On the Beach 1959 premiere
Thursday December 17th, TCL Chinese Theatre 6925 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, CA 90028
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Fred Astaire was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to Johanna (Geilus) and Fritz Austerlitz, a brewer. Fred entered show business at age 5. He was successful both in vaudeville and on Broadway in partnership with his sister, Adele Astaire. After Adele retired to marry in 1932, Astaire headed to Hollywood. Signed to RKO, he was loaned to MGM to appear in Dancing Lady (1933) before starting work on RKO's Flying Down to Rio (1933). In the latter film, he began his highly successful partnership with Ginger Rogers, with whom he danced in 9 RKO pictures. During these years, he was also active in recording and radio. On film, Astaire later appeared opposite a number of partners through various studios. After a temporary retirement in 1945-7, during which he opened Fred Astaire Dance Studios, Astaire returned to film to star in more musicals through 1957. He subsequently performed a number of straight dramatic roles in film and TV.- Actor
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Anthony Perkins was born April 4, 1932 in New York City, to Janet Esselstyn (Rane) and Osgood Perkins, an actor of both stage and film. His father died when he was five. Anthony's paternal great-grandfather was engraver Andrew Varick Stout Anthony. Perkins attended the Brooks School, the Browne & Nichols School, Columbia University and Rollins College. He made his screen debut in The Actress (1953), and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar Friendly Persuasion (1956). Four years later, he appeared in what would be his most noted role, Norman Bates in Psycho (1960), memorializing him into film history forever.- Donna Anderson was born on 5 September 1939 in Gunnison, Colorado, USA. She is an actress, known for Inherit the Wind (1960), On the Beach (1959) and Count Yorga, Vampire (1970). She was previously married to Sumner Williams.
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American leading lady whose sweet smile and sunny disposition made her the prototypical girl-next-door of American movies of the 1940s. Raised in semi-poverty in Bronx neighborhoods by her divorced mother, Allyson (nee Ella Geisman) was injured in a fall at age eight and spent four years confined within a steel brace. Swimming therapy slowly gave her mobility again, and she began to study dance as well. She entered dance contests after high school and earned roles in several musical short films. In 1938, she made her Broadway debut in the musical "Sing Out the News." After several roles in the chorus of various musicals, she was hired to understudy Betty Hutton in "Panama Hattie." Hutton's measles gave Allyson a shot at a performance and she impressed director George Abbott so much that he gave her a role in his next musical, "Best Foot Forward." She was subsequently hired by MGM to recreate her role in the screen version. The studio realized what it had in her and offered her a contract.
Her smoky voice and winning personality made her very popular and she made more than a score of films for MGM, most often in musicals and comedies. She became a box-office attraction, paired with many of the major stars of the day. In 1945, she married actor-director Dick Powell, with whom she occasionally co-starred. Following Powell's death from cancer in 1963, she retreated somewhat from film work, appearing only infrequently on screen and slightly more often in television films. Occasional nightclub appearances and commercials were her only other public performances since, and she died of pulmonary respiratory failure and acute bronchitis on July 8, 2006, after a long illness.- Actor
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The son of a saloon keeper, Jack Benny (born Benny Kubelsky) began to study the violin at the age six, and his "ineptness" at it, would later become his trademark (in reality, he was a very accomplished player). When given the opportunity to play in live theatre professionally, Benny quit school and joined vaudeville. In the same theatre that Benny was working with were the very young The Marx Brothers. Their mother, Minnie Marx, wanted Benny to go on the road with them. However, this plan was foiled by his parents who would not let their 17-year-old son on the road.
Having a successful vaudeville career, Benny also had a greater career on radio for "The Jack Benny Program". The show was one of the few successful radio programs that also became a successful television show.
Benny also starred in several movies, including The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929), Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935), The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945) and George Washington Slept Here (1942), although he had much greater success on radio and on TV than he did on the big screen.
He was good friends with Fred Allen, with whom he had a long-standing comic "feud".- Actor
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Marlon Brando is widely considered the greatest movie actor of all time, rivaled only by the more theatrically oriented Laurence Olivier in terms of esteem. Unlike Olivier, who preferred the stage to the screen, Brando concentrated his talents on movies after bidding the Broadway stage adieu in 1949, a decision for which he was severely criticized when his star began to dim in the 1960s and he was excoriated for squandering his talents. No actor ever exerted such a profound influence on succeeding generations of actors as did Brando. More than 50 years after he first scorched the screen as Stanley Kowalski in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and a quarter-century after his last great performance as Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), all American actors are still being measured by the yardstick that was Brando. It was if the shadow of John Barrymore, the great American actor closest to Brando in terms of talent and stardom, dominated the acting field up until the 1970s. He did not, nor did any other actor so dominate the public's consciousness of what WAS an actor before or since Brando's 1951 on-screen portrayal of Stanley made him a cultural icon. Brando eclipsed the reputation of other great actors circa 1950, such as Paul Muni and Fredric March. Only the luster of Spencer Tracy's reputation hasn't dimmed when seen in the starlight thrown off by Brando. However, neither Tracy nor Olivier created an entire school of acting just by the force of his personality. Brando did.
Marlon Brando, Jr. was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Marlon Brando, Sr., a calcium carbonate salesman, and his artistically inclined wife, the former Dorothy Julia Pennebaker. "Bud" Brando was one of three children. His ancestry included English, Irish, German, Dutch, French Huguenot, Welsh, and Scottish; his surname originated with a distant German immigrant ancestor named "Brandau." His oldest sister Jocelyn Brando was also an actress, taking after their mother, who engaged in amateur theatricals and mentored a then-unknown Henry Fonda, another Nebraska native, in her role as director of the Omaha Community Playhouse. Frannie, Brando's other sibling, was a visual artist. Both Brando sisters contrived to leave the Midwest for New York City, Jocelyn to study acting and Frannie to study art. Marlon managed to escape the vocational doldrums forecast for him by his cold, distant father and his disapproving schoolteachers by striking out for The Big Apple in 1943, following Jocelyn into the acting profession. Acting was the only thing he was good at, for which he received praise, so he was determined to make it his career - a high-school dropout, he had nothing else to fall back on, having been rejected by the military due to a knee injury he incurred playing football at Shattuck Military Academy, Brando Sr.'s alma mater. The school booted Marlon out as incorrigible before graduation.
Acting was a skill he honed as a child, the lonely son of alcoholic parents. With his father away on the road, and his mother frequently intoxicated to the point of stupefaction, the young Bud would play-act for her to draw her out of her stupor and to attract her attention and love. His mother was exceedingly neglectful, but he loved her, particularly for instilling in him a love of nature, a feeling which informed his character Paul in Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris") when he is recalling his childhood for his young lover Jeanne. "I don't have many good memories," Paul confesses, and neither did Brando of his childhood. Sometimes he had to go down to the town jail to pick up his mother after she had spent the night in the drunk tank and bring her home, events that traumatized the young boy but may have been the grain that irritated the oyster of his talent, producing the pearls of his performances. Anthony Quinn, his Oscar-winning co-star in Viva Zapata! (1952) told Brando's first wife Anna Kashfi, "I admire Marlon's talent, but I don't envy the pain that created it."
Brando enrolled in Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at New York's New School, and was mentored by Stella Adler, a member of a famous Yiddish Theatre acting family. Adler helped introduce to the New York stage the "emotional memory" technique of Russian theatrical actor, director and impresario Konstantin Stanislavski, whose motto was "Think of your own experiences and use them truthfully." The results of this meeting between an actor and the teacher preparing him for a life in the theater would mark a watershed in American acting and culture.
Brando made his debut on the boards of Broadway on October 19, 1944, in "I Remember Mama," a great success. As a young Broadway actor, Brando was invited by talent scouts from several different studios to screen-test for them, but he turned them down because he would not let himself be bound by the then-standard seven-year contract. Brando would make his film debut quite some time later in Fred Zinnemann's The Men (1950) for producer Stanley Kramer. Playing a paraplegic soldier, Brando brought new levels of realism to the screen, expanding on the verisimilitude brought to movies by Group Theatre alumni John Garfield, the predecessor closest to him in the raw power he projected on-screen. Ironically, it was Garfield whom producer Irene Mayer Selznick had chosen to play the lead in a new Tennessee Williams play she was about to produce, but negotiations broke down when Garfield demanded an ownership stake in "A Streetcar Named Desire." Burt Lancaster was next approached, but couldn't get out of a prior film commitment. Then director Elia Kazan suggested Brando, whom he had directed to great effect in Maxwell Anderson's play "Truckline Café," in which Brando co-starred with Karl Malden, who was to remain a close friend for the next 60 years.
During the production of "Truckline Café," Kazan had found that Brando's presence was so magnetic, he had to re-block the play to keep Marlon near other major characters' stage business, as the audience could not take its eyes off of him. For the scene where Brando's character re-enters the stage after killing his wife, Kazan placed him upstage-center, partially obscured by scenery, but where the audience could still see him as Karl Malden and others played out their scene within the café set. When he eventually entered the scene, crying, the effect was electric. A young Pauline Kael, arriving late to the play, had to avert her eyes when Brando made this entrance as she believed the young actor on stage was having a real-life conniption. She did not look back until her escort commented that the young man was a great actor.
The problem with casting Brando as Stanley was that he was much younger than the character as written by Williams. However, after a meeting between Brando and Williams, the playwright eagerly agreed that Brando would make an ideal Stanley. Williams believed that by casting a younger actor, the Neanderthalish Kowalski would evolve from being a vicious older man to someone whose unintentional cruelty can be attributed to his youthful ignorance. Brando ultimately was dissatisfied with his performance, though, saying he never was able to bring out the humor of the character, which was ironic as his characterization often drew laughs from the audience at the expense of Jessica Tandy's Blanche Dubois. During the out-of-town tryouts, Kazan realized that Brando's magnetism was attracting attention and audience sympathy away from Blanche to Stanley, which was not what the playwright intended. The audience's sympathy should be solely with Blanche, but many spectators were identifying with Stanley. Kazan queried Williams on the matter, broaching the idea of a slight rewrite to tip the scales back to more of a balance between Stanley and Blanche, but Williams demurred, smitten as he was by Brando, just like the preview audiences.
For his part, Brando believed that the audience sided with his Stanley because Jessica Tandy was too shrill. He thought Vivien Leigh, who played the part in the movie, was ideal, as she was not only a great beauty but she WAS Blanche Dubois, troubled as she was in her real life by mental illness and nymphomania. Brando's appearance as Stanley on stage and on screen revolutionized American acting by introducing "The Method" into American consciousness and culture. Method acting, rooted in Adler's study at the Moscow Art Theatre of Stanislavsky's theories that she subsequently introduced to the Group Theatre, was a more naturalistic style of performing, as it engendered a close identification of the actor with the character's emotions. Adler took first place among Brando's acting teachers, and socially she helped turn him from an unsophisticated Midwestern farm boy into a knowledgeable and cosmopolitan artist who one day would socialize with presidents.
Brando didn't like the term "The Method," which quickly became the prominent paradigm taught by such acting gurus as Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Brando denounced Strasberg in his autobiography "Songs My Mother Taught Me" (1994), saying that he was a talentless exploiter who claimed he had been Brando's mentor. The Actors Studio had been founded by Strasberg along with Kazan and Stella Adler's husband, Harold Clurman, all Group Theatre alumni, all political progressives deeply committed to the didactic function of the stage. Brando credits his knowledge of the craft to Adler and Kazan, while Kazan in his autobiography "A Life" claimed that Brando's genius thrived due to the thorough training Adler had given him. Adler's method emphasized that authenticity in acting is achieved by drawing on inner reality to expose deep emotional experience
Interestingly, Elia Kazan believed that Brando had ruined two generations of actors, his contemporaries and those who came after him, all wanting to emulate the great Brando by employing The Method. Kazan felt that Brando was never a Method actor, that he had been highly trained by Adler and did not rely on gut instincts for his performances, as was commonly believed. Many a young actor, mistaken about the true roots of Brando's genius, thought that all it took was to find a character's motivation, empathize with the character through sense and memory association, and regurgitate it all on stage to become the character. That's not how the superbly trained Brando did it; he could, for example, play accents, whereas your average American Method actor could not. There was a method to Brando's art, Kazan felt, but it was not The Method.
After A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which he received the first of his eight Academy Award nominations, Brando appeared in a string of Academy Award-nominated performances - in Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953) and the summit of his early career, Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). For his "Waterfront" portrayal of meat-headed longshoreman Terry Malloy, the washed-up pug who "coulda been a contender," Brando won his first Oscar. Along with his iconic performance as the rebel-without-a-cause Johnny in The Wild One (1953) ("What are you rebelling against?" Johnny is asked. "What have ya got?" is his reply), the first wave of his career was, according to Jon Voight, unprecedented in its audacious presentation of such a wide range of great acting. Director John Huston said his performance of Marc Antony was like seeing the door of a furnace opened in a dark room, and co-star John Gielgud, the premier Shakespearean actor of the 20th century, invited Brando to join his repertory company.
It was this period of 1951-54 that revolutionized American acting, spawning such imitators as James Dean - who modeled his acting and even his lifestyle on his hero Brando - the young Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. After Brando, every up-and-coming star with true acting talent and a brooding, alienated quality would be hailed as the "New Brando," such as Warren Beatty in Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961). "We are all Brando's children," Jack Nicholson pointed out in 1972. "He gave us our freedom." He was truly "The Godfather" of American acting - and he was just 30 years old. Though he had a couple of failures, like Désirée (1954) and The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), he was clearly miscast in them and hadn't sought out the parts so largely escaped blame.
In the second period of his career, 1955-62, Brando managed to uniquely establish himself as a great actor who also was a Top 10 movie star, although that star began to dim after the box-office high point of his early career, Sayonara (1957) (for which he received his fifth Best Actor Oscar nomination). Brando tried his hand at directing a film, the well-reviewed One-Eyed Jacks (1961) that he made for his own production company, Pennebaker Productions (after his mother's maiden name). Stanley Kubrick had been hired to direct the film, but after months of script rewrites in which Brando participated, Kubrick and Brando had a falling out and Kubrick was sacked. According to his widow Christiane Kubrick, Stanley believed that Brando had wanted to direct the film himself all along.
Tales proliferated about the profligacy of Brando the director, burning up a million and a half feet of expensive VistaVision film at 50 cents a foot, fully ten times the normal amount of raw stock expended during production of an equivalent motion picture. Brando took so long editing the film that he was never able to present the studio with a cut. Paramount took it away from him and tacked on a re-shot ending that Brando was dissatisfied with, as it made the Oedipal figure of Dad Longworth into a villain. In any normal film Dad would have been the heavy, but Brando believed that no one was innately evil, that it was a matter of an individual responding to, and being molded by, one's environment. It was not a black-and-white world, Brando felt, but a gray world in which once-decent people could do horrible things. This attitude explains his sympathetic portrayal of Nazi officer Christian Diestl in the film he made before shooting One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Edward Dmytryk's filming of Irwin Shaw's novel The Young Lions (1958). Shaw denounced Brando's performance, but audiences obviously disagreed, as the film was a major hit. It would be the last hit movie Brando would have for more than a decade.
One-Eyed Jacks (1961) generated respectable numbers at the box office, but the production costs were exorbitant - a then-staggering $6 million - which made it run a deficit. A film essentially is "made" in the editing room, and Brando found cutting to be a terribly boring process, which was why the studio eventually took the film away from him. Despite his proved talent in handling actors and a large production, Brando never again directed another film, though he would claim that all actors essentially direct themselves during the shooting of a picture.
Between the production and release of One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Brando appeared in Sidney Lumet's film version of Tennessee Williams' play "Orpheus Descending," The Fugitive Kind (1960) which teamed him with fellow Oscar winners Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward. Following in Elizabeth Taylor's trailblazing footsteps, Brando became the second performer to receive a $1-million salary for a motion picture, so high were the expectations for this re-teaming of Kowalski and his creator (in 1961 critic Hollis Alpert had published a book "Brando and the Shadow of Stanley Kowalski"). Critics and audiences waiting for another incendiary display from Brando in a Williams work were disappointed when the renamed The Fugitive Kind (1960) finally released. Though Tennessee was hot, with movie versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) burning up the box office and receiving kudos from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, The Fugitive Kind (1960) was a failure. This was followed by the so-so box-office reception of One-Eyed Jacks (1961) in 1961 and then by a failure of a more monumental kind: Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), a remake of the famed 1935 film.
Brando signed on to Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after turning down the lead in the David Lean classic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) because he didn't want to spend a year in the desert riding around on a camel. He received another $1-million salary, plus $200,000 in overages as the shoot went overtime and over budget. During principal photography, highly respected director Carol Reed (an eventual Academy Award winner) was fired, and his replacement, two-time Oscar winner Lewis Milestone, was shunted aside by Brando as Marlon basically took over the direction of the film himself. The long shoot became so notorious that President John F. Kennedy asked director Billy Wilder at a cocktail party not "when" but "if" the "Bounty" shoot would ever be over. The MGM remake of one of its classic Golden Age films garnered a Best Picture Oscar nomination and was one of the top grossing films of 1962, yet failed to go into the black due to its Brobdingnagian budget estimated at $20 million, which is equivalent to $120 million when adjusted for inflation.
Brando and Taylor, whose Cleopatra (1963) nearly bankrupted 20th Century-Fox due to its huge cost overruns (its final budget was more than twice that of Brando's Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)), were pilloried by the show business press for being the epitome of the pampered, self-indulgent stars who were ruining the industry. Seeking scapegoats, the Hollywood press conveniently ignored the financial pressures on the studios. The studios had been hurt by television and by the antitrust-mandated divestiture of their movie theater chains, causing a large outflow of production to Italy and other countries in the 1950s and 1960s in order to lower costs. The studio bosses, seeking to replicate such blockbuster hits as the remakes of The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959), were the real culprits behind the losses generated by large-budgeted films that found it impossible to recoup their costs despite long lines at the box office.
While Elizabeth Taylor, receiving the unwanted gift of reams of publicity from her adulterous romance with Cleopatra (1963) co-star Richard Burton, remained hot until the tanking of her own Tennessee Williams-renamed debacle Boom! (1968), Brando from 1963 until the end of the decade appeared in one box-office failure after another as he worked out a contract he had signed with Universal Pictures. The industry had grown tired of Brando and his idiosyncrasies, though he continued to be offered prestige projects up through 1968.
Some of the films Brando made in the 1960s were noble failures, such as The Ugly American (1963), The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). For every "Reflections," though, there seemed to be two or three outright debacles, such as Bedtime Story (1964), Morituri (1965), The Chase (1966), A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), Candy (1968), The Night of the Following Day (1969). By the time Brando began making the anti-colonialist picture Burn! (1969) in Colombia with Gillo Pontecorvo in the director's chair, he was box-office poison, despite having worked in the previous five years with such top directors as Arthur Penn, John Huston and the legendary Charles Chaplin, and with such top-drawer co-stars as David Niven, Yul Brynner, Sophia Loren and Taylor.
The rap on Brando in the 1960s was that a great talent had ruined his potential to be America's answer to Laurence Olivier, as his friend William Redfield limned the dilemma in his book "Letters from an Actor" (1967), a memoir about Redfield's appearance in Burton's 1964 theatrical production of "Hamlet." By failing to go back on stage and recharge his artistic batteries, something British actors such as Burton were not afraid to do, Brando had stifled his great talent, by refusing to tackle the classical repertoire and contemporary drama. Actors and critics had yearned for an American response to the high-acting style of the Brits, and while Method actors such as Rod Steiger tried to create an American style, they were hampered in their quest, as their king was lost in a wasteland of Hollywood movies that were beneath his talent. Many of his early supporters now turned on him, claiming he was a crass sellout.
Despite evidence in such films as The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) that Brando was in fact doing some of the best acting of his life, critics, perhaps with an eye on the box office, slammed him for failing to live up to, and nurture, his great gift. Brando's political activism, starting in the early 1960s with his championing of Native Americans' rights, followed by his participation in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's March on Washington in 1963, and followed by his appearance at a Black Panther rally in 1968, did not win him many admirers in the establishment. In fact, there was a de facto embargo on Brando films in the recently segregated (officially, at least) southeastern US in the 1960s. Southern exhibitors simply would not book his films, and producers took notice. After 1968, Brando would not work for three years.
Pauline Kael wrote of Brando that he was Fortune's fool. She drew a parallel with the latter career of John Barrymore, a similarly gifted thespian with talents as prodigious, who seemingly threw them away. Brando, like the late-career Barrymore, had become a great ham, evidenced by his turn as the faux Indian guru in the egregious Candy (1968), seemingly because the material was so beneath his talent. Most observers of Brando in the 1960s believed that he needed to be reunited with his old mentor Elia Kazan, a relationship that had soured due to Kazan's friendly testimony naming names before the notorious House un-American Activities Committee. Perhaps Brando believed this, too, as he originally accepted an offer to appear as the star of Kazan's film adaptation of his own novel, The Arrangement (1969). However, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Brando backed out of the film, telling Kazan that he could not appear in a Hollywood film after this tragedy. Also reportedly turning down a role opposite box-office king Paul Newman in a surefire script, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Brando decided to make Burn! (1969) with Pontecorvo. The film, a searing indictment of racism and colonialism, flopped at the box office but won the esteem of progressive critics and cultural arbiters such as Howard Zinn. He subsequently appeared in the British film The Nightcomers (1971), a prequel to "Turn of the Screw" and another critical and box office failure.
Kazan, after a life in film and the theater, said that, aside from Orson Welles, whose greatness lay in film making, he only met one actor who was a genius: Brando. Richard Burton, an intellectual with a keen eye for observation if not for his own film projects, said that he found Brando to be very bright, unlike the public perception of him as a Terry Malloy-type character that he himself inadvertently promoted through his boorish behavior. Brando's problem, Burton felt, was that he was unique, and that he had gotten too much fame too soon at too early an age. Cut off from being nurtured by normal contact with society, fame had distorted Brando's personality and his ability to cope with the world, as he had not had time to grow up outside the limelight.
Truman Capote, who eviscerated Brando in print in the mid-'50s and had as much to do with the public perception of the dyslexic Brando as a dumbbell, always said that the best actors were ignorant, and that an intelligent person could not be a good actor. However, Brando was highly intelligent, and possessed of a rare genius in a then-deprecated art, acting. The problem that an intelligent performer has in movies is that it is the director, and not the actor, who has the power in his chosen field. Greatness in the other arts is defined by how much control the artist is able to exert over his chosen medium, but in movie acting, the medium is controlled by a person outside the individual artist. It is an axiom of the cinema that a performance, as is a film, is "created" in the cutting room, thus further removing the actor from control over his art. Brando had tried his hand at directing, in controlling the whole artistic enterprise, but he could not abide the cutting room, where a film and the film's performances are made. This lack of control over his art was the root of Brando's discontent with acting, with movies, and, eventually, with the whole wide world that invested so much cachet in movie actors, as long as "they" were at the top of the box-office charts. Hollywood was a matter of "they" and not the work, and Brando became disgusted.
Charlton Heston, who participated in Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington with Brando, believes that Marlon was the great actor of his generation. However, noting a story that Brando had once refused a role in the early 1960s with the excuse "How can I act when people are starving in India?," Heston believes that it was this attitude, the inability to separate one's idealism from one's work, that prevented Brando from reaching his potential. As Rod Steiger once said, Brando had it all, great stardom and a great talent. He could have taken his audience on a trip to the stars, but he simply would not. Steiger, one of Brando's children even though a contemporary, could not understand it. When James Mason' was asked in 1971 who was the best American actor, he had replied that since Brando had let his career go belly-up, it had to be George C. Scott, by default.
Paramount thought that only Laurence Olivier would suffice, but Lord Olivier was ill. The young director believed there was only one actor who could play godfather to the group of Young Turk actors he had assembled for his film, The Godfather of method acting himself - Marlon Brando. Francis Ford Coppola won the fight for Brando, Brando won - and refused - his second Oscar, and Paramount won a pot of gold by producing the then top-grossing film of all-time, The Godfather (1972), a gangster movie most critics now judge one of the greatest American films of all time. Brando followed his iconic portrayal of Don Corleone with his Oscar-nominated turn in the high-grossing and highly scandalous Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris"), the first film dealing explicitly with sexuality in which an actor of Brando's stature had participated. He was now again a top ten box office star and once again heralded as the greatest actor of his generation, an unprecedented comeback that put him on the cover of "Time" magazine and would make him the highest-paid actor in the history of motion pictures by the end of the decade. Little did the world know that Brando, who had struggled through many projects in good faith during the 1960s, delivering some of his best acting, only to be excoriated and ignored as the films did not do well at the box office, essentially was through with the movies.
After reaching the summit of his career, a rarefied atmosphere never reached before or since by any actor, Brando essentially walked away. He would give no more of himself after giving everything as he had done in Last Tango in Paris (1972)," a performance that embarrassed him, according to his autobiography. Brando had come as close to any actor to being the "auteur," or author, of a film, as the English-language scenes of "Tango" were created by encouraging Brando to improvise. The improvisations were written down and turned into a shooting script, and the scripted improvisations were shot the next day. Pauline Kael, the Brando of movie critics in that she was the most influential arbiter of cinematic quality of her generation and spawned a whole legion of Kael wannabes, said Brando's performance in Last Tango in Paris (1972) had revolutionized the art of film. Brando, who had to act to gain his mother's attention; Brando, who believed acting at best was nothing special as everyone in the world engaged in it every day of their lives to get what they wanted from other people; Brando, who believed acting at its worst was a childish charade and that movie stardom was a whorish fraud, would have agreed with Sam Peckinpah's summation of Pauline Kael: "Pauline's a brilliant critic but sometimes she's just cracking walnuts with her ass." He probably would have done so in a simulacrum of those words, too.
After another three-year hiatus, Brando took on just one more major role for the next 20 years, as the bounty hunter after Jack Nicholson in Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks (1976), a western that succeeded neither with the critics or at the box office. Following The Godfather and Tango, Brando's performance was disappointing for some reviewers, who accused him of giving an erratic and inconsistent performance. In 1977, Brando made a rare appearance on television in the miniseries Roots: The Next Generations (1979), portraying George Lincoln Rockwell; he won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for his performance. In 1978, he narrated the English version of Raoni (1978), a French-Belgian documentary film directed by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux and Luiz Carlos Saldanha that focused on the life of Raoni Metuktire and issues surrounding the survival of the indigenous Indian tribes of north central Brazil.
Later in his career, Brando concentrated on extracting the maximum amount of capital for the least amount of work from producers, as when he got the Salkind brothers to pony up a then-record $3.7 million against 10% of the gross for 13 days work on Superman (1978). Factoring in inflation, the straight salary for "Superman" equals or exceeds the new record of $1 million a day Harrison Ford set with K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). He agreed to the role only on assurance that he would be paid a large sum for what amounted to a small part, that he would not have to read the script beforehand, and his lines would be displayed somewhere off-camera. Brando also filmed scenes for the movie's sequel, Superman II, but after producers refused to pay him the same percentage he received for the first movie, he denied them permission to use the footage.
Before cashing his first paycheck for Superman (1978), Brando had picked up $2 million for his extended cameo in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) in a role, that of Col. Kurtz, that he authored on-camera through improvisation while Coppola shot take after take. It was Brando's last bravura star performance. He co-starred with George C. Scott and John Gielgud in The Formula (1980), but the film was another critical and financial failure. Years later though, he did receive an eighth and final Oscar nomination for his supporting role in A Dry White Season (1989) after coming out of a near-decade-long retirement. Contrary to those who claimed he now only was in it for the money, Brando donated his entire seven-figure salary to an anti-apartheid charity. He then did an amusing performance in the comedy The Freshman (1990), winning rave reviews. He portrayed Tomas de Torquemada in the historical drama 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), but his performance was denounced and the film was another box office failure. He made another comeback in the Johnny Depp romantic drama Don Juan DeMarco (1994), which co-starred Faye Dunaway as his wife. He then appeared in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), co-starring Val Kilmer, who he didn't get along with. The filming was an unpleasant experience for Brando, as well as another critical and box office failure.
Brando had first attracted media attention at the age of 24, when "Life" magazine ran a photo of himself and his sister Jocelyn, who were both then appearing on Broadway. The curiosity continued, and snowballed. Playing the paraplegic soldier of The Men (1950), Brando had gone to live at a Veterans Administration hospital with actual disabled veterans, and confined himself to a wheelchair for weeks. It was an acting method, research, that no one in Hollywood had ever heard of before, and that willingness to experience life.- Actor
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This popular, baggy-eyed, bald-domed, big lug of a character actor had few peers when called upon to display that special "slow burn" style of comedy few others perfected. But perfect he did -- on stage, film and TV. In fact, he pretty much cornered the market during the 50s and 60s as the dour, ill-tempered guy you loved to hate.
Born Frederick Leonard Clark on March 19 1914, the son of Frederick Clark, a county agriculture commissioner, and Stella (née Bruce) Clark, in Lincoln, California, Fred's initial interest was in medicine and he pursued his pre-med studies at Stanford University. A chance role in the college play "Yellow Jack" change the coarse of his destiny. Earning a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, he paid his dues performing in local community theater and summer stock. By May of 1938, at age 24, he was making his Broadway debut with the short-lived comedy play "Schoolhouse on the Lot". He then returned to Broadway a few months later to appear in the melodrama "Ringside Seat", which also closed early.
Fred's nascent career was interrupted when America entered World War II. He served as a Navy pilot in 1942 but later joined the Army and spent nearly two years with the Third Army in Europe. Clark returned to acting and in during the post-war years broke into films via Hungarian film director Michael Curtiz who cast him in the noir classic The Unsuspected (1947). Able to provide cold-hearted villainy in crime drama as well as dyspeptic humor to slapstick comedy, film work came to Fred in no short order. Ride the Pink Horse (1947), Cry of the City (1948), Flamingo Road (1949), White Heat (1949), Alias Nick Beal (1949), Sunset Blvd. (1950), The Jackpot (1950), The Lemon Drop Kid (1951) and Meet Me After the Show (1951) all made the most of Fred's sour skills. Around this time (1952) he married actress Benay Venuta, whom he met while both were performing on stage in "Light Up the Sky" (1950). The popular couple continued to work together from time to time, which included a 1956 stage production of "Bus Stop" at the La Jolla Playhouse.
Well-established on film by this point, Fred set his sights on TV and earned raves providing weekly bombastic support to George Burns and Gracie Allen on their popular sitcom The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950). Joining the cast into its second season (his role had already been played by two other actors), Fred made the role of neighbor/realtor Harry Morton his own, becoming the first definitive Harry on the show. Investing his character with an amusing, child-like grumpiness, he was ideally paired with comedienne Bea Benaderet (as wife Blanche). Together they provided perfect foursome chemistry with Burns and Allen, much in the same way Vivian Vance and William Frawley did for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz on I Love Lucy (1951). Clark, however, would leave the show in the fall of 1953 following a salary dispute, and was replaced by a fourth Harry Morton, Larry Keating, who managed to keep the role until the end in 1958. Fred would find steady but lesser success on TV after this.
With his trademark cigar, scowl, shiny baldness and pencil-thin mustache, Fred continued to be high in demand in film, usually playing some high-ranking military officer, gang boss, shifty politician or executive skinflint. The Martin & Lewis comedy The Caddy (1953), Marilyn Monroe's How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), Don't Go Near the Water (1957), The Mating Game (1959), Auntie Mame (1958), Bells Are Ringing (1960), Visit to a Small Planet (1960), Boys' Night Out (1962) and Move Over, Darling (1963), all displayed Clark at his blustery best. And on TV he contributed to such comedy shows as The Beverly Hillbillies (1962), I Dream of Jeannie (1965) and The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961). He also received some attention pushing potato chips in commercials.
Fred made a successful stage debut in London with 1963's "Never Too Late" co-starring Joan Bennett and Samantha Eggar, as a cranky middle-aged father-to-be. He would also return infrequently to Broadway with prime roles in "Romanoff and Juliet" (1957), Viva Madison Avenue! (1960) and "Absence of a Cello" (1964). On a sad note, many of Fred's final years were spent in inferior film. Movies such as Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965), I Sailed to Tahiti with an All Girl Crew (1969) and the notorious bomb Skidoo (1968), which was directed by Otto Preminger and starred Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing, were undeserving of his talents.
Divorced from Ms. Venuta in August of 1962, Fred subsequently married a model, Gloria Glaser, in 1966. Fred's sudden death of liver disease two years later on December 5, 1968, at the untimely age of 54, had Hollywood mourning one of its finest comic heavies -- gone way before his time.- Actor
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A cigar-smoking, monocled, swag-bellied character actor known for his Old South manners and charm. In 1918 he and his first wife formed the Coburn Players and appeared on Broadway in many plays. With her death in 1937, he accepted a Hollywood contract and began making films at the age of sixty.- Producer
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Maria Cooper Janis was born on 15 September 1937 in Los Angeles, California, USA. She is a producer and actress, known for Sleepy Hollow High (2000), The Jack Benny Program (1950) and ABC Afterschool Specials (1972). She was previously married to Byron Janis.- Actor
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Effective light comedian of '30s and '40s films and '50s and '60s TV series, Robert Cummings was renowned for his eternally youthful looks (which he attributed to a strict vitamin and health-food diet). He was educated at Carnegie Tech and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Deciding that Broadway producers would be more interested in an upper-crust Englishman than a kid from Joplin, Missouri, Cummings passed himself off as Blade Stanhope Conway, British actor. The ploy was successful. Cummings decided that if it worked on Broadway, it would work in Hollywood, so he journeyed west and assumed the identity of a rich Texan named Bruce Hutchens. The plan worked once more, and he began securing small parts in films. He soon reverted to his real name and became a popular leading man in light comedies, usually playing well-meaning, pleasant but somewhat bumbling young men. He achieved much more success, however, in his own television series in the '50s, The Bob Cummings Show (1955) and My Living Doll (1964).- Actress
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Rosemary Shirley DeCamp was the quintessential small-town American mother, a calming and steadying presence in scores of films in the 1940s and 1950s. She came to Hollywood after a successful career on the stage and in radio, making her film debut in 1941. Though she worked for many studios, she was most closely associated with Warner Bros., for whom she made many pictures, often playing a young mother or the friend or sister of the heroine. Her best-known role was probably as the mother of George M. Cohan (played by James Cagney) in the classic Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). She also did a lot of work on television; she was a regular on The Bob Cummings Show (1961) and played Marlo Thomas's mother on That Girl (1966).- Actor
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A stocky, serious-looking character, Carl William Demarest started off in vaudeville in 1905 along with two older brothers. At one time he also performed in a stage act with his wife Estelle Collette (billed as 'Demarest and Collette') and then moved on to Broadway. He entered movies in 1926 and first appeared in Vitaphone one-reelers and in films for Warner Brothers, which included the first sound picture, The Jazz Singer (1927). In his later years, he became a household name on TV as retired sea captain Uncle Charley, replacing a seriously ill William Frawley in My Three Sons (1960). However, Demarest was truly at his best during the 1940s as a member of Preston Sturges's unofficial stock company of players, noted for his trademark deadpan or exasperated expressions. He made his reputation in eccentric comic supporting roles, invariably seen as pushy, wary or droll cops, business guys or wisecracking, jaundiced friends of the hero with names like Mugsy, Kockenlocker or Heffelfinger. The Great McGinty (1940), Sullivan's Travels (1941) and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943) are often cited as his best films. When movie offers began to diminish, Demarest segued into television work with many guest spots and a regular co-starring role as a ranch foreman in the western series Tales of Wells Fargo (1957). As a character actor, his quiet intensity and comic timing kept him in demand well into his eighties. Nominated just once for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor in the biopic The Jolson Story (1946), he lost out to Harold Russell for his performance in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).- Actor
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First wife Jeanne died in 1943. Wed second wife, Marjorie Little after 16 year courtship when she was 39 and he 67 Marjorie Little had been the hatcheck girl at the Copacabana. Durante and his second wife adopted a baby girl, Cecelia Alicia on Christmas day 1961. Durante doted on "CeCe" until his death.- Actor
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Dan Duryea was educated at Cornell University and worked in the advertising business before pursuing his career as an actor. Duryea made his Broadway debut in the play "Dead End." The critical acclaim he won for his performance as Leo Hubbard in the Broadway production of "The Little Foxes" led to his appearance in the film version, in the same role.- Actress
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A native-born Californian, Rhonda Fleming attended Beverly Hills public and private schools. Her father was Harold Cheverton Louis (1896-1951). Her mother, Effie Olivia Graham (1891-1985), was a famous model and actress in New York. She has a son (Kent Lane), two granddaughters (Kimberly and Kelly) and four great-grandchildren (Wagner, Page, Lane and Cole). She has appeared in over 40 films, including David O. Selznick's Spellbound (1945), directed by Alfred Hitchcock; Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947); and Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase (1946). She later got starring roles in such classics as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), Home Before Dark (1958), Pony Express (1953), Slightly Scarlet (1956), While the City Sleeps (1956) and The Big Circus (1959). While she was always a competent actress, she was more renowned for her exquisite beauty, and the camera absolutely adored her. One time a cameraman on one of her films remarked on how he was so struck by her beauty that, as a gag, he intentionally tried to photograph her badly; he was astonished to discover that no matter how deliberately he botched it, she still came out looking ravishing.
Among her co-stars over the years were Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, Glenn Ford, Burt Lancaster, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Rock Hudson and Ronald Reagan (with whom she made four films). In addition to motion pictures, Fleming made her Broadway debut in Clare Boothe Luce's "The Women", essayed the role of "Lalume" in "Kismet" at the Los Angeles Music Center and toured as "Madame Dubonnet" in "The Boyfriend". She made her stage musical debut in Las Vegas at the opening of the Tropicana Hotel's showroom. Later she appeared at the Hollywood Bowl in a one-woman concert of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin compositions. She also starred in a national ten-week concert tour with Skitch Henderson, featuring the music of George Gershwin. She has guest-starred on numerous television series, including Wagon Train (1957), Police Woman (1974), The Love Boat (1977), Last Hours Before Morning (1975) and a two-hour special of McMillan & Wife (1971). Waiting for the Wind (1991) reunited her with former co-star Robert Mitchum.
In private life she resides in Century City, California, and was married for 23 years to Ted Mann, a producer and chairman of Mann Theatres, until his death in January 2001. She is a member and supporter of Childhelp USA, ARCS (Achievement Rewards For College Scientists); a Life Associate of Pepperdine University; a Lifetime Member of the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge; a Founding Member of the French Foundation For Alzheimer Research; a Benefactor of the Los Angeles Music Center: and a Member of the Center's Blue Ribbon Board of Directors. She is a Member of the Advisory Board of Olive Crest Treatment Centers for Abused Children and serves as a Board of Directors Trustee of World Opportunities International. Along with her husband she helped build the Jerusalem Film Institute in Israel. She also is a member of the Board of Trustees of The UCLA Foundation and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Revlon/UCLA Women's Health Research Program. In addition, she created at the City of Hope Hospital The Rhonda Fleming Mann Research Fellowship to further advance research and treatment associated with women's cancer.
In 1991, she and her husband established the Rhonda Fleming Mann Clinic for Women's Comprehensive Care at UCLA Medical Center. This clinic provides a full range of expert gynecologic and obstetric care to women. Since 1992, she has devoted her time to a second facility at UCLA - the Rhonda Fleming Mann Resource Center for Women with Cancer, which opened in early 1994. This Center is the fulfillment of her vision to create a safe, warm place where women cancer patients and their families might receive the highest quality psychosocial and emotional care as well as assistance with the complex practical problems that arise with cancer. In August 1997, the Center opened "Reflections", a unique retail store and consultation suite that carries wigs, head coverings, breast prostheses and other items to help men, women and children deal with the physical appearance changes brought on by cancer and its treatments. The staffs of the clinic, center and store are guided by her belief that caring, compassion, communication and commitment are essential components of the healing process.- Actor
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Once told by an interviewer, "Everybody would like to be Cary Grant", Grant is said to have replied, "So would I."
Cary Grant was born Archibald Alec Leach on January 18, 1904 in Horfield, Bristol, England, to Elsie Maria (Kingdon) and Elias James Leach, who worked in a factory. His early years in Bristol would have been an ordinary lower-middle-class childhood, except for one extraordinary event. At age nine, he came home from school one day and was told his mother had gone off to a seaside resort. However, the real truth was that she had been placed in a mental institution, where she would remain for years, and he was never told about it (he would not see his mother again until he was in his late 20s).
He left school at age 14, lying about his age and forging his father's signature on a letter to join Bob Pender's troupe of knockabout comedians. He learned pantomime as well as acrobatics as he toured with the Pender troupe in the English provinces, picked up a Cockney accent in the music halls in London, and then in July 1920, was one of the eight Pender boys selected to go to the United States. Their show on Broadway, "Good Times", ran for 456 performances, giving Grant time to acclimatize. He would stay in America. Mae West wanted Grant for She Done Him Wrong (1933) because she saw his combination of virility, sexuality and the aura and bearing of a gentleman. Grant was young enough to begin the new career of fatherhood when he stopped making movies at age 62.
One biographer said Grant was alienated by the new realism in the film industry. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he had invented a man-of-the-world persona and a style - "high comedy with polished words". In To Catch a Thief (1955), he and Grace Kelly were allowed to improvise some of the dialogue. They knew what the director, Alfred Hitchcock, wanted to do with a scene, they rehearsed it, put in some clever double entendres that got past the censors, and then the scene was filmed. His biggest box-office success was another Hitchcock 1950s film, North by Northwest (1959) made with Eva Marie Saint since Kelly was by that time Princess of Monaco.
Although Grant retired from the screen, he remained active. He accepted a position on the board of directors at Faberge. By all accounts this position was not honorary, as some had assumed. Grant regularly attended meetings and traveled internationally to support them. The position also permitted use of a private plane, which Grant could use to fly to see his daughter wherever her mother Dyan Cannon, was working. He later joined the boards of Hollywood Park, the Academy of Magical Arts (The Magic Castle - Hollywood, California), Western Airlines (acquired by Delta Airlines in 1987) and MGM.
Grant expressed no interest in making a career comeback. He was in good health until almost the end of his life, when he suffered a mild stroke in October 1984. In his last years, he undertook tours of the United States in a one-man-show, "A Conversation with Cary Grant", in which he would show clips from his films and answer audience questions. On November 29, 1986, Cary Grant died at age 82 of a cerebral hemorrhage in Davenport, Iowa.
In 1999, the American Film Institute named Grant the second male star of Golden Age of Hollywood cinema (after Humphrey Bogart). Grant was known for comedic and dramatic roles; his best-known films include Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Notorious (1946), An Affair to Remember (1957), North by Northwest (1959) and Charade (1963).- Director
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Paul Henreid was born Paul Georg Julius Freiherr von Hernreid Ritter von Wasel-Waldingau in Trieste, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the son of Marie Luise Heilig (Lendecke) and Baron Karl Alphons Hernreid. His father was an aristocratic banker, who was born to a Jewish family whose surname was changed from Hirsch to Hernreid.
Paul grew up in Vienna and studied at the prestigious Maria Theresa Academy (graduating in 1927) and the Institute of Graphic Arts. For four years, he worked as translator and book designer for a publishing outfit run by Otto Preminger, while training to be an actor at night. Preminger was also a protégé (and managing director) of Max Reinhardt. After attending one of Henreid's acting school performances, Preminger introduced him to the famous stage director and this led to a contract. In 1933, Paul made his debut at the Reinhardt Theatre in "Faust". He subsequently had several leading roles on the stage and appeared in a couple of Austrian films. Paul, like his character Victor Laszlo in Casablanca (1942), was avidly anti-fascist. He accordingly left continental Europe and went to London in 1935, first appearing on stage as Prince Albert in "Victoria the Great" two years later.
Henreid made his English-speaking motion picture debut in the popular drama Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), as the sympathetic German master Max Staefel, who proves to be Chipping's truest friend and ally. After that, however, he became incongruously typecast as Nazi henchmen in Mad Men of Europe (1940) and Night Train to Munich (1940). That year, he moved to the United States (becoming a citizen the following year) and quickly established himself on Broadway with "Flight to the West", as a Ribbentrop-type Nazi consul. His powerful performance led to radio work in the serial "Joyce Jordan-Girl Interne" and a film contract with RKO in 1941.
This marked a turning point in Paul Henreid's career. He finally escaped the stereotypical Teutonic image and began to play heroic or romantic leads, his first being Joan of Paris (1942), opposite Michèle Morgan, as French RAF pilot Paul Lavallier. Significantly, his next film, Now, Voyager (1942), defined his new screen persona: debonnaire, cultured and genteel, lighting two cigarettes simultaneously, then passing one to Bette Davis. According to Henreid, this legendary (and later often lampooned) scene was almost cut from the film because the director, Irving Rapper, had concerns about it. Next came "Casablanca", where Henreid played the idealistic, sensitive patriot Victor Laszlo; the poorly received Bronte sisters biopic Devotion (1946), as an Irish priest; and a stalwart performance as a Polish count and Ida Lupino's love interest, In Our Time (1944).
After several dull romantic leads, Henreid reinvented himself yet again. He played a memorably athletic and lively Dutch pirate, the 'Barracuda', in RKO's colourful swashbuckler The Spanish Main (1945). Another of his best later performances was as a sadistic South African commandant in the underrated film noir Rope of Sand (1949), which re-united him with his former "Casablanca" co-stars Peter Lorre and Claude Rains. After the Arabian Technicolor adventure, Thief of Damascus (1952), Henreid's star began to fade. His last noteworthy appearance during the fifties was as an itinerant magician in the oriental extravaganza Siren of Bagdad (1953) . The most memorable of several in-jokes, had Henreid lighting two hookahs (water pipes) for one of his harem girls, spoofing his famous scene from "Now, Voyager".
Outspoken in his opposition to McCarthyism and adhering to his rights under the First Amendment, he was subsequently blacklisted as a "communist sympathizer" by the House Committee on Un- American Activities. In spite of the damage this did to his career, he re-emerged as a director of second features and television episodes for Screen Gems, Desilu and other companies. In 1957, Alfred Hitchcock (in defiance of the blacklist) hired him to direct several episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955). Towards the end of his career, Paul Henreid directed his former "Now, Voyager" co-star Bette Davis in the camp melodrama Dead Ringer (1963) and toured with Agnes Moorehead on stage in a short-lived revival of "Don Juan in Hell"(1972- 73). Henreid died of pneumonia in a Santa Monica hospital in April 1992, after having suffered a stroke. He has the distinction of having not just one but two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for his films, and one for his television work.- Actor
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Danny Kaye left school at the age of 13 to work in the so-called Borscht Belt of Jewish resorts in the Catskill Mountains. It was there he learned the basics of show biz. From there he went through a series of jobs in and out of the business. In 1939, he made his Broadway debut in "Straw Hat Revue," but it was the stage production of the musical "Lady in the Dark" in 1940 that brought him acclaim and notice from agents. Also in 1940, he married Sylvia Fine, who went on to manage his career. She helped create the routines and gags, and wrote most of the songs that he performed. Danny could sing and dance like many others, but his specialty was reciting those tongue-twisting songs and monologues.
Samuel Goldwyn had been trying to sign Kaye to a movie contract for two years before he eventually agreed. Goldwyn put him in a series of Technicolor musicals, starting with Up in Arms (1944). His debut was successful, and he continued to make hit movies such as The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) and The Inspector General (1949). In 1954, he appeared with Bing Crosby in White Christmas (1954), which was based on the Irving Berlin song of the same name. In 1955, he made what many consider his best comedy, The Court Jester (1955), with the brilliant Pellet with the Poison routine. Like all things, however, the lifespan of a comedian is limited and his movie career waned. In 1960, he began doing specials on television and this led to his own TV series, The Danny Kaye Show (1963), which ran from 1963 to 1967.
Some of his last roles were also his most memorable, such as an intense Holocaust survivor in Skokie (1981) and as a kind but goofy dentist in an episode of The Cosby Show (1984). He also worked tirelessly for UNICEF.- Actor
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Eugene Curran Kelly was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the third son of Harriet Catherine (Curran) and James Patrick Joseph Kelly, a phonograph salesman. His father was of Irish descent and his mother was of Irish and German ancestry.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the largest and most powerful studio in Hollywood when Gene Kelly arrived in town in 1941. He came direct from the hit 1940 original Broadway production of "Pal Joey" and planned to return to the Broadway stage after making the one film required by his contract. His first picture for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was For Me and My Gal (1942) with Judy Garland. What kept Kelly in Hollywood were "the kindred creative spirits" he found behind the scenes at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The talent pool was especially large during World War II, when Hollywood was a refuge for many musicians and others in the performing arts of Europe who were forced to flee the Nazis. After the war, a new generation was coming of age. Those who saw An American in Paris (1951) would try to make real life as romantic as the reel life they saw portrayed in that musical, and the first time they saw Paris, they were seeing again in memory the seventeen-minute ballet sequence set to the title song written by George Gershwin and choreographed by Kelly. The sequence cost a half million dollars (U.S.) to make in 1951 dollars. Another Kelly musical of the era, Singin' in the Rain (1952), was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for its National Film Registry. Kelly was in the same league as Fred Astaire, but instead of a top hat and tails Kelly wore work clothes that went with his masculine, athletic dance style.
Gene Kelly died at age 83 of complications from two strokes on February 2, 1996 in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California.- Actor
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Alan Walbridge Ladd was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the only child of Ina Raleigh (aka Selina Rowley) and Alan Harwood Ladd, a freelance accountant. His mother was English, from County Durham. His father died when he was four. At age five, he burned his apartment playing with matches, and his mother moved them to Oklahoma City. He was malnourished, undersized and nicknamed Tiny. His mother married a house painter who moved them to California--a la "The Grapes of Wrath"--when he was eight. He picked fruit, delivered papers, and swept stores. In high school he discovered track and swimming. By 1931 he was training for the 1932 Olympics, but an injury put an end to those plans. He opened a hamburger stand called Tiny's Patio, and later worked as a grip at Warner Brothers Pictures. He married his friend Midge in 1936, but couldn't afford her, so they lived apart. In 1937, they shared a friend's apartment. They had a son, Alan Ladd Jr., and his destitute alcoholic mother moved in with them, her agonizing suicide from ant poison witnessed a few months later by her son. His size and coloring here regarded as not right for movies, so he worked hard at radio, where talent scout and former actress Sue Carol discovered him early in 1939. After a string of bit parts in "B" pictures--and an unbilled part in Orson Welles' classic Citizen Kane (1941)--he tested for This Gun for Hire (1942) late in 1941. His fourth-billed role as psychotic killer Raven made him a star. He was drafted in January 1943 and discharged in November with an ulcer and double hernia. Throughout the 1940s his tough-guy roles packed audiences into theaters and he was one of the very few males whose cover photos sold movie magazines. In the 1950s he was performing in lucrative but unrewarding films (an exception being what many regard as his greatest role, Shane (1953)). By the end of the 1950s liquor and a string of so-so films had taken their toll. In November 1962 he was found unconscious lying in a pool of blood with a bullet wound near his heart, a probable suicide attempt. In January 1964 he was found dead, apparently due to an accidental combination of alcohol and sedatives.- Actress
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Angela Lansbury was born in 1925 into a prominent family of the upper middle class living in the Regent's Park neighborhood of London. Her father was socialist politician Edgar Isaac Lansbury (1887-1935), a member of both the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Labour Party. Edgar served as Honorary Treasurer of the East London Federation of Suffragettes (term 1915), and Mayor of Poplar (term 1924-1925). He was the second Communist mayor in British history, the first being Joe Vaughan (1878-1938). Lansbury's mother was Irish film actress Moyna Macgill (1895-1975), originally from Belfast. During the first five years of Angela's life, the Lansbury family lived in a flat located in Poplar. In 1930, they moved to a house located in the Mill Hill neighborhood of north London. They spend their weekends vacationing in a farm located in Berrick Salome, a village in South Oxfordshire.
In 1935, Edgar Lansbury died from stomach cancer. Angela reportedly retreated into "playing characters", as a coping mechanism to deal with the loss. The widowed Moyna Macgill soon became engaged to Leckie Forbes, a Scottish colonel. Moyna moved into his house in Hampstead.
From 1934 to 1939, Angela was a student at South Hampstead High School. During these years, she became interested in films.. She regularly visited the local cinema, and imagined herself in various roles. Angela learned how to play the piano, and received a musical education at the Ritman School of Dancing.
In 1940, Lansbury started her acting education at the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art, located in Kensington, West London. She made her theatrical debut in the school's production of the play "Mary of Scotland" (1933) by Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959). The play depicted the life of Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1587, reigned 1542-1567), and Lansbury played one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting.
Also in 1940, Lansbury's paternal grandfather, George Lansbury, died from stomach cancer. When the Blitz started, Moyna Macgill had reasons to fear for the safety of her family and few remaining ties to England. Macgill moved to the United States to escape the Blitz, taking her three youngest children with her. Isolde was already a married adult, and was left behind in England.
Macgill secured financial sponsorship from American businessman Charles T. Smith. She and her children (including Angela) moved into Smith's house in Mahopac, New York, a hamlet in Putnam County. Lansbury was interested in continuing her studies, and secured a scholarship from the American Theatre Wing. From 1940 to 1942, Lansbury studied acting at the Feagin School of Dramatic Art, located in New York City. She appeared in performances organized by the school.
In 1942, Lansbury moved with her family to a flat located in Morton Street, Greenwich Village. She soon followed her mother in her theatrical tour of Canada. Lansbury secured her first paying job in Montreal, singing at the nightclub Samovar Club for a payment of 60 dollars per week. Lansbury was 16 years old at the time, but lied about her age and claimed to be 19 in order to be hired.
Lansbury returned to New York City in August, 1942, but Moyna Macgill soon moved herself and her family again. The family moved to Los Angeles, where Moyna was interested in resurrecting her film career. Their first home there was a bungalow in Laurel Canyon, a neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills.
Lansbury helped financially support her family by working for the Bullocks Wilshire department store in Los Angeles. Her weekly wages were only 28 dollars, but she had a secure income while her mother was unemployed. Through her mother, Lansbury was introduced to screenwriter John Van Druten (1901-1957), who had recently completed his script of "Gaslight" (1944). He suggested that young Lansbury would be perfect for the role of Nancy Oliver, the film's conniving cockney maid. This helped secure Lansbury's first film role at the age of 17, and a seven-year contract with the film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She earned 500 dollars per week, and chose to continue using her own name instead of a stage name.
In 1945, Lansbury married actor Richard Cromwell (1910-1960), who was 15 years older than she. The troubled marriage ended in a divorce in 1946. The former spouses remained friends until Cromwell's death.
In 1946, Lansbury started a romantic relationship with aspiring actor Peter Shaw (1918-2003), who was 7 years older than her. Shaw had recently ended his relationship with actress Joan Crawford (c. 1908-1977). The new couple started living together, while planning marriage. They wanted to be married in the United Kingdom, but the Church of England refused to marry two divorcees. They were married in 1949, in a Church of Scotland ceremony at St. Columba's Church, located in Knightsbridge, London. After their return to the United States, they settled into Lansbury's home in Rustic Canyon, Malibu. In 1951, both Lansbury and Shaw became naturalized citizens of the United States, while retaining their British citizenship.
Meanwhile, Lansbury continued appearing in MGM films. She appeared in 11 MGM films between 1945 and 1952. MGM at times loaned Lansbury to other film studios. She appeared in United Artists' "The Private Affairs of Bel Ami" (1947), and Paramount Pictures' "Samson and Delilah" (1949). In 1948, Lansbury made her debut in radio roles, followed by her television debut in 1950.
In 1952, Lansbury requested the termination of her contract with MGM, instead of its renewal. She felt unsatisfied with her film career as an MGM contract player. She then joined the East Coast touring productions of two former Broadway plays. By 1953, Lansbury had two children of her own and was also raising a stepson. She and her family moved into a larger house, located on San Vincente Boulevard in Santa Monica. In 1959, she and her family moved into a house in Malibu. The married couple were able to send their children to a local public school.
Meanwhile she continued her film career as a freelance actress, but continued to be cast in middle-aged roles. She regained her A-picture actress through well-received roles in the drama film "The Long, Hot Summer" (1958) and the comedy film "The Reluctant Debutante" (1958). She also appeared regularly in television roles, and became a regular on game show "Pantomime Quiz" (1947-1959).
In 1957, Lansbury made her Broadway debut in a performance of "Hotel Paradiso". The play was an adaptation of the 1894 "L'Hôtel du libre échange" ("Free Exchange Hotel"), written by Maurice Desvallières (1857-1926) and Georges Feydeau (1862-1921). Lansbury's role as "Marcel Cat" was critically well received. She continued appearing in Broadway over the next several years, most notably cast as the verbally abusive mother in "A Taste of Honey". She was cast as the mother of co-star Joan Plowright (1929-), who was only four years younger.
In the early 1960s, Lansbury was cast as an overbearing mother in "Blue Hawaii" (1961). The role of her son was played by Elvis Presley (1935-1977), who was only 10 years than her. The film was a box office hit, it finished as the 10th-top-grossing film of 1961 and 14th for 1962 on the "Variety" national box office survey. It gained Lansbury renewed fame, at a difficult point of her career.
Lansbury gained critical praise for a sympathetic role in the drama film "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs" (1960), and the role of a manipulative mother in the drama film "All Fall Down" (1962). Based on her success in "All Fall Down", she was cast in a similar role in the Cold War-themed thriller "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962). She was cast as Eleanor Iselin, the mother of her co-star Laurence Harvey (1928-1973), who was only 3 years younger than she. This turned out to be one of the most memorable roles in her career. She received critical acclaim and was nominated for a third time for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. The award was instead won by Patty Duke (1946-2016).
Lansbury made a comeback in the starring role of Mame Dennis in the musical "Mame" (1966), by Jerome Lawrence (1915-2004) and Robert Edwin Lee (1918-1994). The play was an adaptation of the novel "Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade" (1955) by Patrick Dennis (1921-1976), and focused on the life and ideas of eccentric bohemian Mame Dennis. The musical received critical and popular praise, and Lansbury won her first Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. Lansbury gained significant fame from her success, becoming a "superstar".
Her newfound fame led to other high-profile appearances by Lansbury. She starred in a musical performance at the 1968 Academy Awards ceremony, and co-hosted the 1968 Tony Awards. The Hasty Pudding Club, a social club for Harvard students. elected her "Woman of the Year" in 1968.
Lansbury's next theatrical success was in 1969 "The Madwoman of Chaillot" (1945) by Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944). The play concerns an eccentric Parisian woman's struggles with authority figures. Lansbury was cast in the starring role of 75-year-old Countess Aurelia, despite her actual age of 44. The show was well received and lasted for 132 performances. Lansbury won her second Tony Award for this role.
In 1970, Lansbury's Malibu home was destroyed in a brush fire. Lansbury and her husband decided to buy Knockmourne Glebe, an 1820s Irish farmhouse, located near the village of Conna in rural County Cork.
Her film career reached a new height. She was cast in the starring role of benevolent witch Eglantine Price in Disney's fantasy film "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" (1971). The film was a box-office hit; it was critically well received, and introduced Lansbury to a wider audience of children and families.
In 1972, Lansbury returned to the British stage, performing in London's West End with the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1973, Lansbury appeared in the role of Rose in London performances of the musical "Gypsy" (1959) by Arthur Laurents. It was quite successful. In 1974, "Gypsy" went on tour in the United States. with the same cast. For her role, Lanbury won the Sarah Siddons Award and her third Tony Award. The musical had its second tour in 1975.
Tired from musicals. Lansbury next sought Shakespearean roles in the United Kingdom. From 1975 to 1976, she appeared as Queen Gertrude in the National Theatre Company's production of Hamlet. In November 1975, Lansbury's mother Moyna Macgill died at the age of 79. Lansbury arranged for her mother's remains to be cremated, and the ashes scattered near her own County Cork home.
In 1976, Lansbury returned to the American stage. In 1978, Lansbury temporarily replaced Constance Towers (1933-) in the starring role of Anna Leonowens (1831-1915) in The King and I. While Towers was on a break from the role, Lansbury appeared in 24 performances.
In 1978, Lansbury appeared in her first film role in seven years, as the novelist and murder victim Salome Otterbourne in the mystery film "Death on the Nile" (1978). The film was an adaptation of the 1937 novel by Agatha Christie (1890-1976); Otterbourne was loosely based on real-life novelist Elinor Glyn (1864-1943). The film was a modest box-office hit, and Lansbury befriended her co-star Bette Davis (1908-1989).
In 1979, Lansbury was cast in the role of meat pie seller Mrs. Lovett in the musical "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" (1979), by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler (1912-1987). The musical was loosely based on the penny dreadful serial novel "The String of Pearls: A Domestic Romance" (1846-1847), which first depicted fictional serial killer Sweeney Todd. Lansbury remained in the role for 14 months, and was then replaced by Dorothy Loudon (1925-2003). Lansbury won her fourth Tony Award for this role. She returned to the role for 10 months in 1980.
Lansbury's next prominent film role was that of Miss Froy in "The Lady Vanishes" (1979), a remake of the 1938 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980). She was next cast in the role of amateur sleuth Miss Jane Marple in the mystery film "The Mirror Crack'd" (1980), an adaptation of the novel "The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side" (1962) by Agatha Christie. The novel was loosely inspired by the life of Gene Tierney (1920-1991). The film was a modest commercial success. There were plans for at least two sequels, but they ended in development hell.
In 1982, Lansbury was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame, She appeared at the time in the new play "A Little Family Business" and a revival of "Mame", but both shows were commercial failures. In film, Lansbury voiced the witch Mommy Fortuna in the animated fantasy film "The Last Unicorn" (1982). The film was critically well received, but was not a box-office hit.
Lansbury played Ruth in the musical comedy "The Pirates of Penzance" (1983), a film adaptation of the 1879 comic opera by William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900). The film was a box office bomb, earning about 695,000 dollars.
Lansbury's next film role was that of Granny in the gothic fantasy film "The Company of Wolves" (1984), based on a 1979 short story by Angela Carter (1940-1992). Lansbury was cast as the grandmother of protagonist Rosaleen (played by Sarah Patterson), in a tale featuring werewolves and shape-shifting. The film was critically well received, but barely broke even at the box office.
At about that time, Lansbury appeared regularly in television films and mini-series. Her most prominent television role was that of Jessica Fletcher in the detective series "Murder, She Wrote" (1984-1996). Jessica was depicted as a successful mystery novelist from Maine who encounters and solves many murders. The character was considered an American counterpart to Miss Marple. The series followed the "whodunit" format and mostly avoided depictions of violence or gore.
The series was considered a television landmark for having an older female character as the protagonist. It was aimed primarily at middle-aged audiences, but also attracted both younger viewers and senior citizen viewers. Ratings remained high for most of its run. Lansbury rejected pressure from network executives to put her character in a relationship, as she believed that Fletcher should remain a strong single female.
In 1989, Lansbury co-founded the production company Corymore Productions, which started co-producing the television series with Universal Television. This allowed Lansbury to have more creative input on the series. She was appointed an executive producer. By the time the series ended in 1996, it tied with the original "Hawaii Five-O" (1968-1980) as the longest-running detective drama series in television history.
Her popularity from "Murder, She Wrote" made Lansbury a much-sought figure for advertisers. She appeared in advertisements and infomercials for Bufferin, MasterCard and the Beatrix Potter Company.
Lansbury's highest-profile film role in decades was voicing the character of singing teapot Mrs. Potts in Disney's animated fantasy film "Beauty and the Beast" (1991). Lansbury performed the film's title song, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, and the Grammy Award for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media.
During the late 1980s and 1990s, Lansbury lived most of the year in California. In 1991, she had Corymore House, a farmhouse at Ballywilliam, County Cork, built as her new family home. She spend Christmases and summers there.
Following the end of "Murder, She Wrote", Lansbury returned to a career as a theatrical actress. She temporarily retired from the stage in 2001, to take care of her husband Peter Shaw, whose health was failing. Shaw died in 2003, from congestive heart failure at the couple's Brentwood, California home. Their marriage had lasted for 54 years (1949-2003).
Lansbury felt at the time that she could not take on any more major acting roles, but that she could still make cameos. She moved back to New York City in 2006, buying a condominium in Manhattan. Her first prominent film role in years was that of Aunt Adelaide in the fantasy film "Nanny McPhee" (2005). She credits her performance in the film with pulling her out of depression, a state of mind which had lasted since her husband's death.
Lansbury returned to performing on the Broadway stage in 2007, after an absence of 23 years. In 2009, she won her fifth Tony Award. She shared the record for most Tony Award victories with Julie Harris (1925-2013). In the 2010s, she continued regularly appearing in theatrical performances. In 2014, she returned to the London stage, after an absence of nearly 40 years.
In 2015, Lansbury received her first Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actress. At age 89, she was among the oldest first-time winners. Also in 2015, November 2015 was awarded the Oscar Hammerstein Award for Lifetime Achievement in Musical Theatre.
In 2017, she was cast as Aunt March in the mini-series "Little Women". The mini-series was an adaptation of the 1868-1869 novel of the same name by Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888). The series lasted for 3 episodes, and was critically well received.
In 2018, Lansbury gained her next film role in Disney's fantasy film "Mary Poppins Returns" (2018), a sequel to "Mary Poppins". Lansbury was cast in the role of the Balloon Lady, a kindly old woman who sells balloons at the park. The films was a commercial hit, earning about 350 million dollars at the worldwide box office.
In 2019, Lansbury performed at a one-night benefit staging of Oscar Wilde's play "The Importance of Being Earnest" (1895). a farce satirizing Victorian morals. She was cast in the role of society lady Lady Bracknell, mother to Gwendolen Fairfax.
By 2020, Lansbury was 95 years old, one of the oldest-living actresses. She has never retired from acting, and remains a popular icon.- Actor
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Jerry Lewis (born March 16, 1926 - August 20, 2017) was an American comedian, actor, singer, film producer, screenwriter and film director. He is known for his slapstick humor in film, television, stage and radio. He was originally paired up with Dean Martin in 1946, forming the famed comedy team of Martin and Lewis. In addition to the duo's popular nightclub work, they starred in a successful series of comedy films for Paramount Pictures. Lewis was also known for his charity fund-raising telethons and position as national chairman for the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA). Lewis won several awards for lifetime achievements from The American Comedy Awards, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and Venice Film Festival, and he had two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2005, he received the Governors Award of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Board of Governors, which is the highest Emmy Award presented. On February 22, 2009, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Lewis the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
Jerry died on August 20, 2017, in Las Vegas.- Actor
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Square-jawed, intense, no-nonsense Frank Lovejoy played a succession of detectives, street cops, reporters, soldiers and such over his career. Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1912, he worked on Wall Street as a teenager, but the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 cost him his job, and to make ends meet he got into acting. He played in touring companies throughout the Northeast before making his Broadway debut in 1934. His gritty, authoritative voice was perfect for radio, and he became a staple on such shows as "Gangbusters", "Night Beat" and "Damon Runyon Theater". Making his film debut in 1948, he worked steadily, mainly in supporting parts but also as a first or second lead (one of his best roles was as one of the hunters kidnapped by murderous psychopath William Talman in the classic The Hitch-Hiker (1953), directed by Ida Lupino). He played soldiers in such war pictures as Breakthrough (1950) and Retreat, Hell! (1952) and even showed up in a western or two. During the 1950s he starred in his own TV shows, Man Against Crime (1956) and The Adventures of McGraw (1957). He died of a heart attack in New York City in 1962.- Actress
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She was a child prodigy and pianist at age 10. Her first movie was There's Magic in Music (1941) aka The Hard-Boiled Canary (1941), under the name Dolly (a short version of her real name, Dolores) Loehr. She signed a long-term contract with Paramount in 1942 and had her name changed to Diana Lynn. She had good parts in The Major and the Minor (1942), The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943), and Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (1944). She got fewer roles as she matured; she did do My Friend Irma (1949) and My Friend Irma Goes West (1950), based on the popular radio sitcom, and Bedtime for Bonzo (1951), and had a nice career on TV. Her first marriage was from 1948 to 1954 to architect John C. Lindsay (no children); then, on December 6, 1956, she married Mortimer C. Hall, president of L.A. radio station KLAC. His mother was Dorothy Schiff, then publisher of the New York Post. She had four children with him between 1958 and 1964. They moved to New York City so he could assume a post on his mother's paper. Diana Lynn passed away on December 17, 1971, of a stroke/brain hemorrhage in Los Angeles.- Actress
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Shirley MacLaine was born Shirley MacLean Beaty in Richmond, Virginia. Her mother, Kathlyn Corinne (MacLean), was a drama teacher from Nova Scotia, Canada, and her father, Ira Owens Beaty, a professor of psychology and real estate agent, was from Virginia. Her brother, Warren Beatty, was born on March 30, 1937. Her ancestry includes English and Scottish.
Shirley was the tallest in her ballet classes at the Washington School of Ballet. Just after she graduated from Washington-Lee High School, she packed her bags and headed for New York. While auditioning for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's "Me and Juliet", the producer kept mispronouncing her name. She then changed her name from Shirley MacLean Beaty to Shirley MacLaine. She later had a role in "The Pajama Game", as a member of the chorus and understudy to Carol Haney. A few months into the run, Shirley was going to leave the show for the lead role in "Can-Can" but ended up filling in for Haney, who had broken her ankle and could not perform. She would fill in for Carol, again, three months later, following another injury, the very night that movie producer Hal B. Wallis was in the audience. Wallis signed MacLaine to a five-year contract to Paramount Pictures. Three months later, she was off to shoot The Trouble with Harry (1955). She then took roles in Hot Spell (1958) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956), completed not too long before her daughter, Sachi Parker (born Stephanie), was born. With Shirley's career on track, she played one of her most challenging roles: "Ginny Moorhead" in Some Came Running (1958), for which she received her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. She went on to do The Sheepman (1958) and The Matchmaker (1958). In 1960, she got her second Academy Award nomination for The Apartment (1960). Three years later, she received a third nomination for Irma la Douce (1963). In 1969, she brought her friend Bob Fosse from Broadway to direct her in Sweet Charity (1969), from which she got her "signature" song, "If My Friends Could See Me Now". After a five-year hiatus, Shirley made a documentary on China called The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir (1975), for which she received an Oscar nomination for best documentary.
In 1977, she got her fourth Best Actress Oscar nomination for The Turning Point (1977). In 1979, she worked with Peter Sellers in Being There (1979), made shortly before his death. After 20 years in the film industry, she finally took home the Best Actress Oscar for Terms of Endearment (1983). After a five-year hiatus, Shirley made Madame Sousatzka (1988), a critical and financial hit that took top prize at the Venice Film Festival. In 1989, she starred with Dolly Parton, Sally Field and Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias (1989). She received rave reviews playing Meryl Streep's mother in Postcards from the Edge (1990) and for Guarding Tess (1994). In 1996, she reprised her role from "Terms of Endearment" as "Aurora Greenway" in The Evening Star (1996), which didn't repeat its predecessor's success at the box office. In mid-1998, she directed Bruno (2000), which starred Alex D. Linz. In February 2001, Shirley worked with close friends once again in These Old Broads (2001), and co-starred with Julia Stiles in Carolina (2003) and with Kirstie Alley in Salem Witch Trials (2002).
MacLaine as her own website which includes her own radio show and interviews, the Encounter Board, and Independent Expression, a members-only section of the site. In the past few years, Shirley starred in a CBS miniseries based on the life of cosmetics queen Mary Kay Ash--Hell on Heels: The Battle of Mary Kay (2002), and wrote two more books, "The Camino" in 2001, and "Out On A Leash" in 2003. After taking a slight hiatus from motion pictures, Shirley returned with roles in the movies that were small, but wonderfully scene-stealing: Bewitched (2005) with Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, In Her Shoes (2005) with Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette, in which Shirley was nominated for a Golden Globe in the best supporting actress category, and Rumor Has It... (2005) with Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Costner. Shirley completed filming of Closing the Ring (2007), directed by Sir Richard Attenborough, in 2007. Her latest book is entitled "Sage-ing While Ag-ing"; Shirley's latest film is Valentine's Day (2010), which debuted in theaters on February 12, 2010.- Actor
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Born to a Czech mother and a Serbian father in Chicago as Mladen Sekulovich, on March 22, 1912, Karl Malden did not speak English until he was in kindergarten. After graduating from high school in the nearby steel town of Gary, Indiana, Malden worked in the industry for three years until 1934, when he was frustrated with the drudgery of manual labor. He left to attend the Arkansas State Teacher's College, then the Goodman Theater Dramatic School and never looked back. Three years later, he went to New York City to find fame.
Malden rapidly became involved with the Group Theater, an organization of actors and directors who were changing the face of theater, where he attracted the attention of director Elia Kazan. With Kazan directing, Karl starred in plays such as "All My Sons" by Arthur Miller and "A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams. While Malden had one screen appearance before his military service in World War II, in They Knew What They Wanted (1940), he did not establish his film career until after the war. Malden won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and showed his range as an actor in roles such as that of Father Corrigan in On the Waterfront (1954) and the lecherous Archie Lee in Baby Doll (1956).
He starred in dozens of films such as Fear Strikes Out (1957), Pollyanna (1960), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), Gypsy (1962), How the West Was Won (1962), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), and Patton (1970) as General Omar Bradley. In the early 1970s, he built a television career on the tough but honest screen persona he had created when he starred as Detective Mike Stone on The Streets of San Francisco (1972), co-starring with Michael Douglas. He also became the pitchman for American Express, a position he held for 21 years. In 1988, he was elected President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a position he held for five years. Following that he, published his memoir entitled, "When Do I Start?: A Memoir", written with his daughter Carla.
Malden also courted controversy by pushing for a special salute to Elia Kazan at the 1999 Academy Awards. Malden defended both Kazan and the award, arguing that Kazan's artistic achievements outshone any shame attached to Kazan's naming names before the Congressional committee investigating Communists in Hollywood. Marlon Brando refused to give Kazan the statuette; Robert De Niro ultimately did. Karl Malden died at age 97 of natural causes at his home in Los Angeles on July 1, 2009. He was buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, California.- Director
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Delbert Mann, the Oscar-winning film director, was born Delbert Martin Mann Jr. in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1920. His father moved the family to Nashville, Tennesse, after taking a teaching position at Scarritt College. The young Mann graduated from Vanderbilt University, where he met his future wife, Ann Caroline Gillespie. He developed a lifelong friendship with Fred Coe, whom he met at the Nashville Community Playhouse, that would prove critical in his professional life.
After his 1941 graduation from Vanderbilt, Mann joined the Army and was assigned to the Air Corps, eventually becoming a pilot with the 8th Air Force. As a B-24 pilot with the "Mighty Eighth," Mann flew 35 bombing missions in the European Theater of Operations. After being demobilized at the end of the war, his interest changed to another type of theater, and he attended the Yale Drama School. From Yale he moved on to a directing job with the Town Theatre of Columbia, South Carolina.
His old friend Fred Coe, a producer at NBC, offered Mann the opportunity to direct live television drama on the network's The Philco Television Playhouse (1948). Mann accepted the job offer and moved to New York in 1949. For NBC he directed many dramas for the "Philco Playhouse," which later alternated its broadcasting weeks on the network with the Goodyear Playhouse (1951) and Producers' Showcase (1954) (television programs in the early days typically had one major commercial sponsor; thus, many programs from the early days bore the name of that primary sponsor). Mann directed episodes for all three showcases, including "October Story" with Julie Harris and Leslie Nielsen, "Middle of the Night" with Eva Marie Saint and E.G. Marshall, a remake of The Petrified Forest (1936) with the inevitable Humphrey Bogart (who created the role of Duke Mantee on the Broadway stage and played it in the classic 1935 film), and even two productions of William Shakespeare's "Othello" (one of which featured the unlikely Walter Matthau as Iago!).
Mann was one of the best-known graduates of "The Golden Age of Television," when live original drama was a staple of network TV. Other showcases he worked for included NBC Repertory Theatre (1949), Ford Star Jubilee (1955) and Playwrights '56 (1955). In 1953 he directed a live teleplay written by another WWII vet, Paddy Chayefsky. The episode of "Goodyear Television Playhouse" starring another vet, the up-and-coming Method actor Rod Steiger, as a lonely butcher named "Marty."
Delbert Mann's name will always be linked to the extraordinary cultural phenomenon that was "Marty," but it was as a film, not as television program, that Chayevsky's 1953 script became legendary, the first blockbuster hit of independent cinema. However, Mann's first recognition from the culture industry didn't come from Chayevsky's "Marty," either on television or film, but from Thornton Wilder's theatrical warhorse about a small burg in New Hampshire, "Our Town."
In 1954, Mann won a Best Director Emmy nomination for the "Producers' Showcase" episode "Our Town," a musical adaptation featuring the young Paul Newman and the singing talents of swinging Frank Sinatra. Ironically, the TV play of "Marty," considered the summit of TV's Golden Age in retrospect, went unrecognized during the nascent industry's awards season, though it did receive an excellent buzz via word of mouth. (The live "Marty" was captured via kinescope, a method of reproduction that involved shooting a 16-mm copy of the broadcast off of a TV monitor for rebroadcast to the West Coast in the days before coast-to-coast TV hookups, let along videotape; such programs were seldom rebroadcast after the initial showing due to the poor quality of the 'scope.) That situation would change once "Marty" moved from New York to Hollywood.
It's said that superstar Burt Lancaster and his producing partner Ben Hecht were looking for a property to generate a tax write-off for their successful indie production company, Hecht-Lancaster. That property was Marty, shot in B+W in the standard Academy ratio of 4:3 in an era when the blockbuster, like Cecil B. DeMIlle's epic remake of "The Ten Commandments," shot in color in the wide-screen processes of CinemaScope, Cinerama and VistaVision, were all the rage. (The box office gross of the 1956 "Ten Commandments," if adjusted for inflation, would rival the grosses generated by the top block busters of the present era.) Color, widescreens and spectacle were considered to be the necessary ingredients to get people out of the house where they were planted in front of the TV and back into the theaters. And here was a low-budget, B+W film with no production values and no stars based on a TV play that had appeared free on TV (Hollywood's great enemy) just two years before!
Remaking "Marty" seemed an honorable way to generate a tax-write off, so the story goes, while associating the company with quality, but Hecht-Lancaster refused to spend much money on it. The budget was limited to just under $350,000. (It's said that "Marty" was the first Oscar-winning film in which the advertising costs exceeded the budget.) Rod Steiger, who did not want to be bound contractually to Hecht-Lancaster, refused to reprise the eponymous title role, so it was turned over to Burt Lancaster's "From Here to Eternity" co-star, 'Ernest Borginine' . Having assayed Fatso Judson and other screen heavies in his brief cinema career, Borgnine had never played a sympathetic supporting character, let alone a lead, on film before.
Possibly due to its unpromising prospects, Burt Lancaster didn't bother putting his name on the picture as a producer, leaving that honor (and the Oscar that lay in "Marty's future) to Hecht. No wonder the success of "Marty" caught everyone flat-footed! It's perhaps the supreme case in Hollywood's checkered flirtation with "quality" cinema that quality not only won out, but more importantly, paid off (and paid off handsomely at that!).
The movie "Marty" was a critical success before it was a commercial success. Shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1955, it was the first American film to win the Golden Palm (an award which, in the French manner, is shared by its director). In release, the film returned $3 million in rentals ($21 million in 2005 dollars), which was a considerable amount in the mid-1950s. More importantly for Hecht-Lancaster, its low-budget made "Marty" one of the most profitable movies ever made.
The critical recognition and boffo box office made "Marty" a sleeper at the 1956 Academy Awards, at which Mann won the Oscar as Best Director of 1955 and Chayevsky copped the Best Adapted Screenplay trophy. In addition to the original "auteurs," Ernest Borgnine won the Best Actor Oscar and Harold Hecht picked up the gong for Best Picture. Betsy Blair and Joe Mantell also received nominations in Best Supporting Acting categories, and on the technical side, "Marty" was nominated for Best B+W Cinematography (Joseph LaShelle) and Best B+W Art Direction-Set Decoration ( Ted Haworth, Walter M. Simonds, Robert Priestley). Until Sam Mendes duplicated the feat in 2000, Mann was the only director to win an Oscar for his first film.
Though he could not know it then, "Marty" was the highpoint of Mann's career. While Chayevsky went on to win two more Oscars, Mann never won another Oscar nomination, though he did pick up two more Emmy nominations in 1972 and 1980 during his productive career. More significantly, Delbert Mann had the respect of his peers: in addition to his three subsequent Directors Guild of America nominations to go along with his win for "Marty," the DGA honored him with its Robert B. Aldrich Achievement Award in 1997 and an Honorary Life Membership in 2002.- Actor
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The bushy-browed, cigar-smoking wise-cracker with the painted-on moustache and stooped walk was the leader of The Marx Brothers. With one-liners that were often double entendres, Groucho never cursed in any of his performances and said he never wanted to be known as a dirty comic. With a great love of music and singing (The Marx Brothers started as a singing group), one of the things Groucho was best known for was his rendition of the song "Lydia the Tattooed Lady."- Actor
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Gardner is the son of Deane McKay, an ad executive, and Catherine. He was raised in New York and Paris. He attended Cornell University two years but left when his father died. He worked in advertising for 6 months but found that he could not stand it. At age 20, he became a sculptor and had a piece displayed in the Museum of Modern Art. In 1959, he was spotted by a Hollywood producer who convinced him to join the cast of TV's Adventures in Paradise (1959). When it was over, he decided he really did not like the celebrity spotlight and proceeded to roam the world. He hiked in the Amazon, rode camels in Egypt, and crewed on Caribbean yachts. Finally, in 1980, he met Madeleine Madigan, who became his wife. The life-long bachelor settled down and decided to become a writer.- Actor
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Ray Milland became one of Paramount's most bankable and durable stars, under contract from 1934 to 1948, yet little in his early life suggested a career as a motion picture actor.
Milland was born Alfred Reginald Jones in the Welsh town of Neath, Glamorgan, to Elizabeth Annie (Truscott) and Alfred Jones. He spent his youth in the pursuit of sports. He became an expert rider early on, working at his uncle's horse-breeding estate while studying at the King's College in Cardiff. At 21, he went to London as a member of the elite Household Cavalry (Guard for the Royal Family), undergoing a rigorous 19-months training, further honing his equestrian skills, as well as becoming adept at fencing, boxing and shooting. He won trophies, including the Bisley Match, with his unit's crack rifle team. However, after four years, he suddenly lost his means of financial support (independent income being a requirement as a Guardsman) when his stepfather discontinued his allowance. Broke, he tried his hand at acting in small parts on the London stage.
There are several stories as to how he derived his stage name. It is known, that during his teens he called himself "Mullane", using his stepfather's surname. He may later have suffused "Mullane" with "mill-lands", an area near his hometown. When he first appeared on screen in British films, he was billed first as Spike Milland, then Raymond Milland.
In 1929, Ray befriended the popular actress Estelle Brody at a party and, later that year, visited her on the set of her latest film, The Plaything (1929). While having lunch, they were joined by a producer who persuaded the handsome Welshman to appear in a motion picture bit part. Ray rose to the challenge and bigger roles followed, including the male lead in The Lady from the Sea (1929). The following year, he was signed by MGM and went to Hollywood, but was given little to work with, except for the role of Charles Laughton's ill-fated nephew in Payment Deferred (1932). After a year, Ray was out of his contract and returned to England.
His big break did not come until 1934 when he joined Paramount, where he was to remain for the better part of his Hollywood career. During the first few years, he served an apprenticeship playing second leads, usually as the debonair man-about-town, in light romantic comedies. He appeared with Burns and Allen in Many Happy Returns (1934), enjoyed third-billing as a British aristocrat in the Claudette Colbert farce The Gilded Lily (1935) and was described as "excellent" by reviewers for his role in the sentimental drama Alias Mary Dow (1935). By 1936, he had graduated to starring roles, first as the injured British hunter rescued on a tropical island by The Jungle Princess (1936), the film which launched Dorothy Lamour's sarong-clad career. After that, he was the titular hero of Bulldog Drummond Escapes (1937) and, finally, won the girl (rather than being the "other man") in Mitchell Leisen's screwball comedy Easy Living (1937). He also re-visited the tropics in Ebb Tide (1937), Her Jungle Love (1938) and Tropic Holiday (1938), as well as being one of the three valiant brothers of Beau Geste (1939).
In 1940, Ray was sent back to England to star in the screen adaptation of Terence Rattigan's French Without Tears (1940), for which he received his best critical reviews to date. He was top-billed (above John Wayne) running a ship salvage operation in Cecil B. DeMille's lavish Technicolor adventure drama Reap the Wild Wind (1942), besting Wayne in a fight - much to the "Duke's" personal chagrin - and later wrestling with a giant octopus. Also that year, he was directed by Billy Wilder in a charming comedy, The Major and the Minor (1942) (co-starred with Ginger Rogers), for which he garnered good notices from Bosley Crowther of the New York Times. Ray then played a ghost hunter in The Uninvited (1944), and the suave hero caught in a web of espionage in Fritz Lang's thriller Ministry of Fear (1944).
On the strength of his previous role as "Major Kirby", Billy Wilder chose to cast Ray against type in the ground-breaking drama The Lost Weekend (1945) as dipsomaniac writer "Don Birnam". Ray gave the defining performance of his career, his intensity catching critics, used to him as a lightweight leading man, by surprise. Crowther commented "Mr. Milland, in a splendid performance, catches all the ugly nature of a 'drunk', yet reveals the inner torment and degradation of a respectable man who knows his weakness and his shame" (New York Times, December 3, 1945). Arrived at the high point of his career, Ray Milland won the Oscar for Best Actor, as well as the New York Critic's Award. Rarely given such good material again, he nonetheless featured memorably in many more splendid films, often exploiting the newly discovered "darker side" of his personality: as the reporter framed for murder by Charles Laughton's heinous publishing magnate in The Big Clock (1948); as the sophisticated, manipulating art thief "Mark Bellis" in the Victorian melodrama So Evil My Love (1948) (for which producer Hal B. Wallis sent him back to England); as a Fedora-wearing, Armani-suited "Lucifer", trawling for the soul of an honest District Attorney in Alias Nick Beal (1949); and as a traitorous scientist in The Thief (1952), giving what critics described as a "sensitive" and "towering" performance. In 1954, Ray played calculating ex-tennis champ "Tony Wendice", who blackmails a former Cambridge chump into murdering his wife, in Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954). He played the part with urbane sophistication and cold detachment throughout, even in the scene of denouement, calmly offering a drink to the arresting officers.
With Lisbon (1956), Ray Milland moved into another direction, turning out several off-beat, low-budget films with himself as the lead, notably High Flight (1957), The Safecracker (1958) and Panic in Year Zero! (1962). At the same time, he cheerfully made the transition to character parts, often in horror and sci-fi outings. In accordance with his own dictum of appearing in anything that had "any originality", he worked on two notable pictures with Roger Corman: first, as a man obsessed with catalepsy in The Premature Burial (1962); secondly, as obsessed self-destructive surgeon "Dr. Xavier" in X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)-the Man with X-Ray Eyes, a film which, despite its low budget, won the 1963 Golden Asteroid in the Trieste Festival for Science Fiction.
As the years went on, Ray gradually disposed of his long-standing toupee, lending dignity through his presence to many run-of-the-mill television films, such as Cave in! (1983) and maudlin melodramas like Love Story (1970). He guest-starred in many anthology series on television and had notable roles in Rod Serling's Night Gallery (1969) and the original Battlestar Galactica (1978) (as Quorum member Sire Uri). He also enjoyed a brief run on Broadway, starring as "Simon Crawford" in "Hostile Witness" (1966), at the Music Box Theatre.
In his private life, Ray was an enthusiastic yachtsman, who loved fishing and collecting information by reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica. In later years, he became very popular with interviewers because of his candid spontaneity and humour. In the same self-deprecating vein he wrote an anecdotal biography, "Wide-Eyed in Babylon", in 1976. A film star, as well as an outstanding actor, Ray Milland died of cancer at the age of 79 in March 1986.- Actor
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Cameron Mitchell was the son of a minister, but chose a different path from his father. Prior to World War II, in which he served as an Air Force bombardier, Mitchell appeared on Broadway, and, in 1940, an experimental television broadcast, "The Passing of the Third Floor Back". He made his film debut in What Next, Corporal Hargrove? (1945), but continued with stage as well as film work. He gained early recognition for his portrayal of Happy in the stage and screen versions of "Death of a Salesman". Still, out of more than 300 film and TV appearances, he is probably best remembered for his work on The High Chaparral (1967) TV series in which he, as the happy-go-lucky Buck Cannon, and Henry Darrow, as Manolito Montoya, stole the show.- Actor
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George Montgomery was boxing champion at the University of Montana where he majored in architecture and interior design. Dropping out a year later he decided to take up boxing more seriously. He moved to California where he was coached by ex-heavyweight world champion James J. Jeffries. While in Hollywood, he came to the attention of the studios (not least, because he was an expert rider) and was hired as a stuntman in 1935. After doing this for four years, George was offered a contract at 20th Century Fox in 1939, but found himself largely confined to leads in B-westerns. He did not secure a part in anything even remotely like a prestige picture until his co-starring role in Roxie Hart (1942), opposite Ginger Rogers. Next, in Orchestra Wives (1942), he played the perfunctory love interest for Ann Rutherford, though both, inevitably, ended up playing second trombone to Glenn Miller and His Orchestra.
In 1947, George got his first serious break, being cast as Raymond Chandler's private eye Philip Marlowe in The Brasher Doubloon (1947). Reviewers, however, compared his performance unfavorably with that of Humphrey Bogart and found the film "pallid" overall. So it was back in the saddle for George. Unable to shake his image as a cowboy actor he starred in scores of films with titles like Belle Starr's Daughter (1948), Dakota Lil (1950), Jack McCall, Desperado (1953), and Masterson of Kansas (1954) at Columbia, and for producer Edward Small at United Artists. When not cleaning up the Wild West with his six-shooter, he branched out into adventure films set in exotic locales (notably as Harry Quartermain in Watusi (1959)). During the 60s, he also wrote, directed and starred in several long-forgotten, low-budget wartime potboilers made in the Philippines.
At the height of his popularity, George attracted as much publicity for his acting as for his liaisons with glamorous stars, like Ginger Rogers, Hedy Lamarr (to whom he was briefly engaged) and singer Dinah Shore (whom he married in 1943). After his retirement from the film business, he devoted himself to his love of painting, furniture-making and sculpting bronze busts, including one of his close friend Ronald Reagan.- Actress
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Born Helen Luella Koford on January 7, 1929, the Los Angeles, California native worked as a model before she made her film debut at age 11 in 20th Century-Fox's Maryland (1940). Through the 1940s, she worked under a variety of names (her own, Judy Ford and January Ford) before settling on Terry Moore in 1948. Placed under contract by Columbia Pictures, Moore was loaned out to RKO Radio Pictures for one of her most famous films, Mighty Joe Young (1949). By that time, Columbia studio boss Harry Cohn had changed her Swedish name Helen Koford to the Irish-sounding Terry Moore. In 1953, she received an Academy Award nomination for her performance in Paramount Pictures' Come Back, Little Sheba (1952). In the 1970s, she was in the news more than she was in films, asserting that she was the secret wife of the late billionaire Howard Hughes. She has starred in 77 feature films and listed among her leading men are such Hollywood legends including Burt Lancaster, John Wayne, Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, Glenn Ford, Mickey Rooney and Robert Wagner. Since she was a pilot herself, Terry played a major role in preparing Leonardo DiCaprio for his portrayal of Howard Hughes in The Aviator (2004). In 1964, Terry published a memoir of her life with Howard Hughes, entitled 'The Beauty and the Billionaire'.- This lovely Austrian-born actress was born (in 1917) and raised in Vienna, performing as a child on stage and appearing in various productions for the renown Max Reinhardt. Trained in dance, she was a member of the Bodenwieser Ensemble, a European troupe. Following a few high school plays and dance recitals, she went on to study drama and voice at the Vienna Conservatory. Maria arrived in the United States at the outbreak of war in 1938 and first performed on the New York stage, notably in the 1942 production of "The Moon Is Down." Spotted for films, she was one of many foreign actresses Hollywood took in at the time to fill their quota of exotic mystery ladies in war-era intrigue and film noir. She made her debut in Mission to Moscow (1943) for Warner Bros. and continued on freelancing for other studios with Days of Glory (1944), opposite Gregory Peck, Lady on a Train (1945), The Web (1947), The Other Love (1947), Strictly Dishonorable (1951), By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953), and Outcasts of the City (1958), among others. Her film career waned in the 50s and she turned to radio, TV and commercials. She formed her own production company, Maria Palmer Enterprises, and hosted her own local Los Angeles show "Sincerely, Maria Palmer" in the early 60s. In later years she wrote a number of non-produced teleplays, often under the pseudonym Eliot Parker White. Dying of pulmonary failure while battling cancer in 1981, she kept extensive journals of her life and career which were later available to the public.
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Glimpsed here and there throughout the 1950s, usually in amiable supporting roles on film, it was as in television that Jerry Paris found his true calling. In front of the camera, however, most fans will remember him as Jerry Helper, the next-door neighbor of Rob and Laura Petrie (Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore) on The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961).
He was born William Gerald Paris on July 25, 1925, in San Francisco, California. His father was a Russian immigrant; his mother, the former Esther Mohr, remarried when Jerry was a small child. Jerry's new stepfather, Milton Grossman, eventually adopted the boy and Jerry thereafter used the name William Gerald Grossman while growing up. He reverted back to his real name when he became an actor. He graduated from both New York University and UCLA, and studied at the Actor's Studio after serving in the Navy during WWII. Starting off onstage in such plays as "The Front Page". He appeared dramatically on Broadway twice, making his debut in "Medea" (1947) in the bit part as a soldier, and later appearing in a 1952 revival of "Anna Christie", which starred Celeste Holm.
He turned to films in 1949 with unbilled bits but slowly progressed to a higher acting tier in such durable films as Outrage (1950), The Wild One (1953), The Caine Mutiny (1954), Marty (1955), The Naked and the Dead (1958) and The Great Impostor (1960). Hyperactive in nature, the tall, dark-haired actor was often cast as the genial or helpful pal of the star. He never found that one film role that might have moved him beyond the secondary character ranks. TV, however, would become a more accepting medium. After appearing as a regular in the series The Untouchables (1959) in 1959, Jerry found himself in classic company on The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961) in 1961 as next-door-neighbor Jerry Helper, and (of course) pal to Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore.
Loose and fun-loving, Jerry loved to keep the laughs going on- and off-stage and continued to do so -- behind the camera. It was comic actor and "Dick Van Dyke Show" producer Carl Reiner who gave Jerry his first chance to direct on one of the show's episodes. The actor took to it like a duck to water. By the mid-60s, Jerry was a regular director on the show and won an Emmy for his efforts during the 1963-1964 season. Highly encouraged (he also won a Directors Guild Award down the road), he decided to abandon acting and concentrate solely on behind-the-camera work. Working on such movies as Viva Max (1969) and Star Spangled Girl (1971), he eventually returned to familiar territory (TV sitcoms) and found his niche helming several popular shows including Happy Days (1974) (twice Emmy-nominated) and The Odd Couple (1970).
Now and then, Jerry would return to movie-making and helmed his last feature in 1986, Police Academy 3: Back in Training (1986), the year of his death. Diagnosed with brain cancer, he died of complications following surgery. He was 60 years young. Predeceased by his wife, Ruth (Benjamin) Paris, who died in 1980, the couple had three children.- Actor
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Few actors ever managed a complete image transition as thoroughly as did Dick Powell: in his case, from the boyish, wavy-haired crooner in musicals to rugged crime fighters in film noirs. Powell grew up in the town of Little Rock, Arkansas, one of three brothers (one of them, Howard, ended up as vice president of the Illinois Central Railroad). He worked his way through schooling, sidelining as a soda jerk and a grocery clerk before entering the world of show biz as a singer (tenor) and banjo player with the Royal Peacock Orchestra in Louisville, Kentucky. He then got a gig with the Charlie Davis band and toured with them throughout the mid-west, appearing at dance halls and picture theaters. He next worked as a master of ceremonies and this rounded him off as an entertainer even before he was signed by a Warner Brothers talent scout in 1932. Looking rather younger than his actual years, Powell soon found himself typecast as clean-cut singing juveniles in a series of exuberant musicals with lavish production numbers like 42nd Street (1933), one of two dozen similar pictures he made for the studio.
In 1935, Powell's salary amounted to $70,000. Two years later, he had become one of Hollywood's top ten box office stars, yet was paid just half of what he had earned as an MC. A keen businessman with an eye for profit, Powell had already invested wisely in land and property. When he left Warners in 1939 with no discernible acting opportunities in sight, he was in no way short of money. He was, however, desperate to escape his image, declaring "I knew I wasn't the greatest singer in the world and I saw no reason why an actor should restrict himself to any one particular phase of the business". He fairly jumped at the chance to act in non-singing roles, joining Paramount in 1940 to appear opposite Ellen Drew in the sparkling Preston Sturges comedy Christmas in July (1940). This was followed by two marital farces featuring his then-wife, Joan Blondell, both efforts receiving only a lukewarm response at the box-office. Still dissatisfied with lightweight roles, Powell lobbied hard to get the lead (eventually scored by Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity (1944) but was knocked back. Instead, he was slotted into more of the same fare, refused to comply and was suspended.
His box office credo now at a low ebb, Powell tried his luck at RKO and at last managed to secure a lucrative role: that of hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler's Murder, My Sweet (1944). The author himself approved of the casting, though the director (Edward Dmytryk) fought off initial misgivings. The result proved nothing if not a tangible hit for RKO. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times remarked " ...and while he may lack the steely coldness and cynicism of a Humphrey Bogart, Mr. Powell need not offer any apologies. He has definitely stepped out of the song-and-dance, pretty-boy league with this performance". In short order, offers suddenly kept coming. Having successfully reinvented himself, Powell now found steady work on radio, respectively as "Richard Rogue" and then "Richard Diamond, Private Eye". In films, he remained on cue for wise-cracking tough guy roles in Cornered (1945) and Johnny O'Clock (1947). His most challenging role yet was as best-selling novelist James Lee Bartlow in MGM's epic drama The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)]. Powell also dabbled at directing, though he only helmed six pictures in total: among them a minor film noir, Split Second (1953)], and an above-average submarine drama, The Enemy Below (1957)]. Having quit film acting in the mid-50s, he began to concentrate primarily on producing TV drama as host and executive producer of his own award-winning anthology show, The Dick Powell Theatre (1961). He was also co-founder and managing director of Four Star Television (which had its studios where Republic had formerly existed and which would subsequently become CBS Cinema Center).
Dick Powell died prematurely of lung cancer in January 1963 at the age of 58. He was survived by his third wife, the actress June Allyson.- Actor
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Tall, suave and sophisticated Cesar Romero actually had two claims to fame in Hollywood. To one generation, he was the distinguished Latin lover of numerous musicals and romantic comedies, and the rogue bandit The Cisco Kid in a string of low-budget westerns. However, to a younger generation weaned on television, Romero was better known as the white-faced, green-haired, cackling villain The Joker of the camp 1960s TV series Batman (1966), and as a bumbling corporate villain in a spate of Walt Disney comedies, such as chasing a young Kurt Russell in the fun-packed The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969). Fans and critics alike agreed that Romero was a major talent who proved himself an enduring and versatile star in an overwhelming variety of roles in a career as an actor, dancer and comedian that lasted nearly 60 years.
Cesar Romero was born of Cuban parents in New York City in February 1907. He attended the Collegiate School and Riverdale Country School before working as a ballroom dancer. He first appeared on Broadway in the 1927 production of Lady Do, and then in the stage production of Strictly Dishonorable. His first film role was in The Shadow Laughs (1933), after which he gave strong performances in The Devil Is a Woman (1935) and in the Shirley Temple favorite, Wee Willie Winkie (1937).
Critics and fans generally agree that Romero's best performance was as the Spanish explorer Cortez in Captain from Castile (1947). However, he also shone in the delightful Julia Misbehaves (1948) and several other breezy and lighthearted escapades. In 1953 he starred in the 39-part espionage TV serial Passport to Danger (1954), which earned him a considerable income due to a canny profit-sharing arrangement. Although Romero became quite wealthy and had no need to work, he could not stay away from being in front of the cameras. He continued to appear in a broad variety of film roles, but surprised everyone in Hollywood by taking on the role of "The Joker" in the hugely successful TV series Batman (1966). He refused to shave his trademark mustache for the role, and close observation shows how the white clown makeup went straight on over his much loved mustache! The appearances in Batman were actually only a small part of the enormous amount of work that Romero contributed to television. He guest-starred in dozens of shows, including Rawhide (1959), 77 Sunset Strip (1958), Zorro (1957), Fantasy Island (1977) and Murder, She Wrote (1984). However, it was The Joker for which his TV work was best remembered, and Romero often remarked that for many, many years after Batman ended, fans would stop him and ask him to chuckle and giggle away just like he did as The Joker. Romero always obliged, and both he and the fans just loved it!
With a new appeal to a younger fan base, Romero turned up in three highly popular Disney comedies: The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969), Now You See Him, Now You Don't (1972) and The Strongest Man in the World (1975) as corrupt but inept villain A.J. Arno. Throughout the remainder of the 1980s Romero remained busy, and even at 78 years of age the ladies still loved his charm, and he was cast as Jane Wyman's love interest in the top-rated prime-time soap opera Falcon Crest (1981), playing Peter Stavros from 1985 to 1987.
Although Romero stopped acting in 1990, he remained busy, regularly hosting classic movie programs on cable television. A talented and much loved Hollywood icon, he passed away on New Year's Day 1994, at the age of 86.- Actor
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Distinguished U.S. actor and longtime civil rights campaigner Robert Bushnell Ryan was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Mable Arbutus (Bushnell), a secretary, and Timothy Aloysius Ryan, whose wealthy family owned a real estate firm. His father was of Irish ancestry, and his mother was of English and Irish descent. Ryan served in the United States Marines as a drill sergeant (winning a boxing championship) and went on to become a key figure in post WWII American Film Noir and western productions.
Ryan grabbed critical attention for his dynamic performances as an anti-Semitic bully in the superb Crossfire (1947), as an over-the-hill boxer who refuses to take a fall in The Set-Up (1949) and as a hostile & jaded cop in On Dangerous Ground (1951). Ryan's athletic physique, intense gaze and sharply delivered, authoritarian tones made him an ideal actor for the oily world of the Film Noir genre, and he contributed solid performances to many Film Noir features, usually as a vile villain. Ryan played a worthy opponent for bounty hunter James Stewart in the Anthony Mann directed western The Naked Spur (1953), he locked horns with an intrepid investigator Spencer Tracy in the suspenseful Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) and starred alongside Harry Belafonte in the grimy, gangster flick Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). Plus, the inventive Ryan excelled as the ruthless "John Claggart" in Billy Budd (1962), and two different WWII US generals - first in the star-filled The Longest Day (1962) and then in Battle of the Bulge (1965).
For the next eight years prior to his untimely death in 1973, Ryan landed some tremendous roles in a mixture of productions each aided by his high-caliber acting skills leaving strong impressions on movie audiences. He was one of the hard men hired to pursue kidnapped Claudia Cardinale in the hard boiled action of The Professionals (1966), a by-the-book army colonel clashing with highly unorthodox army major Lee Marvin in The Dirty Dozen (1967), and an embittered bounty hunter (again) forced to hunt down old friend William Holden in the violent Sam Peckinpah western classic The Wild Bunch (1969). Ryan's final on-screen performance was in the terrific production of The Iceman Cometh (1973) based on the Eugene O'Neill play and also starring Lee Marvin and Fredric March.
Legend has it that Sam Peckinpah clashed very heatedly with Ryan during the making of The Wild Bunch (1969); however Peckinpah eventually backed down when a crew member reminded Sam of Robert Ryan's proficiency with his fists!
Primarily a man of pacifist beliefs, Ryan often found it a challenge playing sadistic and racist characters who very much were at odds with his own personal ideals. Additionally, Ryan actively campaigned for improved civil rights, restricting the growth of nuclear weapons, and he strongly opposed McCarthyism and its abuse of people who many believed were innocent. A gifted, intelligent and powerful actor, Robert Ryan passed away on July 11th, 1973 of lung cancer.- Actress
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Her real name was Frances "Fanny" Rose Shore, and she was born in Winchester, Tennessee. Stricken with polio at 18 months of age, she recovered after receiving the Sister Kenny treatment. She became a cheerleader at Hume-Fogg High School in Nashville and went on to graduate from Vanderbilt University in 1938, where she majored in sociology. She took voice and acting lessons on the side and sang on radio station WSM in Nashville. In 1938 she left Tennessee for New York City and began singing on radio station WNCW in New York. Her first recordings were with bandleader Xavier Cugat, and she later changed her named to Dinah after her success with the song of the same name. She received numerous Emmy awards for television specials and productions and appeared in many films. She was married to actor George Montgomery, with whom she had one daughter and adopted a son.- Actress
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Ann Sothern's film career started as an extra in 1927. Originally a redhead, she began to bleach her hair blonde for comedy roles. After working at MGM and on Broadway, Ann was signed by Columbia Pictures for Let's Fall in Love (1933). The next year she would work with Eddie Cantor in his hit Kid Millions (1934). For the next two years, Ann would appear in a number of "B" pictures until she was dropped by Columbia in 1936. She then went to RKO, where the quality of her films did not improve. She appeared in a series of "B' pictures movies with Gene Raymond, but her career was going nowhere. In 1938 she left RKO and played the tart in Trade Winds (1938), which got her a contract at MGM. She was given the lead in a "B" comedy about a brassy, energetic showgirl not salesgirl--originally intended for Jean Harlow--that wound up becoming a huge hit and spawned a series of sequels that ran until 1947: Maisie (1939). Ann also appeared in such well received features as Brother Orchid (1940), Cry 'Havoc' (1943) and A Letter to Three Wives (1949). After 1950 the roles dried up and Ann turned to television and another hit series, playing the meddlesome Susie in the 1953 series Private Secretary (1953). The series was canceled in 1957 and Ann came back in The Ann Sothern Show (1958), which ran from 1958 to 1961. In 1965, she would be the voice of the 1928 Porter in the camp classic My Mother the Car (1965). While the 1970s and 1980s were relatively quiet for Ann, she would be nominated for an Academy Award for her role as the neighbor of Lillian Gish and Bette Davis in The Whales of August (1987).- Actor
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"Straight Shooting" -- whether skeet shooting, or portraying Eliot Ness -- Robert Stack always told it like it was, and shot straight. Born in Los Angeles, California, the younger son of James Langford Stack (1860-1928), the owner of an advertising agency, and Mary Elizabeth Modini Wood (1891-1975), he was originally named Charles Langford Modini Stack at birth by his mother but his father soon changed the name to Robert Langford Stack. (The name Robert reportedly referred to no one in particular.) His elder brother and only sibling was James Langford Stack (1916-2006).
His parents had divorced when he was one-year-old, and his mother took him to Europe when he was three. He did not learn to speak English until he was six years old. His brother, James Langford Stack Jr., stayed in the United States with their father. Young Robert spoke fluent Italian and French, but had to learn English when they returned to Los Angeles. His mother and father remarried in 1928. Robert took drama courses at USC. He was not interested in team sports, so he took up skeet shooting. In 1935, he came in second in the National Skeet Shooting Championship (held in Cleveland) and, in 1936, his 5-man team broke the standing record at the National Skeet Championships (held in St. Louis).
Stack arrived at Universal City Studios in 1939, when the movie studio (once riding high on the successes of movies such as Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931)) was in financial trouble, and looking for a superstar. That superstar was Deanna Durbin (acquired from MGM), and Stack made his screen debut as her lover in First Love (1939). At first, he did not want to listen to the makeup man who had told him, "no blond has ever made it as a leading man", and insisted on dyeing his hair black and uncurling it. That makeup man was genius and Oscar winner, Jack P. Pierce (who had done all the monsters for Universal), and Stack became a matinee idol, overnight. After two more movies, he was teamed with Durbin again, in Nice Girl? (1941). he was now a bona-fide star, but Universal was still only paying him $150 a week. For the next 10 years, Stack did Westerns, war movies and romantic comedies.
Stack had fond memories for Bullfighter and the Lady (1951), a movie produced by his friend, John Wayne, which meant 12 weeks filming in sunny Mexico. The movie had a great script; unfortunately, two bullfighters were gored while filming. There were several weeks of delays, they could not get a crew or a sound stage, until they realized that, in Mexico, it is necessary to bribe the local union; some money was passed and filming started, immediately. There were wild times, and lots of tequila. Robert became a local legend; when some Mexicans asked him what he did in the War, Robert said: "I taught machine gun." The rumor spread: "Roberto teaches chingas!" (that's Spanish for "hookers"). In 1952, he made movie history (much like Al Jolson had done in 1927, being in the first "talkie") -- he starred in Bwana Devil (1952), the first 3-D movie. This gave startling effects to the story, which was based on real-life lion attacks in Africa.
Stack attended the premiere, and recalled people's reactions to the 3-D lion scenes: "People in the audience jumped out of their seats, some even fainted." The movie broke box office records, and immediately started the demand to film more movies in 3-D (such as House of Wax (1953)). Around 1955, Robert (Hollywood's most eligible bachelor) was introduced to Rosemarie Bowe, by mutual agent Bill Shiffrin. Rosemarie had been under contract to MGM and Columbia, making such movies as Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) and The Golden Mistress (1954). The couple wed two years later and had two children: Elizabeth Stack and Charles Stack. The former perennial bachelor found out he liked being married and being a father. His onscreen fame had grown and, for Written on the Wind (1956), he received an Academy Award nomination. Unfortunately, this did not sit well with 20th-Century Fox, which had him under contract, and had lent him to Universal for this picture. His contract with Fox came to an end. Stack made the transition to the new medium that was sweeping the country: television. He delivered breakout performances in his signature role as T-man (Treasury agent) Eliot Ness on The Untouchables (1959) which, after the pilot, ran for four seasons (118 episodes). And there was also the television movie, The Scarface Mob (1959).
There were some funny behind-the-scenes anecdotes, such as this one: there is no scene which stood out more as the most potentially evil, and risky in terms of audience acceptance, as the "bacio di morte" ("kiss of death"), the Sicilian gesture whenever a Capo (Neville Brand) kissed a Mafia soldier (Frank DeKova) to send him out as an executioner. The two actors were nervous enough about this scene (two guys had never kissed on television before), but then some crewman decided to be a prankster and told each star, in private, just before filming, "look out -- your co-star likes kissing guys" (a complete deception, of course). There were some unfortunate anecdotes: Joseph Wiseman was a fine actor, but trained to work on the New York stage with props; he was not accustomed to real Hollywood sets. In a 1960 episode of "The Untouchables", Stack was supposed to take an axe and smash up a brewery. He hit a real pipe, the axe ricocheted off the metal, and cut through his Achilles tendon. "I never felt so sorry for anyone in my life", Stack commented. They wrote a role for Wiseman as a crippled, renegade chemist a few weeks later in "The Antidote", which Stack noted, "was one of our half-dozen top shows". Stack went on to do television series, such as The Name of the Game (1968) alternating lead with Gene Barry and Anthony Franciosa, then later Most Wanted (1976), and he pleasantly surprised everyone with his flair for comedies in movies like 1941 (1979) and Airplane! (1980).
Stack hosted Unsolved Mysteries (1987) and did more zany humor in Caddyshack II (1988), Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996) and BASEketball (1998). He also provided the voice of the character Ultra Magnus in The Transformers: The Movie (1986). He portrayed the no-nonsense G-man Ness again in The Return of Eliot Ness (1991). Stack was being treated for prostate cancer when he died at age 84 on May 14, 2003 at his home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, after suffering a heart attack.- Rosemarie Bowe frequently turned heads with her flashing turquoise eyes, sultry mane of black hair and sparkling personality. Effortlessly diverting attention from the scenic location spots of her mid-'50s film adventures and dramas, her stroll before the cameras was short--it was over within a few years.
The Montana-born beauty was the daughter of a building contractor, Dennis Bowe, and his wife Ruby. She and her siblings (Clara and Sydney) were raised in Tacoma, Washington, where Rosemarie first developed an interest in the arts. Dancing and appearing in operetta-styled musicals at her high school in Tacoma, she graduated and attended Tacoma Community College for one semester before being drawn to modeling. Finding work as a photographer's model and fashion cover girl in the Seattle area, she was the winner of pageant titles, including "Miss Tacoma", and was an official entrant in the "Miss Washington" contest. Eventually she relocated to Los Angeles, where she ultimately made the cover of Life magazine, among others.
Rosemarie broke into films in the early 1950s, primarily as an extra (model, swimmer) in MGM musicals. Within a few years she had moved into TV episodic work and earned a co-starring role in the voodoo adventure The Golden Mistress (1954) which was written and directed by Abner Biberman under the pseudonym Joel Judge (he also had a supporting role as her father). The film, starring Shirley Temple's ex, John Agar, was obvious hokum but did take the time to emphasize its lovely newcomer. Rosemarie was quite stunning as a jungle captive and signed on to play a few other decorative, damsel-in-distress roles.
Nothing-special movies more or less came and went but did little to test her dramatic mettle; they were, however, providing the requisite building ground for her to move up the Hollywood ranks. The Adventures of Hajji Baba (1954) had Rosemarie playing a slave girl in support of dashing young commoner John Derek and spirited princess Elaine Stewart. In the noirish The Big Bluff (1955), Rosemarie provided a harder edge as a married nightclub singer dallying on the side with lothario John Bromfield who, in turn, is making a play for the affections of wealthy but terminally ill widow Martha Vickers. The View from Pompey's Head (1955) focused more on star Dana Wynter, a scene-stealing Marjorie Rambeau and its Southern-bred racism theme than on Rosemarie's secondary role. Her last leading film assignment was in the preachy western The Peacemaker (1956) as a benevolent lady who tries to help gunfighter-turned-minister James Mitchell (who was then better known for his dancing skills in musicals) tame a corrupt town.
Rosemarie ended her career after marrying Robert Stack, 13 years her senior, on January 23, 1956. The couple eventually became the parents of a daughter (Elizabeth) and son (Charles). Sharing a love with her husband for the outdoors, especially sailing and horseback riding, Rosemarie enjoyed life as a Hollywood celebrity and socialite and expressed no regrets in ending her career. In October of 1969 she survived a serious automobile accident in Sacramento that killed her husband's cousin and left her with injuries requiring plastic surgery. Occasionally she came out of her self-imposed retirement to appear on TV, usually in vehicles starring her husband, such as the mini-movie Murder on Flight 502 (1975).
Her beloved husband, Robert Stack, died in 2003 after 47 years of marriage. Rosemarie passed away many years later on January 20, 2019, at age 86. - Actress
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One of Hollywood's more talented and watchable stars on screen was sullen and thin 50s actress Jan Sterling who didn't quite reach the top echelon of stardom but certainly ensured audiences of a real good time with her sexy pout and flashy style in soaps, film noir and saucy comedy.
Jan was born Jane Sterling Adriance in Manhattan in 1921 to a well-to-do family. Her father was a prominent advertising executive who divorced her mother when the girl was only eight years old. Her mother remarried (to an oilman) when Jan was still a youngster and the family relocated abroad where Jan was schooled by private tutors in Brazil, then later in London and Paris.
Although both sets of parents disapproved, Jan, who by this time possessed a strong British accent, set her sites on acting and was eventually enrolled in Fay Compton's dramatic school in London. A strong-minded young lady with a heartfelt passion for the arts, she returned to Manhattan to conquer Broadway and by the age of 17 had found her first ingénue role in "Bachelor Born," playing (naturally) a young British lady. Over the next 11 years, Jan dominated Broadway as proper British ladies while billing herself as "Jane Adrian."
One of her highlights was working with the legendary Ruth Gordon in 1942 in Gordon's first play entitled "Over 21." As Billie Dawn in the Chicago company of "Born Yesterday," Jan bowled over the critics and seemed almost a shoo-in to do the 1950 film version but she lost out in the end to Judy Holliday. The ash-blonde broke quickly into films supporting Oscar-winning Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda (1948) in a key, emotional role.
To her absolute delight, she left the docile, ladylike image behind her and was allowed to dig her nails into a florid array of cheap floozies, hard-bitten dames, and lethal schemers and stood out well with 'bad girl' parts in the films Caged (1950), Ace in the Hole (1951), Flesh and Fury (1952), The Human Jungle (1954), and Female on the Beach (1955). In between she occasionally made a nicer, or at least a more sympathetic, impression in the movies Sky Full of Moon (1952) and The High and the Mighty (1954), the latter earning her an Oscar nomination.
Married to and divorced from actor John Merivale in the 1940s, Jan later married gruff film star Paul Douglas in 1950. The couple moved away from the Hollywood scene in Burlington, Vermont. The couple appeared together professionally on occasional TV shows and Douglas revived his "Born Yesterday" Harry Brock role with a stage tour starring Jan in the Billie Dawn part. It and they were a solid hit.
Jan's career slowed down considerably after the sudden death of her 52-year-old second husband in 1959. He suffered a massive heart attack at their Hollywood home. She refocused on stage and TV but at a slower step. Incidental filming occurred on occasion, including support roles in Love in a Goldfish Bowl (1961) and The Incident (1967). She also involved herself in humanitarian causes. In the late 1960s she moved to London, England and in the 1970s, she entered into a strong personal relationship with actor Sam Wanamaker. An isolated film role came her way with a small part in First Monday in October (1981). They never married but stayed together until his death in 1993.
Inactive for nearly two decades, Jan made an appearance at the Cinecon Film Festival in Los Angeles in the fall of 2001, still charming audiences at the age of 80. On 26 March 2004, she passed away at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. She was 82.- 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.- Actress
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A brash, sharp-tongued, incorrigible actress/singer who led a six decade career that contained many highs and lows, veteran Elaine Stritch's raucous six-decade career certainly lived up well to the Stephen Sondheim song lyrics "I'm Still Here." A popular, magnetic performer, she stole so many moments on stage she could have been convicted of grand larceny This tough old bird approached her octogenarian years with still-shapely legs, a puffy blonde hairdo, a deep, whiskey voice and enough sardonic bluster and bravado to convince anyone that she would be around forever.
The Detroit-born (February 2, 1925) Elaine Stritch was the daughter of a B.F. Goodrich executive, of Irish/Welsh heritage, and the youngest of three sisters. Educated locally at Sacred Heart Convent and Duschesne Residence Finishing School, she prepared for the stage at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School where fellow "school mates" included Marlon Brando. She made her first appearance at the New School as a tiger and a cow in a 1944 children's production entitled "Babino," then followed it the following year with the part of a parlor maid in "The Private Life of the Master Race."
Elaine made it to Broadway in October 1946 as "Pamela Brewster" in "Loco" at the Biltmore Theatre. Taking over the part of "Miss Crowder" in "Made in Heaven" after that, she finished off the decade appearing in such theatre productions as "Three Indelicate Ladies," "The Little Foxes" (as Regina), the revue "Angel in the Wings" and "Yes M'Lord."
From the 1950's on, Elaine would become the toast of both Broadway and (later) London's West End, earning award-worthy acclaim on both continents over the years. Starting with a tour of "Pal Joey" (as Melba) in 1952, she followed this success with such shows as "Call Me Madam" (as Sally); "On Your Toes" (as Peggy); "Bus Stop" (Tony nom: as waitress Grace), "The Sin of Pat Muldoon" (as Gertrude); "Goldilocks" (as Maggie); "Sail Away!" (Tony nom, and also London debut as Mimi); "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (as Martha); "The King and I" (as Anna); "The Grass Harp" (as Babylove); "Wonderful Town" (as Ruth); "Private Lives" (as Amanda); "Mame" (as Vera, then Mame); "Company" (Tony-nom: as Joanne); "Small Craft Warnings" (as Leona); "The Gingerbread Lady" (as Evy); "Show Boat" (Drama Desk Award: as Parthy); and "A Delcate Balance" (Tony-nom, Drama Desk Award: as Claire). Through sheer personality alone, her cacophonous singing voice miraculously took classic songs from, among others, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart to Noël Coward and Stephen Sondheim and put her own indelibly raucous stamp on them.
Oddly, Elaine never made the same kind of impact on film. Nevertheless, she appeared in an armful of supports over the years, growing increasingly abrasive, in such movies as The Scarlet Hour (1956), Three Violent People (1956), A Farewell to Arms (1957), The Perfect Furlough (1958), Kiss Her Goodbye (1959), Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965), Too Many Thieves (1966), The Sidelong Glances of a Pigeon Kicker (1970), The Spiral Staircase (1975), Providence (1977), September (1987), Cocoon: The Return (1988), Cadillac Man (1990), Out to Sea (1997), Krippendorf's Tribe (1998), Screwed (2000), Small Time Crooks (2000); Autumn in New York (2000), Monster-in-Law (2005), ParaNorman (2012) and River of Fundament (2014)
The actress fared somewhat better on early TV. She appeared as one of the Paynes in the early Dumont family comedy series The Growing Paynes (1948), and made appearances on several anthology series ("Kraft Theatre," "Goodyear Playhouse," "The Alcoa Hour," "The Dupont Show of the Month"). A few guest spots also decorated her small screen resume, including "Mister Peepers," "Adventures in Paradise" and "Wagon Train". In the 60's, Elaine returned to the series format, but only enjoyed single season life on three: My Sister Eileen (1960), as Ruth Sherwood; the acclaimed The Trials of O'Brien (1965) as lawyer Peter Falk's secretary "Miss G."; and as Ellen Burstyn's derisive mother on The Ellen Burstyn Show (1986).
In 1973, Elaine married English actor John Bay and moved to London. While there she appeared in a number of plays/musicals and then played an American authoress in the British comedy series Two's Company (1975) co-starring Donald Sinden as the butler. When she returned to America in the early 80's, she returned alone.
At age 76, a razor-sharp Elaine captivated audiences in a candid one woman musical stage memoir that would win her the Tony, Drama Desk, Obie, Outer Circle Critics and New York Drama Critics awards. Elaine Stritch at Liberty (2002) show also chronicled her notorious private life, combative nature, which included a long bout with the bottle (to curb her stage fright), and a destructive relationship with fellow alcoholic Gig Young. Add to that a fair share of Hollywood gossip all cleverly packaged up with raw wit and show-stopping patter songs and you had quintessential Elaine Stritch. Truly one of a kind, she would eventually be inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1995.
Other memorable TV appearances included her Aunt Polly in the mini-series Pollyanna (1973); a 1984 continuing role on the daytime soaper The Edge of Night (1956); the role of Ouisar in the TV movie version of Steel Magnolias (1990); and three Emmy Award-winning portrayals -- as a guest on "Law & Order," for the 2004 TV documentary of her one-woman triumph, and for a recurring character on the hit sitcom 30 Rock (2006).
A diabetic, it took stomach cancer to finally slow this woman down at the end, dying at age 89 on July 17, 2014, at her Michigan home.- Actor
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One of America's most heard men back in the day with thousands of radio programs to his credit and the possessor of one of the most prominent male voices of that medium's war-era "Golden Age," veteran actor Les Tremayne was considered to have the third most distinctive tones on the airwaves, only behind Bing Crosby and Franklin D. Roosevelt!
Born Lester Tremayne Henning in London, England, on April 16, 1913, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois when the boy was only four. Wanting to bury his British accent growing up in the States, Tremayne took an an eager interest in community theatre. He began his professional career as a dancer in vaudeville, supplementing his income on the side as a barker in various amusement parks.
Tremayne received his first radio job in Chicago when he was 17 years old. While gaining experience, he attended Northwestern University where he studied Greek drama and also took up anthropology at Columbia University and UCLA. During the 1930s and 1940s, Tremayne was usually heard in more than one show per week. Growing in leaps and bounds as a voice that could handle many types, ages and accents, his first big break occurred in 1934 as the leading man on the soap drama "The Romance of Helen Trent." He then replaced actor Don Ameche as the leading man on the popular weekly radio drama "The First Nighter," a stint that lasted six years. During that time, his more popular series work included that of super-sleuth Nick Charles in "The Adventures of the Thin Man." He also became the announcer on "The Bob Crosby Show."
Searching for bigger opportunities, Tremayne transplanted himself to both Los Angeles New York in 1943, and continued to find radio work as the title role in "The Falcon," played detective Pat Abbott in "The Abbott Mysteries," appeared on Bob Crosby's programs "The Old Gold Show" and "The Bob Crosby Show," and co-starred as the straight man alongside "The Great One" on "The Jackie Gleason/Les Tremayne Show" when Crosby enlisted for WWII service. Other shows would include a breakfast talk format, "The Tremaynes," with second wife Alice Reinheart, as well as the programs "Cavalcade of America," "Ford Theatre," "Inner Sanctum Mysteries," "Kraft Music Hall," "Lux Radio Theatre" and "The Whistle," among so many others.
In the 1950s, Tremayne took on films and the new medium of TV. Typically playing military types, erudite professionals, shifty execs and errant husbands, his more officious roles included playing a police commission chief in The Racket (1951); a colonel in Francis Goes to West Point (1952); a lawyer in Susan Slept Here (1954); a senator in A Man Called Peter (1955) and another colonel in The Perfect Furlough (1958). Best remembered for his characters in cult 1950s sci-fiers, he co-starred or was featured in The War of the Worlds (1953), The Monolith Monsters (1957), The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959) and The Angry Red Planet (1959). His mellifluous voice was also utilized in films (Forbidden Planet (1956)), in film trailers (The Iron Petticoat (1956)) and for narrating documentaries (Adventures in the Red Sea (1951)).
On TV, Tremayne earned frequent appearances on such established programs as "The Danny Thomas Show," "Mr. Adams and Eve," "The Thin Man," "Bachelor Father," "77 Sunset Strip," "The Jack Benny Program," "The Rifleman," "State Trooper," "M Squad," "Thriller," "Perry Mason," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Checkmate" and "The Andy Griffith Show." He also had a recurring TV role as Major Stone on The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin (1954) and co-starred as Inspector Richard Queen, the father of the famed mystery writer (played by George Nader on the series The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen (1958).
A flurry of unworthy low-budget films came Tremayne's way in later years including Shootout at Big Sag (1962), King Kong vs. Godzilla (1963), The Slime People (1963), Creature of Destruction (1968), Strawberries Need Rain (1971) and Fangs (1974). He also found work with the CBS Mystery Radio Theatre, and also provided voices for "Mr. Magoo," "Johnny Quest," "The Smurfs," "Go-Bots," "Scooby Doo" and "Rikki Tiki Tavi."
Inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1995, Tremayne would take his final bow in the comedy film horror The Naked Monster (2005) which featured several other cult actors of '50s sci-fi/horror including Kenneth Tobey, John Agar, Robert Clarke, Robert Cornthwaite, Jeanne Carmen, Lori Nelson, Ann Robinson and Gloria Talbott.
Tremayne died of heart failure in Santa Monica, California, on December 19, 2003, at the age of 90, and was survived by his fourth wife, Joan Hertz.- Actor
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While in Vietnam entertaining troops with Bob Hope and others touring with the USO, Thomas Tully contracted a filarial worm, similar to the worm which can lead to elephantiasis. After returning to the U.S. his condition was diagnosed after a blood clot in a major leg vein cut off circulation so severely his left leg was amputated very close to the hip. This was circa 1971. The amputation was performed in Laguna Beach, California, close to his home in San Juan Capistrano. Complications to this surgery caused pleuritis, deafness and serious debilitation. His death was due, in great part, to these serious medical conditions. He should be remembered as a true patriot who sacrificed his life to entertain our troops during the Vietnam War.- Actor
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Already trained in dance and theater, he quit school at age 13 to study music and painting. By 19 he was a professional ballroom dancer in New York, and by his mid-twenties he was performing in musicals, dramas on Broadway and in London, and in silent movies. His first real success in film came in middle age as the classy villain Waldo Lydecker in Laura (1944), followed by the part of Elliott Templeton in The Razor's Edge (1946) - both of which won him Oscar nominations. His priggish Mr. Belvedere in a series of films was supposedly not far removed from his fastidious, finicky, fussy, abrasive and condescending real-life persona. He was inseparable from his overbearing mother Maybelle, with whom he lived until her death at 91, six years before his own death. The recent success of Titanic (1997) created brief interest due his having appeared with Barbara Stanwyck in the 1953 version of the story. He is interred at Abbey of the Psalms, Hollywood Memorial Cemetery (now known as Hollywood Forever).- Actor
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Henry Wilcoxon was given the lead role of Marc Antony in Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra (1934). It would prove to be the beginning of a long relationship with DeMille he would become a familiar DeMille character actor and DeMille's associate producer in the later years of DeMille's career. However, after DeMille died, he worked sporadically and accepted minor acting roles.- Actress
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Esther Jane Williams was born on August 8, 1921 in Inglewood, California. Her youth was spent as a teenage swimming champion and she won three United States National championships. She eventually was spotted by a MGM talent scout while working in a Los Angeles department store. She made her film debut with MGM in an "Andy Hardy" picture called Andy Hardy's Double Life (1942). She became Mickey Rooney's love interest in the movie, and her character was called Sheila Brooks. Following this movie, stardom was not far away. MGM created a special sub-genre for her known as "Aqua Musicals". Her first swimming role was in Bathing Beauty (1944). This was a simple movie compared to her later big splashes such as Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), co-starring Victor Mature and Walter Pidgeon. Esther Williams was often called "America's Mermaid", as it appeared that she could stay underwater forever!
Following the decline of the once lucrative MGM aqua musical, she attempted dramatic roles. The Unguarded Moment (1956), is one example of this new found dramatic confidence. It co-starred George Nader and John Saxon. Also, The Big Show (1961), co-starring Cliff Robertson and Robert Vaughn was another dramatic role. Overall, Esther's acting skills were limited and, as a musical star in the audience's eyes, she was unsuccessful. She retired from the movie industry in the 1960s, returning as a star guest in That's Entertainment! III (1994) discussing her appearance in MGM films. She certainly is recognized today for bringing enjoyment, escapism and entertainment on the big screen and has also a highly successful business in swimwear. Occasional television work discussing her contribution to the film industry is a treat for her fans from time to time.
Esther Williams died at age 91 in her sleep on June 6, 2013 in her home in Los Angeles, California.