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- Seiji Miyaguchi was born on 15 November 1913 in Tokyo, Japan. He was an actor, known for Seven Samurai (1954), Ikiru (1952) and Throne of Blood (1957). He died on 12 April 1985.
- Born as Nathan Weinstein, the only son of a wealthy Manhattan real estate developer, West grew up as an overly spoiled child, largely burdened by the belief that he shouldn't be expected to work or show up on time or in any other way trouble himself to get by in the world. The Depression did a lot to revise this attitude. There is abundant evidence as to the domineering nature of his Russian Jewish mother in his novels along with sexual ambiguity (although he seems to have favored female prostitutes, given his numerous bouts with gonorrhea). As a child, West was enthralled by Russian novels and decided to pursue a career as an author. To West, a literary career presupposed a life in Paris, the 1920's intellectual Mecca, hanging out with the likes of Joyce and Fitzgerald, but the 4-month trip was largely spent engaging in sexual debauchery while attempting to pass himself off as a literary flaneur. Upon his return to New York, West failed miserably at writing, his short stories were continually rejected by magazines, his first novel had minuscule run of 500 copies (sales of his critically well-reviewed second novel, "Miss Lonelyhearts" suffered when the publisher went bankrupt), a play with his brother in law S.J. Perelman went unproduced and he sought out a career in Hollywood, where he became a pot boiler screenwriter and script doctor. Hollywood provided the financial stability his novels hadn't and a work structure that encouraged productivity. As a novelist, West was decades ahead of the public norm. His characters were the antithesis of anything drawn by Horatio Alger, filled with the grotesque themes. Indeed, West made it his conscious goal to be unlike anyone else and to be ahead of his time. He married 27-year old Eileen McKenney (the "Eileen" in "My Sister Eileen") in early 1940 and the couple were killed in a car accident--- West was a terrible driver, blowing through a red light at an intersection in El Centro, California, while returning from a hunting trip that had been overshadowed by the death of their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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American leading man of the 1940s and 1950s, Dana Andrews was born Carver Dana Andrews on New Years Day 1909 on a farmstead outside Collins, Covington County, Mississippi. One of thirteen children, including fellow actor Steve Forrest, he was a son of Annis (Speed) and Charles Forrest Andrews, a Baptist minister.
Andrews studied business administration at Sam Houston State Teachers College in Texas, but took a bookkeeping job with Gulf Oil in 1929, aged 20, prior to graduating. In 1931, he hitchhiked to California, hoping to get work as an actor. He drove a school bus, dug ditches, picked oranges, worked as a stock boy, and pumped gas while trying without luck to break into the movies. His employer at a Van Nuys gas station believed in him and agreed to invest in him, asking to be repaid if and when Andrews made it as an actor. Andrews studied opera and also entered the Pasadena Community Playhouse, the famed theatre company and drama school. He appeared in scores of plays there in the 1930s, becoming a favorite of the company. He played opposite future star Robert Preston in a play about composers Gilbert and Sullivan, and soon thereafter was offered a contract by Samuel Goldwyn.
It was two years before Goldwyn and 20th Century-Fox (to whom Goldwyn had sold half of Andrews' contract) put him in a film, but the roles, though secondary, were mostly in top-quality pictures such as The Westerner (1940) and The Ox-Bow Incident (1942). A starring role in the hit Laura (1944), followed by one in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), made him a star, but no later film quite lived up to the quality of these. During his career, he had worked with with such directors as Otto Preminger, Fritz Lang, William Wyler, William A. Wellman, Jean Renoir, and Elia Kazan.
Andrews slipped into a steady stream of unremarkable films in which he gave sturdy performances, until age and other interests resulted in fewer appearances. In addition, his increasing alcoholism caused him to lose the confidence of some producers. Andrews took steps to curb his addiction and in his later years was an outspoken member of the National Council on Alcoholism, who decried public refusal to face the problem. He was probably the first actor to do a public service announcement about alcoholism (in 1972 for the U.S. Department of Transportation), and did public speaking tours. Andrews was one of the first to speak out against the degradation of the acting profession, particularly actresses doing nude scenes just to get a role.
Andrews was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1963, serving until 1965. He retired from films in the 1960s and made, he said, more money from real estate than he ever did in movies. Yet he and his second wife, actress Mary Todd, lived quietly in a modest home in Studio City, California. Andrews suffered from Alzheimer's disease in his later years and spent his final days in a nursing facility. He died of congestive heart failure and pneumonia in 1992, aged 83.- Actress
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Delightful character actress who held her own against such acting heavyweights as Charles Laughton, Boris Karloff, Tyrone Power, Barbara Stanwyck, and Sydney Greenstreet. Often cast by studio heads as comic relief thanks to her thick Irish accent and rubber-faced expressions, most notably in Universal's horror classics, Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and The Invisible Man (1933). Her final role was as the devoted housekeeper in Billy Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution (1957), a role she originated on stage. Her hilarious testimony during the trial is one of the film's highlights.- Actor
- Director
Dane Clark was born Bernard Elliot Zanville in Brooklyn, New York City, to Rose (Korostoff) and Samuel Zanville, who were Russian Jewish immigrants. He graduated from Cornell University and St. John's Law School (Brooklyn). When he had trouble finding work in the mid-1930s he tried boxing, baseball, construction, sales and modeling, among other jobs. From there he went into acting on Broadway ("Dead End", "Stage Door", "Of Mice and Men"), which finally brought him to Hollywood. He acted under his own name until 1943 when, as Dane Clark (a name he said was given him by Humphrey Bogart), he took the role of sailor Johnnie Pulaski in Warner's Action in the North Atlantic (1943), a wartime tribute to the Merchant Marine. He was a regular in World War II movies, playing the part of a submariner in Destination Tokyo (1943), an airman in God Is My Co-Pilot (1945) and a Marine in Pride of the Marines (1945).
Though he co-starred with such luminaries as Bogart, Cary Grant, Bette Davis and Raymond Massey, it was his self-described "Joe Average" image that got him his parts: "They don't go much for the 'pretty boy' type [at Warner Brothers]. An average-looking guy like me has a chance to get someplace, to portray people the way they really are, without any frills." He was also proud of his role as Abe Saperstein, who founded the Harlem Globetrotters black basketball team, in Go Man Go (1954), a film he believed pioneered in opposing race hatred.