, on December 13, 1914, of German and Irish descent. As a child growing up in Joliet, Illinois, he was plagued by a variety of illnesses, including rheumatic fever, but persevered with physical exercise and sheer strength of will. Majoring in science at the University of Illinois, his plans to become a doctor dissolved when, to the dismay of his parents, he found a passionate sideline in college dramatics.
He began appearing in touring shows, then made the big move to New York, finding initial employment as an usher at Carnegie Hall and a tour guide at Radio City. Following a number of summer stock shows, he made an inauspicious 1937 Broadway debut with a minor role in the Group Theatre's presentation of "Golden Boy". Developing a close-knit relationship with the Group, he was just beginning to build up his resumé in such Broadway outings as "All the Living", "My Heart's in the Highlands" and "Pure in Heart" when he had to return to his Illinois home following the death of his father.
He toiled for a time in Chicago as a Pullman inspector on the New York Central Railroad until the possibility of a film role had him re-setting his acting sights on Los Angeles. Although the film deal fell through, Larry stayed in L.A. and somehow made ends meet working construction. Columbia expressed interest in the fledgling actor and signed him up in 1941 after a favorable screen test. He stayed for nine years. His buildup was slow-moving, taking his first small step with a minor role in Mystery Ship (1941). Time, however, did not increase the tempo or quality of his movies. Either he was oddly cast, such as his role as an Indian opposite exotic Yvonne De Carlo in The Deerslayer (1943), or completely dismissed, as co-star of such obscurities as The Black Parachute (1944), Sergeant Mike (1944) or She's a Sweetheart (1944).
His association with the Group Theatre back in New York led to a chance introduction to musical actress Betty Garrett and the couple married in 1944. Larry had settled by this time in Hollywood but Betty was a hot item on Broadway. MGM finally offered her a contract and she relocated to Los Angeles to join her husband. The couple eventually had two children, one of whom, Andrew Parks, became a fine actor in his own right. Their other son, Garrett Parks, served as composer for the film Diamond Men (2000).
Larry scored an Oscar nomination playing Jolson (which was originally offered to both James Cagney and Danny Thomas), and hoped for equally challenging roles. His hopes were dashed as the studio instead continued casting him haphazardly in mild-mannered comedies and swashbuckling adventures. Other than the box-office sequel Jolson Sings Again (1949), most of Larry's films were hardly worthy of his obvious talent. To compensate somewhat, he managed to find a creative outlet in summer stock, and both he and Betty put together a successful vaudeville act with one tour ending up playing London's Palladium.
Following the completion of Love Is Better Than Ever (1952) with Elizabeth Taylor, the political scandal erupted and erased all of his chances to do film. One of many casualties of Hollywood "blacklisting", he was forced to end his association with Columbia, and he and Betty, whose own career was damaged, traveled to Europe to find work.
He found some TV parts after the controversy died down, and Betty and Larry were a delightful replacement for Judy Holliday and Sydney Chaplin on Broadway in "Bells Are Ringing". During the many meager times, he concentrated on becoming a successful businessman, including building apartment complexes. He made only two more films, last playing a doctor in the Montgomery Clift starrer Freud (1962). By the time he died of a heart attack on April 13, 1975, at age 60, Larry had long faded from view. Betty, however, managed to revitalize her career on TV sitcoms with regular roles on All in the Family (1971), Laverne & Shirley (1976), and roles on numerous other TV series before passing on February 12, 2011.- Sam Levene was the actor who originated "craps-shooter extraordinaire" Nathan Detroit in the seminal American musical "Guys and Dolls" on the Great White Way in the original 1950 production. Levene was not a good singer and had trouble staying in key, so his solo number "Sue Me" had to be written in one octave to compensate for his lack of pipes. Singing great Frank Sinatra played the Nathan Detroit role in the movie version of the musical Guys and Dolls (1955)) after producer Samuel Goldwyn cast non-singer Marlon Brando as Sky Masterston. Many critics noted that Sinatra -- who would not use the character's New York, ethnic accent when singing -- would have been perfect as Sky and rued the lack of "Jewish wry" the Italian-American crooner brought to the role, openly wishing that Levene had been cast as Nathan Detroit to Old Blue Eyes' Masterson. That was not meant to be, although 20 years later he would not be asked to reproduce another of his memorable roles on Broadway.
Born in Russia on August 28, 1905, Sam Levene made his Broadway debut in 1927 in the melodrama "Wall Street", two years before "Variety" noted that the fabled temple of capitalism had "laid an egg". Fifty-four years later he appeared in his 39th and last Broadway show, "Horowitz and Mrs. Washington", a flop that lasted but four performances. Along the way he was nominated for a Tony Award in 1961 as Best Actor in a Play for "The Devil's Advocate." Levene also starred in the original Broadway production of Neil Simon "The Sunshine Boys", playing Al Lewis to Jack Albertson's Willie Clark. However, the role in the 1975 movie (The Sunshine Boys (1975)) originally was earmarked for Jack Benny, who was replaced by his friend George Burns after Benny's death. Burns won an Oscar playing the role, another big one that got away from Levene.
Levene made over 45 movies. He was brought to Hollywood to recreate his stage role as -- fittingly -- a gambler in Three Men on a Horse (1936), following it up with the first of two appearances as San Francisco police Lt. Abrams in the "Thin Man" series: After the Thin Man (1936) and Shadow of the Thin Man (1941). His last film role was in the 1979 film And Justice for All (1979). The highlight of his movie career arguably are his turns in the hard-boiled film noir classics The Killers (1946), Brute Force (1947) and Crossfire (1947). He also appeared in one of the ultimate New York movies, the classic Sweet Smell of Success (1957).
Sam Levene died of a heart attack on December 28, 1980. He was 75 years old. - Actor
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Jeff Corey was a film and television character actor, as well as one of the top acting teachers in America.
Corey was born Arthur Zwerling on August 10, 1914 in New York City, New York, to Mary (Peskin), a Russian Jewish immigrant, and Nathan Zwerling, an Austrian Jewish immigrant. He was an indifferent student, but after taking a drama class in high school, young Corey became hooked. His talent earned him a scholarship to the Feagin School of Dramatic Arts, the top acting school in New York City at the time. Corey then became a professional actor, a career choice which saved him from a life selling sewing machines, he later said.
His first gig after acting school was with a Shakespearean repertory company, after which he became a member of a traveling troupe that entertained children. After Leslie Howard closed his Broadway production of Hamlet in December 1936, he took the play on the road with Corey cast as Rosencrantz in 1937. In 1939, Corey appeared as part of the Federal Theater Project's (FTP) Living Newspaper dramatic showcase in the Life and Death of an American, co-starring with Arthur Kennedy, and featuring the music of Alex North. He made his film debut in a bit part in the Federal Theater's sole movie production, ...One Third of a Nation... (1939). Starring Sylvia Sidney, Leif Erickson and future Oscar-winning director Sidney Lumet, the movie, which was released by Paramount, was a progressive exegesis on the hazards of tenement slum conditions. Congress terminated FTP funding on June 30, 1939, mainly due to objections to the leftist political tones of many FTP productions (see Tim Robbins' movie Cradle Will Rock (1999) about the pressures faced by the FTP in 1939).
In 1940, Corey, who had married his wife Hope in 1938, moved to Hollywood, where he appeared in studio productions through 1943, including The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), My Friend Flicka (1943) and Joan of Arc (1948). He also had a hand in establishing the Actors Lab, where he appeared in a wide variety of plays, including "Abe Lincoln in Illinois", "Miss Julie" and "Prometheus". He also produced "Juno and the Paycock" for the Lab. He joined the United States Navy Photographic Service in 1943 and was assigned to the aircraft carrier Yorktown as a motion picture combat photographer. He earned three citations while serving during the war, including one for shooting footage on the Yorktown during a kamikaze attack on the ship. The citation, which was awarded in October 1945, read: "His sequence of a Kamikaze attempt on the Carrier Yorktown, done in the face of grave danger, is one of the great picture sequences of the war in the Pacific, and reflects the highest credit upon Corey and the U.S. Navy Photographic Service."
After the war, Corey returned to Hollywood and resumed his acting career, specializing in character parts and playing heavies in films such as The Killers (1946) and Brute Force (1947), both of which starred another returning war vet, Burt Lancaster. His appearance as the psychiatrist in Home of the Brave (1949), one of his best screen performances, promised a long and productive career in Hollywood, but the first phase of his cinema career was cut short in 1951 when he was subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) after being named as a former Communist Party member by actor Marc Lawrence.
HUAC had scheduled hearings in Los Angeles as part of its crusade to ferret out Communist influence in Hollywood. Appearing before HUAC in Los Angeles in September 1951, the 37-year-old Corey refused to testify, instead invoking his 5th Amendment rights. The movie industry ruled that anyone invoking their constitutional right not to testify would be blacklisted, and Corey was, missing out on an entire decade of work in films and television during the 1950s. Ironically, Lawrence, whom Corey despised for the rest of his life, pointing out that he had remained stateside on a health deferment while Corey risked his life during the war, was virtually absent from American films and television during the same decade, having to make his living in Italy along with American expatriates who had been blacklisted.
In the book on Hollywood blacklistees "Tender Comrades", Corey explained that he had been a member of the Communist Party, and that while he no longer was in 1951, he could not in good conscience turn informer. "Most of us were retired reds," Corey said. "We had left it, at least I had, years before. The only issue was, did you want to just give them their token names so you could continue your career, or not? I had no impulse to defend a political point of view that no longer interested me particularly. They just wanted two new names so they could hand out more subpoenas."
After being blacklisted, Corey used his G.I. Bill benefits to study speech therapy at UCLA while supporting his family as a common laborer. At the request of a fellow student, Corey organized a class in speech that he taught in the garage of his home in Hollywood Hills home. He expanded his curriculum to acting, accepting $10 a month in "tuition" per month from each student that allowed them to attend weekly classes. Eventually, he expanded the garage to create a small theater where his students performed scenes. Corey's reputation as a teacher grew, and by the mid-1950s, he had become the premier acting coach in Hollywood. Although studios refused to hire the blacklisted Corey as an actor, they did send contract players to study with him.
Corey's class, which became known as the Professional Actors Workshop, attracted directors, screenwriters and established actors seeking insight into the craft. Corey's Workshop has been described by the National Observer as "A major influence in the motion picture industry." Corey was a Stanislavskian teaching the popular Method technique of sense-memory popularized by such other acting gurus as Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, which sought to tap into the actor's own emotions and psyche. Corey's own teaching technique was eclectic: He focused on one-on-one work with an individual actor, seeking through improvisational exercises to get the actor to tap into his/her subconscious and to use their imagination to come up with a theme that would elucidate their character.
His students included Robert Blake, pop singer Pat Boone, Richard Chamberlain, singer/actress Cher, director-producer Roger Corman, James Dean, Kirk Douglas, Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Michael Forest, Sally Kellerman, Irvin Kershner, Shirley Knight, Penny Marshall, Rita Moreno, Jack Nicholson, Leonard Nimoy, Anthony Perkins, Rob Reiner, singer/actress/director Barbra Streisand, future Academy Award-winning screenwriter Robert Towne and Robin Williams. Of Corey the teacher, three-time Oscar-winner Jack Nicholson said after he had become a major movie star, "Acting is life study, and Corey's classes got me into looking at life as an artist."
Corey also tutored experienced actors who had trouble with a role, or who just needed insight into playing a character. One of the already-established actors Corey tutored was three-time Oscar nominee Kirk Douglas, who came to Corey for help in playing the title role in Spartacus (1960). It was Douglas who, along with Otto Preminger, ended the blacklist by hiring Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplays for Spartacus (1960) and Exodus (1960), respectively. Two years after the Trumbo-penned films debuted on the big screen, Corey again was working in films and television. In 1962, he was cast in the film The Yellow Canary (1963) when one of his acting students, pop singer Pat Boone, pressured 20th-Century Fox into hiring him. Now off the blacklist, Corey became a busy character actor in movies and on television. Corey made his reputation as an actor's actor whom other actors loved to work with. Always good with actors, Corey also directed some episodes of television series.
In addition to his acting work, Corey continued teaching. He was Professor of Theater Arts at California State University in Northridge, and was artist in residence at Ball State, in Indiana, the University of Illinois in Bloomington, Chapman College's World Campus Afloat, the University of Texas in Austin, and at the Graduate School of Creative Writing at New York University. He also conducted acting seminars at Emory University in Atlanta, and for the Canadian Film Institute in Vancouver, British Columbia.
On August 16, 2002, six days after his 88th birthday, Corey died in a Santa Monica, California hospital, of complication from a fall. He was survived by his wife of 64 years, Hope, three daughters, and grandchildren.- Actor
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Mickey Knox was born on 24 December 1921 in New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for I Walk Alone (1947), The Godfather Part III (1990) and The 10th Victim (1965). He died on 15 November 2013 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
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American character actor who specialized in underworld types, despite a far greater range. A native of the Bronx, he participated in plays in school, then attended City College of New York. In 1930, he was accepted into Eva Le Gallienne's company, where he became friendly with another young actor, one day to be known as John Garfield. The two appeared in a number of plays, both with Le Gallienne's company and with the highly-politicized Group Theatre, before Lawrence was given a film contract with Columbia Pictures. His scarred complexion and brooding appearance made him a natural for heavies, and he played scores of gangsters and mob bosses over the next six decades. Nevertheless, he could turn in fine performances in very different kinds of roles as well, such as his bewildered mountain boy in The Shepherd of the Hills (1941).
Following the Second World War, as anti-Communist fervor gripped America, Lawrence found himself under scrutiny for his political leanings. When called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), he admitted he had once been a member of the Communist Party. The Committee broke down his resolve and he "named names" (including Sterling Hayden, Lionel Stander, Anne Revere, Larry Parks, Karen Morley and Jeff Corey). Nonetheless, he was blacklisted and departed for Europe, where he continued to make films, often in leading roles. Following the demise of the blacklist, he returned to America and resumed his position as a familiar and talented purveyor of gangland types. He was also a writer and director.- Actor
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Esteemed character actor Paul Stewart had a pair of the coldest orbs in town and made his living for decades playing dark, callous, shiftless villains, including a vast number of mobsters. Not a well-known name per se, he was nevertheless a reliable actor who seemed to have been born for the film noir and gangland crime drama genre with his premature silvery hair, dark thick brows and probing, deep-set eyes, all accentuated by a tough and penetrating Brooklyn accent.
Born in New York City on March 13, 1908, Stewart developed an interest for acting in his teens, making his Broadway debut with "Two Seconds" in 1931, following graduation from Columbia University. He had played a few more stage roles in New York when he met and made an impression on Orson Welles. As a result he became a founding member of the Mercury Theatre and a founding member of AFTRA when it was just a radio union.
Stewart's tough, guttural voice became a familiar sound on the 1930s airwaves and he was among the cast in the infamous Welles broadcast "The War of the Worlds." He married band singer/actress Peg La Centra (1910-1996) in 1939 and over the years they appeared together on many radio programs. She also provided singing voices for such stars as Susan Hayward on celluloid. Welles next put Stewart in his films, with the classic Citizen Kane (1941) as Raymond, Kane's wily valet, and Stewart found himself in demand as an untrustworthy character player.
Paul went on to essay a number of stark, sinister types to perfection, with roles in such films as Johnny Eager (1941), Mr. Lucky (1943), Champion (1949), Illegal Entry (1949), Twelve O'Clock High (1949), Carbine Williams (1952), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
On TV, Paul became a regular on a couple of short-lived series -- Top Secret (1954) and The Man Who Never Was (1966). In the 1950s Stewart turned to stage and TV directing as well, helming a number of popular crimers such as Peter Gunn (1958), Michael Shayne (1960), It Takes a Thief (1968), Hawaii Five-O (1968) and Remington Steele (1982). His voice also fit the bill for cartoons in the 1960s.
In 1974 Stewart suffered a heart attack while on location in New Mexico for Bite the Bullet (1975), but he returned sporadically to films, including the role of impresario Florenz Ziegfeld in W.C. Fields and Me (1976). He suffered a second and fatal heart attack in 1986 at age 77.- Producer
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Norman Lloyd was born Norman Perlmutter in Jersey City, New Jersey, to Sadie (Horowitz), a housewife and singer, and Max Perlmutter, a furniture store manager. His family was Jewish (from Hungary and Russia). He began his acting career in the theater, first "treading the boards" at Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory in New York. Aspiring to work as a classical repertory player, he gradually shed his Brooklyn accent and became a busy stage actor in the 1930s; he next joined the original company of the Orson Welles-John Houseman Mercury Theatre. Lloyd was brought to Hollywood to play a supporting part (albeit the title role) in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942). Hitchcock, who later used the actor in Spellbound (1945) and other films, made him an associate producer and a director on TV's long-running Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) (then in its third year). In the course of his eight years on the series, Lloyd became a co-producer (with Joan Harrison) and then executive producer. He has since directed for other series (including the prestigious Omnibus (1952)) and for the stage, produced TV's Tales of the Unexpected (1979) and Journey to the Unknown (1968), and played Dr. Auschlander in TV's acclaimed St. Elsewhere (1982).- Actor
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Martin Gabel was born on 19 June 1912 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was an actor and producer, known for Marnie (1964), The Front Page (1974) and The Lost Moment (1947). He was married to Arlene Francis. He died on 22 May 1986 in New York City, New York, USA.- Actress
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Her father, Donald Cole, was a consulting engineer, and died in 1926 when Kim was only three years old. Her mother, Grace Lind, once performed as a concert pianist. She had one brother who was eight years older than she, and she was educated at Miami Beach High.
According to an in-depth article on Kim Hunter by Joseph Collura in the October 2009 issue of "Classic Images", Kim was quiet and painfully shy as a child and overcame it through the guidance of a local dramatics teacher, a Mrs. Carmine. Included were diction, voice and posture lessons.
She studied at the Actors Studio and her first professional appearance was as "Penny" in "Penny Wise" in Miami in November 1939. Then, she joined a repertory group called "Theatre of Fifteen", but it disbanded in 1942 when WWII took away most of its male members.
She made her Broadway debut performance as "Stella" in "A Streetcar Named Desire" at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York, in December 1947 that was the 1947-1948 season's success and for which she won the Critics Circle and Donaldson awards.
A one-time student of the Pasadena Playhouse, she was appearing in the 1942 production of "Arsenic and Old Lace" when she was discovered by an RKO talent hunter who signed her to a seven-year contract for David O. Selznick's company. Selznick suggested she change her first name to "Kim" and a RKO secretary suggested the last name of "Hunter". A few years later, Irene Mayer Selznick, David's ex-wife by then, recommended Kim for her reprise role of "Stella" in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which she won an Oscar.- Lloyd Gough was born on 21 September 1907 in New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Sunset Blvd. (1950), All My Sons (1948) and The Green Hornet (1966). He was married to Karen Morley and Mildred Munson. He died on 23 July 1984 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
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Lee played Danny (opposite of Hilda Simms, who played Anna) in Anna Lucasta on Broadway in 1944. Anna Lucasta was the first non-black written play performed by an all black cast on Broadway. He became an actor after careers as a jockey, boxer and musician. Lee was a civil rights activist, following in the footsteps of Paul Robeson.- Actress
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Dolores del Rio was the one of the first Mexican movie stars with international appeal and who had meteoric career in the 1920s/1930s Hollywood. Del Rio came from an aristocratic family in Durango. In the Mexican revolution of 1916, however, the family lost everything and emigrated to Mexico City, where Dolores became a socialite. In 1921 she married Jaime Del Río (also known as Jaime Martínez Del Río), a wealthy Mexican, and the two became friends with Hollywood producer/director Edwin Carewe, who "discovered" del Rio and invited the couple to move to Hollywood where they launched careers in the movie business (she as an actress, Jaime as a screenwriter). Eventually they divorced after Carewe cast her in her first film Joanna (1925), followed by High Steppers (1926), and Pals First (1926). She had her first leading role in Carewe's silent version of Pals First (1926) and soared to stardom in 1928 with Carewe's Ramona (1928). The film was a success and del Rio was hailed as a female Rudolph Valentino. Her career continued to rise with the arrival of sound in the drama/romance Bird of Paradise (1932) and hit musical Flying Down to Rio (1933). She later married Cedric Gibbons, the well-known art director and production designer at MGM studios.
Dolores returned to Mexico in 1942. Her Hollywood career was over, and a romance with Orson Welles--who later called her "the most exciting woman I've ever met"--caused her second divorce. Mexican director Emilio Fernández offered her the lead in his film Wild Flower (1943), with a wholly unexpected result: at age 37, Dolores del Río became the most famous movie star in her country, filming in Spanish for the first time. Her association with Fernández' team (cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, writer Mauricio Magdaleno and actor Pedro Armendáriz) was mainly responsible for creating what has been called the Golden Era of Mexican Cinema. With such pictures as Maria Candelaria (1944), Las abandonadas (1945) and Bugambilia (1945), del Río became the prototypical Mexican beauty. career included film, theater and television. In her last years she received accolades because of her work for orphaned children. Her last film was The Children of Sanchez (1978).- Originally named Shalom Jaffe, he became known to the world as Sam Jaffe. He was born in New York City, to Heida (Ada) and Barnett Jaffe, who were Russian Jewish immigrants. As a child, he appeared in Yiddish theatre productions with his mother, a prominent regional stage actress. He graduated from the City College of New York and then studied engineering at Columbia University graduate school. He began his career as a mathematics teacher in the Bronx. Around 1915 Jaffe joined the Washington Square Players. By 1918 he was no stranger to Broadway, having debuted in the original play Youth, and he appeared regularly through the 1920s, though less in the 1930s and only sporadically in the 1940s. He appeared in 21 plays on Broadway during his acting career, his final appearance in 1979.
Jaffe was a method actor before it was defined and early on sported his signature shock of curly hair that some people would later misinterpret as part of some Harpo Marx characterization. Jaffe was anything but. His acting talents were considerable, and Hollywood noticed him first for the unusual role of the mad Grand Duke Peter in Josef von Sternberg 's The Scarlet Empress (1934). Frightening in his rendition of Peter, he was dispatched by the always magnificent Marlene Dietrich.
Jaffe was no matinee idol but his homely features were made for unusual character roles. He did not disappoint in providing unforgettable performances. Frank Capra cast him as the mysterious High Lama in Lost Horizon (1937) (as last minute replacement; the actor originally cast had died). It would be another two years before Jaffe was once more called to Hollywood - he was back quite busy on Broadway. He appeared in George Stevens Gunga Din (1939) which sported big star names as well. Stevens gave Jaffe the lead, Gunga Din, native regimental bhisti (Hindi for water-carrier). It was probably Jaffe's most familiar film role. It was a standout part which Jaffe handled with great humanity, and the film was a huge hit.
Jaffe would not appear in another film for eight years. His second of two movies in 1947 was Elia Kazan 's powerful expose of anti-Semitism Gentleman's Agreement (1947) in which Jaffe played an Albert Einstein-like professor. Jaffe would play doctors of one sort or another in the handful of movies for the next few years. Then in 1950 he played a very different doctor - Doc Erwin Riedenschneider, criminal mastermind -- in John Huston's taut The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Jaffe would receive a nomination for a supporting actor Oscar for this effort. Of the three films he did in 1951, Jaffe also appeared in an another Einstein-like role in the Robert Wise sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
Jaffe experienced the destructive anti-communist furor when his name was included on a listing of performers sympathetic to communism in the Red Channels pamphlet and like many, was blacklisted by the big Hollywood studios. He was considered essential by producer Julian Blaustein and Robert Wise to play Professor Jacob Barnhardt, and 20th Century Fox boss Darryl Zanuck (who had resisted much heat for Gentleman's Agreement (1947)) agreed. It was ironic that Einstein, veiled as the character Barnhardt, was a pacifist and being watched by the U.S. government at that time. There was some credence for rumors that Jaffe provided the calculus equations (mainly the gravitational force between bodies) on Barnhardt's blackboard - solved so easily by alien Michael Rennie.
Jaffe didn't appear on-screen for seven years due to the punitive effects of the blacklisting. In 1958, John Huston wanted him for his very original The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958) with John Wayne, and director William Wyler also came forward later to cast him as faithful servant Simonides in the blockbuster Ben-Hur (1959). From then on Jaffe was very busy, especially with episodic TV through the 1960s which included his own recurring role as Dr. Zorba in the very popular Ben Casey (1961) series. Jaffe also appeared with his lifelong best friend, screen icon Edward G. Robinson in the made-for-TV film The Old Man Who Cried Wolf (1970) . Jaffe remained active into the year of his passing, a thoroughly engaging and unique actor and human being who never pushed his views on anyone. - Actress
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Arguably best remembered for her role as Miss Ellie, the Ewing family matriarch on the long-running TV series Dallas (1978), Barbara Bel Geddes had earlier scored success on stage and screen long before gaining more lasting fame on television. She was born in New York City on Halloween Day 1922, the daughter of noted theatrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, who staged more than 200 plays. After growing up amidst the theatre, Bel Geddes began acting on stage at age 18 and soon moved on to Broadway. The silver screen also beckoned; she made her film debut in The Long Night (1947). She was quickly labeled a star, gracing the cover of Life magazine on April 12, 1948. Her third motion picture, I Remember Mama (1948), garnered Bel Geddes an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. Other notable films include Panic in the Streets (1950) directed by Elia Kazan; Alfred Hitchcock's classic mystery-thriller Vertigo (1958) with James Stewart and Kim Novak; and The Five Pennies (1959) opposite Danny Kaye. Though she achieved immediate success in films, Bel Geddes also continued to tread the boards on Broadway, since theatre was her first love. In 1952, she received the prestigious Woman of the Year Award from Hasty Pudding Theatricals USA, America's oldest theater company. She was nominated for Tony Awards as best dramatic actress for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1956 and for the lead in Mary, Mary in 1961. Bel Geddes made several TV appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) and other programs in the mid 1950s, but her greatest television role came as Miss Ellie Ewing Farlow on Dallas (1978), which enjoyed a run of 13 years (1978-1991). She won the Emmy Award for best actress in 1980 and was nominated in the same category in 1979 and 1981. Bel Geddes left the show for health reasons during the 1984-85 season, with Donna Reed taking over the role of Miss Ellie. Bel Geddes returned for the 1985-86 season and continued on Dallas (1978) until 1990, when she effectively retired from acting. She did not appear in either of the two Dallas TV reunion movies. On August 8, 2005, she died following a long illness.- Actress
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Born Mildred Linton in Ottumwa, Iowa on December 12, 1909, Karen Morley was adopted by a well-to-do family who moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1920s. She enrolled at Hollywood High School and studied for a career in medicine at UCLA, but a class in theater changed her career ambitions.
After studying at Pasadena Playhouse, she was signed by Fox Studios and her big chance came when producer Howard Hughes selected her to play the blond moll in the 1932 crime epic, Scarface (1932), Morley was put on a contract by MGM and starred in such early 1930s movies as Mata Hari (1931) (with Greta Garbo), Arsène Lupin (1932) (with John Barrymore), Dinner at Eight (1933) (with Jean Harlow), as well as films with Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery and Boris Karloff. In 1934, Morley left MGM after arguments about her roles and her private life, including her intention to start a family and her marriage to director Charles Vidor. She continued working as a freelance performer, appearing in King Vidor's Our Daily Bread (1934), Michael Curtiz' Black Fury (1935) and Pride and Prejudice (1940).
In 1947, her screen career came to a halt when she testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and refused to answer questions about her possible enrollment in the Communist Party. Afterward, she continued promoting left-wing causes and married actor Lloyd Gough. In 1954, she ran unsuccessfully as a New York lieutenant governor candidate for the American Labor Party. Morley died March 8, 2003 at the Motion Picture Country House in Woodland Hills.- Actor
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Zero Mostel was born Samuel Joel Mostel on February 28, 1915 in Brooklyn, New York, one of eight children of an Orthodox Jewish family. Raised in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the young Zero, known as Sammy, developed his talent for painting and drawing at art classes provided by the Educational Alliance, an institution serving Jewish immigrants and their children. Sammy often would go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to copy the paintings.
Sam Mostel matriculated at the City College of New York, then entered a master's program in art at New York University after graduating from CCNY in 1935. He dropped out after a year and worked at odd jobs before being hired by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project to teach drawing and painting at the 92nd Street "Y", the famous Young Men and Young Women's Hebrew Association located on Manhattan's 92nd St., in 1937.
Mostel married Clara Sverd, a CCNY classmate, in 1939, but the marriage was troubled due to personality conflicts. The couple separated in 1941 and divorced in 1944. While still teaching, Mostel supplemented his income by providing gallery lectures at various museums under the aegis of the WPA. His lectures were full of jokes as Mostel personally was a clown, and subsequently he was hired to perform at private parties.
Mostel auditioned as a comedian at the downtown nightclub Cafe Society in late 1941, a jazz club. Initially rejected, owner Barney Josephson hired Mostel after Pearl Harbor, figuring his patrons, now at war, could use some laughs. It was Ivan Black, the club's press agent, who gave Sam Mostel the nickname Zero, explaining, "Here's a guy who's starting from nothing."
Debuting at the Cafe Society on February 16, 1942, Zero was a hit with audiences and the critics, Simultaneously, Zero began appearing in the play "Cafe Crown" at the Cort Theatre, which opened on January 23, 1942 and played through May 23rd, closing after 141 performances. Zero made some impromptu appearances on stage, but he wasn't officially part of the cast of the play, which was staged by Elia Kazan and starred Morris Carnovsky, Sam Jaffe (a future blacklistee), Whit Bissell, and Sam Wanamaker. Zero made his formal Broadway debut in "Keep 'em Laughing" on April 24, 1942 at the 44th Street Theatre. The show ran for 77 performances.
Within a year, he was touring the national nightclub circuit and appearing on radio. He had a brief stint in the Army in 1943, but was quickly discharged due to an unspecified physical disability. Zero spent the rest of the war entertaining the troops overseas.
Zero married Kathryn Harkin, a former Radio City Music Hall Rockette, on July 2, 1944, an act that ruined his relationship with his Orthodox Jewish parents as his new wife was a gentile. The two remained a married couple until his death and produced two sons: Josh Mostel, who was born in 1946, and Tobias, who was born in 1949.
In the post-war years, Zero began to branch-out as a straight actor. On October 19, 1948, he made his television debut in the series "Off the Record," which was broadcast on the DuMont network, following it up with an appearance on October 26, 1948. He later appeared in the The Ford Theatre Hour (1948) episode "The Man Who Came to Dinner," which was broadcast on January 16, 1949 on NBC. He was reunited with his "Cafe Crown" director Elia Kazan in the Oscar-winner's movie Panic in the Streets (1950) (1950). In the movies, Zero often played heavies due to his physique, roles that downplayed his unique gift for comedy.
Zero had long been a leftist politically, and had made contributions to progressive causes. His nightclub act lampooned the red-baiters rampant at the time, and featured the character of a pompous senator called Polltax T. Pellagra. When he and the wife of his good friend 'Jack Gilford' were named by Jerome Robbins before the House Un-American Activities Committee as being communists, Zero was subpoenaed to testify by HUAC.
Mostel testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee on October 14, 1955. In a playful mood, he told the Committee that he was employed by "19th Century-Fox." Zero denied he was a Communist, but refused to name names. He told the Committee that he would gladly discuss his own conduct but was prohibited by religious convictions from naming others. Consequently, he was blacklisted during the 1950s. Shut-out from the movies, he also lost many lucrative nightclub gigs, and he had to make due by playing gigs for meager salaries and by selling his paintings.
In the 1950s, Mostel bumped into Elia Kazan on the street in New York City, and the two reminisced. Kazan said Mostel chided him for putting Mostel through the paces in "Panic in the Streets," forcing him to run more than he ever had. The two retired to a bar, and as they began to drink, s Mostel kept muttering, in reference to Kazan's naming names before HUAC, "Ya shouldn't a done that. Ya shouldn't a done that."
There was no blacklist in the theater, and his friend Burgess Meredith, a noted liberal, offered Zero the lead role in his 1958 Off-Broadway production of "Ulysses in Nighttown," based on the Nighttown episode of James Joyce's novel "Ulysses," that Meredith was directing. Mostel's performance as Leopold Bloom, Joyce's Jewish Everyman, was a great hit with audiences and critics alike, and he won an "Obie," the Off-Broadway equivalent of a Tony. Zero also starred in productions of "Nighttown" in London and Paris.
By the end of 1959, Zero again was appearing on television, cast in the "Play of the Week" episode "The World of Sholom Aleichem," which was broadcast on December 14, 1959 in syndication. He also was cast in a Broadway play, "The Good Soup."
Zero never opened in the play as he was hit by a bus on January 13, 1960. His left leg was severely injured, and required four operations. Zero was in the hospital for five months but regained the use of the leg.
He made a triumphant return to Broadway in the fall of 1960, starring in Ionesco's absurdist tour-de-force "Rhinoceros," for which he won a Tony award. He was cast in another "Play of the Week" episode, this time in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," which was broadcast on April 3, 1961 in syndication.
Zero and his friend Jack Gilford, who had also been blacklisted due to Jerome Robbins having named names and hadn't worked for many years, were both cast in the Broadway musical "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." However, the show, under director George Abbott, was troubled. When Stephen Sondheim pitched Robbins to producer Harold Prince as the savior of "Forum," which was floundering in its out-of-town tryouts, Prince phoned Mostel to ask whether he would be prepared to work with Robbins.
"Are you asking me to eat with him?" asked Mostel.
"I'm just asking you to work with him," Prince replied.
"Of course I'll work with him," Mostel said. "We of the left do not blacklist."
When Robbins showed up at his first rehearsal, everyone was terrified of him because of his reputation as a tough taskmaster and perfectionist. Robbins made the rounds of the cast, shaking hands. When he got to Mostel, there was silence. Then Mostel boomed, "Hiya, Loose Lips!"
Everyone burst out laughing, including Robbins, and the show went on. Robbins was uncredited for staging and choreographing "Forum," which opened at the Alvin Theatre on May 8, 1962. "Forum" was a great hit, running for 964 performances at the Alvin and at the Mark Hellinger Theatre and later at the Majestic, closing on August 29, 1964. "Forum" won six Tony awards, including Best Musical and Best Director for George Abbott. Mostel won his second Tony and Gilford was nominated for the Tony for Best Featured Actor.
Zero followed up this triumph with his legendary turn as Tevye, the milkman with marriageable daughters in "Fiddler on the Roof," based on the stories of Sholom Aleichem. With direction and choreography credited to Jerome Robbins, "Fiddler on the Roof" opened at the Imperial Theatre on September 22, 1964 and did not close until almost eight years later, at the Broadway Theatre on July 2, 1972, with a stop at the Majestic in between during the late '60s. After seven previews, "Fiddler" racked up a total of 3,242 performances, making it one of the greatest Broadway smashes ever. After wining nine Tony awards in 1965, including Best Musical, Best Director, and Best Actor in A Musical (Zero's third Tony), the show was awarded a 10th Tony, a Special Award in 1972 when "Fiddler" became the longest-running musical in Broadway history.
Zero was cast in the 1966 movie version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), and then concentrated on movies and television for the rest of his career. Most of his projects, with the exception of Mel Brooks' The Producers (1967), did not fully utilize his talents. It was a major blow when director Norman Jewison cast the Israeli actor Topol as Tevye in his movie adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof (1971), passing over the legend who had created the role. Topol got an Oscar nomination, but faded quickly out of American movies. The movie of "Fiddler," a huge roadshow hit in 1971, also faded out of American consciousness. One wonders if with Zero in the role, the movie would now be considered a classic and constantly revived on television.
In 1974, Zero reprised his Leopold Bloom in a Broadway production of "Ulysses in Nighttown," again directed by Burgess Meredith, which netted him a Tony Award nomination as Best Actor in a Play. He turned in an affecting performance as a blacklisted comedian in Martin Ritt's movie about the blacklist, The Front (1976). He also had a success with a Broadway revival of "Fiddler on the Roof" in December 1976.
Zero was cast as Shylock in Arnold Wesker's "The Merchant," a pro-Jewish reimagining of 'William Shakespeare''s "The Merchant of Venice." Mostel had great hopes that his Shylock would be the crowning achievement of his career and put him back on top. His huge talent and larger-than-life persona seemed to do better on stage.
This was not to come to pass. He fell ill after a tryout performance in Philadelphia in September and was hospitalized. On September 8, 1977, Zero Mostel died from an aortic aneurysm at the age of sixty-two. One of the greatest, most unique, and definitely irreplaceable talents to grace the American stage and movies had passed away. We are unlikely to look on his likes again.- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Actor / director John Cromwell was born December 23, 1887, in Toledo, OH. He made his Broadway debut on October 14, 1912, in Marian De Forest's adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" at the Playhouse Theatre. The show was a hit, running for a total of 184 performances. Cromwell appeared in another 38 plays on Broadway between February 24, 1914--when he appeared in Frank Craven's "Too Many Cooks" at the 39th Street Theatre (a hit show he co-directed with Craven that ran for a total of 223 performances)--and October 31, 1971, when he closed with "Solitaire/Double Solitaire" at the John Golden Theatre after 36 performances. In addition to "Cooks", Cromwell directed or staged 11 plays and produced seven plays on Broadway. Among the highlights of his Broadway acting career were his multiple appearances as a Shavian actor. He was "Charles Lomax" in the original Broadway production of George Bernard Shaw's "Major Barbara" in 1915 (Guthrie McClintic, who married Katharine Cornell in 1921 and became a notable Broadway director, played a butler) and as "Capt. Kearney" in the revival of "Captain Brassbound's Conversion" the following year (McClintic played "Marzo"). He also appeared as "Brother Martin Ladvenu" in Katharine Cornell's 1936 "Saint Joan", directed by McClintic, and played "Freddy Eynsford Hill" in Cedric Hardwicke's 1945 revival of "Pygmalion", starring Gertrude Lawrence as "Eliza Doolittle" and Raymond Massey as "Henry Higgins".
As for William Shakespeare, he played "Paris" to Katharine Cornell's "Juliet" and Maurice Evans' "Romeo" in McClntic's "Rome and Juliet" in 1935, and appeared as "Rosenkrantz" in McClintic's 1936 Broadway staging of "Hamlet", with John Gielgud in the title role, Lillian Gish as "Ophelia" and Judith Anderson as "Gertrude". He also appeared as "Lennox" in the 1948 revival of Shakespeare's "Scottish Play", with Michael Redgrave as "Macbeth" and Flora Robson as "Lady Macbeth" (young actors also featured in the play who went on to renown were Julie Harris, Martin Balsam and Beatrice Straight). Cromwell won a Tony Award as Best Featured Actor in a Play in 1952 for "Point of No Return", in which he supported Henry Fonda, and appeared as the father, "Linus Larabee Sr.", in "Sabrina Fair" the next year.
With the advent of sound pictures, Cromwell went "Hollywood" in 1929, appearing in The Dummy (1929) in support of Ruth Chatterton and Fredric March. He also co-directed two talkies with A. Edward Sutherland that year, Close Harmony (1929) and The Dance of Life (1929) (he had a bit part as a doorman in the latter). After learning the craft of directing, he directed The Mighty (1929) with George Bancroft, in which he made innovative use of sound. He also directed Jackie Coogan in Tom Sawyer (1930) the next year. He made his name with Ann Vickers (1933) in 1933 and Of Human Bondage (1934) in 1934, two films he shot for RKO based on novels by the preeminent writers Sinclair Lewis and W. Somerset Maugham. Both movies ran into censorship trouble. Lewis' "Ann Vickers" featured Irene Dunne as a reformer and birth control advocate who has a torrid extramarital affair. The novel had been condemned by the Catholic Church, and the proposed movie adaptation proved controversial. The Studio Relations Committee, headed by James Wingate (whose deputy was future Production Code Administration head Joseph Breen, a Roman Catholic intellectual) condemned the script as "vulgarly offensive" before production began. The SRC, which oversaw the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association's Production Code, refused to approve the script without major modifications, but RKO production chief Merian C. Cooper balked over its excessive demands. Though studio head B.B. Kahane protested the SRC's actions to MPPDA President Will Hays, the studio agreed to make "Ann Vickers" an unmarried woman at the time of her affair, thus eliminating adultery as an issue, and the film received a Seal of Approval. The battle over "Ann Vickers" was one of the reasons the more powerful PCA was created in 1934 to take the place of the SRC.
Joseph Breen, now head of the PCA, warned that the script for W. Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" was "highly offensive" because the prostitute "Mildred", whom the protagonist, medical student "Philip Carey", falls in love with, comes down with syphilis. Breen demanded that Mildred be turned into less of a tramp, that she be afflicted with tuberculosis rather than syphilis and that she be married to Carey's friend whom she cheats on him with. RKO gave in on every point, as the PCA, unlike the SRC, had the ability to levy a $25,000 fine for violations of the Production Code. Despite the changes, chapters of the Catholic Church's Legion Of Deceny condemned the film in Chicago, Detroit, Omaha and Pittsburgh. Despite a picket line manned by local priests in Chicago, Cromwell's film broke all records at the Hippodrome Theater when it played there in August 1934. Five hundred people had to be turned away opening night. It seemed that wherever the Legion of Decency had condemned the film, it played to capacity crowds. In 1935 Breen ruled that "Of Human Bondage" would have to be changed if RKO wished to re-release it.
Other major films Cromwell directed include Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Algiers (1938), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), Since You Went Away (1944) and Anna and the King of Siam (1946). In 1951 he directed The Racket (1951) starring Robert Mitchum, Lizabeth Scott, and Robert Ryan; he had appeared in the original staging of the Broadway play by Bartlett Cormack on which the movie was based back in 1927.
Busy on Broadway in the 1950s, it was seven years before he directed another film, The Goddess (1958), with a screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky and starring Kim Stanley. He directed two more minor films before calling it quits as a movie director in 1961. As a director, Cromwell eschewed flashy camera work, as he felt it detracted from both the story and the actors' performances. Late in his life director Robert Altman cast Cromwell as an actor in two of his films, 3 Women (1977) and A Wedding (1978).
John Cromwell died on September 26, 1979, in Santa Barbara, CA.- Actor
- Director
- Producer
Irving Pichel was born on 24 June 1891 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He was an actor and director, known for Destination Moon (1950), Dracula's Daughter (1936) and Tomorrow Is Forever (1946). He was married to Violette Wilson. He died on 13 July 1954 in Hollywood, California, USA.- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
- Director
Writer-director Abraham Lincoln Polonsky, one of the most prominent victims of the Hollywood blacklisting of communists and social progressives in the post-World War II period, was born on December 5, 1910, in New York, New York. An unreconstructed Marxist, Polonsky never hid his membership in the Communist Party. (Indeed, it was known by the federal government during World War II, when he was a member of the O.S.S. working in France with the Resistance, given credence to the charge that the House Un-American Activities Committee wasn't interested so much in "ferreting out" communists and fellow-travelers as in making progressives of the F.D.R. coalition publicly repudiate their beliefs in a form of public penance.) After being named by former fellow O.S.S. member Sterling Hayden, Polonsky himself was arraigned before HUAC in 1951. After defying the committee by refusing to name names, he was blacklisted for 17 years by the U.S. film industry.
As director and screenwriter, Polonsky was an "auteur" of three of the great film noirs made in the last century: Body and Soul (1947) (screenplay; directed by fellow CPUSA member Robert Rossen, who kept his career by "naming names"), Force of Evil (1948) (which he wrote and directed), and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) (which he wrote using a front).
Polonsky studied English at City College of New York (CCNY) and, after briefly shipping out as a merchant seaman, went to Columbia Law School. Polonsky's father wanted him to have a profession, and he preferred the law over medicine. The young Polonsky had wanted to be a writer, and he taught English at CCNY while matriculating at Columbia Law, but the law was his first career. After graduation from Columbia Law, he became a practicing attorney, which ironically, led to his career in screenwriting.
Gertrude Berg, the creative force behind the popular radio show "The Goldbergs" (which later made the transition to TV), was a client of his firm. Needing background for an episode that would feature the machinations of the law, Polonsky was assigned to Berg as an expert. Berg was so impressed when Polonsky dictated a scene to his secretary, she hired him as one of her writers. Thus, in 1937, by a serendipitous route charted originally by his father, who wanted his son to be a professional, not a writer, Polonsky was on his way to becoming a hot, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and writer-director.
Polonsky eventually left Berg and became a labor organizer. In 1939, after organizing autoworkers at a General Motors plant near his home in Briarcliff, New York, he became the educational director of the Congress of Industrial Organization, the major labor federation for skilled workers, in upstate New York. While working as a labor organizer, Polonsky wrote his first novel, "The Discoverers", a novel dealing with New York City bohemians, radicals, and frustrated intellectuals. The book was optioned by a publisher that unfortunately went out of business; it remains unpublished to this day. However, he began to thrive as a novelist: Simon and Schuster published a novel he co-wrote, "The Goose Is Cooked," in 1942, and Little Brown published his sea-adventure story "The Enemy Sea," which originally had been serialized in "Colliers Magazine".
Paramount became interested in Polonsky and offered him a contract. However, as a dedicated anti-Nazi, Polonsky was determined to serve in the war despite being turned down for military service due to poor eyesight. Recruited by the O.S.S. (likely because of his communist background; it was said that during World War II, communists made the best secret agents due to their propensity for secrecy and their dedication to their ideology). He signed a contract with Paramount guaranteeing him a job after the war, and then was shipped off to London before serving in France as a liaison with the French underground.
Back from World War II, Polonsky alienated Paramount's head writer when he complained that his nominal boss had kept him waiting too long for their initial meeting. The peeved head writer gave him the Marlene Dietrich potboiler Golden Earrings (1947) as his first screenwriting assignment, and although he received a screen credit, he claimed that nothing he wrote made it to the screen. He quit Paramount to take a job with John Garfield's Enterprise Productions, which had a collectivist philosophy akin to the old Group Theater on Broadway, of which the former Julius Garfinkle (Garfield) had been a member. Garfield was a leftist, though not a member of the Communist Party, though he did employ director Robert Rossen, who was a member of CPUSA, as was Polonsky, who had joined during the Depression.
Working from Polonsky's script, Rossen shot the classic boxing drama Body and Soul (1947). Polonsky actually was allowed on the set (not a common occurrence for the film industry) and actively gave Rossen advice. Some critics see Polonsky as a "co-director," a claim Polonsky rejected as "no one," he said, "co-directs a Robert Rossen Picture." However, in the collectivist atmosphere of the studio, he was able to prevail over Rossen's conception of a "happy ending," ensuring that his own ending was part of the picture. Polonsky won an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for the film that was hailed as a classic by cineastes not long after its release. Garfield encouraged Polonsky to become a director, a development the screenwriter relished as it would give him more control over his screenplay and enable him to bring his vision to the screen just as he saw it. Adapting a 1940 crime novel "Tucker's People," Polonsky wrote and directed Force of Evil (1948), which has been hailed as the greatest low-budget film noir ever.
By the time production had wrapped, Enterprise had gone bankrupt, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was impressed enough to pick up the picture, though its hard-hitting indictment of big business, capitalism and political corruption was not Louis B. Mayer's cup of tea. MGM essentially dumped the picture as the bottom half of a double bill released for the Christmas season. This classic noir, with its indictment of capitalist society, was not exactly Christmas fare, and as Turner Classic Movies' Robert Osborne has said, it was quickly forgotten until rediscovered in the early 1960s. It has been considered a classic for at least a generation and had a big influence on Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), whose equation of crime with business, and business with criminal behavior had been aired 24 years before in Polonsky's debut. In a huge loss to American cinema, Polonsky's debut was to be his last directorial effort for 20 years.
Both Body and Soul (1947) and Force of Evil (1948) are about the deleterious effects of materialism on the soul, as both protagonists (both played by John Garfield operating at the peak of his talent) face the loss of their soul due to the temptation of big money. Indeed, it is easy to see why conservatives would be offended by Force of Evil (1948) as it arguably is the most radical film to have come out of mainstream Hollywood, and definitely is informed by Marxism.
Blacklisted after his uncooperative appearance before HUAC in April 1951, Polonsky did not get a chance to direct another film until 1968, when he helmed the production of the revisionist Western Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), which he turned into an indictment of genocide. Although he wrote screenplays and marketed them through fronts (most famously, with the indictment of racism Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), directed by Robert Wise, it wasn't until 1968 that he was credited on a film, for the screenplay for Don Siegel's exegesis of police corruption, Madigan (1968). After the release of the well-reviewed "Willie Boy," Polonsky enter4ed into "Fiddler on the Roof" territory and helmed the more light-hearted Romance of a Horsethief (1971). After that, he was told by his physician that his heart could not take the strain of movie directing, so he retired from that part of his work, though he continued to write screenplays until the end of his life.
After the tide of public opinion turned against the HUAC informers after Victor Navasky's 1980 history "Naming Names," Polonsky was rediscovered by scholars of the cinema. However, he proved a frustrating subject to those that wanted to ferret out the films that had been produced from his fronted-work screenplays. Similarly to his stand 40 years earlier, when he had refused to "name names," Polonsky refused to cite the pictures he had ghostwritten or to name the fronts he had used for his fronted screenplays during the days of the blacklist. He said he had given the men his word that he would not betray their confidence, and indeed, he refused to cite his anonymous work as he felt it would have gone back on his pledge to the men who had helped him through a tough period, as it would have resulted in them being denied credit for the work. Polonsky had bargained with them in good faith, and a man of principle, he refused to go back on his pledge to them.
An unrepentant Marxist until his death, Polonsky publicly objected when director Irwin Winkler sanitized his script for Guilty by Suspicion (1991) to make the character played by Robert De Niro a liberal rather than a communist. He also was prominent in objecting to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences awarding an honorary Academy Award to director Elia Kazan, who was the most prominent of the people who "named names" before HUAC.
Abraham Polonsky died of a heart-attack in Beverly Hills, California, on October 26, 1999, convinced that he had been exonerated by history. As the auteur of three classic films that will live on in cinema history, he was right.- Writer
- Director
- Producer
Robert Rossen was born on 16 March 1908 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and director, known for The Hustler (1961), All the King's Men (1949) and Alexander the Great (1956). He was married to Sarah (Sue) Siegel. He died on 18 February 1966 in New York City, New York, USA.- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Writer
Born in New York, director Bernard Vorhaus made his name in England during the 1930s and later became a victim of the Hollywood blacklist. His most well-known film was The Last Journey (1935), but his quirky thriller about phony spiritualists, The Amazing Mr. X (1948), has a loyal following. A graduate of Harvard University, Vorhaus gave a young director by the name of David Lean his first job as a film cutter. Lean went on to become an Oscar-winning director known for such intelligent epics such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Lean called Vorhaus the "greatest influence" in his life. After being blacklisted, Vorhaus relocated to England, where he lived with his Welsh-born wife until his death in November 2000.- Director
- Producer
- Actor
Martin Ritt, one of the best and most sensitive American filmmakers of all time, was a director, actor and playwright who worked in both film and theater. He was born in New York City. His films reflect, like almost none other, a profound and intimate humane vision of his characters.
He originally attended and played football for Elon College in North Carolina. The stark contrasts of the Depression-era South compared to his New York City upbringing instilled in him a passion for expressing the struggles of inequality, which is clearly present in the films he directed. After leaving St. John's University, he found work with a theater group, and began acting in plays. His first performance was as Crown in "Porgy and Bess". After his performance drew favorable reviews, Ritt concluded that he could "only be happy in the theater." He then went to work with the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration's New Deal agency the Works Progress Administration as a playwright for the Federal Theater Project, a government-funded theater support program. With work hard to find and the Depression in full effect, many WPA theater performers, directors and writers became heavily influenced by the radical left and Communism, and Ritt was no exception (years later he would state that he had never been a member of the Communist Party, although he considered himself a leftist and found common ground with some Marxist principles)
Ritt moved on from the WPA to the Theater of Arts, then to the Group Theatre of New York City. It was at the Group Theatre that he met Elia Kazan, then a director. Kazan cast Ritt as an understudy in his play "Golden Boy". Ritt's social consciousness and political views continued to mature during his time with the Group, and would influence the social and political viewpoint that he would later express in his films (he would continue his association with Kazan for well over a decade, later assisting, and sometimes filling in for, his erstwhile mentor at The Actors Studio, eventually becoming one of the Studio's few non-performing life members). During World War II Ritt served with the U.S. Army Air Forces and appeared as an actor in the Air Force's Broadway play "Wiinged Victory" (also in the film version, Winged Victory (1944)). During the Broadway run of the play, Ritt directed a production of Sidney Kingsley's play "Yellow Jack", using actors from "Winged Victory" and rehearsing between midnight and 3 a.m. after "Winged Victory" performances. The play had a brief Broadway run and was performed again in Los Angeles when the "Winged Victory" troupe moved there to make the film version.
After working as a playwright with the Works Progress Administration, acting on stage and directing hundreds of plays, Ritt became a successful television director. In 1952 he was acting, directing and producing teleplays and television programs when he was caught up in what became known as the "Red Scare", which was an attempt by ultra-conservatives in Congress to "root out" what they saw as Commuist influence in films and on Broadway, championed by Wisconsin Repubican Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Although not directly named by the committee conducting the investigation--The House Committee on Un-American Activities, aka HUAC--Ritt was mentioned in a right-wing newsletter called "Counterattack", published by American Business Consultants, a group formed by three former FBI agents. "Counterattack" alleged that Ritt had helped Communist Party-affiliated locals of the New York-based Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union stage their annual show. He was finally blacklisted by the television industry when a Syracuse grocer charged him with donating money to Communist China in 1951. Unable to work in the television industry, Ritt returned to the theater for several years.
By 1956 the "Red Scare" had begun to fade away, and Ritt turned to film directing. His first film as a director was Edge of the City (1957), an important film for Ritt and an opportunity to give voice to his experiences. Based on the story of a union dock worker who faced intimidation by a corrupt boss, the film is a virtual laundry list of themes influencing Ritt over the years: corruption, racism, intimidation of the individual by the group, defense of the individual against government oppression and, most notable, the redeeming quality of mercy and the value of shielding others from evil, including sacrificing one's own reputation, career and even life if necessary. Ritt went on to direct 25 more films, including such classics as The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Hud (1963), The Great White Hope (1970), Norma Rae (1979) and Murphy's Romance (1985).- Director
- Producer
- Editor
Mark Robson studied political science and economics at the University of California. He then took a law course at Pacific Coast University, and, at one time, also attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Ultimately, his interests led him elsewhere, since he ended up in the movie business as a part-time assistant set dresser in the property department of 20th Century Fox. Asking studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck for a promotion turned out to be a bad move, since he was promptly fired. Playing golf with RKO executive Herman Zobel, conversely, opened the door to a position at the studio's film library, where he was to earn a meager 66 cents per hour. Undeterred, Robson eventually moved up to the position of assistant editor and worked (uncredited) on Orson Welles' s Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) for $1.25 per hour, but slaving over a gruelling 110 to 120 hour-week. When "Ambersons" and Journey Into Fear (1943) ran into production difficulties, Welles and his Mercury Group fell out of favour at RKO and Robson was re-assigned by Lou L. Ostrow to a B-unit, headed by Val Lewton.
Within the relaxed atmosphere of Lewton's company, Robson was employed as full-time editor between 1941 and 1943. He became noted for his outstanding work on Cat People (1942). In one famous scene, he originated a technique called 'the bus', abruptly cutting from the face of a person in terror (in this case Simone Simon) to a bus stopping violently with hissing airbrakes, thus effectively jolting the audience in their seats. The 'bus', of course, could be substituted for any other sudden event, intended as a red herring in order to shock the viewer. It is still a widely used practice today, particularly in horror movies or thrillers.
After editing I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The Leopard Man (1943), Robson was promoted by Lewton to director as a replacement for Jacques Tourneur. Robson's first film was The Seventh Victim (1943), a tale of Satanists operating in Greenwich Village. This was followed by three more entries in Lewton's series of low budget horror thrillers: The Ghost Ship (1943), Isle of the Dead (1945) and Bedlam (1946). All of these modest ventures recouped their investment fourfold. In the long run, however, it was not enough to save struggling RKO. Robson lost his job and found himself on the bread line for the next two years. In 1949, he was head-hunted by independent producer Stanley Kramer to direct the boxing drama Champion (1949), starring Kirk Douglas as a callous boxing champ on his way to the top. This prestige production marked the turning point in Robson's career. Bosley Crowther, the leading New York Times reviewer, praised the director for providing "a wealth of pictorial interest and exciting action of a graphic, colourful sort" (NY Times, April 11 1949). Robson made another film for Kramer, Home of the Brave (1949), which dealt with the results of racial prejudice.
Suddenly finding himself much in demand, Robson worked briefly under contract for Samuel Goldwyn, before launching the second phase of his career as a director of big budget commercial hits, among them the charismatic The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954); another hard-hitting tale of corruption in the world of boxing, The Harder They Fall (1956); the stylishly-made small-town melodrama Peyton Place (1957); and the unabashedly sentimental, romanticised 'true-life' story of an English missionary in China, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) (filmed in North Wales !). One of his best later films was the Paul Newman thriller The Prize (1963), directed by Robson in a style entirely reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock, filled with rollicking action and witty dialogue. That same year, Robson established his own production company, Red Lion. He made several patchy films under this banner, including a stodgy, fictionalised account of the Ghandi assassination Nine Hours to Rama (1963); and a dull, forgettable anti-war drama, Lost Command (1966). The lurid, but slickly-made melodrama Valley of the Dolls (1967) rekindled Robson's career, which was rounded out with the all-star blockbuster disaster movie Earthquake (1974), filmed in 'Sensurround' for greater impact. A massive box-office hit, it eventually grossed in excess of 80 million dollars. Robson died of a heart attack just weeks after completing work on the action thriller Avalanche Express (1979).- Director
- Writer
- Actor
John Berry was born on 6 September 1917 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a director and writer, known for Ça va barder (1955), 'Round Midnight (1986) and A Captive in the Land (1990). He was married to Myriam Boyer and Gladys Berry. He died on 29 November 1999 in Paris, France.- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Producer
Carl Foreman was born on 23 July 1914 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Guns of Navarone (1961), High Noon (1952) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). He was married to Estelle Barr and Evelyn Smith. He died on 26 June 1984 in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
- Director
- Music Department
Hugo Butler, the screenwriter, was born on May 4, 1914 in Calgary, Alberta, the son of a silent movie actor and screenwriter. Butler worked as a journalist and playwright before moving to Hollywood in 1937, where he established himself as a screenwriter. In 1940, he married actress and screenwriter Jean Rouverol. The next year, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Edison, the Man (1940) along with future Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer boss Dore Schary. (Schary, a well-known liberal, was one of the few top movie industry executives who objected to the imposition of the blacklist at the 1947 Waldorf Conference, which he attended as R.K.O.'s executive vice president in charge of production). His career was temporarily interrupted by military service in World War II, then permanently disrupted when he was blacklisted as a subversive after the war.
Butler and his wife moved to Mexico with Hollywood 10 member (and fellow blacklistee) Dalton Trumbo, with whom Butler pseudonymously collaborated on the screenplay for He Ran All the Way (1951), a film noir that was John Garfield' s last film. (Garfield died of a heart attack soon after being grilled by the House Un-American Activities Committee.)
In Mexico, Butler wrote for the directors Luis Buñuel and Carlos Velo. Butler and his wife did not return to the United States on a permanent basis until the 1960s.
Hugo Butler suffered from arteriosclerotic brain disease. He died from a heart attack on January 7, 1968 in Hollywood, California at the age of 53. The last film for which he was credited, Robert Aldrich's potboiler The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) was released later that year.
In 1997, the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America voted to posthumously give him official credit for scripts he had written.- Writer
- Additional Crew
Ben Barzman was an Anglo-Canadian best known as a screenwriter who was blacklisted during the post-World War II "Red scare" in Hollywood. Born on October 12, 1910, in Toronto, he moved to the United States, where he established himself as a screenwriter during the war. He is probably best known for The Boy with Green Hair (1948), his adaptation of Betzi Beaton's novel that was an allegory against intolerance that bears witness to post-war American attitude that demanded conformity. The movie was directed by Joseph Losey, who also would be blacklisted and with whom Barzman would work in the future.
In Hollywood Ben and his wife Norma Barzman became members of the Communist Party and remained so in exile. After Barzman traveled to England in 1949 to work on a movie, he decided to stay in Europe, and he and Norma moved to Paris, where they had the freedom to associate with Communists, left-wingers and anyone else they wanted to. However, Ben grew to dislike the milieu, and moved the family to the south of France in the 1950s. They broke with the Party after the student riots of 1968 due to the French Communist Party's failure to support a general strike called by labor unions in solidarity with the students.
Norma Barzman claims that Ben rewrote the screenplay of the Oscar-winning Z (1969) for director Costa-Gavras, but did not receive credit. He also helped arrange for the filming of the movie in Algeria. In addition to his screen work, Barzman wrote the science-fiction novel "Out of This World" in 1960.
He died on December 15, 1989, in Santa Monica, California, at the age of 79.- John Wexley was born on 14 September 1907 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), The Last Mile (1932) and Hangmen Also Die! (1943). He died on 4 February 1985 in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, USA.
- Writer
- Additional Crew
Screenwriter Lester Cole, who is known in cinema history primarily as a member of the "Hollywood Ten," a group who defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigation into their political beliefs who were black-listed by the industry for their defiance, was born on June 19, 1904 in New York to a Polish immigrant family. His first desire was to be an actor, and Cole dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen in 1920. He began writing and directing plays, and in the 1920s and '30s, he worked primarily as an actor on the stage. He appeared in Painted Faces (1929) and Love at First Sight (1929) but made his name as a screenwriter. His first screenplay, W.C. Fields comedy If I Had a Million (1932) was made in 1932. In 1933, the first year of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, Cole and eight other screenwriters, including future Hollywood Ten members John Howard Lawson and Samuel Ornitz, organized the Screen Writers Guild (SWG), the first and most radical of the Hollywood guilds. Cole's politics were on the hard left, and he joined the Communist Party-USA in 1934.
Cole adhered to the Hollywood Ten's common front strategy of challenging HCUA's right to interrogate them on the basis of their political beliefs. Convicted of contempt of Congress, he was fined and served one year in prison. His unfinished script about the Mexican revolutionary general Emiliano Zapata later finished by fellow traveler John Steinbeck for former CP-USA members (and HUAC song-bird) Elia Kazan, who made Viva Zapata! (1952) starring Marlon Brando from the script.
After he got out of federal prison, Cole worked a series of odd jobs. He emigrated to London in 1961, but eventually returned to the U.S., where he began collaborating on screenplays using an assumed name. One of his scripts, written under the pseudonym "Gerald L.C. Copley", was made into the popular movie Born Free (1966). He also wrote his autobiography, "Hollywood Red" (1981) and reviewed films for "The People's World" and taught screen-writing at the University of California, Berkeley.
Lester Cole died of a heart attack on August 15, 1985. He was 81 years old.- Composer
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Hanns Eisler was a German-Austrian-American composer and lyricist. He was known for his "Das Lied von der Moldau" ("La Chanson du Moldau", "The Song of the Moldau") used in the TV film Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg (1961) and also sang by Zarah Leander on TV. He did so many more songs in Hollywood, France, Austria and Germany.- Animation Department
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John Hubley was born on 21 May 1914 in Marinette, Wisconsin, USA. He was a director and producer, known for Of Stars and Men (1961), The Hole (1962) and A Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass Double Feature (1966). He was married to Faith Hubley and Claudia Lenora (Ross) Sewell. He died on 21 February 1977 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.- Writer
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Lester Fuller was born on 29 January 1908 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and director, known for We Go to Monte Carlo (1953), Three Steps North (1951) and You Can't Ration Love (1944). He died on 5 August 1962 in Los Angeles County, California, USA.- Director
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A stage actor and director, Michael Gordon broke into films in 1940 as a dialogue director, then became a film editor. He directed his first feature in 1942. He started out with low-budget crime thrillers, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s turned out several well-crafted dramas, notably Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), which garnered José Ferrer an Academy Award. His career was interrupted, however, by the anti-Communist hysteria in the 1950s, led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Because of Gordon's early affiliation with several leftist organizations, he was accused of Communist leanings by the Red-baiting politicians of the era, and found himself blacklisted and unable to obtain work. He made one film in Australia, then returned to the U.S. Gordon started getting jobs again in the late 1950s, and this time, instead of turning out the tight, gritty little dramas he was known for, did a complete 180 and worked on glossy, big-budget mainstream comedies. He was, however, responsible for what is arguably Doris Day's best vehicle, the stylish Pillow Talk (1959).- Writer
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Garson Kanin has worked as an actor on stage and as a director on Broadway and in Hollywood, but his best-known work is as a writer. During the Great Depression, he dropped out of high school to help support his family by working as a musician and later as a comedian. He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts from 1932 to 1933. He briefly worked as an actor on Broadway following his studies but then worked as an assistant to the Broadway director George Abbot. In 1937, he joined Samuel Goldwyn's staff but left after a year because he had not been given any directing assignments. He was signed by RKO and there directed such films as The Great Man Votes (1939) and Tom, Dick and Harry (1941), but he soon became frustrated by the lack of control he had over his films under the studio system. When he was drafted during World War II, he made documentary films for the War Information and Emergency Manpower offices. One of them, co-directed by Carol Reed, The True Glory (1945), won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. During the war years, Kanin began writing stories and plays as well. After the war, he directed his play "Born Yesterday" on Broadway, which he later adapted for the screen. He and his wife, Ruth Gordon, collaborated on four screenplays, including Adam's Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952). They stopped working on scripts together for the sake of their marriage after 1952, but in 1979 they co-wrote one more, the TV film Hardhat and Legs (1980). Kanin and Gordon were never under contract by any studio as writers. They wrote the scripts on their own and sold them to interested Hollywood studios.- Actress
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When Ruth Gordon convinced her father, a sea captain, to let her pursue acting she came to New York and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She acted in a few silents made at Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1915. She made her Broadway debut in "Peter Pan" as Nibs the same year. The next 20 years she spent on stage, even appearing at the Old Vic in London in the successful run of "The Country Wife" in 1936. Nearly 25 years after her film debut, she returned to movies briefly. Her most memorable role during this period in the early 1940s was as Mary Todd in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940).
She left Hollywood to return to theater. Back in New York, she married Garson Kanin in 1942 (her first husband Gregory Kelly, a stage actor, died in 1927). She began writing plays, and, later, her husband and she collaborated on screenplays for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, whose screen relationship was modeled on their own marriage. She returned to film acting during the 1960s. It is during this last period of her career that she became a movie star, with memorable roles in Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Harold and Maude (1971). She wrote several books during the mid-1970s and appeared on TV. She won an Emmy for her role on Taxi (1978) in 1979.- Editor
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Carl Lerner was born on 17 June 1912 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was an editor and director, known for Black Like Me (1964), Klute (1971) and 12 Angry Men (1957). He was married to Gerda Lerner. He died on 26 August 1973 in New York City, New York, USA.- Director
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Editor/director Irving Lerner got his start in the film business at Columbia University, where he was a research editor on the school's Encyclopedia of Social Sciences and began making documentaries for the school's anthropology department in the early 1930s. He produced documentaries for the Office of War Information during World War II, and after the war he became the head of New York University's Educational Film institute.
In 1948 Lerner and Joseph Strick co-directed a short documentary, Muscle Beach (1948). After that Lerner got into low-budget feature films, directing the gritty little crime drama 'C'-Man (1949) and the somewhat bizarre Mister Universe (1951), about a bodybuilder who gets involved with con artists and professional wrestling. He also worked as a cinematographer, editor and assistant director on others' films, and served as director and cinematographer on several documentaries. He was the editor on Martin Scorsese's 1977 film New York, New York (1977), but died before finishing the cutting. Scorsese dedicated the film to him.- Director
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Known for his creative stage direction, Elia Kazan was born Elias Kazantzoglou on September 7, 1909 in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (now Istanbul, Turkey). Noted for drawing out the best dramatic performances from his actors, he directed 21 actors to Oscar nominations, resulting in nine wins. He directed a string of successful films, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), and East of Eden (1955). During his career, he won two Oscars as Best Director and received an Honorary Oscar, won three Tony Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards.
His films were concerned with personal or social issues of special concern to him. Kazan writes, "I don't move unless I have some empathy with the basic theme." His first such "issue" film was Gentleman's Agreement (1947), with Gregory Peck, which dealt with anti-Semitism in America. It received 8 Oscar nominations and three wins, including Kazan's first for Best Director. It was followed by Pinky (1949), one of the first films in mainstream Hollywood to address racial prejudice against black people. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), an adaptation of the stage play which he had also directed, received 12 Oscar nominations, winning four, and was Marlon Brando's breakthrough role. In 1954, he directed On the Waterfront (1954), a film about union corruption on the New York harbor waterfront. In 1955, he directed John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1955), which introduced James Dean to movie audiences.
A turning point in Kazan's career came with his testimony as a witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 at the time of the Hollywood blacklist, which brought him strong negative reactions from many liberal friends and colleagues. His testimony helped end the careers of former acting colleagues Morris Carnovsky and Art Smith, along with ending the work of playwright Clifford Odets. Kazan later justified his act by saying he took "only the more tolerable of two alternatives that were either way painful and wrong." Nearly a half-century later, his anti-Communist testimony continued to cause controversy. When Kazan was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1999, dozens of actors chose not to applaud as 250 demonstrators picketed the event.
Kazan influenced the films of the 1950s and 1960s with his provocative, issue-driven subjects. Director Stanley Kubrick called him, "without question, the best director we have in America, and capable of performing miracles with the actors he uses." On September 28, 2003, Elia Kazan died at age 94 of natural causes at his apartment in Manhattan, New York City. Martin Scorsese co-directed the documentary film A Letter to Elia (2010) as a personal tribute to Kazan.- Actor
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Lee J. Cobb, one of the premier character actors in American film for three decades in the post-World War II period, was born Leo Jacoby in New York City's Lower East Side on December 8, 1911. The son of a Jewish newspaper editor, young Leo was a child prodigy in music, mastering the violin and the harmonica. Any hopes of a career as a violin virtuoso were dashed when he broke his wrist, but his talent on the harmonica may have brought him his first professional success. At the age of 16 or 17 he ran away from home to Hollywood to try to break into motion pictures as an actor. He reportedly made his film debut as a member of Borrah Minevitch and His Harmonica Rascals (their first known movie appearance was in the 1929 two-reeler Boyhood Days), but that cannot be substantiated. However, it's known that after Leo was unable to find work he returned to New York City, where he attended New York University at night to study accounting while acting in radio dramas during the day.
An older Cobb tried his luck in California once more, making his debut as a professional stage actor at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1931. After again returning to his native New York, he made his Broadway debut as a saloonkeeper in a dramatization of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, but it closed after 15 performances (later in his career, Dostoevsky would prove more of a charm, with Cobb's role as Father Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov (1958) garnering him his second Oscar nomination),
Cobb joined the politically progressive Group Theater in 1935 and made a name for himself in Clifford Odets' politically liberal dramas Waiting for Lefty and Til the Day I Die, appearing in both plays that year in casts that included Elia Kazan, who later became famous as a film director. Cobb also appeared in the 1937 Group Theater production of Odets' Golden Boy, playing the role of Mr. Carp, in a cast that also included Kazan, Julius Garfinkle (later better known under his stage name of John Garfield), and Martin Ritt, all of whom later came under the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the heyday of the McCarthy Red Scare hysteria more than a decade later. Cobb took over the role of Mr. Bonaparte, the protagonist's father, in the 1939 film version of the play, despite the fact that he was not yet 30 years old. The role of a patriarch suited him, and he'd play many more in his film career.
It was as a different kind of patriarch that he scored his greatest success. Cobb achieved immortality by giving life to the character of Willy Loman in the original 1949 Broadway production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. His performance was a towering achievement that ranks with such performances as Edwin Booth as Richard III and John Barrymore as Hamlet in the annals of the American theater. Cobb later won an Emmy nomination as Willy when he played the role in a made-for-TV movie of the play (Death of a Salesman (1966)). Miller said that he wrote the role with Cobb in mind.
Before triumphing as Miller's Salesman, Cobb had appeared on Broadway only a handful of times in the 1940s, including in Ernest Hemingway's The Fifth Column (1940), Odets' "Clash by Night" (1942) and the US Army Air Force's Winged Victory (1943-44). Later he reprised the role of Joe Bonaparte's father in the 1952 revival of Golden Boy opposite Garfield as his son, and appeared the following year in The Emperor's Clothes. His final Broadway appearance was as King Lear in the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center's 1968 production of Shakespeare's play.
Aside from his possible late 1920s movie debut and his 1934 appearance in the western The Vanishing Shadow (1934), Cobb's film career proper began in 1937 with the westerns North of the Rio Grande (1937) (in which he was billed as Lee Colt) and Rustlers' Valley (1937) and spanned nearly 40 years until his death. After a hiatus while serving in the Army Air Force during World War II, Cobb's movie career resumed in 1946. He continued to play major supporting roles in prestigious A-list pictures. His movie career reached its artistic peak in the 1950s, when he was twice nominated for Best Supporting Actor Academy Awards, for his role as Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront (1954) and as the father in The Brothers Karamazov (1958). Other memorable supporting roles in the 1950s included the sagacious Judge Bernstein in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), as the probing psychiatrist Dr. Luther in The Three Faces of Eve (1957) and as the volatile Juror #3 in 12 Angry Men (1957).
It was in the 1950s that Cobb achieved the sort of fame that most artists dreaded: he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee on charges that he was or had been a Communist. The charges were rooted in Cobb's membership in the Group Theater in the 1930s. Other Group Theater members already investigated by HUAC included Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan, both of whom provided friendly testimony before the committee, and John Garfield, who did not.
Cobb's own persecution by HUAC had already caused a nervous breakdown in his wife, and he decided to appear as a friendly witness in order to preserve her sanity and his career, by bringing the inquisition to a halt. Appearing before the committee in 1953, he named names and thus saved his career. Ironically, he would win his first Oscar nomination in On the Waterfront (1954) directed and written by fellow HUAC informers Kazan and Budd Schulberg. The film can be seen as a stalwart defense of informing, as epitomized by the character Terry Malloy's testimony before a Congressional committee investigating racketeering on the waterfront.
Major films in which Cobb appeared after reaching his career plateau include Otto Preminger's adaptation of Leon Uris' ode to the birth of Israel, Exodus (1960); the Cinerama spectacle How the West Was Won (1962); the James Coburn spy spoofs, Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967); Clint Eastwood's first detective film, Coogan's Bluff (1968); and legendary director William Wyler's last film, The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970).
In addition to his frequent supporting roles in film, Cobb often appeared on television. He played Judge Henry Garth on The Virginian (1962) from 1962-66 and also had a regular role as the attorney David Barrett on The Young Lawyers (1969) from 1970-71. Cobb also appeared in made-for-TV movies and made frequent guest appearances on other TV shows. His last major Hollywood movie role was that of police detective Lt. Kinderman in The Exorcist (1973).
Lee J. Cobb died of a heart attack in Woodland Hills, California, on February 11, 1976, at the age of 64. He is buried in Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. Though he will long be remembered for many of his successful supporting performances in the movies, it is as the stage's first Willy Loman in which he achieved immortality as an actor. Bearing in mind that the role was written for him, it is through Willy that he will continue to have an influence on American drama far into the future, for as long as Death of a Salesman is revived.- Actor
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Actor and director Sam Wanamaker was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Molly (Babell) and Maurice Wattenmaker, a tailor. He studied at Drake University, IA, then trained at Goodman Theatre, Chicago, worked with summer stock companies in Chicago as an actor and director, and made his London debut in 1952. In 1957, he was appointed director of the New Shakespeare Theatre, Liverpool, and in 1959 joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre company at Stratford-upon-Avon. He produced or directed several works at Covent Garden and elsewhere in the 1960s and 1970s, including the Shakespeare Birthday Celebrations in 1974. He worked both as director and actor in films and television, his appearances included The Spiral Staircase (1975), Private Benjamin (1980), Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), and Baby Boom (1987).
Married to Charlotte Holland, his daughter is actress Zoë Wanamaker.- Actor
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Morris Carnovsky was one of the more prominent victims of the Hollywood blacklist, being named as a Communist party member by both Elia Kazan -- the most infamous of the informers who sang before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the era blacklistee Lillian Hellman called the "Scoundrel Time" -- and Sterling Hayden. However, he had been effectively blacklisted -- unofficially banned from appearing in Hollywood films -- since 1950, two years before Kazan sang before HUAC, when Carnovsky himself refused to "name names" before the Committee. Carnovsky did not make any more movies for the better part of a decade -- in fact, his movie acting career essentially was over -- but he did have a thriving career on the Broadway stage, the venue where he established his reputation as a thespian back in the 1930s.
Morris Carnovsky was born in St. Louis, Missouri on September 5, 1898, the son of a grocer. Upon graduation from high school he attended St. Louis' Washington University.
Like most actors of his generation, he worked his way up the ladder by first appearing with traveling stock companies. Eventually, he landed in New York City, where he became a member of the Theatre Guild, the legendary theatrical company appearing as Kublai Khan in Nobel Prize winner 'Eugene O'Neill's play "Marco Millions' (I)'. Subsequently, he became one of the founding members of the left-wing Group Theatre.
Founded in 1931 by Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford, The Group Theatre contained Luther Adler, Stella Adler, Elia Kazan, and playwright Clifford Odets; the latter three were major forces in transforming American theater and acting, a process that began with the Provincetown Theatre. Stella Adler, Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg, including their students/latter Group Theatre members like Bobby Lewis, were instrumental in making "The Method" -- a variation of Konstantin Stanislavski's acting theories, based on finding and cultivating "motivation" -- revolutionized American acting on stage and in the movies, most famously through Adler's student Marlon Brando. Kazan and Strasberg later founded the Actors Studio, America's premier acting school that promulgated "The Method" via such alumni as James Dean, Paul Newman and hundreds of others.
Carnovsky was a member of the Group Theater until it broke up in 1940. He appeared prominently in Odets' plays "Awake and Sing" and Golden Boy (1939). Carnovsky's talents were in demand by other theatrical troupes, and he appeared on Broadway in the 1930s in multiple non-Group Theatre productions.
Eventually, Hollywood beckoned and Carnovsky made his screen debut in The Life of Emile Zola (1937), playing Anatole France in support of Paul Muni. Settling in Los Angeles after the Group Theatre breakup, Carnovsky was one of the founders of the Actor's Laboratory and became involved with the the Hollywood Communist Party, whose cultural apparatchik, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, was later one of the Hollywood Ten, the first group of leftists blacklisted by the film industry. While Carnovsky was never involved in espionage or any overt acts against the interests of the United States (as were none of the Hollywood Ten or other blacklistees), he led Marxist study groups in his home, as Sterling Hayden testified to before HUAC.
In his 1952 testimony before HUAC, Elia Kazan named Carnovsky as a member of the Communist Party cell he had belonged to in the Group Theatre. Other members included Lee Strasberg's wife, Paula (best known as Marilyn Monroe's acting coach). Kazan had quit the cell in the mid-1930s, he said, when it was ordered by the Party to undermine Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg (who did not know his wife was a communist) and take over the Group Theatre. The attempted coup was never launched.
In 1950, Carnovsky was hauled before HUAC, where he refused to "name names." This resulted in his blacklisting, not Kazan's testimony. (Kazan said that Carnovsky, like others he named, already were known by the Committee.) The blacklist did not exist on Broadway, and producer (and future Osar-winning actor) John Houseman cast Carnovsky in the Broadway production of Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People," whose script was written by future HUAC target Arthur Miller. He acted in many Broadway productions throughout the 1950s and into the '60s.
A part in Sidney Lumet's film version of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge (1962) did not revive his movie career, and he continued to act on stage. He died on September 1, 1992, at the age of 94.- Roman Bohnen, known as "Bud" to his family and friends was not only an excellent film actor but also a stage actor of note. As a member of the prestigious Group Theatre from 1934-40, he appeared in such classic productions as "Waiting for Lefty", "Golden Boy", "Awake and Sing" and "The Gentle People". He left for Hollywood in the late '30s to pursue a film career mainly as an effort to earn money for his family and ailing wife, Hilda.
In film, he is perhaps best known for his performances as Candy in Of Mice and Men (1939) with Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney Jr., as Francois Soubirous in The Song of Bernadette (1943), and as Pat Derry in William Wyler's classic The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). The latter role although a small one is beautifully played. It is a rare opportunity to see a full life artfully created in a few short scenes. Take a look in particular at the scene where "Bud" reads the citations awarded to his son, Fred Derry (ably played by Dana Andrews). It is rich with the feeling and pride of a father, helpless to provide for his son (with beautiful support by the great Gladys George as Hortense).
Roman was also an integral member of "The Actor's Laboratory Theatre" in Hollywood. He was stricken with a heart attack while performing on stage for the Lab Theatre and died shortly after at age 47. A rare talent, an underrated actor who left us too soon. - J. Edward Bromberg was a founding member of the legendary Group Theatre. His appearance being rather short and stocky, Bromberg from the start was known as a character actor who was very respected by his peers. He was primarily a stage actor but in the mid-thirties made his way into film where he further enhanced his reputation as a diverse character actor.
In 1950 he was accused of being a communist and ordered to appear before the House Committee of Un-American Activities. He plead the 5th amendment refusing to answer questions as was his right. He was also named as a communist by film director Edward Dmytryk. Bromberg was then blacklisted and could no longer appear in films. The trauma of all that he went through took a terrible toll on his health. While working on a play in England, J. Edward Bromberg died of a heart attack just before his 48th birthday.
At a memorial service for Bromberg, actress Lee Grant was asked to give one of the eulogies. Ms. Grant, a close friend of Bromberg's was fresh on the heels of her great successes in the stage and film productions of "Detective Story" (garnered her a Critic's Circle Award, the Cannes Film Festival award for Best Actress and an Best Supporting Actress Academy Award Nomination as the "Shoplifter".) Ms. Grant knowing the awful pressures exerted upon J. Edward and the possible fallout that was wreaking havoc in the film community gave a moving eulogy. This eulogy was printed in "Red Channels" and effectively squelched Ms. Grant's film career for many years. It was her small but wonderfully played role as Mrs. Colbert in Norman Jewison's "In the Heat of the Night" that revived her film career. Such was only two of the numerous tragedies done to American Artists of the time. - Art Smith was born on 23 March 1899 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was an actor, known for In a Lonely Place (1950), Brute Force (1947) and Edge of Darkness (1943). He died on 24 February 1973 in West Babylon, New York, USA.
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Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City, one of three children born to Augusta (nee Barnett) and Isidore Miller. His family was of Austrian Jewish descent. His father manufactured women's coats, but his business was devastated by the Depression, seeding his son's disillusionment with the American Dream and those blue-sky-seeking Americans who pursued it with both eyes focused on the Grail of Materialism. Due to his father's strained financial circumstances, Miller had to work for tuition money to attend the University of Michigan, where he wrote his first plays. They were successful, earning him numerous student awards, including the Avery Hopwood Award in Drama for "No Villain" in 1937.
The award was named after one of the most successful playwrights of the 1920s, who simultaneously had five hits on Broadway, the Neil Simon of his day. Now almost forgotten except for his contribution to Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Hopwood achieved a material success that the older Miller could not match, but he failed to capture the immortality that would be Miller's. Hopwood's suicide, on the beach of the Cote d'Azur, reportedly inspired Norman Maine's march into the southern California surf in A Star Is Born (1937).
Like Fitzgerald, Miller tasted success at a tender age. In 1938, upon graduating from Michigan, he received a Theatre Guild National Award and returned to New York, joining the Federal Theatre Project. He married his college girlfriend, Mary Grace Slattery, in 1940; they would have two children, Joan and Robert. In 1944, he made his Broadway debut with "The Man Who Had All the Luck", a flop that lasted only four performances. He went on to publish two books, "Situation Normal" (1944) and "Focus" (1945), but it was in 1947 that his star became ascendant. His play "All My Sons", directed by Elia Kazan, became a hit on Broadway, running for 328 performances. Both Miller and Kazan received Tony Awards, and Miller won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. It was a taste of what was to come.
Staged by Kazan, "Death of a Salesman" opened at the Morosco Theatre on February 10, 1949, and closed 742 performances later on Nov 18, 1950. The play was the sensation of the season, winning six Tony Awards, including Best Play and Best Author for Miller. Miller also was awarded the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play made lead actor Lee J. Cobb, as Willy Loman, an icon of the stage comparable to the Hamlet of John Barrymore: a synthesis of actor and role that created a legend that survives through the bends of time. A contemporary classic was recognized, though some critics complained that the play wasn't truly a tragedy, as Willy Loman was such a pathetic soul. Given his status, Loman's fall could not qualify as tragedy, as there was so little height from which to fall. Miller, a dedicated progressive and a man of integrity, never accepted that criticism. As Willy's wife Linda said at his funeral, "Attention must be paid", even to the little people.
In 1983, Miller himself directed a staging of "Salesman" in Chinese at the Beijing People's Art Theatre. He said that while the Chinese, then largely ignorant of capitalism, might not have understood Loman's career choice, they did have empathy for his desire to drink from the Grail of the American Dream. They understood this dream, which Miller characterizes as the desire "to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be loved, and above all, perhaps, to count." It is this desire to sup at the table of the great American Capitalists, even if one is just scrounging for crumbs, in a country of which President Calvin Coolidge said, "The business of America is business," this desire to be recognized, to be somebody, that so moves "Salesman" audiences, whether in New York, London or Beijing.
Miller never again attained the critical heights nor smash Broadway success of "Salesman," though he continued to write fine plays that were appreciated by critics and audiences alike for another two decades. Disenchanted with Kazan over his friendly testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the two parted company when Kazan refused to direct "The Crucible", Miller's parable of the witch hunts of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Defending her husband, Kazan's wife, Molly, told Miller that the play was disingenuous, as there were no real witches in Puritan Salem. It was a point Miller disagreed with, as it was a matter of perspective--the witches in Salem were real to those who believed in them. However, subsequent research has shown that the cursorily-researched (at best) play contains fictional motifs (regarding Goodman and Goodwife Putnam and their offspring), limited research, and carelessness in identifying (or not identifying, as with William Stoughton) the true authors of the witch trials. Directed by another Broadway legend, Jed Harris, the play ran for 197 performances and won Miller the 1953 Tony Award for Best Play. Miller had another success with "A View from the Bridge", a play about an incest-minded longshoreman written with overtones of classical Greek tragedy, which ran for 149 performances in the 1955-56 season.
It was in 1956 that Miller made his most fateful personal decision, when he divorced his first wife, Mary Slattery Miller, and married movie siren-cum-legend Marilyn Monroe. With this marriage Miller achieved a different type of fame, a pop culture status he abhorred. It was a marriage doomed to fail, as Monroe was, in Miller's words, "highly self-destructive". In his 1989 autobiography, "Timebends", Miller wrote that a marriage was a conspiracy to keep out the light. When one or more of the partners could no longer prevent the light from coming in and illuminating the other's faults, the marriage was doomed. In his own autobiography, "A Life", Kazan said that he could not understand the marriage. Monroe, who had slept with Kazan on a casual basis, as she did with many other Hollywood players, was the type of woman someone took as a mistress, not as a wife. Miller, however, was a man of principle. He was in love. "[A]ll my energy and attention were devoted to trying to help her solve her problems", Miller confessed to a French newspaper in 1992. "Unfortunately, I didn't have much success."
The conspiracy collapsed during the filming of The Misfits (1961) (1961), with John Huston shooting the original script Miller had written expressly for his wife. The genesis of the story had come to him while waiting out a divorce from his first wife Mary in Nevada. Monroe hated her character Roslyn, claiming Miller had made her out to be the dumb blond stereotype she so loathed and had been trying to escape. Withering in her criticism of Miller, and ultimately unfaithful to him, she and Miller separated. Norman Mailer, in his 1973 biography, "Marilyn", ridiculed Miller for not doing enough to help Monroe. Film critic Pauline Kael lambasted Mailer by imputing petty machismo and jealousy as the cause of his animus against Miller. Miller would later reunite with Kazan to launch the new Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, with the play "After the Fall", a fictionalization of his relationship with Monroe. "Fall" ran for 208 performances in repertory in 1964 and 1965 and won 1964 Tony Awards for Jason Robards and Kazan's future wife Barbara Loden, playing the Miller and Monroe stand-ins Quentin and Maggie. Miller's own "Incident at Vichy" played in repertory with "Fall" in the 1965 season, but lasted only 32 performances.
On June 1, 1957, Miller was found in contempt of Congress for refusing to name names of a literacy circle suspected of Communist Party affiliations. The State Department deprived him of his passport, and he became a left-wing cause célèbre. In 1967 Miller became President of P.E.N., an international literacy organization that campaigned for the rights of suppressed writers. He published a collection of short stories entitled "I Don't Need You Any More", that same year. Returning to the Morosco Theatre, the site of his greatest triumph, "The Price" was Miller's last unqualified hit in America, running for 429 performances between February 7, 1968 and February 15, 1969. Though Miller won a 1968 Tony Award for Best Play, the bulk of his success as an original playwright was over. The Price (1971) (a 1971 teleplay) was nominated for six Emmy awards, including Outstanding Single Program-Drama or Comedy, and won three, including Best Actor for George C. Scott, who would later win a 1976 Tony playing Willy Loman in a 1975 Broadway revival.
Miller never again achieved success on Broadway with an original play. In the 1980s, when he was hailed as the greatest living American playwright after the death of Tennessee Williams, he even had trouble getting full-scale revivals of his work staged. One of his more significant later works, "The American Clock", based on Studs Terkel's oral history of the Great Depression, "Hard Times", ran for only 11 previews and 12 performances in late 1980 at the Biltmore Theatre. Also in 1980, Miller courted controversy by backing the casting of the outspokenly anti-Zionist Vanessa Redgrave as a concentration-camp Jewess in his teleplay Playing for Time (1980), an adaptation of the memoir "The Musicians of Auschwitz". Despite the fallout in the United States for America's then-greatest living playwright, his works were popular in Great Britain, whose intellectual and theatrical communities treated him as a major figure in world literature. The universality of his work was highlighted with his own successful staging of "Death of a Salesman" in Beijing in 1983.
"Death of a Salesman" has become a standard warhorse, now revived each decade on Broadway, and internationally. In addition to George C. Scott and Lee J. Cobb (who received an Emmy nomination for the 1966 teleplay; Miller himself received a Special Citation from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for the production), Dustin Hoffman and Brian Dennehy have garnered kudos for playing Willie Loman. The 1984 Broadway revival of "Salesman" won a Tony for best Reproduction and helped revive Miller's domestic reputation, while Volker Schlöndorff's 1985 film (Death of a Salesman (1985)) of the production won 10 Emmy nominations, including one for Miller as executive producer of the Outstanding Drama/Comedy Special. Hoffman won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for playing Willy Loman. The 1999 revival won four Tonys, including Dennehy for Best Actor, and ran for 274 performances at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. Arthur Miller died in Roxbury, Connecticut in 2005, aged 89. He had been suffering from cancer, pneumonia and a heart condition.
Miller based his works on American history, his own life, and his observations of the American scene. His stature is traditionally based on his perceived refusal to avoid moral and social issues in his writing. His willingness to fight for what he believed in his chosen art form made him a literary icon whose name will live on in world letters.- Writer
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Clifford Odets dropped out of high school to pursue acting. In the 1930s he became a charter member of the Group Theatre, the famous "Method" acting troupe founded by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford. Beginning with "Waiting for Lefty" (1935), Odets quickly became the most famous young playwright in America. In the next four years he wrote five more plays, including "Awake and Sing!"; "Golden Boy" and "Rocket to the Moon", whose histrionics well suited the Group's exuberant style. On his first Hollywood assignment he met (and soon married) Luise Rainer, but they lived together only briefly. Between reconciliations with Rainer, Odets had a stormy, tempestuous affair with Frances Farmer. His other conquests included Fay Wray and a host of less famous women, including stage actress Betty Grayson, who became his second wife.
In 1934 - Odets joined the American Communists Party; he left the party a few months later. In 1952 - Odets was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a "friendly witness". He disavows Communism, and he "confirms names" of fellow Communists. He only said the names of people already mentioned to HUAC, and did not give any new names to the committee.
Odets was not himself 'blacklisted' by the HUAC.- Music Artist
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Harold George Belafonte was born on March 1, 1927 in New York City. He was educated at the New York Dramatic Workshop. He grew up in Jamaica, British West Indies, and did folk-singing in nightclubs and theaters, and on television and records. His debut was at the Village Vanguard in New York. Also, he appeared in the Broadway revues "John Murray Anderson's Almanac" and "Three for Tonight". He owns his own music publishing firm and film production company. He won a Tony Award in 1953, a Donaldson Award in 1953-1954, a Show Business Award in 1954, a Diners' Club Award in 1955-1956, and an Emmy Award for "Tonight with Belafonte". He has made many records. Joining the ASCAP in 1960, his popular-music compositions include "Turn Around", "Shake That Little Foot" and "Glory Manger".- Actress
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Dorothy Comingore earned a place in motion picture history for her role as the second Mrs. Kane (the Marion Davies to Orson Welles's William Randolph Hearst) in Citizen Kane (1941). It was an extraordinary performance, justifiably praised by critics and public alike. She was apparently slated to be on the short list for an Academy Award. However, there was to be no stardom in films for this talented actress.
Dorothy was discovered by Charles Chaplin while performing with the Carmel Little Theater in Monterey County. He was enchanted by her and his praise won her a Hollywood contract. That contract was unaccountably dropped after just three months without even a screen test. At Warner Brothers, she was utilized purely for publicity stills and as a clothes model. She would have none of it. Having already acquired a reputation as a firebrand, she walked out on the studio, having been relegated to what amounted to nothing more than a crowd scene. She was determined to be appreciated for her acting ability, not to be wasted as an extra. Columbia signed her on. However, between 1938 and 1940, most of her roles (in which she was often billed as 'Linda Winters') still turned out to be uncredited bits and walk-ons. There were also westerns and 'Three Stooges' comedy shorts, but certainly nothing of substance. Her turning point came courtesy of an introduction to Orson Welles at a party. Welles came to think of her as ideal casting for the part of brash, feather-brained would-be diva Susan Alexander Kane. A successful screen test followed and then came the role that brought Dorothy Comingore at once fame and ruin.
Soon after its release, the wrath of Citizen Hearst descended upon everyone associated with the picture. In particular, he never forgave Dorothy for playing a part so obviously (and effectively) modeled on his mistress. Dorothy Comingore was already well known for her leftist sympathies, and her father had been a high profile unionist. The newspaper magnate had ample ammunition to orchestrate a nationwide smear campaign, using prominent columnists Hedda Hopper and Walter Winchell to branding her a 'subversive', a member of the Communist Party. Though devoid of substantiating evidence, the spurious allegation stuck. Dorothy had associations and friends in Hollywood (not to mention her husband, the screenwriter Richard Collins, who had been an active party member of the Hollywood chapter in the 1930s), who had communist affiliations or were party members. She had also made enemies by following in her father's footsteps, canvassing for and supporting civil rights causes and union solidarity. Refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) made her an 'unfriendly witness'. Not only was she blacklisted in Hollywood, but her phone was tapped, her mail opened and her home ransacked. Collins, by now Dorothy's ex, did not have the same moral fortitude. To escape blacklisting, he recanted his previous testimony and fully cooperated with HUAC's inquisitors.
Dorothy's career effectively ended in 1951, her acting swansong in films being a small part in an indifferent drama of teenage angst, The Big Night (1951). Her personal life, meanwhile, continued to spiral out of control. She became an alcoholic. In October 1952, she was arrested by vice squad officers on a solicitation charge, another likely frame-up as payback for her "red" affiliations. Having lost custody of her children, she agreed to have the charges against her dropped in exchange for being committed to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital. There she spent two years (not 'a little time', as she had promised in court) 'undergoing treatment'. Not much is known of her final years, except, that she spent most of it in seclusion, married to a postman in Connecticut in a home with two dogs and ten cats. She died in December 1971 of pulmonary disease, likely the result of long-term alcohol abuse, at the age of 58.- Ludwig Donath was born on 6 March 1900 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now Vienna, Austria]. He was an actor, known for Torn Curtain (1966), Gilda (1946) and The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler (1943). He was married to Jean Montrose and Maria Josefa Camsky. He died on 29 September 1967 in New York City, New York, USA.
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Martin Gabel was born on 19 June 1912 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was an actor and producer, known for Marnie (1964), The Front Page (1974) and The Lost Moment (1947). He was married to Arlene Francis. He died on 22 May 1986 in New York City, New York, USA.- Actress
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Academy Award-winner Lee Grant was born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal on October 31, 1925 in Manhattan, New York City, to Witia (Haskell), a teacher and model, and Abraham Rosenthal, an educator and realtor. Her father was of Romanian Jewish descent, and her mother was a Russian Jewish immigrant. Lee made her stage debut at age 4 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, playing the abducted princess in "L'Orocolo". After graduating from high school, she won a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where she studied acting with Sanford Meisner. When she was a teenager Grant established herself as a formidable Broadway talent when she won The Critics' Circle Award for her portrayal of the shoplifter in "Detective Story". She reprised the role in the film version (Detective Story (1951), a performance that garnered her the Cannes Film Festival Citation for Best Actress as well as her first Academy Award Nomination. Immediately following her screen debut, however, Lee became a victim of the McCarthy-era blacklists in which actors, writers, directors, etc., were persecuted for supposedly "Communist" or "progressive" political beliefs, whether they had them or not. Except for an occasional role, she did not work in film or television for 12 years. In 1965 Lee re-started her acting career in the TV series Peyton Place (1964), for which she won an Emmy Award as Stella Chernak, and she later garnered her first Academy Award for Shampoo (1975), also receiving Academy Award nominations for The Landlord (1970) and Voyage of the Damned (1976). Since 1980 Lee has been concentrating on her directorial career, which began as part of the Women's Project at The Americal Film Institute (AFI); her adaptation of August Strindberg's, "Stronger, The" was consequently selected as one of the 10 best films ever produced for AFI. In 1987 she received an Academy Award for the HBO documentary, Down and Out in America (1985) and directed Nobody's Child (1986) for CBS, for which she received the Directors Guild Award. In 1983 she received the Congressional Arts Caucus Award for Outstanding Achievement in Acting and Independent Filmmaking. Subsequently, Women in Film paid tribute to her in 1989, with its first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award. Both the New York City Council and the County of Los Angeles Board of Supervisors have recognized Ms. Grant for the contribution her films have made to the fight against domestic violence.- Actor
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A Presbyterian minister's son, softly-spoken, intellectual-looking Alexander Knox received his education from the University of Western Ontario where he studied English literature. An excellent elocutionist (a member of the university's Hesperian Club) he had his first fling with dramatic acting playing the lead in "Hamlet". His professional theatrical debut began on the Boston stage in 1929 while simultaneously earning an income as a journalist for the Boston Post. After just one year he went looking for better acting opportunities in England, specializing in 'serious' classical parts which required just the right measure of 'gravitas'. During another journalistic stint with the London Advertiser he made the acquaintance of noted stage director and producer Tyrone Guthrie who helped him to make a name for himself on the London stage at the Old Vic. As the decade progressed, Knox appeared opposite such theatrical icons as Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier (in "The King of Nowhere"), and in plays by James Bridie and George Bernard Shaw.
Movie work followed in 1938 with appearances in The Phantom Strikes (1938) and a bit part in The Four Feathers (1939). However, the outbreak of World War II prompted his return to America. In 1940, Knox got his big break on Broadway cast in the role of Friar Laurence in "Romeo and Juliet", written and staged by Olivier and starring Vivien Leigh as Juliet. A later leading role in "The Three Sisters" (1942-43) -- a turn-of-the-century drama set in Russia -- saw him as Baron Tuzenbach opposite Katharine Cornell and Judith Anderson. With a brace of good critical notices, it became only a matter of time before the screen beckoned again. In 1941, Knox made his Hollywood film bow and was perfectly cast as the quiet intellectual Humphrey Van Weyden, protagonist of Jack London's maritime classic The Sea Wolf (1941). His performance was somewhat overshadowed by those of his co-stars, Edward G. Robinson (in the titular role of Wolf Larsen) and the dynamic John Garfield (as chief mutineer George Leech) but it led to further work as a reliable lead character player.
For most of his career, Knox tended to be typecast as men of integrity (though he did play the odd villain): stern authority figures, psychiatrists, academics and politicians - undoubtedly, this was because of his inherently sincere, though rather sombre on-screen personality. It was also a consequence of having been cast in the starring role of Woodrow Wilson, the 28th U.S. President, in Darryl F. Zanuck's over-ambitious biopic Wilson (1944). Bosley Crowther commented for The New York Times (August 2, 1944): "Much of the film's quality is due to the performance of Alexander Knox in the title role. Mr. Knox....draws a character that is full of inner strength - honest, forceful and intelligent, yet marked by a fine reserve... The casting of Mr. Knox, a comparative unknown, in this role was truly inspired". Despite the excellent personal notices, 'Wilson' was a rather slow and ponderous affair, a flop at the box office and one of Zanuck's most conspicuous failures. His personal reputation intact, Knox had several leading roles come his way in the wake of 'Wilson', even a rare comedy part in The Judge Steps Out (1948) as a starchy, but likeable Boston judge. However, in 1952, his career suffered a serious setback when he was blacklisted by HUAC for alleged left-wing affinities and forced to leave for England.
From 1954, Alexander Knox appeared in scores of British films and was particularly good in two productions for the director Joseph Losey (who had also been black-listed in Hollywood): The Damned (1962) and Accident (1967). He also played another U.S. president in the James Bond thriller You Only Live Twice (1967) and was a memorable spook (the ill-fated 'Control') in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) on television. He made a successful return to the London stage, frequently in plays by Henrik Ibsen and Clifford Odets. Outside of his principal occupation he was finally able to devote himself wholeheartedly to his long-standing literary ambition, as the author of plays ("Old Master", "Trafalgar Square"), screenplays and five adventure novels set in the wilds of 19th century Canada. Knox died in his adopted home in Berwick-Upon-Tweed, England, in 1995 at the age of 88.- Actress
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The daughter of a Mexican surgeon, Maria Margarita Guadalupe Teresa Estella Castilla Bolado y O'Donnell was born in Mexico City. As a niece to famous bandleader Xavier Cugat, she performed with his orchestra from the age of nine as a specialty dancer in nightclubs, and, later, on the Starlight Roof of the hotel Waldorf Astoria in New York. When she was fifteen years old, she was head-hunted by writers Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, who saw her dance and cast her in the Claude Rains drama Crime Without Passion (1934). Her debut as Rains' ex-lover who ends up being murdered by him, was well-received, critic Mordaunt Hall describing her performance as 'excellent'. Margo was best-known, however, for her role as the slum girl Miriamne Esdras in both stage and screen version of Maxwell Anderson's play Winterset (1936) and for her poignant performance as the young girl leaving Shangri-La (to her detriment) in Lost Horizon (1937). She also appeared on Broadway in 'Masque of Kings' (1937) and 'The World We Make' (1939) and had another small screen role in The Leopard Man (1943).
Margo was married for 39 years to the actor Eddie Albert, residing in Pacific Palisades, California. In later years, she became involved in the public sector, in 1974 becoming Commissioner for Social Services in Los Angeles.- Actor
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One of the truly great and gifted performers of the century, who often suffered lesser roles, Burgess Meredith was born in 1907 in Cleveland, Ohio. He was educated in Amherst College in Massachusetts, before joining Eva Le Gallienne's Student Repertory stage company in 1929. By 1934 he was a star on Broadway in 'Little 'Ol Boy', a part for which he tied with George M. Cohan as Best Performer of the Year.. He became a favorite of dramatist Maxwell Anderson, premiering on film in the playwright's Winterset (1936). Other Broadway appearances included 'The Barretts of Wimpole Street'. 'The Remarkable Mr Pennypacker', 'Candida', and 'Of Mice and Men. 'Meredith served in the United States Army Air Corps in World War II, reaching the rank of captain. He continued in a variety of dramatic and comedic roles often repeating his stage roles on film until being named an unfriendly witness by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950s, whereupon studio work disappeared. His career picked up again, especially with television roles, in the 1960s, although younger audiences know him best for either the Rocky (1976) or Grumpy Old Men (1993) films. Meredith also did a large amount of commercial work, serving as the voice for Skippy Peanut Butter and United Air Lines, among others. He was also an ardent environmentalist who believed pollution one of the greatest tragedies of the time, and an opponent of the Vietnam War. Burgess Meredith died at age 89 of Alzheimer's disease and melanoma in his home in Malibu, California on September 9, 1997.- Actor
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Harry Morgan was a prolific character actor who starred in over 100 films and was a stage performer. Known to a younger generation of fans as "Col. Sherman T. Potter" on M*A*S*H (1972). Also known for his commanding personality throughout his career, he tackled movies and television in a way no other actor would do it.
Born Harry Bratsberg in Detroit, Michigan to Anna Olsen, a homemaker who immigrated from Sweden, and Henry Bratsberg, a mechanic who immigrated from Norway. After graduating from Muskegon High School in Muskegon, Michigan, he took on a salesman job before becoming a successful actor.
Several of his most memorable film roles were: The Omaha Trail (1942), in the next quarter-century, he would also appear in The Ox-Bow Incident (1942), Wing and a Prayer (1944), State Fair (1945), Dragonwyck (1946), All My Sons (1948), Red Light (1949), Outside the Wall (1950), Dark City (1950) where he met future Dragnet 1967 (1967) co-star Jack Webb, who would be best friends until Webb's death, late in 1982, along with Appointment with Danger (1950). His films credits also include: High Noon (1952), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), Strategic Air Command (1955), among many others. He also co-starred with James Garner in Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969) and Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971).
On television, he is fondly remembered as Spring Byington's jokingly henpecked neighbor, "Pete Porter" on December Bride (1954), where he became the show's scene-stealer. It was also based on a popular radio show that transferred into television. The show was an immediate success to viewers, which led him into starring his own short-lived spin-off series, Pete and Gladys (1960), which co-starred Cara Williams, who met Morgan in the movie, The Saxon Charm (1948).
Morgan began his eight-year association with old friend, Jack Webb, and Universal, starting with Dragnet 1967 (1967), which he played Off. Bill Gannon. For the second time, like December Bride (1954) before this, it was an immediate hit, where it tackled a lot of topics. Dragnet was canceled in 1970, after a 4-season run, due to Morgan's best friend and co-star (Jack Webb) leaving the show to continue producing other shows, such as Adam-12 (1968) and Emergency! (1972). Morgan would later work with Webb in both short-lived series, The D.A. (1971), opposite Robert Conrad and Hec Ramsey (1972), opposite Richard Boone. After those roles, Morgan ended his contract with both Universal and Mark VII, to sign with 20th Century Fox.
Morgan's biggest role was that of a tough-talking, commanding, fun-loving, serious Army Officer, "Col. Sherman T. Potter" on M*A*S*H (1972), when he replaced McLean Stevenson, who left the show to unsuccessfully star in his own sitcom. For the third time, the show was still a hit with fans, and at 60, he was nominated for Emmies nine times and won his first and only Emmy in 1980, for Outstanding Supporting Actor. By 1983, M*A*S*H's series was getting very expensive, as well as with the cast, hence, CBS reduced it to 16 episodes. Despite M*A*S*H's finale in 1983, Morgan went on to star in a short-lived spin-off series AfterMASH (1983), co-starring Jamie Farr and William Christopher, from the original M*A*S*H (1972) series, without series' star Alan Alda.
He also co-starred in 2 more short-lived series, as he was over 70, beginning with Blacke's Magic (1986) with Hal Linden and his final role with You Can't Take It with You (1987). That same year, he reprised his role, for a second time as "Off. Bill Gannon" in the film, Dragnet (1987), which starred Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks. Then, he guest-starred in several shows such as: The Twilight Zone (1985), Renegade (1992), The Jeff Foxworthy Show (1995), for the third time, he also reprised his "Off. Bill Gannon" role, supplying his voice on The Simpsons (1989). Towards the end of his acting career, as he reached 80, he had a recurring role as the older college professor on 3rd Rock from the Sun (1996), opposite John Lithgow. Afterwards, he retired from show business and lived with his family. Harry Morgan died on December 7, 2011 at 96. On confirming his death, his son Charles said that he had been recently treated for pneumonia. Morgan was also one of the oldest living Hollywood male actors.- Actor
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Veteran performer John Randolph was a Tony Award-winning character actor whose union and social activism in the '40s and '50s caused him to be blacklisted during the McCarthy era. The balding performer may not have been a household name, but he was a regular face in movies and TV for over four decades.
He was born Emanuel Cohen on June 1, 1915, in New York City, to Jewish immigrants from Romania and Russia, mother Dorothy (Shorr), an insurance agent, and father Louis Cohen, a hat manufacturer. When his father died and his mother remarried, his stepfather, Joseph Lippman, renamed him Mortimer.
He began his dramatic training in the '30s, studying under Stella Adler and changing his name to the less ethnic moniker of "John Randolph". He served in the Army Air Force during WWII and married actress Sarah Cunningham in Chicago in 1945 while performing in Orson Welles's stage production of "Native Son". They had two children, Martha and Harrison.
After the war, Randolph become one of the original members of the Actors Studio. After making his film debut with The Naked City (1948), his passionate, outspoken leftist views and defense of other accused figures led to Randolph and his wife being blacklisted. In 1955, they were both called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and pleaded the Fifth Amendment. Although Randolph lost many jobs during this 15-year blacklist, he continued to find work onstage, mainly in New York.
Finally, director John Frankenheimer broke the Hollywood blacklist after casting Randolph, along with fellow "marked" actors Will Geer and Jeff Corey, in Seconds (1966), in which he played a disillusioned older man surgically made to look decades younger (now played by Rock Hudson). Randolph continued to flourish in films and TV following this breakthrough with important roles in Serpico (1973), Frances (1982), Prizzi's Honor (1985) and You've Got Mail (1998), along with the TV movies The Missiles of October (1974) and "Lincoln" (1975) (mini). He also played the recurring role of Roseanne Barr's father on her popular sitcom.
In 1987, he was the recipient of both Tony and Drama Desk awards for his close-to-home portrayal of a Communist, left-wing grandfather in Neil Simon's "Broadway Bound". Randolph continued his activism into the 1980s, heading the Council of American-Soviet Friendship, a cultural exchange organization. He died of natural causes at age 88.- Born in turn-of-the-century Yonkers, New York, Robert Shayne (born Robert Shaen Dawe) worked at a variety of jobs before his interests ultimately turned toward acting. He appeared in a succession of legit theater productions throughout the 1930s and even appeared in a few films, making a comedy short in New York in 1929, two features in 1934 and a comedy short shot in New York in 1937. In 1942 he signed with Warner Brothers and trekked to Hollywood, where he became a contract player at their Culver City studios. Warners starred the newly-arrived stage actor in a series of two-reel Westerns before graduating him to supporting roles in "A"-level features. In 1946 he left the studio to freelance. Several years later he got involved in the infant medium of TV, where he played the part for which he is best remembered--Inspector Henderson in the series Adventures of Superman (1952).
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Tough, virile, wavy-haired and ruggedly handsome with trademark forlorn-looking brows that added an intriguing touch of vulnerability to his hard outer core, actor Howard Duff and his wife-at-the-time, actress Ida Lupino, were one of Hollywood's premiere film couples during the 1950s "Golden Age". Prior to that, Duff had relationships with a number of the cinema's most dazzling leading ladies, including Ava Gardner (just prior to her marriage to musician Artie Shaw) and Gloria DeHaven.
Duff's talent first manifested itself on radio as Dashiell Hammett's popular private eye "Sam Spade" (1946-1950), and eventually extended to include stage, film and TV. While never considered a top-tier movie star and, despite his obvious prowess, never considered for any acting awards, Howard Duff was an undeniably strong good guy and potent heavy but perhaps lacked the requisite charisma or profile to move into the ranks of a Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas or Robert Mitchum. His career spanned over four decades.
His full name was Howard Green Duff and he was born in Bremerton, Washington on November 24, 1913. Growing up in and around the Seattle area, he attended Roosevelt High School where he played basketball. It was here that he also found an outlet acting in school plays and, following graduation, studied drama. He eventually became an acting member of the Repertory Playhouse in Seattle. Military service interrupted his early career and he served with the U.S. Army Air Force's radio service from 1941 to 1945. Upon his discharge, he returned to his acting pursuits and won the role of "Sam Spade" on NBC Radio in the role Humphrey Bogart made famous in The Maltese Falcon (1941). Lurene Tuttle played his altruistic secretary "Effie" on the series. He eventually left the program when his film career settled in and Stephen Dunne took over the radio voice of the detective in 1950 for its final season.
Duff's post-war movie career started completely on the right foot at Universal with the hard-hitting film noir Brute Force (1947), in which he received good notices as an ill-fated cellmate to Burt Lancaster, Charles Bickford and others. Quite well-known for his radio voice by this time, he was given special billing in the movie's credits as "Radio's Sam Spade". This was followed by equally vital and volatile performances in the prescient semi-documentary-styled police drama The Naked City (1948) and in Arthur Miller's taut family drama All My Sons (1948) starring Lancaster, again, and Edward G. Robinson.
After such a strong showing, Howard career went into a period of moviemaking in which his films were more noted for its entertainment and rousing action than as character-driven pieces. A number of them were routine westerns that paired him opposite some of Hollywood's loveliest ladies: Red Canyon (1949) with Ann Blyth, Calamity Jane and Sam Bass (1949) with Yvonne De Carlo and The Lady from Texas (1951) with Mona Freeman. Other adventure-oriented flicks that more or less came and went included Spaceways (1953), Tanganyika (1954), The Yellow Mountain (1954), Flame of the Islands (1955), Blackjack Ketchum, Desperado (1956) (title role), The Broken Star (1956) and Sierra Stranger (1957). Howard also began appearing infrequently on the stage in the early 1950s with such productions as "Season in the Sun" (1952) and "Anniversary Waltz" (1954).
Those films that rose above the standard included gritty top-billed roles in Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949), Illegal Entry (1949), Shakedown (1950), Spy Hunt (1950) and Woman in Hiding (1950), the last a film noir which paired him with Ida Lupino for the first time. Here, he plays the hero who saves Lupino from a murdering husband (Stephen McNally). In 1951, he married Ms. Lupino, already a well-established star at Warner Bros., who was coming into her own recently as a director. The couple had one daughter, Bridget Duff, born in 1952. Lupino and Duff co-starred in four hard-boiled film dramas during the 1950s -- Jennifer (1953), Private Hell 36 (1954), Women's Prison (1955) and While the City Sleeps (1956). The demise of the studio-guided contract system had an effect on Howard's film career and offers started drying up in the late 1950s.
Fortunately, he found just as wide an appeal on TV, appearing in a number of dramatic showcases for Science Fiction Theatre (1955), Lux Video Theatre (1950) and Climax! (1954). And, in a change of pace, the married couple decided to go for laughs by starring together in the TV series Mr. Adams and Eve (1957). Here, they played gregarious husband-and-wife film stars "Howard Adams" and "Eve Drake". Many of the scripts, though broadly exaggerated for comic effect, were reportedly based on a few of their own real-life experiences. They also guest-starred in an entertaining hour-long episode of the The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (1957) in 1959 with the two couples inadvertently booked at the same vacant lodge, together. The show ends up a battle-of-the sexes, free-for-all with the two gals scheming to add a little romance to what has essentially become a fishing vacation for the guys. The 1960s bore more fruit on TV than in film. Sans Lupino, Duff went solo as nightclub owner "Willie Dante" in the tongue-in-cheek adventure series Dante (1960), which lasted less than a season. A few years later, the veteran co-starred with handsome rookie Dennis Cole in what is perhaps his best-remembered series, the police drama The Felony Squad (1966), which was filmed in and around Los Angeles. Duff directed one of those episodes, having directed several episodes of the silly sitcom Camp Runamuck (1965), a year or so earlier. In between series work were guest assignments on such popular primetime shows as Bonanza (1959), The Twilight Zone (1959), Burke's Law (1963) and Combat! (1962).
The marriage of Ida and Howard did not last, however, and the famous married couple separated in 1966 after 15 years of marriage. Ida and Howard didn't officially divorce, however, until 1984. Howard later married a non-professional, Judy Jenkinson, who survived him. While much of Howard's work in later years was standard, if unmemorable, every now and then he would demonstrate the fine talent he was. A couple of his better film performances came as a sex-minded, booze-swilling relative in A Wedding (1978) and as Dustin Hoffman's attorney in the Oscar-winning drama Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). He also enjoyed a villainous role in the short-lived series Flamingo Road (1980) and had a lengthy stint on Knots Landing (1979) during the 1984-1985 season. Duff died at age 76 of a heart attack, on July 8, 1990, in Santa Barbara, California.- Actor
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Emanuel Goldenberg arrived in the United States from Romania at age ten, and his family moved into New York's Lower East Side. He took up acting while attending City College, abandoning plans to become a rabbi or lawyer. The American Academy of Dramatic Arts awarded him a scholarship, and he began work in stock, with his new name, Edward G. Robinson (the "G" stood for his birth surname), in 1913. Broadway was two years later; he worked steadily there for 15 years. His work included "The Kibitzer", a comedy he co-wrote with Jo Swerling. His film debut was a small supporting part in the silent The Bright Shawl (1923), but it was with the coming of sound that he hit his stride. His stellar performance as snarling, murderous thug Rico Bandello in Little Caesar (1931)--all the more impressive since in real life Robinson was a sophisticated, cultured man with a passion for fine art--set the standard for movie gangsters, both for himself in many later films and for the industry. He portrayed the title character in several biographical works, such as Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940) and A Dispatch from Reuters (1940). Psychological dramas included Flesh and Fantasy (1943), Double Indemnity (1944), The Woman in the Window (1944)and Scarlet Street (1945). Another notable gangster role was in Key Largo (1948). He was "absolved" of allegations of Communist affiliation after testifying as a friendly witness for the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy hysteria of the early 1950s. In 1956 he had to sell off his extensive art collection in a divorce settlement and also had to deal with a psychologically troubled son. In 1956 he returned to Broadway in "Middle of the Night". In 1973 he was awarded a special, posthumous Oscar for lifetime achievement.- Actor
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Actor, raconteur, art collector and connoisseur of haute cuisine are just some of the attributes associated with Vincent Price. He was born Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. in St. Louis, Missouri, to Marguerite Cobb "Daisy" (Wilcox) and Vincent Leonard Price, who was President of the National Candy Company. His grandfather, also named Vincent, invented Dr. Price's Baking Powder, which was tartar-based. His family was prosperous, as he said, "not rich enough to evoke envy but successful enough to demand respect." His uniquely cultivated voice and persona were the result of a well-rounded education which began when his family dispatched him on a tour of Europe's cultural centres. His secondary education eventually culminated in a B.A. in English from Yale University and a degree in art history from London's Courtauld Institute.
Famously, his name has long been a byword for Gothic horror on screen. However, Vincent Price was, first and foremost, a man of the stage. It is where he began his career and where it ended. He faced the footlights for the first time at the Gate Theatre in London. At the age of 23, he played Prince Albert in the premiere of Arthur Schnitzler 's 'Victoria Regina' and made such an impression on producer Gilbert Miller that he launched the play on Broadway that same year (legendary actress Helen Hayes played the title role). In early 1938, he was invited to join Orson Welles 's Mercury Theatre on a five-play contract, beginning with 'The Shoemaker's Holiday'. He gave what was described as "a polished performance". Thus established, Vincent continued to make sporadic forays to the Great White Way, including as the Duke of Buckingham in Shakespeare's 'Richard III' (in which a reviewer for the New Yorker found him to be "satisfactorily detestable") and as Oscar Wilde in his award-winning one man show 'Diversions and Delights', which he took on a hugely successful world-wide tour in 1978. While based in California, Vincent was instrumental in the success of the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, starring in several of their bigger productions, including 'Billy Budd' and 'The Winslow Boy'. In 1952, Vincent joined the national touring company of 'Don Juan in Hell' in which he was cast as the devil. Acting under the direction of Charles Laughton and accompanied by noted thespians Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke and Agnes Moorehead, he later recalled this as one of his "greatest theatrical excitements".
As well as acting on stage, Vincent regularly performed on radio network programs, including Lux Radio Theatre, CBS Playhouse and shows for the BBC. He narrated or hosted assorted programs ranging from history (If these Walls Could Speak) to cuisine (Cooking Price-Wise). He wrote several best-selling books on his favourite subjects: art collecting and cookery. In 1962, he was approached by Sears Roebuck to act as a buying consultant "selling quality pictures to department store customers". As if that were not enough, he lectured for 15 years on art, poetry and even the history of villainy. He recorded numerous readings of poems by Edgar Allan Poe (nobody ever gave a better recital of "The Raven"!), Shelley and Whitman. He also served on the Arts Council of UCLA, was a member of the Fine Arts Committee for the White House, a former chairman of the Indian Arts & Crafts Board and on the board of trustees of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
And besides all of that, Vincent Price remained a much sought-after motion picture actor. He made his first appearance on screen as a romantic lead in Service de Luxe (1938), a frothy Universal comedy which came and went without much fanfare. After that, he reprized his stage role as Master Hammon in an early television production of 'The Shoemaker's Holiday'. For one reason or another, Vincent was henceforth typecast as either historical figures (Sir Walter Raleigh, Duke of Clarence, Mormon leader Joseph Smith, King Charles II, Cardinal Richelieu, Omar Khayyam) or ineffectual charmers and gigolos. Under contract to 20th Century Fox (1940-46), Laura (1944) provided one of his better vehicles in the latter department, as did the lush Technicolor melodrama Leave Her to Heaven (1945) which had Vincent showcased in a notably powerful scene as a prosecuting attorney. His performance was singled out by the L.A. Times as meriting "attention as contending for Academy supporting honors".
His first fling with the horror genre was Dragonwyck (1946), a Gothic melodrama set in the Hudson Valley in the early 1800's. For the first time, Vincent played a part he actually coveted and fought hard to win. His character was in effect a precursor of those he would later make his own while working for Roger Corman and American-International. As demented, drug-addicted landowner Nicholas Van Ryn, he so effectively terrorized Gene Tierney's Miranda Wells that the influential columnist Louella Parsons wrote with rare praise: "The role of Van Ryn calls for a lot of acting and Vincent admits he's a ham and loves to act all over the place, but the fact that he has restrained himself and doesn't over-emote is a tribute to his ability". If Vincent was an occasional ham, he proved it with his Harry Lime pastiche Carwood in The Bribe (1949). Much better was his starring role in a minor western, The Baron of Arizona (1950), in which he was convincingly cast as a larcenous land office clerk attempting to create his own desert baronetcy.
With House of Wax (1953) , Vincent fine-tuned the character type he had established in Dragonwyck, adding both pathos and comic elements to the role of the maniacal sculptor Henry Jarrod. It was arduous work under heavy make-up which simulated hideous facial scarring and required three hours to apply and three hours to remove. He later commented that it "took his face months to heal because it was raw from peeling off wax each night". However, the picture proved a sound money maker for Warner Brothers and firmly established Vincent Price in a cult genre from which he was henceforth unable to escape. The majority of his subsequent films were decidedly low-budget affairs in which the star tended to be the sole mitigating factor: The Mad Magician (1954), The Fly (1958) (and its sequel), House on Haunted Hill (1959), the absurd The Tingler (1959) (easily the worst of the bunch) and The Bat (1959). With few exceptions, Vincent's acting range would rarely be stretched in the years to come.
Vincent's association with the genial Roger Corman began when he received a script for The Fall of the House of Usher, beginning a projected cycle of cost-effective films based on short stories by Edgar Allen Poe. As Roderick Usher, Vincent was Corman's "first and only choice". Though he was to receive a salary of $50,000 for the picture, it was his chance "to express the psychology of Poe's characters" and to "imbue the movie versions with the spirit of Poe" that clinched the deal for Vincent. He made another six films in this vein, all of them box office winners. Not Academy Award stuff, but nonetheless hugely enjoyable camp entertainment and popular with all but highbrow audiences. Who could forget Vincent at his scenery chewing best as the resurgent inquisitor, luring Barbara Steele into the crypt in The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)? Or as pompous wine aficionado Fortunato Luchresi in that deliriously funny wine tasting competition with Montresor Herringbone (Peter Lorre) in Tales of Terror (1962)? Best still, the climactic battle of the magicians pitting Vincent's Erasmus Craven against Boris Karloff's malevolent Dr. Scarabus in The Raven (1963) (arguably, the best offering in the Poe cycle). The Comedy of Terrors (1963) was played strictly for laughs, with the inimitable combo of Price and Lorre this time appearing as homicidal undertakers.
For the rest of the 60s, Vincent was content to remain in his niche, playing variations on the same theme in City in the Sea (1965) and Witchfinder General (1968) (as Matthew Hopkins). He also spoofed his screen personae as Dr. Goldfoot and as perennial villain Egghead in the Batman (1966) series. He rose once more to the occasion in the cult black comedy The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) (and its sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972)) commenting that he had to play Anton Phibes "very seriously so that it would come out funny". The tagline, a parody of the ad for Love Story (1970), announced "love means never having to say you're ugly".
During the 70s and 80s, Vincent restricted himself mainly to voice-overs and TV guest appearances. His final role of note was as the inventor in Edward Scissorhands (1990), a role written specifically for him. The embodiment of gleeful, suave screen villainy, Vincent Price died in Los Angeles in October 1993 at the age of 82. People magazine eulogized him as "the Gable of Gothic." Much earlier, an English critic named Gilbert Adair spoke for many fans when he said "Every man his Price - and mine is Vincent."- Actor
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His father, Richard Head Welles, was a well-to-do inventor, his mother, Beatrice (Ives) Welles, a beautiful concert pianist; Orson Welles was gifted in many arts (magic, piano, painting) as a child. When his mother died in 1924 (when he was nine) he traveled the world with his father. He was orphaned at 15 after his father's death in 1930 and became the ward of Dr. Maurice Bernstein of Chicago. In 1931, he graduated from the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. He turned down college offers for a sketching tour of Ireland. He tried unsuccessfully to enter the London and Broadway stages, traveling some more in Morocco and Spain, where he fought in the bullring.
Recommendations by Thornton Wilder and Alexander Woollcott got him into Katharine Cornell's road company, with which he made his New York debut as Tybalt in 1934. The same year, he married, directed his first short, and appeared on radio for the first time. He began working with John Houseman and formed the Mercury Theatre with him in 1937. In 1938, they produced "The Mercury Theatre on the Air", famous for its broadcast version of "The War of the Worlds" (intended as a Halloween prank). His first film to be seen by the public was Citizen Kane (1941), a commercial failure losing RKO $150,000, but regarded by many as the best film ever made. Many of his subsequent films were commercial failures and he exiled himself to Europe in 1948.
In 1956, he directed Touch of Evil (1958); it failed in the United States but won a prize at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. In 1975, in spite of all his box-office failures, he received the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1984, the Directors Guild of America awarded him its highest honor, the D.W. Griffith Award. His reputation as a filmmaker steadily climbed thereafter.- Born to George & Frances Simonson Walter, and named Sterling Relyea Walter. Father died in 1925. Adopted by stepfather 'James Hayden' renamed Sterling Walter Hayden. Grew up in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., and Maine. Though very poor, attended prep school at Wassookeag School in Dexter, Maine. Ran away to sea at 17, first as ship's boy, then as doryman on the Grand Banks, as a seaman and fireman on numerous vessels before getting his first command at 19. He sailed around the world a number of times, becoming a well-known and highly respected ship's captain. At urging of friends, met with producer Edward H. Griffith who signs him to a Paramount contract. Fell for his first leading lady, Madeleine Carroll, and married her. Prior to Pearl Harbor, abandoned Hollywood to become a commando with the COI (later the OSS). Joined Marines under pseudonym "John Hamilton" (a name he never acts under), eventually running guns and supplies to Yugoslav partisans through the German blockade of the Adriatic, as well as parachuting into Croatia for guerrilla activities. Won Silver Star and citation from Tito of Yugoslavia. Briefly flirted with Communist Party membership due to friendship with Yugoslav Communists. Returned to film work, which he despised, in order to pay for a succession of sailing vessels. As Red Scare deepens in U.S., he cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee, confessing his brief Communist ties. Ever after regretted this action, holding himself in enormous contempt for what he considered "ratting". Offered role of Tarzan as replacement for Lex Barker, but refused. Made headlines defying court order not to sail to Tahiti with his children following divorce decree. Published autobiography "Wanderer" in 1963, and novel "Voyage" in 1976, both to great acclaim. Cast as Quint in Jaws (1975) but unable to play due to tax problems. Died of cancer in 1986.
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Born in Canada, John Ireland was raised in New York. Performing as a swimmer in a water carnival, he moved into the legitimate theater, often appearing in minor roles in Broadway plays. His first big break in pictures came in 1945 when he appeared as Windy the introspective letter-writing G.I. in the classic war epic A Walk in the Sun (1945). Ireland was then often featured (mostly as a heavy) in several films. In 1949, he was nominated for best supporting actor for his role as the reporter in All the King's Men (1949). During the early 1950s, Ireland often starred as the emoting, brooding hero, almost exclusively in "B" pictures. In 1953, with his son Peter Ireland and wife, Joanne Dru, Ireland co-produced and co-directed the western mini-classic Hannah Lee: An American Primitive (1953) (aka Outlaw Territory). From the mid-'50s on. he appeared mainly in Italian "quickie" features and showed up occasionally in supporting roles in major pictures (Spartacus (1960)). Occasionally, his name was mentioned in tabloids of the times, in connection with young starlets, namely Natalie Wood and Sue Lyon. He was to play the role of the patriarch on the Ponderosa in Bonanza: The Next Generation (1988) but the series was not picked up. In addition to Hannah Lee: An American Primitive (1953), his best work was in Little Big Horn (1951) and The Bushwhackers (1951). In his later years, he owned and operated a tiny restaurant, Ireland's, in Santa Barbara, California.- Vera Caspary was born on 13 November 1899 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. She was a writer, known for Laura (1944), A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and Laura. She was married to Isadore Goldsmith. She died on 13 June 1987 in New York City, New York, USA.
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Edward entered the film industry as a publicity director for Columbia Pictures. In addition to writing films, Edward also wrote fourteen plays and was often a guest at Louis B. Mayer's lunch table at the MGM Commissary. In 1953 he was blacklisted by the Hollywood studios after being identified as a Communist Party member by choreographer Jerome Robbins.- The Oscar-nominated screenwriter Guy Endore -- who served as one of the "fronts" during the time of the Hollywood blacklist until he too was blacklisted -- was born Samuel Goldstein in New York City on the Fourth of July in the year 1900. His father, Isidor Goldestein, was variously a coal miner, inventor and investor who hailed from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The family was poor and when young Sam was four years old, his mother -- Malka Hapern Isidore -- committed suicide.
After his wife's death, Isidor changed the family name to Endore and had his children committed to a Methodist orphanage. He eventually sold an invention that made him wealthy enough to send Guy and his siblings to Vienna, Austria to be educated. They were raised under the tutelage of a Catholic governess. After five years, their father disappeared from their lives and the children were sent back to Pittsburgh.
The hard-up Samuel Guy Endore managed to get enough money to attend New York's Columbia University, where he graduated in 1923 with his baccalaureate degree. Reportedly, he had rented out the bed in his room to another Columbia undergrad and slept on the floor. He took his master's degree from Columbia two years later. His wife was the former Henrietta Portugal, whom he married after completing his studies.
Guy Endore moved to Hollywood in 1935. While his credits are few (he had four in 1935, but they dropped off after that), he made a successful living as a screenwriter in Hollywood until he was blacklisted in the 1950s. He liked occult subjects and worked on such genre horror films as Mark of the Vampire (1935), Mad Love (1935), The Raven (1935) and The Devil-Doll (1936). One of his favorite subjects was hypnotism. His hypnosis-based novel "Methinks The Lady" was made into the classic film noir Whirlpool (1950) by producer-director Otto Preminger in 1949.
Endore was attracted to leftism While at Columbia. He had suffered his share of hard times and half-a-decade after he finished his M.A. in the flush years of the Cal Coolidge "The Business of America is Business" years, the country was mired in the Great Depression. He joined the Communist Party and wrote articles for the New Masses and other communist publications.
Endore was never subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee but he was eventually blacklisted. Eventually, he used his wife's brother-in-law as a front, Harry Relis. He himself had been a front for Dalton Trumbo before he was blacklisted.
In 1945, he was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay of Story of G.I. Joe (1945). His last credit was the 1969 TV movie Fear No Evil (1969).
Guy Endore died in Los Angeles on February 12, 1970. He was 69 years old. - Writer
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Playwright and author of sophisticated screenplays, a graduate of Bard College and Columbia University Law School. Howard Koch started out as a practicing lawyer in Hartsdale, New Jersey, but soon found himself dissatisfied with his career choice and began to write plays on the side. His first two efforts flopped on Broadway (respectively in 1929 and 1933). Nonetheless, Koch continued, undaunted, and had his first critical success with "The Lonely Man", produced at the Blackstone Theater in Chicago in 1937. On the strength of this work he was engaged by John Houseman to write dramatic material for Orson Welles' "Mercury Theater on the Air" radio program (his starting salary was $75 for roughly sixty pages of script). Koch re-wrote H.G. Wells sci-fi story "War of the Worlds" as "Invasion from Mars" for the famous Halloween broadcast that "panicked America". It had such an effect on the public that the "New York Times" ran the headline "Many Flee Homes to Escape 'Gas Raid From Mars'".
The following year Koch moved to Hollywood and was signed to a screenwriting contract by Warner Brothers (1939-1945). He achieved lasting fame through his felicitous collaboration with brothers Philip Epstein and Julius J. Epstein in adapting Murray Burnett's adaptation of the obscure play "Everybody Comes to Rick's" to the now classic Casablanca (1942). The Epsteins concentrated on the dialogue while Koch worked out the dramatic continuity. The three subsequently shared the 1943 Academy Award for Best Screenplay (Koch sold his Oscar at auction in 1994 for $184,000 in order to fund a granddaughter's school tuition). Before and after "Casablanca", Koch worked on a variety of other subjects, turning out polished screenplays for Errol Flynn's hugely entertaining swashbuckler The Sea Hawk (1940), an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's steamy melodrama The Letter (1940), the patriotic flag-waver Sergeant York (1941) and the George Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue (1945). His own personal favorite was his script for Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), a tender story of unrequited love set in Vienna.
Koch's reputation was sadly tarnished as a result of his work on Mission to Moscow (1943), the account of Joseph E. Davies, a former US ambassador to Russia. Although he was not particularly happy with this assignment, Koch was coerced into it by studio boss Jack L. Warner, who, in turn, was under pressure from the U.S. government to produce a picture that showcased the efforts of the Soviet Union in the fight against Nazi Germany. However, in 1947, at the height of the Red-baiting hysteria stirred up by senator Joseph McCarthy, Warner testified as a "friendly" witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), charged with "rooting out" Communist influence in the motion picture industry. Warner named Koch and other "liberals" as being Communist sympathizers, using the pro-Russian content of "Mission to Moscow" as "proof". This resulted in Koch becoming one of the so-called "Hollywood Nineteen" and finding himself being blacklisted by the industry in 1951. Unable to earn a living, he had little choice but to leave the country. Like other writers and directors in the same position, he moved to England where he continued to write screenplays under a pseudonym ("Peter Howard"). Returning to the US five years later, he bought a property near Woodstock, NY, and resumed writing plays for regional productions (as well as occasional film scripts).
In his memoirs, "As Time Goes By", Koch recalled how, early in the casting process, the stars of "Casablanca" were slated to be Dennis Morgan (!), Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan (in the Paul Henreid role of Victor Laszlo). Our appreciation of the classic film would have been rather different . . .- Writer
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Sidney Kingsley was born on 22 October 1906 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Detective Story (1951), Dead End (1937) and Men in White (1934). He was married to Madge Evans. He died on 20 March 1995 in Oakland, New Jersey, USA.- Writer
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John Howard Lawson is not the most famous member of the Hollywood 10, those filmmakers who defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities' inquiry into alleged "Communist subversion" in the Hollywood movie industry in 1947, but he was the central figure of the group--the mind if not the heart and soul of the Communist community in Hollywood. One of the founders and the first president of the Screenwriters Guild (now called the Writers' Guild of America), the first and most aggressive of the Hollywood guilds, he was the Communist Party's de facto cultural commissar in Hollywood, particularly as it affected writers.
Technically, New York-based American Communist Party (CPUSA) cultural commissar V.J. Jerome was his superior but in the Hollywood hierarchy, Lawson arguably was second only to Gerhart Eisler in authority. Eisler was the "boss" in his role as an agent of the Moscow-controlled Comintern, and thus outranked Lawson, who was not a member of the secret quasi-military organization. Like Eisler, he was unquestionably under the discipline of Moscow, and thus, in essence, answerable to Joseph Stalin, the spider at the center of the web. When the party wanted a member to come to heel, Lawson enforced the ukase. (Eisler's brother, film composer Hanns Eisler -- a good friend of "Hollywood 19" member Bertolt Brecht, was deported from the United States after his own 1947 HUAC testimony. On his part, Brecht willingly testified before HUAC, told them nonsense, then decamped for East Germany, where he lived out the rest of his life under the aegis of the Warsaw Pact.)
Like the rest of the Hollywood 10, Lawson would be blacklisted by the film and television industries during the late 1940s and through the 1950s.
Lawson was born into a wealthy family in New York City on September 25, 1894, the son of Simeon Levy and the former Belle Hart Lawson,who were Jews. He was named after the 19th century British prison reformer John Howard. With a strong desire to assimilate, Simeon changed the family name to Lawson so that his children would not experience anti-Semitism and had them join a Christian Church. However, John Howard Lawson would adhere to Jewish dietary laws all his life.
He matriculated at at Williams College, earning a bachelor of arts degree in 1914. (Oscar-winning director Elia Kazan, whom Lawson would deride as a "stool pigeon" for cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee, was also an alumnus of that small, prestigious private college located in Massachusetts' Berkshire Mountains.) He contributed to the school's literary magazine, served as editor of the year book and wrote his first play, "A Hindoo Love Drama," which attracted the attention of Mary Kirkpatrick, who would become his first agent.
After graduation, Lawson moved to New York and worked for Reuters while dedicating himself to drama. In 1914 he began a play he called "Atmosphere" that was entitled "Souls: "A Psychic Fantasy" when the 69-page-long typewritten manuscript was copyrighted on May 21, 1915. An innovative though talky melodrama, this effort was discounted by Kirkpatrick as non-commercial. It was never produced or published.
In "Souls", Lawson had experimented with using asides to the audience by his characters, which precedes the same use of the device by O'Neil in his 1926 play "Strange Interlude". (O'Neill got the credit for "reviving" the device, which had been used in venerable dramas; however, at the time of "Souls", O'Neil was studying dramatic writing at Harvard).
In the period of 1915-16, he wrote three more plays, "Standards", "The Spice of Life", and "Servant-Master-Lover". "Standards" and "Servant-Master-Lover" were optioned, the first by George M. Cohan and Sam Harris and the latter by Olivier Morosco, but both plays closed out of town due to bad reviews.
He became involved with the avant-garde dramatists and actors of Greenwich Village's Playwrights' Theater that would produce Eugene O'Neill's first play, "Bound East for Cardiff" (and their first production) in November 1916. Before Lawson could become a Broadway playwright, World War I intervened.
After the United States entered the war, Lawson volunteered to be an ambulance driver with the American Field Service in France, where he befriended another driver, John Dos Passos, who would establish himself as a proletarian writer before veering sharply rightward later in his career. After the cessation of hostilities, Lawson moved to Rome, where he edited a newspaper. When he repatriated himself to the United States, he once again took up the career of the Broadway dramatist.
As a playwright, Lawson was committed to the avant-garde, and he began using non-realistic play-writing techniques. His plays were subtle though unfocused attacks on the bourgeoisie. He was deeply affected by the protests surrounding the case of the imprisoned--and later executed--anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (who served as the basis for Maxwell Anderson's Pultizer-Prize winning play "Winterset (1936)"), which stimulated the development of his left-wing politics and radicalism.
Tutored in Marxism by the great critic Edmund Wilson, Lawson imbued his plays with Marxist ideas, including his Broadway debut, 1923's "Roger Bloomer". There were ten productions of Lawson's plays on Broadway from 1923-37, all originals, and a revival of his second Broadway play, 1925's "Processional". Though his plays have not been revived since 1937, he did exert an influence on Eugene O'Neill, whose play "Dynamo" is indebted to Lawson.
With the dawn of talking pictures, there was a demand for dramatists and in 1928 Lawson moved to Hollywood, where he established himself as a screenwriter. He helped establish the Writers' Guild of America in 1933 with fellow future "Hollywood 10" members Lester Cole and Samuel Ornitz, and served as the union's first president from 1933-34. It was in 1934 that Lawson joined the Communist Party. It would come to dominate his life as he became an important member of the small CPUSA community in Hollywood, then eventually its cultural czar.
It's ironic that Lawson would become an enforcer of party ukases, in that with the writing of his last plays produced on Broadway in the late 1930s, he had undergone a struggle between his own aesthetic choices and his commitment to communist ideology. In the 1940s, however, it fell to Lawson as a senior party apparatchik to enforce party discipline among screenwriters who were CPUSA members, making sure that they toed the party line and that their work adhere to the CPUSA's ideology, no matter how impractical that was in the Hollywood studio system, which was based on a collaborative factory paradigm in which individuals contributions were subsumed and muted by the mass nature of the constructed product.
As a screenwriter, Lawson was able to inject politics into several movies, including his most important film, Blockade (1938), a story about the Spanish Civil War. For his screenplay, Lawson was nominated for a Best Story Oscar. Seven years later, the Lawson-scribed movie _Counter-Attack (1945)_ (qv, paid tribute to the US-USSR anti-fascist alliance of World War Two. However, as befits a Hollywood screenwriter who is but one writer of many assigned to a film, his credited work typically ran to more innocuous fare, such as the hit Algiers (1938).
For his defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was cited for contempt of Congress. After exhausting his appeals (his legal strategy dictated by party lawyers), he was sentenced to one year in prison and fined, resulting in his "official" blacklisting in Hollywood. (In fact, he had been blacklisted immediately after refusing to testify.) Not long afterwards, Lawson went into self-imposed exile in Mexico, where he began writing books on drama and film making. During his exile, he wrote a screenplay for the early anti-apartheid film Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) under a pseudonym. His last screenplay, also written under a pseudonym, was The Careless Years (1957), in which a high school couple in love takes it on the lam for Mexico. He also became a lecturer in American universities, where he taught drama and film.
John Howard Lawson died in San Francisco on August 14, 1977, at the age of 82.- Oscar-nominated screenwriter Albert Maltz was born on October 28, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from Columbia University in 1930, he attended the Yale School of Drama for two years as a tyro playwright. After striking out on his own as a dramatist, he developed sociopolitical plays which were destined to be produced by the left-wing theatrical companies the Theatre Union and the Group Theatre. He also wrote novels and short stories. In 1935, during the Great Depression, he joined the Communist Party.
Maltz labored as a screenwriter for Warner Bros., which had made its reputation in the 1930s for its socially aware dramas. He worked on the classic Casablanca (1942) and other feature films and documentaries during World War II. He wrote the Oscar-winning documentary The House I Live In (1945), a plea for racial tolerance, and was nominated for an Oscar for writing Pride of the Marines (1945).
Maltz wrote an article in 1945 for the "New Masses" that demanded more intellectual freedom from the Communist Party for its members. Pressure from the Party made him recant his position, which had a chilling effect on some other Party members and liberal supporters of the Party's right to exist.
In 1947, Maltz and other Party members (and suspected Party members and sympathizers) were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which had determined to investigate "communist infiltration" of the movie industry. Maltz and nine others were cited for contempt of Congress for their uncooperative behavior before the Committee, which included not "naming names" of other communists, and were dubbed the "Hollywood 10". All were fined and jailed, and they were also blacklisted by the American film industry.
Remaining a committed communist, Maltz continued to write, using "fronts" who sold his screenplays and received any writing credit alloted by the studios and WGA. He remained unrepentant about his progressive politics until the end, which came on August 26, 1985 when he died in Los Angeles at the age of 76. - Writer
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Dorothy Rothschild was born on August 22, 1893 into a family of comfortable financial means. Raised by her father and Stepmother after her mother's death, she was given an excellent education for the times. Highly intelligent, she pursued a career after her formal education and proved herself to be one of the early feminists. She started writing poems early and her witty remarks are still alive today. In 1917 she was asked to join the staff at Vanity Fair magazine and to marry Edward Pond Parker II, both of which she agreed to gladly. Eddie Parker soon was stationed overseas and Dorothy became one of the founding members of the Algonquin Hotel "Round Table". Eddie arrived back from the war with an unfortunate drinking problem, and Dorothy decided she loved her new life more than she did him. They were separated far more than together and divorced in 1928. She spent a very dramatic period of time in New York City, doing theater reviews, spending time with her Algonquin friends, drinking far too much. She published poems and short stories and in 1929 won the national O. Henry Prize for the short story "Big Blonde". This established her as a serious writer. She married Alan Campbell when she was forty and he was twenty-nine. He encouraged her to go Hollywood where they became a very successful screenwriting team. Beginning in 1933 they received screen credits for fifteen films, most notably A Star Is Born (1937) which was nominated for an Academy Award. The time spent in Hollywood were the most lucrative years of her career, yet she spent every dime of it. She divorced and remarried Alan Campbell and in 1963 he died. She spent her last years in New York City, in very poor health due to heavy drinking and making do on very little money. Often, she would have to call on friends like Lillian Hellman to help her financially. Dorothy Parker died in 1967 at seventy-three years old in her New York hotel room, all alone. Time magazine devoted an entire page to her obituary, which was considered an amazing tribute. Her estate was left in full to Martin Luther King and the NAACP.- Writer
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- Additional Crew
Waldo Salt was one of the many people blacklisted in Hollywood during the Red Scare, but unlike others, Salt recovered triumphantly. He wrote his first scripts in the late 1930s (MGM contract writer, 1936-42) and also served as a civilian consultant to the Office of War Information from 1942- 1945 before being blacklisted in 1951 after refusing to testify before HUAC. Salt spent several years writing under assumed names for various television series (low-budget series such as "Colonel March of Scotland Yard," for example) and undistinguished films before slowly turning his career around, working in more widely seen television and eventually winning two Oscars for his later work in film.- The Oscar-winning screenwriter, Ring Lardner, Jr., will always be known for one of two things: that he was the son of one of the greatest humorists American literature has produced, and he was one of the Hollywood 10, the ten film-makers who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigating subversion in Hollywood and were fined and jailed for the defiance.
The son of newspaper sports columnist and best-selling writer Ring Lardner, the future double Oscar winner was born on August 19, 1915 in Chicago, Illinois. Ring, Sr. (who was born Ringgold Wilmer Lardner) became famous for his "Saturday Evening Post" series, "You Know Me Al", fictional letters being sent from one baseball player to another. Mawell Perkins, editor-extraordinaire at the publishing house, Charles Scribners & Son, collected Lardner's columns and stories into publishable form (Ernest Hemingway, another Scribers writer, was a great fan) and they were a great success. Such was Lardner's renown, that 30 years after his death (while his son and namesake was still officially blacklisted), he was the first sportswriter inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, for meritorious contributions to baseball writing, in 1963.
On his part, Ring, Jr. became a reporter for the "New York Daily Mirror" after dropping out of Princeton. He moved West and became a publicist for producer David O. Selznick, where he met his future wife, who also worked for the producer. He also worked as a script doctor for Selznik, then went on to become a screenwriter, often working in collaboration.
During the Spanish Civil War, Lardner moved steadily left in his political thinking, and helped raise funds for the Republican cause. He joined the Communist Party and became involved in organizing anti-fascist demonstrations. Although his leftist politics were known to the studios, in the 1930s and early '40s, Hollywood did not shy away from hiring talented writers no matter what their political proclivities, and employed many known (as well as secret) communists.
In 1943, he and Michael Kanin won the Oscar in 1942 for their Woman of the Year (1942) screenplay. He wrote such great pictures as Laura (1944) for Otto Preminger and, in 1947, 20th Century Fox gave him a contract at $2,000 a week, making him one of the highest paid scribes in La-La Land. Ironically, at the time of this seeming triumph, his career and life were about to unravel.
When it was Lardner turn to be hauled before HUAC and asked, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?", he came up with a witty riposte.
"I could answer the question exactly the way you want, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning". After the appeals process against HUAC's citations for contempt of Congress played out, Lardner was sentenced to a year in prison and fined. More importantly, he was blacklisted and could not find work in Hollywood except under pseudonyms for work "fronted" by others. After the blacklist was officially broken when Preminger hired Dalton Trumbo to adapt Leon Uris's novel "Exodus" for his 1960 production (Kirk Douglas then immediately hired Trumbo to write a screenplay for his upcoming Spartacus (1960)), the blacklisted writers slowly returned to work under their own names. Lardner was hired by producer Martin Ransohoff, who respected writers more than did the average Hollywood producer, to write the screenplay for The Cincinnati Kid (1965) under his own name. His comeback was complete when, in 1971, he won his second Oscar for adapting Robert Hooker's comic novel, "M*A*S*H" (1970) (ironically, due to director Robert Altman's improvisational style, little of Lardner's dialogue remained in the movie). His career, though, had been effectively aborted by the blacklist, and he only was credited with two more screenplays during his lifetime.
Ring Lardner, Jr. was the last of the Hollywood 10 to die, passing away on Halloween, October 31, 2000, in New York City from cancer. He was 85 years old and had long outlived most of the witch-hunters who had tormented him. He was survived by his wife, Frances Chaney, and five children. - Writer
- Producer
Adrian Scott, the producer of progressive films who was blacklisted as one of the Hollywood 10, was born into a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Arlington, New Jersey, on February 6, 1912, to Mary (Redpath) and Allan Scott. He established his reputation as a writer on various magazines before finding employment in the movie industry. As a screenwriter, Scott worked on Keeping Company (1940), The Parson of Panamint (1941), We Go Fast (1941) and Mr. Lucky (1943), but it was as a producer he made his biggest mark in Hollywood, helping to create the genre later known as "film noir". In the mid-1940s at R.K.O., working with director Edward Dmytryk and screenwriter 'John Paxton ', Scott produced Murder, My Sweet (1944), a detective thriller based on 'Raymond Chander's's "Farewell My Lovely", with 'Dick Powell' as Philip Marlowe. The team next made Cornered (1945) (again with Dick Powell) and So Well Remembered (1947), with Scott producing Clifford Odets Deadline at Dawn (1946), directed by Harold Clurman. But it was for the gritty noir masterpiece Crossfire (1947), the first Hollywood film to deal with anti-semitism, that the group is best known. "Crossfire" was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Robert Ryan, Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Gloria Grahame), Best Director (Dmytryk), Best Writing-Screenplay (Paxton) and Best Picture (Scott). Scott and his collaborator Dymytrk had reached the summit of their careers; for Scott, it would be the last motion picture he'd ever produce. Both he and Dmytryk were called before the House Un-American Actitivies Committee in 1947 and refused to name names. As a part of a common defense strategy crafted by Communist Party lawyers (Scott had joined the Party in 1944), he and Dymytrk and the eight others who became known to posterity as "The Hollywood 10", refused to answer any questions other than their names and addresses. The even denied the Committee the right to query them as to their membership in the Screen Writers Guild. The 10 claimed that the Firstst Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave them the right to refuse HUAC's inquiry into their political beliefs as it was an unconstitutional violation of privacy. All members of the Hollywood 10 subsequently were found guilty of contempt of Congress and fined and jailed. All were blacklisted from the industry. Scott was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $1,000. (Dmytryk later recanted his communist past and was re-employed by Hollywood. Testifying before HUAC in 1951, he claimed that Scott had pressured him to put communist propaganda in his films.) On his part, Scott took on the Hollywood blacklist: He sued R.K.O. for wrongful dismissal, but the case was ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court in 1957. While blacklisted, Scott survived by writing for television under an assumed name, including such All-American fare as "Lassie" and the faintly subversive ("Steals from the rich/Gives to the poor!") "The Adventures of Robin Hood". He also produced one of the more remarkable American movies, the left-wing Salt of the Earth (1954), a film about a miner's strike that was made by Scott and other victims of the blacklist. Adrian Scott died of lung cancer in Los Angeles, on 25th December, 1973.- Writer
- Producer
Irwin Shaw was born on 27 February 1913 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Talk of the Town (1942), In the French Style (1963) and The Big Gamble (1961). He was married to Marian Edwards. He died on 16 May 1984 in Davos, Graubünden, Switzerland.