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- "Kewpie" Ross was an obese comedian who appeared in silent two-reel slapstick comedies with two other heavyweights, Frank Alexander and Hilliard Karr, in F.B.O.'s low-budget "Ton of Fun" series at the end of the silent era. The troika of very fat comedians, each of whom topped the scale at 300 lbs (Alexander weighed 350 at the height of his fame), made their debut as a comedy team in 1925's Tailoring (1925), with Alexander billed as "Tiny Alexander" (he would later take on the moniker "Fatty" for the series) and Karr as "Fat Karr".
Produced by 'Joe Rock', the shorts were made by the Poverty Row studio Standard Photoplay Co. and released by Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Office (F.B.O.), the precursor to R.K.O Radio Pictures. The series was made, in those far-less politically correct, less health-conscious times, to serve as part of the bill for budget-conscious theaters catering to the masses in the days when the movies were king, and television still a gleam in the eyes and imaginations of inventors and radio moguls.
Advertized by F.B.O. as the "three fattest men on the screen, Kewpie romped across the screen with fellow fat men Fatty Alexander and Fat Karr in 34 shorts, many with the adjective "Heavy" in the title (The Heavy Parade (1926), Heavy Fullbacks (1926), Heavy Infants (1928) and the strangely named Heavyation (1926)). Also billed as "The Three Fatties", the "Ton of Fun" team offered the most anarchic comedy per pound available at the time or after. In the series entry Three of a Kind (1926), The Three Fatties play entertainers at a nightclub/restaurant. In short order, a mêlée breaks out between the audience and A Ton of Fun, with the expected result of tables overturned and dishes smashed.
In another entry, Heavy Love (1926), they portray three of the most inept carpenters who ever drove a nail through a board, let alone a skull. The Three Fatties get themselves a job working for a young lady (Lois Boyd) and end up building and subsequently destroying the most bizarre house ever seen.
After making the last "Ton of Fun" comedy in 1928, A Joyful Day (1928), "Kewpie" Ross retired from the scene. - The venerable British stage and film actor A.E. Matthews was born Alfred Edward Matthews on November 22, 1869 in Bridlington, East Riding of Yorkshire, England. The actor nicknamed "Matty" established himself on the British and American stage and in British films, taking up the craft after working as a clerk in a London bookstore. He said that after he learned that the great actor Sir Henry Irving (the first thespian to be knighted) had worked at the store, and used the very same desk he did, he decided to dedicate his life to the theatre.
The former bookseller started at the Princess Theatre as a "call boy," the factotum who calls the actors to the stage. Eventually, he was given acting roles, and appeared on stage with such greats as Ellen Terry (the aunt of Sir John Gielgud and Sir Gerald du Maurier. Matty made his Broadway debut on August 8, 1910 at the Garrick Theatre, in "Love Among the Lions." Later that year he appeared as Algernon Moncrieff in a production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) at the Lyceum Theatre. He did not appear again on The Great White Way until 1921, when he played Jerry in the comedy Peg o' My Heart (1922) opposite the legendary American stage actress Laurette Taylor. Later that year he played the eponymous lead in Bulldog Drummond (1929).
A.E. Matthews appeared on Broadway an additional eight times in the 1920s and appeared in seven Broadway productions in the 1930s. Of his appearance in W. Somerset Maugham' comedy "The Breadwinner" in 1931, "Time Magazine" credited his acting with contributing to the success of the comedy, which had problems in its third Act and was described by the "Time" reviewer as "simply a bag of parlour tricks performed by dialog." The reviewer praised "gentle, toothy Mr. Matthews, who somehow suggests the kind old water rat in The Wind in the Willows."
Matty's last appearance On Broadway was in 1949, in William Douglas-Home's comedy "Yes, M'Lord," with a cast that featured a young Elaine Stritch. He appeared in numerous roles on the British stage.
He made his film debut in 1916, in the silent comedy Wanted: A Widow (1916). He appeared in two more flicks in 1916, one in 1918, and two more silent films in 1918 before devoting himself to stage-work. He did not make his talking picture debut until 1934, when he supported George Arliss in The Iron Duke (1934), which also featured Emlyn Williams. He made one more movie in the 1930s, the backstage drama Men Are Not Gods (1936) (1936) which featured a young Rex Harrison. His film career began in earnest in 1941, when he appeared in Anthony Asquith's Quiet Wedding (1941), the propaganda film This England (1941) (again with Emlyn Williams), and Leslie Howard's "'Pimpernel' Smith (1941)_. He appeared in another 41 movies from 1942 to 1960, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), _Million Pound Note, the (1956), The Ship Was Loaded (1957), and Around the World in 80 Days (1956).
A.E. Matthews died on July 25, 1960. He was 90. - Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
- Director
Writer-director Abraham Lincoln Polonsky, one of the most prominent victims of the Hollywood blacklisting of communists and social progressives in the post-World War II period, was born on December 5, 1910, in New York, New York. An unreconstructed Marxist, Polonsky never hid his membership in the Communist Party. (Indeed, it was known by the federal government during World War II, when he was a member of the O.S.S. working in France with the Resistance, given credence to the charge that the House Un-American Activities Committee wasn't interested so much in "ferreting out" communists and fellow-travelers as in making progressives of the F.D.R. coalition publicly repudiate their beliefs in a form of public penance.) After being named by former fellow O.S.S. member Sterling Hayden, Polonsky himself was arraigned before HUAC in 1951. After defying the committee by refusing to name names, he was blacklisted for 17 years by the U.S. film industry.
As director and screenwriter, Polonsky was an "auteur" of three of the great film noirs made in the last century: Body and Soul (1947) (screenplay; directed by fellow CPUSA member Robert Rossen, who kept his career by "naming names"), Force of Evil (1948) (which he wrote and directed), and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) (which he wrote using a front).
Polonsky studied English at City College of New York (CCNY) and, after briefly shipping out as a merchant seaman, went to Columbia Law School. Polonsky's father wanted him to have a profession, and he preferred the law over medicine. The young Polonsky had wanted to be a writer, and he taught English at CCNY while matriculating at Columbia Law, but the law was his first career. After graduation from Columbia Law, he became a practicing attorney, which ironically, led to his career in screenwriting.
Gertrude Berg, the creative force behind the popular radio show "The Goldbergs" (which later made the transition to TV), was a client of his firm. Needing background for an episode that would feature the machinations of the law, Polonsky was assigned to Berg as an expert. Berg was so impressed when Polonsky dictated a scene to his secretary, she hired him as one of her writers. Thus, in 1937, by a serendipitous route charted originally by his father, who wanted his son to be a professional, not a writer, Polonsky was on his way to becoming a hot, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and writer-director.
Polonsky eventually left Berg and became a labor organizer. In 1939, after organizing autoworkers at a General Motors plant near his home in Briarcliff, New York, he became the educational director of the Congress of Industrial Organization, the major labor federation for skilled workers, in upstate New York. While working as a labor organizer, Polonsky wrote his first novel, "The Discoverers", a novel dealing with New York City bohemians, radicals, and frustrated intellectuals. The book was optioned by a publisher that unfortunately went out of business; it remains unpublished to this day. However, he began to thrive as a novelist: Simon and Schuster published a novel he co-wrote, "The Goose Is Cooked," in 1942, and Little Brown published his sea-adventure story "The Enemy Sea," which originally had been serialized in "Colliers Magazine".
Paramount became interested in Polonsky and offered him a contract. However, as a dedicated anti-Nazi, Polonsky was determined to serve in the war despite being turned down for military service due to poor eyesight. Recruited by the O.S.S. (likely because of his communist background; it was said that during World War II, communists made the best secret agents due to their propensity for secrecy and their dedication to their ideology). He signed a contract with Paramount guaranteeing him a job after the war, and then was shipped off to London before serving in France as a liaison with the French underground.
Back from World War II, Polonsky alienated Paramount's head writer when he complained that his nominal boss had kept him waiting too long for their initial meeting. The peeved head writer gave him the Marlene Dietrich potboiler Golden Earrings (1947) as his first screenwriting assignment, and although he received a screen credit, he claimed that nothing he wrote made it to the screen. He quit Paramount to take a job with John Garfield's Enterprise Productions, which had a collectivist philosophy akin to the old Group Theater on Broadway, of which the former Julius Garfinkle (Garfield) had been a member. Garfield was a leftist, though not a member of the Communist Party, though he did employ director Robert Rossen, who was a member of CPUSA, as was Polonsky, who had joined during the Depression.
Working from Polonsky's script, Rossen shot the classic boxing drama Body and Soul (1947). Polonsky actually was allowed on the set (not a common occurrence for the film industry) and actively gave Rossen advice. Some critics see Polonsky as a "co-director," a claim Polonsky rejected as "no one," he said, "co-directs a Robert Rossen Picture." However, in the collectivist atmosphere of the studio, he was able to prevail over Rossen's conception of a "happy ending," ensuring that his own ending was part of the picture. Polonsky won an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for the film that was hailed as a classic by cineastes not long after its release. Garfield encouraged Polonsky to become a director, a development the screenwriter relished as it would give him more control over his screenplay and enable him to bring his vision to the screen just as he saw it. Adapting a 1940 crime novel "Tucker's People," Polonsky wrote and directed Force of Evil (1948), which has been hailed as the greatest low-budget film noir ever.
By the time production had wrapped, Enterprise had gone bankrupt, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was impressed enough to pick up the picture, though its hard-hitting indictment of big business, capitalism and political corruption was not Louis B. Mayer's cup of tea. MGM essentially dumped the picture as the bottom half of a double bill released for the Christmas season. This classic noir, with its indictment of capitalist society, was not exactly Christmas fare, and as Turner Classic Movies' Robert Osborne has said, it was quickly forgotten until rediscovered in the early 1960s. It has been considered a classic for at least a generation and had a big influence on Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), whose equation of crime with business, and business with criminal behavior had been aired 24 years before in Polonsky's debut. In a huge loss to American cinema, Polonsky's debut was to be his last directorial effort for 20 years.
Both Body and Soul (1947) and Force of Evil (1948) are about the deleterious effects of materialism on the soul, as both protagonists (both played by John Garfield operating at the peak of his talent) face the loss of their soul due to the temptation of big money. Indeed, it is easy to see why conservatives would be offended by Force of Evil (1948) as it arguably is the most radical film to have come out of mainstream Hollywood, and definitely is informed by Marxism.
Blacklisted after his uncooperative appearance before HUAC in April 1951, Polonsky did not get a chance to direct another film until 1968, when he helmed the production of the revisionist Western Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), which he turned into an indictment of genocide. Although he wrote screenplays and marketed them through fronts (most famously, with the indictment of racism Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), directed by Robert Wise, it wasn't until 1968 that he was credited on a film, for the screenplay for Don Siegel's exegesis of police corruption, Madigan (1968). After the release of the well-reviewed "Willie Boy," Polonsky enter4ed into "Fiddler on the Roof" territory and helmed the more light-hearted Romance of a Horsethief (1971). After that, he was told by his physician that his heart could not take the strain of movie directing, so he retired from that part of his work, though he continued to write screenplays until the end of his life.
After the tide of public opinion turned against the HUAC informers after Victor Navasky's 1980 history "Naming Names," Polonsky was rediscovered by scholars of the cinema. However, he proved a frustrating subject to those that wanted to ferret out the films that had been produced from his fronted-work screenplays. Similarly to his stand 40 years earlier, when he had refused to "name names," Polonsky refused to cite the pictures he had ghostwritten or to name the fronts he had used for his fronted screenplays during the days of the blacklist. He said he had given the men his word that he would not betray their confidence, and indeed, he refused to cite his anonymous work as he felt it would have gone back on his pledge to the men who had helped him through a tough period, as it would have resulted in them being denied credit for the work. Polonsky had bargained with them in good faith, and a man of principle, he refused to go back on his pledge to them.
An unrepentant Marxist until his death, Polonsky publicly objected when director Irwin Winkler sanitized his script for Guilty by Suspicion (1991) to make the character played by Robert De Niro a liberal rather than a communist. He also was prominent in objecting to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences awarding an honorary Academy Award to director Elia Kazan, who was the most prominent of the people who "named names" before HUAC.
Abraham Polonsky died of a heart-attack in Beverly Hills, California, on October 26, 1999, convinced that he had been exonerated by history. As the auteur of three classic films that will live on in cinema history, he was right.- Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who represented Harlem in the U.S. Congress from 1945 through 1971, was the first modern African American politician and the first Black Congressman to exercise real power in the halls of Washington, D.C. He succeeded his father as the pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church and parlayed the pulpit into a political career. Yet, after scaling the summit of power, Powell lost it all, seemingly fatigued by the failure of liberalism to deliver on providing the American Dream to all Americans, regardless of color, and tripped up by his own moral shortcomings.
Due to seniority, Powell eventually rose in Congress and in 1961, became chairman of the Education & Labor Committee, one of the critical committees in the House of Representatives. From this post, Powell was instrumental in passing legislation introduced by Presidents John F. Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, including such watershed programs as Medicare and Medicaid. The social programs that were part of Johnson's vision of "The Great Society" were shepherded by Powell through his committee.
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and Education & Labor Committee set records in passing legislation as Johnson set out not only to equal but surpass Roosevelt and the New Deal by enacting liberal, progressive laws to help the common people in general and African Americans in particular. However, L.B.J. also sowed the seeds of the cancer that would destroy his presidency and undermine liberalism: The Vietnam War. Liberalism, which seemed so remarkably ascendant in the period of 1964-66, would be swamped at the polls in 1968 after suffering a setback during the by-election of 1966. As the inner-cities burned on TV, white society began to evince a severe backlash against African Americans.
Powell's absences from committee hearings became legion. It could be seen as symbolic of the anomie that was afflicting the African American community, that soon began afflicting liberalism in general, as a philosophy and political movement. It was if liberalism set off a cycle of violence both at home, in the ghettos, and abroad, in Vietnam.
Soon, Adam Clayton Powell seemed to lose interest. He became careless. Earlier, as a young man, his commitment to the church had been questioned. Some felt that he had just used the pulpit as a vehicle to obtain social position. Likewise, Powell's commitment to social progress began to be questioned.
In a bizarre development that showed Powell was losing his political as well as moral judgment, he lost a slander lawsuit. The Congressman from Harlem refused to pay the judgment against him, which made him subject to arrest. Powell curtailed trips to New York to avoid being incarcerated, and began spending more time in Florida and Bimini, where he lived ostentatiously. His failure to be present in Congress for roll-call votes became a scandal of its own. While petty corruption of the kind practiced by Powell had long been a hallmark of Congressmen and Senators (U.S. Senator Tom Dodd was censured in June 1967 for misusing campaign funds) for the chairman of one of the most powerful committees in Congress to be absent regularly could not be tolerated.
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. won his 11th bid for reelection to Congress in 1966, but when he went to take the oath of office in January 1967, Speaker of the House refused to administer it to him. He was excluded from the chamber, and the House Democratic Caucus ousted Powell as chair of the Education & Labor Committee due to allegations of corruption.
The House of Representatives refused to let him take his seat until the completion of an investigation by a Special Committee empowered by the Judiciary Committee. After the Select Committee reported its findings, in March of 1967 the House voted 307 to 116 to censure Powell and declare his seat vacant. He also was fined $40,000.
Always a fighter, Powell and 13 of his constituents filed a federal lawsuit against the Speaker and other House officials. In his lawsuit, Powell claimed that his expulsion was unconstitutional as the Constitution mandated a two-thirds vote to expel a member of a Congressional body, a bar the House had failed to meet. In the meantime, Powell ran for his vacated seat in a special election held in April, and won. He did not retake his seat, but continued his legal battle through the federal courts. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 1969, in the case of Powell v. McCormack, that the expulsion was unconstitutional, agreeing with Powell's argument that it took a two-thirds vote to exclude a member of Congress. Thus, Powell was able to retake his seat, but he had lost his seniority and his political power.
After being re-seated in Congress, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. again was criticized for absenteeism, and in the June 1970 Democratic primary, he was defeated by Charles Rangel. Powell vowed to get on the ballot as an independent for the November election, but did not. Resigning as the minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, he moved to Bimini, where he lived until April 1972, when he was hospitalized in Miami. He died on April 4, 1972 from acute prostatitis. He was 63 years old. - Adela Rogers St. Johns was born Nora Adela Rogers on May 20, 1894 in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of legendary criminal defense attorney Earl Rogers, a brilliant barrister who drank himself to death at an early age. Lionel Barrymore won a Best Actor Oscar playing a mouthpiece based on her father in A Free Soul (1931), which was based on a 1927 novel written by Adela. A story of hers was adapted into another talkie classic, What Price Hollywood? (1932), the precursor of the 1937's A Star Is Born (1937) and its two remakes.
Earl Rogers, a lawyer whose reputation for winning acquittals in seemingly hopeless cases was so great that another legend of the bar, Clarence Darrow, used his services in a jury tampering case, was a friend of newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. As a nineteen-year-old, the teen-aged Adela became a reporter for "San Francisco Examiner", Hearst's self-heralded "Monarch of the Dailies". As a cub reporter working her way up the ranks, she covered everything from crime and sports to politics and high society.
She quit the newspaper racket in the early part of The Roaring Twenties to became a freelance writer. During the halcyon years of The Jazz Age, she made her living interviewing celebrities for "Photoplay Magazine", the premiere movie rag of its time. She also began publishing short stories in top drawer magazines such as Hearst's "Cosmopolitan" and toiled in the belly of The Hollywood Beast of as a screenwriter before returning to the fold of the Hearst newspapers in the late 1920.
She remained a reporter until 1948, when she shifted her focus to writing books and teaching. In 1970,St. Johns was awarded the Presidential Medal for Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, by President Richard Nixon. She got back in harness as a reporter for the "Examiner" in 1976, when the 82-year-old covered the trial of Patricia Hearst, William Randolph Hearst's granddaughter.
St. Johns married Richard Irving Hyland and Ivan St. Johns. She died on August 10, 1988 in Arroyo Grande, California at the age of 94. - Writer
- Producer
Adrian Scott, the producer of progressive films who was blacklisted as one of the Hollywood 10, was born into a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Arlington, New Jersey, on February 6, 1912, to Mary (Redpath) and Allan Scott. He established his reputation as a writer on various magazines before finding employment in the movie industry. As a screenwriter, Scott worked on Keeping Company (1940), The Parson of Panamint (1941), We Go Fast (1941) and Mr. Lucky (1943), but it was as a producer he made his biggest mark in Hollywood, helping to create the genre later known as "film noir". In the mid-1940s at R.K.O., working with director Edward Dmytryk and screenwriter 'John Paxton ', Scott produced Murder, My Sweet (1944), a detective thriller based on 'Raymond Chander's's "Farewell My Lovely", with 'Dick Powell' as Philip Marlowe. The team next made Cornered (1945) (again with Dick Powell) and So Well Remembered (1947), with Scott producing Clifford Odets Deadline at Dawn (1946), directed by Harold Clurman. But it was for the gritty noir masterpiece Crossfire (1947), the first Hollywood film to deal with anti-semitism, that the group is best known. "Crossfire" was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Robert Ryan, Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Gloria Grahame), Best Director (Dmytryk), Best Writing-Screenplay (Paxton) and Best Picture (Scott). Scott and his collaborator Dymytrk had reached the summit of their careers; for Scott, it would be the last motion picture he'd ever produce. Both he and Dmytryk were called before the House Un-American Actitivies Committee in 1947 and refused to name names. As a part of a common defense strategy crafted by Communist Party lawyers (Scott had joined the Party in 1944), he and Dymytrk and the eight others who became known to posterity as "The Hollywood 10", refused to answer any questions other than their names and addresses. The even denied the Committee the right to query them as to their membership in the Screen Writers Guild. The 10 claimed that the Firstst Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave them the right to refuse HUAC's inquiry into their political beliefs as it was an unconstitutional violation of privacy. All members of the Hollywood 10 subsequently were found guilty of contempt of Congress and fined and jailed. All were blacklisted from the industry. Scott was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $1,000. (Dmytryk later recanted his communist past and was re-employed by Hollywood. Testifying before HUAC in 1951, he claimed that Scott had pressured him to put communist propaganda in his films.) On his part, Scott took on the Hollywood blacklist: He sued R.K.O. for wrongful dismissal, but the case was ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court in 1957. While blacklisted, Scott survived by writing for television under an assumed name, including such All-American fare as "Lassie" and the faintly subversive ("Steals from the rich/Gives to the poor!") "The Adventures of Robin Hood". He also produced one of the more remarkable American movies, the left-wing Salt of the Earth (1954), a film about a miner's strike that was made by Scott and other victims of the blacklist. Adrian Scott died of lung cancer in Los Angeles, on 25th December, 1973.- Allen "Al" Davis, the man who is synonymous with the Oakland Raiders franchise of the National Football League and its earlier American Football League incarnation, was born on the Fourth of July, 1929 into a Jewish family in Brockton, Massachusetts. Raised in Brooklyn and educated at the borough's Erasmus High School, he played football at Syracuse University, but was cut from the varsity team.
After graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in English from Syracuse in 1950, he began his football career as a line coach at Adelphi College from 1950 to 1951. He became head coach of the U.S. Army team at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia from 1952 to 1953, then served as line coach at The Citadel. In 1957, he moved on to the University of Southern California, where he served as line coach for two years.
With the placing of an American Football League franchise in Los Angeles, Davis was able to move into pro ball. He served as the offensive end coach of the AFL's Los Angeles Chargers from 1960 to 1962, and then was named head coach and general manager of the AFL's struggling Oakland Raiders at the age of 33. Davis took a team that was 9-33 in th first three years of its existence and whipped them into shape in one season. In 1963, his first year as a pro head coach, he was voted the AFL Coach of the Year after his Raiders went 10-4. His success in his four season as head coach led to him being named AFL Commissioner in April 1966.
His reign was short-lived. Although the AFL had always contended with the NFL in the signing of college players and Canadian Football League Players, Davis launched an aggressive campaign to recruit top NFL's top players, thus driving up the salaries of football players in both leagues. Due to the rising costs of salaries, AFL owners met with NFL owners and agreed to a merger after the 1970 season. Davis opposed the merger and quit as AFL Commissioner, returning to Oakland as managing general partner of the Raiders. The glory days of Al Davis were about to commence.
For a generation, the Oakland (and later Los Angeles) Raiders became one of the top teams in pro football, winning 13 divisional championships, one AFL title (1967), and three Super Bowls from 1967 through 1985. The Raiders in 1985 were one of the most famous, and storied franchises in all American sports, up there with the Yankees, Red Sox, Lakers, Celtics, and Canadiens.
Beginning in 1980, Al Davis played David against the Goliath that was NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle (under whom the merger of the AFL and NFL was effected). Davis wanted to move his Raiders to Los Angeles after the city of Oakland refused to expand the Oakland Colesium, but his plans were blocked by the League. Davis filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL, and his franchise became the Los Angeles Raiders for the 1982 NFL season after a federal district court ruled in Davis' favor. The following season, Los Angeles Raiders won Superbowl XVIII in 1984. It was the high-water mark of Al Davis' career.
The team has won only one conference championship in the last 22 seasons, the back-in-Oakland (having returned in 1995 after the city agreed to expand the Colesium) losing Super Bowl XXXVII in 2002 to the Buccaneers. Davis seemed to be consumed by lawsuits against the NFL and municipalities.
Other than his three Super Bowl victories, the great Al Davis will be remembered for being a pioneer in for providing opportunity to minority players, coaches and executives when pro football was still dominated by racist owners hostile to African Americans. Int he AFL, Davis scouted and drafted African American players from the traditionally black colleges ignored by the NFL. He was the first owner to hire a Hispanic-American head coach (Tom Flores) and an African American head coach (Art Shell). His selection of Amy Trask to be CEO of the Raiders made him the first (and lamentably, so-far the only) NFL owner to put a woman in charge of an NFL team.
Al Davis was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a Team and League Administrator in 1992. - Actor
- Director
- Writer
Al Freeman, Jr. was an actor and director who was the first African American to win a Daytime Emmy Award for acting. His most famous role was that of Police Captain Ed Hall in the soap opera One Life to Live (1968), which brought him the Emmy in 1979. He was a regular on the soap from 1972 through 1987, and appeared off and on as Captain Hall from 1988 through 2000. He received three additional Emmy nominations playing the role in 1983, '86 and '87. Freeman also was the first African American to direct a TV soap opera, helming "One Life to Live" episodes.
Born on March 21, 1934 in San Antonio, Texas, he was raised primarily by his father, an actor and jazz musician, after his parents divorced. Al Freeman father and son left Texas, moving to Cleveland, Ohio. After studying drama at Los Angeles City College, Freeman fils moved to New York City to act in the theater, making his Broadway debut in Ketti Frings's "The Long Dream" in 1960, a flop that closed after five performances. He had a major success playing the lead in James Baldwin's play "Blues for Mister Charlie" in 1964. In 1970, he appeared in "Look to the Lilies" on Broadway, a musical version of the 1963 movie Lilies of the Field (1963), playing the part of Homer Smith, the role that brought Sidney Poitier an Oscar. Despite a prestigious production team that included director Joshua Logan, composer Jule Styne and lyricist Sammy Cahn, the show was a flop.
Freeman made his reputation primarily in television. He debuted as a television actor in the series Suspicion (1957) in 1958, and his soap opera debut came in 1967 in The Edge of Night (1956). He was nominated for Primetime Emmy Awards for My Sweet Charlie (1970) and for Roots: The Next Generations (1979), in which he played Malcolm X.
In 1958, Freeman made his movie debut in an uncredited role in the Glenn Ford WWII picture _Torpedo Run (1958)_ and first received billing in the 1960 gang war B-movie potboiler This Rebel Breed (1960). His most memorable role was the lead in Amiri Baraka's Dutchman (1966) opposite Shirley Knight, who was named Best Actress at the 1967 Venice Film Festival. Freeman won the N.A.A.C.P. Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture for playing Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad in Spike Lee's Malcolm X (1992).
Freeman was a professor in the drama department of Howard University. When he died on August 9, 2012, in Washington, D.C. at the age of 78, he had established himself as a legend in the African American arts community.- 15-time All-Star Al Kaline of the Detroit Tigers was one of the premier baseball players of his generation, slugging 399 home-runs and amassing 3,007 hits in those less-statistics crazy times. (In this era, Kaline -- who announced his retirement before his final season of 1974 and stuck to it -- would have come back for another season to hit homer #400, one of the great benchmarks of that time, before steroids and human growth hormone made nonsense to the baseball power-hitting records in the late 1990s.) The winner of 10-gold gloves for fielding excellence, Kaline was greatly respected as an all-around star player with all the tools, like his contemporary Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox, who became the first American League Player to hit 400 dingers and 3,000 hits in 1979.
Kaline, who had the desire to excel at baseball, did not have the desire to upstage Yaz by pointing out that it was something he easily could have done, and was gracious when the Red Sox left fielder set the milestones in 1979. Perhaps Kaline could afford to be generous, for unlike Yaz, who was perpetually a bridesmaid and never a bride when it came to the post-season (Yaz's BoSox even lost the A.L. East pennant to Kaline and Billy Martin's Tigers by Tigers won the 1968 World's Championship. Distinct underdogs to the the same St. Louis Cardinals team, and post-season marvel Bob Gibson, who had beaten Yaz's "Impssible Dream" BoSox the year before and had whipped the last team of the great Yankees Dynasty, the '64 Bronx Bombers of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Yogi Berra, Elston Howard and Whitey Ford, the Tigers made history by staging one of the great upsets in World Series history. The '68 battle royal for the World's Championship was almost as good, and legendary, as the '67 Series, and like the previous match-up of the Cards and the American League contender, it had gone done to the seventh and deciding game. Though the Cardinals were mighty, it was the Tigers behind the pitching of donut-maven Mickey Lolich who prevailed. Al hit .379 with two homers and eight runs batted in during the Series, further establishing his credentials as a first-ballot Hall of Famer.
Al Kaline had been signed as a "Bonus Baby" by the Tigers in 1953, and under the extant rules of Major League Baseball, had gone straight to the major league team, bypassing the minor leagues. (To justify the bonus, or rather, to limit the payout of large bonuses, MLB required teams signing young players to large bonuses to keep them on the major league roster for part of the year, every year, or lose them.) The 18-year old Kaline came up for a cup of coffee with the Tigers in 1953, and then played a total of 22 seasons for them, a record only surpassed by Yaz for the Red Sox and Brooks Robinson for the Baltimore Orioles, who in those pre-free-agent times, played a total of 23 years for the same team. Kaline blossomed early, winning his first and only batting title in 1955, at the tender age of 20, leading both leagues with a .340 average. Kaline became the youngest player ever to win a batting title, establishing that record by nosing out fellow Tiger Ty Cobb by one day.
Although he never won a Most Valuable Player Award, Kaline ranked in the Top 10 in M.V.P. votes nine times between 1955 and 1967, coming in second in '55 and '63 and third in '56. Never a true power hitter, he was remarkably consistent and steady in his production, hitting a minimum of 25 homers seven times and hitting over .300 nine times, playing primarily in what is becoming known as baseball's second "Dead Ball Era". His superb fielding was a marvel, and he once went 242 consecutive games in the field without committing an error. Kaline was the type of player a general manager dreams of building a franchise around.
Fittingly, Al Kaline was known as "Mr. Tiger" when he retired after the 1974 season. Kaline was the most popular player in the Detroit franchise's history (the dyspeptic Cobb was a greater player and highly respected by Tigers fans, but not particularly beloved). After his election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York in his first year of eligibility, his number 6 was the first number ever to be retired by the Tigers. - Writer
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Alain Corneau was a Cesar Award-winning French writer-director best known for his multiple collaborations with French cinema superstars Yves Montand, Simone Signoret and Gérard Depardieu. Born on August 7, 1943 in Meung-sur-Loire, Loiret, Corneay trained as a musician but switched his interest to film, becoming an assistant director.
He was an assistant director on Costa-Gavras's 1970 film The Confession (1970) ("The Confession"), which co-starred Montand and Signoret. In 1974 he made the transition to the director's chair, helming France société anonyme (1974), a movie about drug dealers. His next policier starred Montand as a a Dirty Harry-like dick in Police Python 357 (1976) (1976), which co-starred Montand's wife Signoret. He followed it up with another crime drama starring Montand, La Menace (1977) (1977). Corneau finished up his crime cycle with Choice of Arms (1981) (1981), which starred Montand, Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. The movie was released in the United States as "Choice of Arms."
Shifting gears away from policiers, he directed the French Foreign Legion drama 'Fort Saganne (1984)' (1984). Set in 1911, the movie starred Depardieu and Deneuve. Depardieu also headlined his lush costume drama _Tous les matins du monde (1991)- (1991), an international hit, for which Corneau won the Cesar Award, the French equivalent of the Oscar, for direction.
At the age of 67, Alain Corneau died on August 30, 2010 in Paris from cancer. His remains were interred at Père Lachaise Cemetery.- Writer
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Alan Bennett is an award-winning dramatist and screenwriter who is best known as a member of Beyond the Fringe (1964) (a satirical review that was a hit on both the London stage and on Broadway and featured fellow members Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore) and for his plays The Madness of King George (1994) and The History Boys (2006). Bennett and Miller also collaborated on the TV sketch show On the Margin (1966).
In 1995, Bennett was nominated for an Academy Award for his adaptation of his own play "The Madness of King George." He has declined a knighthood and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University.- Actor
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Alan Mowbray, the American film actor who was one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild, was born Ernest Allen on August 18, 1896, in London, England, to a non-theatrical family. He served in the British army during World War I and received the Military Medal and the French Croix De Guerre for bravery in action. He began as a stage actor in England, and in some accounts he gave of his life, claimed he was a provincial actor in England before his naval service. In other versions, he claimed he turned to acting after The Great War, as World War I was then known, as he was broke and had no other skills.
After acting in London's West End, Mowbray came to the United States, where he toured the country with the Theater Guild from 1923 to 1929. On the road with the Guild, he most enjoyed acting in the plays of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw. He made his Broadway debut in the play "Sport of Kings" at the Lyceum Theatre on May 4, 1926. He also appeared on Broadway in "These Modern Women" in February 1928 and in "The Amorous Antic" in December 1929.
On August 25, 1929, Mowbray's own play, "Dinner is Served," an original comedy he wrote, directed and starred in, made its debut at the Cort Theatre. The play was not a success, closing after just four performances. After "The Amorous Antic," Mowbray did not appear again on Broadway until 1963, when he was featured in "Enter Laughing," the hit stage adaptation of Carl Reiner's novel.
His relative lack of success on Broadway during the "Roaring Twenties" did not matter, as sound had come to Hollywood and the studios were looking for stage actors who could appear in the talkies. Blessed with excellent diction, and tall with a stiff posture and a patrician air, he was ideal for character parts in sound pictures. A member of the "stiff-upper lip" school of British acting, he was often cast as a British, European or upper-class American gentleman, or as an aristocrat or royalty. As he aged, roles as doctors or butlers were his forte.
Mowbray was praised by the critics for limning George Washington in the 1931 biopic Alexander Hamilton (1931) (he would once again play the Father of His Country, this time in a comic vein, in the 1945 musical Where Do We Go from Here? (1945)). He had a romantic lead role opposite Miriam Hopkins in Pioneer Films' Becky Sharp (1935), which was the first feature film made in three-strip Technicolor.
Mowbray had the distinction of appearing in movies with three screen Sherlock Holmeses: Clive Brook in Sherlock Holmes (1932), Reginald Owen in A Study in Scarlet (1933) and Basil Rathbone in Terror by Night (1946). He played the butler in the first two "Topper" films, and as a character actor had memorable turns in two John Ford pictures, My Darling Clementine (1946) and Wagon Master (1950). In the area of typecasting, Mowbray could be counted on as a "pompous blowhard" in such movies as My Man Godfrey (1936), or as "the surprise killer" in B-movie murder mysteries. One of his favorite roles was the con man in the television series Colonel Humphrey Flack (1953), which ran on the Dumont network in 1953.
Mowbray occasionally was a screenwriter, but mostly concentrated on acting. In his personal life he was a member of the Royal Geographic Society and was active in several acting fraternities. He also was one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild. The Guild was formed in 1933, in the wake of the formation of the Screen Writers Guild, in reaction to a proposed 50% across-the-board pay cut implemented by the studios.
Actors Equity, the theatrical actors union, had tried to organize Hollywood after winning a contract and a closed shop on Broadway after World War I, but it had failed. Screen actors angered over the lack of contracts and the grueling work hours at the Hollywood studios founded the Masquers club in 1925 in a move towards unionization. After studio technicians won a collective bargaining agreement from the studios in 1926, MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer had the idea of heading off collective bargaining by the "talent" branches--the actors, writers and directors--by creating a company union. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences was created to serve as an intermediary between the studios and the talent branches and technicians, negotiating contract disputes. Proto-unions, such as the original Screen Writers Guild, folded in 1927 after the creation of the Academy.
By the announcement of the across-the-board cut in 1933, two previous rounds of cutbacks and lay-offs caused by the Great Depression had alienated most of the talent in Hollywood and had led to a strike by the technicians which had closed down the studios for a day. Losing faith in the company union that was the Academy, the talent began organizing their own guilds. In addition to the lack of contracts for many actors and the concerns over wages and hours, one of the new Screen Actors Guild's grievances was that Academy membership was by invitation-only.
In March 1933, SAG was founded by six actors: Berton Churchill, Charles B. Miller, Grant Mitchell, Ralph Morgan, Alden Gay and Kenneth Thomson. Three months later Mowbray was named to SAG's board of directors. He personally funded SAG when it was first founded. While many high-profile actors, already signed to seven-year contracts, refused initially to join SAG, they began to flock to the new union once the studios initiated an anti-raiding provision in the new National Industrial Relations Act code the industry had implemented after Franklin D. Roosevelt became US President and oversaw the enactment of his New Deal legislation in the first 100 days of his administration.
The NRA code the movie industry adopted created a situation for the talent similar to baseball's reserve clause, in which another studio was prevented from offering a contract to an actor, writer or director whose contract had lapsed until their old studio had finished with them and not picked up their option. The NRA code contained a pay ceiling for the talent and technicians, but not for executives. The talent was further enraged when it found out that the Academy, the "company union," had created a committee to investigate the feasibility of long-term contracts. Long-term contracts were the only island of stability in an industry that enhanced its profitability by cutting the wages of its employees and by working them long hours.
At a pivotal meeting at the home of Frank Morgan (the future "Wizard of Oz" and the brother of first SAG president Ralph Morgan), Eddie Cantor insisted that SAG's response to the new code--a collective bargaining agreement--should be in the interests of all actors, not just the already established ones. In the three weeks after the critical meeting, SAG membership rose from approximately 80 members to more than 4,000. Actors resigned from the Academy en masse to join SAG.
Cantor, a friend of President Roosevelt, took the occasion of his being invited to spend the 1933 Thanksgiving holiday with the Roosevelt family to point out the inequities in the new code that SAG found particularly noxious. By executive order, F.D.R. struck them down.
Finally, in 1937, after a long period of resistance, the studios recognized SAG as a collective bargaining agent for actors. Recognition of the Screen Writers Guild and the Screen Directors Guild eventually followed. Mowbray's financial support, in the crucial early days of the guild, had helped make a collective bargaining agreement for actors a reality.
Alan Mowbray married Lorayne Carpenter in 1927, and they had two children. He died on March 25, 1969, of a heart attack.- Alan Shepherd was the first American in space and the only one of the original Mercury astronauts to walk on the moon. Born in Derry, New Hampshire on November 18, 1923, he attended the U.S. Naval Academy after graduating from the Pinkerton Academy in 1940. After his graduation from Annapolis in 1944, he served in the Pacific Ocean during the rest of World War II.
After the war, he earned his naval aviator wings in 1947 and served several tours aboard aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. He became a test pilot in 1950 and served as an instructor in the Test Pilot School. Upon graduating from the Naval War College with an M.S. degree in military science in 1958, he was was assigned to be a staff office with the Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, serving as an aircraft readiness officer.
A year later, he became one of 11 military test pilots invited by the NASA to try out for the manned space flight program. By that time, he had logged over 8,000 hours flying time. He passed the physical and psychological tests and became one of the original group of seven Mercury astronauts.
Shepherd should have been the first man in space, but NASA postponed his flight from March 6, 1961 to May 5th. This allowed the Soviet Union the opportunity to put cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space on April 12, 1961. As well as being the first human being in space, Gagarin also became the first person to orbit the Earth; Shepherd's flight on Freedom 7 on May 5th was a sub-orbital mission.
In 1963, Shepherd subsequently was chosen as the command pilot for the first manned Project Gemini mission and was designated as the chief of the Astronaut Office, overseeing all activities involving NASA astronauts, including training. In early 1964, he was grounded after he developed Ménière's disease. The disease is marked by the build-up of fluid in the inner-ear and causes disorientation and dizziness. His spot in Project Gemini was given to Gus Grissom.
After undergoing an innovative surgery to treat his Ménière's disease, he was put back on flight status in Mary 1969. Originally assigned to command the ill-fated Apollo 13 (1995), he swapped missions with the Apollo 14 crew as as it was felt he and his crew needed more time to train. When he made the Apollo 14 flight to the moon between January 31 and February 9, 1971, the 47-year-old Shepard was the oldest astronaut in the NASA space program.
The Apollo 14 mission was the first moon mission broadcast entirely in color, and part of the broadcast was Shepherd golfing on the moon, using a Wilson six-iron head attached to a lunar sample scoop handle. He managed to drive two golf balls with a one-handed swing. He was criticized by some for his playful action, including on an episode of All in the Family (1971).
Shepard was reinstated as Chief of the Astronaut Office in June 1971 but the following month, President Richard Nixon appointed him as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, where he served from September to December. Nixon also promoted him to the rank of rear admiral that year. He retired from the Navy and NASA on August 1, 1974 and went on to a successful business career, allegedly becoming the first astronaut to become a millionaire.
Alan Shepherd lived out the end of his life in Pebble Beach, California. He died of leukemia in a Monterey hospital on July 21, 1998. He was 74 years old. - Albert Anastasia was born February 26, 1903, in Calabria, Italy, famous for its hams and the 'ndrangheta, which was every bit as vicious as the Sicilian Mafia. He was brought to America as a child along with his eight brothers. When he was starting in organized crime, he helped Salvatore Lucania, who later became known as Lucky Luciano, murder Giuseppe Masseria (aka "Joe The Boss" or "The Chinese"). When the "Boss of Bosses", Salvatore Maranzano, was murdered by Luciano, La Cosa Nostra was divided into different families known as The Commission. The bosses of the family Anastasia belonged to were brothers Vincent Mangano and Philip Mangano.
It wasn't long before Anastasia started to lust for power. As the underboss, he and Vincent Mangano often fought physically. Anastasia, being younger, would usually win. Anastasia's old friend and boss of the Luciano family, Frank Costello, soon found himself in a pickle when his partner, Vito Genovese, returned from Italy after nine years' exile. Costello needed Anastasia's help but couldn't do a thing unless he had an entire family behind him. Costello and Anastasia soon came up with the idea of killing the Manganos. On April 19, 1951, one of the most mysterious murders in Mafia history occurred. The body of Phil Mangano was found in a marshland with three bullets in the back of his head and two in each cheek. When the police tried to contact his brother, they couldn't reach him. When Vincent didn't show up at his brother's funeral, the police and Mafia bosses assumed that Vincent had been murdered as well. Frank Costello stuck up for Anastasia when the families had a sit-down to discuss the murder, saying that the Manganos were planning to kill him. Anastasia was now the boss of the former Mangano family.
After he became the boss, he and his younger brother, Anthony Anastasia (aka "Tough Tony") - who changed his last name to Anastasio, most likely in order to avoid public connections with his brother--ran the Brooklyn waterfronts for over a decade. When Lucky Luciano was arrested, Albert and his brother Tony sabotaged a huge French ocean liner moored at a pier and spread the word that it had been done by Nazi saboteurs. They then made a deal with the US government that they would "protect" the waterfront from further "sabotage" in exchange for Luciano's release. A compromise was reached in which Luciano was sent to a minimum-security prison. Under Luciano's order, Anastasia became the head of the Mafia's enforcement arm, known as Murder Inc. This group of killers was responsible for an estimated 700 to 1000 murders, the large number of killings attributed to Anastasia's hot temper and love of violence. When he saw an interview with a New York shop owner named Arnold Schuster, who had recognized notorious bank robber Willie Sutton on the street and notified the police, who then arrested Sutton, Anastasia immediately ordered that Schuster be killed; he had no connection with Sutton, but his reasoning for ordering Schuster's murder what that "I don't like rats".
Schuster's death enraged the public as well as the other Mafia bosses. A few years later Luciano was deported to Italy, and the Italian government then exiled him to Sicily where, during WW II, he and the local Mafia ingratiated themselves with US forces after the invasion of Sicily by identifying and helping capture "fascists" and "fascist sympathizers" (most of whom, strangely enough, turned out to be Luciano's competitors in his various criminal enterprises).
When Luciano left, Genovese wanted more and more power, but Frank Costello, Albert Anastasia and Anastasia's underboss Frank Scalise ran things. Genovese was growing irritated with Albert because of the many murders committed by Albert's crew, which Genovese considered unjustified and which went against the Mafia's laws. Albert was also selling memberships for his family for a few thousand dollars apiece. Genovese hired future boss Vincent Gigante (aka "The Chin") to kill Costello. In 1957 Costello was shot in the head by Gigante, but Costello's phenomenal luck held and he was only grazed by the bullet. However, the assassination attempt persuaded him to semi-retire from his life of crime. By tradition, an underboss was murdered before the boss, in order to prevent retaliation. Anastasia's strongest ally, Joe Adonis, was suddenly deported to Italy. His underboss, Frank Scalise, was murdered not long afterwards when he went out to buy some fruit.
One of Anastasia's capos, Carlo Gambino, who later became the most powerful Mafia boss in US history, was secretly meeting with Vito Genovese to discuss the planned killing of Anastasia. Genovese promised that Gambino would be named the boss of the family if he killed Anastasia. Carlo could not refuse. Anastasia was about the same age, so by the time Carlo became boss, he wouldn't have much longer to live. Gambino consulted Joe Profaci, another Mafia boss, and the two hired the Gallo brothers, including the infamous Joe Gallo (aka "Crazy Joe"), to kill Anastasia. Anastasia's favorite barber shop was on the bottom floor of the famous Park Sheraton Hotel. He loved getting his beard trimmed and the feel of the towel on his face. When the barber put the towel on Albert's face, two of the three Gallo brothers rushed in and fired five shots into Anastasia, blasting him out of the barber's chair. The New York criminal and law enforcement communities were relieved that "The Lord High Executioner" had been taken out. Some people, however, were not so happy about it, and one of the most troubled was future boss John Gotti. Albert had been his role model and, at the time, his one hope of getting in the family. Albert's brother Tough Tony continued to control the waterfronts after Albert's death. - Oscar-nominated screenwriter Albert Maltz was born on October 28, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from Columbia University in 1930, he attended the Yale School of Drama for two years as a tyro playwright. After striking out on his own as a dramatist, he developed sociopolitical plays which were destined to be produced by the left-wing theatrical companies the Theatre Union and the Group Theatre. He also wrote novels and short stories. In 1935, during the Great Depression, he joined the Communist Party.
Maltz labored as a screenwriter for Warner Bros., which had made its reputation in the 1930s for its socially aware dramas. He worked on the classic Casablanca (1942) and other feature films and documentaries during World War II. He wrote the Oscar-winning documentary The House I Live In (1945), a plea for racial tolerance, and was nominated for an Oscar for writing Pride of the Marines (1945).
Maltz wrote an article in 1945 for the "New Masses" that demanded more intellectual freedom from the Communist Party for its members. Pressure from the Party made him recant his position, which had a chilling effect on some other Party members and liberal supporters of the Party's right to exist.
In 1947, Maltz and other Party members (and suspected Party members and sympathizers) were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which had determined to investigate "communist infiltration" of the movie industry. Maltz and nine others were cited for contempt of Congress for their uncooperative behavior before the Committee, which included not "naming names" of other communists, and were dubbed the "Hollywood 10". All were fined and jailed, and they were also blacklisted by the American film industry.
Remaining a committed communist, Maltz continued to write, using "fronts" who sold his screenplays and received any writing credit alloted by the studios and WGA. He remained unrepentant about his progressive politics until the end, which came on August 26, 1985 when he died in Los Angeles at the age of 76. - Alec McCowen was born Alexander Duncan McCowan on May 26, 1925 in Tunbridge Wells, England. After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he made his professional debut in 1942. He established his reputation in classical stage roles, appearing in the ensemble of Laurence Olivier's famed duo-production of William Shakespeare's "Anthony and Cleopatra" and George Bernard Shaw's "Caesar and Cleopatra" at the 1951 Festival of Britain. McCowen transferred with the productions to New York that same year, making his Broadway debut.
McCowen made his movie debut in The Cruel Sea (1953), but for his turn as Police Inspector Oxford in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), his reputation is rooted in his stage work. "Frenzy" led to his one lead role in a major motion picture, that of Henry Pulling in George Cukor's adaptation of 'Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt (1972). Though the film won an Oscar for Costume Design and a Best Actress nod for co-star Maggie Smith (among its total of four nominations), the movie did not advance McCowen's career. Over a decade later, he played the title role in the Thames Television series Mr. Palfrey of Westminster (1984), which ran for two seasons on British television from 1984 to 1985. His last cinema appearance was in a small role in Gangs of New York (2002) for director Martin Scorsese; he had earlier appeared in Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993).
Though his services were in demand in movies and on television, McCowen remained wedded to the stage; he regards the character of "Astrov" in Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" as his favorite role. From 1967 to 1992, McCowen appeared nine times on Broadway, for which he garnered two Drama Desk Awards (out of four nominations) and three Tony Award nominations. One of his Tony Award nominations was for his magisterial solo performance in "St. Mark's Gospel", which debuted on Broadway in 1978 and had a return engagement on the Great White Way in 1981.
He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1972 Queen's New Years Honours and Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1986 Queen's New Years Honours for his services to drama. Alec McCowan died at age 91 on February 6, 2017 in London, England. - Actor
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Alfred Ryder, the veteran actor who appeared on radio and Broadway and in the movies and TV and who also was a renowned stage director, was born Alfred Jacob Corn on January 5, 1916, in New York City. He made his professional debut as an actor at the age of eight and attended New York City's Professional Children's School. His Broadway debut came in 1929, when the 13-year-old Ryder played a "lost boy" in Eva Le Gallienne's production of J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan". Ryder studied acting with Benno Schneider, Robert Lewis and Lee Strasberg. He appeared in the 1938 Broadway production of "Our Town" - his Broadway debut as an adult performer - as well as numerous Broadway productions before World War II, including the 1939 revival of Clifford Odets's "Awake and Sing!". For many years he was the voice of Sammy in the radio serial "Rise of the Goldbergs" Ryder joined the Army Air Force during World War II, eventually appearing in the U.S. Army Air Force's gala Broadway stage show "Winged Victory" in 1943. The following year, he made his movie debut as "PFC Alfred Ryder" in the film version of the show Winged Victory (1944)). After the war he made more films, including director Anthony Mann's classic 1947 film noir T-Men (1947). On Broadway, he appeared as Oswald in the 1948 revival of Henrik Ibsen's "Ghosts" and as Mark Antony in the 1950 production of "Julius Caesar". Also that year, he appeared as Orestes in the Broadway play "The Tower Beyond Tragedy".
Ryder had the singular honor of being cast as the understudy for Laurence Olivier in one of the legendary actor's greatest roles, that of Archie Rice, in the 1958 Broadway production of John Osborne's "The Entertainer". Olivier's Archie Rice is considered one of the greatest performances of the 20th century, and Ryder was chosen to keep the Broadway patrons in their seats in the event the great British theatrical knight couldn't go on. Ryder also appeared in the original Broadway production of Eugène Ionesco's absurdist masterpiece "Rhinoceros" in 1960.
A noted theatrical stage director with such companies as Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage, Ryder made his Broadway directorial debut with the play "A Far Country" in 1961. He subsequently directed two more Broadway productions, "The Exercise" in 1968 and the 1971 revival of August Strindberg's "Dance of Death."
Despite his achievements on the stage, film and radio, Ryder is mostly remembered as a prolific and versatile TV character actor. He made over 100 appearances on TV, including memorable turns on Star Trek (1966) (he appeared as Prof. Robert Crater in the series' very first aired episode, "The Man Trap"), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964) (two appearances as the ghost of Nazi U-boat commander Capt. Gerhardt Krueger), and The Invaders (1967) (appearing as The Alien Leader). Ryder retired from screen acting in 1976 to concentrate on the stage, both as an actor and director. He died on April 16, 1995 in Englewood, NJ, at the age of 79. He was married to actress Kim Stanley, with whom he had a child, from 1957 until 1964, and he was the brother of actress Olive Deering.- Having worked as a telephone operator at age 13 and a fashion model afterwards, Alice Joyce joined the Kalem film company at 20, making her debut in The Deacon's Daughter (1910), and achieved popularity as a charming, proper leading lady in many shorts. After Vitagraph bought out Kalem, Joyce began appearing in the company's features, and her career soared. She was so popular as an ingénue that she was still playing those parts into her late 20s, but eventually she switched to older, more mature roles. She played Clara Bow's mother in Bow's wildly popular film Dancing Mothers (1926). After retiring from the screen, she married director Clarence Brown.
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Louis Ginsberg, the moderate Jewish Socialist and his wife Naomi, who was a radical Communist and irrepressible nudist are the parents of Irwin Allen Ginsberg, the poet and man of many other things eg. actor. Poems he written eg. Howl, Six gallery, Sunflower Sutra ... His themes: drugs, against Vietnam War, politics, "beat generation", hippies, buddhism, ... In 1970 he met with a Tibetan guru and he accepted Trungpa Rinpoche as his personal guru. He created a poetry school 'Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics'. He has remained active, publishing poems, realising musical recordings. He published a book with his own photos.- Anatole France, the 1921 Nobel laureate for literature, was born Jacques Anatole Thibault in Paris on April 16, 1844, the son of a Paris book dealer. He attended the Parisian boys' school Collège Stanislas, where he received a classical education, and later matriculated at the École des Chartes. For 20 years after finishing his education, he worked at various positions, including the post of assistant librarian of the French Senate from 1876 to 1890, before devoting himself full-time to writing. He was able to write even when he worked, and in his life-time in which he became the premier French man of letters, he produced a vast output of novels, as well as works in every genre. A story-teller in the French classical style, his literary precursors were Voltaire and Fénélon. His urbane skepticism and enlightened hedonism were in the spirit and tradition of the French enlightenment of the 18th century. His epicurean philosophy was limned in his 1895 book of aphorisms, "The Garden of Epicurus."
France's first great success was the novel "Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881), which was honored by the Académie Française. France later became a member of the Académie in 1896. He published an autobiographical novel in 1885, "Le Livre de mon ami" ["My Friend's Book"], which he followed up with "Pierre Nozière" (1899), "Le Petit Pierre" (1918), and "La Vie au fleur" (1922) ["The Bloom of Life"].
France was the literary critic on the "Le Temps" newspaper, and his reviews were published in a four-volume collection entitled "La Vie littéraire" [On Life and Letters] between 1888 and 1892. It was in this period that France wrote historical fiction about past civilizations, focusing particularly on the transition from paganism to Christianity. He published "Balthazar" (1889), a story of the conversion of one of the Magi, and "Thaïs" (1890), about the conversion of an Alexandrian courtesan. In 1891, he published "L'Étui de nacre" ["Mother of Pearl"], the story of a hermit and a faun. It was during this period that the classicist France reacted strongly against Emile Zola's naturalism.
Approximately half of France's output appeared in periodicals and newspapers. The style of his novels was rooted in elegance and a subtle irony. "La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque" ["At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque], a historical novel about life in 18th century France, was published in 1893. It proved to be the most celebrated of France's novels; that same year, he used the central character of the novel, the Abbé Coignard, in "Les Opinions de Jérôme Coignard." The Abbé again appeared in "Le Puits de Sainte Claire" ["The Well of Saint Claire"], a collection of stories published in 1895.
With "Le Lys rouge" ["The Red Lily"], a tragic love story published in 1894, France returned to contemporary fiction. In 1896, he began a cycle of prose works focused on the character of Professor Bergeret, one of his most famous literary creations, in the "Histoire contemporaine," published between 1896 and 1901.
He protested the unjust conviction of Captain Alfed Dreyfuss for treason and the anti-semitism of the French establishment that permitted his persecution, and developed an empathy for socialism. After the Dreyfus Affair, in which he came out in support of Zola, Dreyfus' great champion, France's work became more engaged socially and slanted increasingly towards political satire. In 1908, he published a satire about the Dreyfus Affair, "L'Île des pingouins" ["Penguin Island"]. Also that year, his biography of Joan of Arc was published. His other major works of his later period include "Les Dieux ont soif (1912) ["The Gods are Athirst"], a novel about the French Revolution, and "La Révolte des anges" (1914) ["The Revolt of the Angels].
Anatole France was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921, "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament." In the presentation Speech by E.A. Karlfeldt, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, the author of historical novels about the transition from paganism to Christianity was praised for limning "a faith purified by healthy doubts, by the spirit of clarity, a new humanism, a new Renaissance, a new Reformation."
Karlfeldt would go on to praise rance as "the faithful servant of truth and beauty, the heir of humanism, of the lineage of Rabelais, Montaigne, Voltaire, [and ]Renan," but first, he would honor him as embodying the best of French civilization and letters:
"Sweden cannot forget the debt which, like the rest of the civilized world, she owes to French civilization," Karlfeldt said. "Formerly we received in abundance the gifts of French Classicism like the ripe and delicate fruits of antiquity. Without them, where would we be? This is what we must ask ourselves today. In our time Anatole France has been the most authoritative representative of that civilization; he is the last of the great classicists. He has even been called the last European. And indeed, in an era in which chauvinism, the most criminal and stupid of ideologies, wants to use the ruins of the great destruction for the building of new walls to prevent free intellectual exchange between peoples, his clear and beautiful voice is raised higher than that of others, exhorting people to understand that they need one another. Witty, brilliant, generous, this knight without fear is the best champion in the sublime and incessant war which civilization has declared against barbarism. He is a marshal of the France of the glorious era in which Corneille and Racine created their heroes.
France used the occasion to himself honor the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, the Swedish Prime Minister Karl Hjalmar Branting, a diplomat who worked for disarmament and helped draft the Geneva Protocol, a proposed international security system mandating arbitration between belligerent nations. France also denounced the Versailles Treaty as being unjust and a continuation of the Great War and called for the instillation of common sense among diplomats lest Europe meet its doom. After France received his Prize from the King of Sweden, after all the laureates had again ascended the rostrum, France turned to Professor Walther Nernst, the German Nobel laureate for chemistry, and shook his hand cordially for an extended time. The gesture profoundly moved the crowd as the symbolism of the meeting of the heart (literature) and the head (science) and of two nations so recently engaged in waging a ruinous war against each other was not missed. The audience applauded the gesture as a symbol of reconciliation between France, the nation, and Germany.
Anatole France's writings were put on the Index of Forbidden Books of the Roman Catholic Church in the 1920s. Between 1925 and 1935, France's collected works were published in 25 volumes.
Anatole France died on October 12, 1924 in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France and was buried in the Ancient Cemetery of Neuilly, Hauts-de-Seine. - Director
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Andre Roosevelt was an entrepreneur and filmmaker who tried to develop the tourist industry in Bali in the 1920s in order to preserve the native culture by turning the island into a national park. As part of his aspirations, he wrote the screenplay for the 1932 film "Goona-Goona, An Authentic Melodrama" (aka Kriss (1931)) that, upon being released in America in 1932, created a Bali craze.
Andre was the first cousin, once-removed, of US President Theodore Roosevelt; his father Cornelius was related to Teddy. After marrying a French actress, Cornelius was living in Paris when Andre was born in 1879. He was first involved with the movies in 1917, when he served as a production manager on director Wesley Ruggles's WWI propaganda picture For France (1917) for Vitagraph Films.
"Goona Goona" was made with Armand Denis, a Belgian documentary filmmaker. The two began shooting footage of Bali on a trip there in 1928. The film combined documentary footage with a fictional romantic story about the love between a native prince and a servant.- Ann Jellicoe was born on the 15th of July 1927 in Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire and studied acting at London's Central School of Speech and Drama. She had wanted to be an actress since the age of four, when she took a dancing class. She fell in love with performance and was engaged in theatricals during her school days.
Ann Jellicoe is an English playwright and theatrical director who's best known for her 1962 play "The Knack", which was adapted into the 1965 film The Knack... and How to Get It (1965) by director Richard Lester, and for promoting the idea of "community plays".
Her first tentative efforts at writing were creating dialogue in her head for charades. At the Central School of Speech and Drama, a class in improvisation whetted her appetite for making up dialogue. She also was exposed to the dramatist Christopher Fry, who was invited in the school to talk to the students about playwriting.
After she graduated from the Central School, she did her apprenticeship as a thespian in a repertory theatre in Aberystwyth,Wales. She was a plain girl in a time when young actresses were expected to be good-looking and were not allowed to be interesting, before the impact of Bertolt Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble on English theatre, a revolution she would be part of. It was friends who got her her first job at Aberystwyth, and after that was over, she bounced around between acting gigs and tried her hand at directing. She also taught acting.
Jellicoe established and ran the experimental Cockpit Theatre at the Little Theatre Club. She began her career as a dramatist with a one-act play written to implement her own innovative ideas of the theatre that was included in a showcase she was directing. Her breakthrough was the play "The Sport of My Mad Mother", written for a 1955 competition for aspiring playwrights sponsored by "The Observer" newspaper, overseen by critic Kenneth Tynan. The play, which used absurdist dialogue and physical theater to tell the story of juvenile delinquents, won third prize . The initial production was staged by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre. Company founder George Devine directed the play.
Tasking himself with the mission of creating a new type of theater that broke with the class-bound complacency of the commercial West End theater, Devine also directed John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1959) in 1956, the play that heralded the arrival of "The Angry Young Man" who forever changed English theater. Eschewing plot, Jellicoe's drama embraced absurdity and unconventional theatrical devices. In contrast, "Look Back in Anger", which started the revolution in the London theater, was conventional in plot and dialog. Jellicoe's technique sought to involve the audience more directly.
"The Sport of My Mad Mother" was a commercial flop in its initial run, and it also failed to win over the critics. This was not seen as a bad thing by Devine and others at the Royal Court, as they were in a war against conventional theater whose foot-soldiers were stodgy Establishment critics.
Working with Devine at the Royal Court was a great experience for Jellicoe as Devine loved writers, believing that it was writers who would change the English theater. In 1955, he had declared the English Stage Company to be a "writer's theatre". There was a writers group at the Royal Court that influenced the development of her drama. She even met her second husband, the photographer Roger Mayne, at the Royal Court.
The sole woman member of the Royal Court's Writers Workshop, she continued to write, earning a reputation as someone who knew about the younger generation as her plays focused on young people. "The Sport of My Mad Mother" was re-staged many times and was revised by the author in 1962 That was the year she had her greatest success, when the Royal Court staged her play "The Knack" starring Rita Tushingham, who also would star in the 1965 film.
Jellicoe had decided to write a sex comedy after the discouraging reception of her first play. Developed under the aegis of the Royal Court's writers group, "The Knack" is autobiographical, with her second husband Roger, whom she lived with for a while before marriage, being the mode for the character of Colin. "The Knack", directed by Mike Nichols, was a hit when it was staged Off-Broadway in New York in 1964, running for 685 performances.
Jellicoe never had another huge success like "The Knack", for instead of following it up with a similar work, the Royal Court stated her play "The Rising Generation", which had been written before the "Knack" for the Girl Guides, who had wanted a play about teenagers, and "Shelley", an historical play about the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She eventually became literary manager of the Royal Court in the period 1973-5, where she promoted women playwrights, including Caryl Churchill.
She had two children with her husband Roger, and wrote several children's plays, plays about children in which children would act the parts, as part of an evolution as dramatist that was as a result of raising her own kids. She wrote the first of children's plays (known as Jellieplays) in Dorset, where they had moved in the early '70s to get away from the decay of London which accelerated under 'Edward Heath''s ministry. The first children's play was written for a small comprehensive school, but the teacher who normally staged plays with the schoolchildren felt threatened, and the school backed out of putting on the play. Through her involvement with South West Arts' Drama Committee, she had become acquainted with the Medium Fair Theatre Company, which put on community plays. (It has since disbanded.) She approached Medium Fair and they staged her first children's play.
It involved a cast of 80, including children from the school that had originally rejected it (the teacher who had stymied the production had moved on). In this iteration of a community play, it involves many members of a community, not just the cast but the crew and community members who sign on for various jobs like selling refreshments during the intermission.
In 1978, she launched the Colway Theatre Trust, which evolved into the Claque Theatre, to promote the concept of community plays. As the concept evolved, a community play is written about a particular group of people and the issues they face. It is written and staged, employing locals, in no more than 18 months. The Colway/Claque Theatre has produced 30 community plays in all. The community play movement was instrumental in bringing more women into the theater, providing a vehicle for women dramatists. - Actress
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Ann Todd was a beautiful English actress best known as Gregory Peck's wife in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947). Her third husband was the legendary director David Lean, for whom she appeared in three films, The Passionate Friends (1949), Madeleine (1950), and The Sound Barrier (1952).- Actress
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Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American movie star, was born Wong Liu Tsong on January 3, 1905, in Los Angeles, California, to laundryman Wong Sam Sing and his wife, Lee Gon Toy. A third-generation American, she managed to have a substantial acting career during a deeply racist time when the taboo against miscegenation meant that Caucasian actresses were cast as "Oriental" women in lead parts opposite Caucasian leading men. Even when the role called for playing opposite a Caucasian in yellowface, as with Paul Muni's as the Chinese peasant Wang Lung in The Good Earth (1937), Wong was rejected, since she did not fit a Caucasian's imagined ideal look for an Asian woman. The discrimination she faced in the domestic industry caused her to go to Europe for work in English and German films. Her name, which she also spelled Wong Lew Song, translates literally as "Frosted Yellow Willows" but has been interpreted as "Second-Daughter Yellow Butterfly." Her family gave her the English-language name Anna May. She was born on Flower Street in downtown Los Angeles in an integrated neighborhood dominated by Irish and Germans, one block from Chinatown, where her father ran the Sam Kee Laundry.
The Wong family moved back to Chinatown two years after Liu Tsong's birth, but in 1910 they uprooted themselves, moving to a nearby Figueroa Street neighborhood where they had Mexican and East European neighbors. There were two steep hills between the Wongs' new home and Chinatown, but as her biographer, Colgate University history professor Graham Russell Gao Hodges, points out, those hills put a psychological as well as physical distance between Liu Tsong and Chinatown. Los Angeles' Chinatown already was teeming with movie shoots when she was a girl. She would haunt the neighborhood nickelodeons, having become enraptured with the early "flickers." Though her traditional father strongly disapproved of his daughter's cinephilia, as it deflected her from scholastic pursuits, there was little he could do about it, as Liu was determined to be an actress. The film industry was in the midst of relocating from the East Coast to the West, and Hollywood was booming. Liu Tsong would haunt movie shoots as she had earlier haunted the nickelodeons. Her favorite stars were Pearl White, of The Perils of Pauline (1914) serial fame, and White's leading man, Crane Wilbur. She was also fond of Ruth Roland.
Educated at a Chinese-language school in Chinatown, she would skip school to watch film shoots in her neighborhood. She made tip money from delivering laundry for her father, which she spent on going to the movies. Her father, if he discovered she had gone to the movies during school hours, would spank her with a bamboo stick. Around the time she was nine years old, she began begging filmmakers for parts, behavior that got her dubbed "C.C.C." for "curious Chinese child."
Liu Tsong's first film role was as an uncredited extra in Metro Pictures' The Red Lantern (1919), starring Alla Nazimova as a Eurasian woman who falls in love with an American missionary. The film included scenes shot in Chinatown. The part was obtained for her by a friend of her father's (without his knowledge) who worked in the movie industry. Retaining the family surname "Wong" and the English-language "Christian" name bestowed on her by her parents, Liu Tsong Americanized herself as "Anna May Wong" for the movie industry, though she would not receive an on-screen credit for another two years.
The rechristened Anna May Wong appeared in bit parts in movies starring Priscilla Dean, Colleen Moore and the Japanese-born Sessue Hayakawa, the first Asian star of American movies. Due to her father's demands, she had an adult guardian at the studio, and would be locked in her dressing room between scenes if she was the only Asian in the cast. Initially balancing school work and her budding film career, she eventually dropped out of Los Angeles High School to pursue acting full time. She was aided by the fact that, though still a teenager, she looked more mature than her real age.
Director Marshall Neilan cast the teenage Anna May in a bit part in his film Dinty (1920), then gave her her first credited role in the "Hop" sequence of Bits of Life (1921), the American movie industry's first anthology film. In "Hop" Wong played Toy Ling, the abused wife of Lon Chaney's character Chin Gow, which the Man of a Thousand Faces played in yellowface. She next appeared in support of John Gilbert in Fox's Shame (1921) before being cast in her first major role at the age of 17, the lead in The Toll of the Sea (1922). She played Lotus Flower in this adaptation of the opera "Madame Butterfly," which moved the action from Japan to China. "The Toll of the Sea" was the first feature film shot entirely in Technicolor's two-strip color process. By appearing top-billed in this romantic melodrama, Anna became the first native-born Asian performer to star in a major Hollywood movie. Most portrayals of Asian women were done by Caucasian actresses in "yellow-face," such as the 1915 Madame Butterfly (1915) starring "America's Sweetheart" Mary Pickford (who was born in Toronto, Canada) in the title role. In "The Toll of the Sea," Anna May's character perpetuates the stereotype of the Asian "lotus blossom," a self-sacrificial woman who surrenders her life for the love of a Caucasian man. The film was a hit, and it showcased Wong in a preternaturally mature and restrained performance. This breakthrough should have launched Anna May Wong as a star, but for one thing: She was Chinese in a country that excluded (by law) Chinese from emigrating to the US, that forbade (by law) Chinese from marrying Caucasians and that generally excluded (by law or otherwise) Chinese from the culture at large, except for bit roles as heavies in the national consciousness.
"The Toll of the Sea" made Anna May Wong a known, and thus a marketable, commodity in Hollywood. She became the #1 actress when a young Asian female part had to be cast, but unfortunately lead roles for Asians were few and far between. Instead of becoming a star, this beautiful woman with a complexion described as "a rose blushing through old ivory" continued to be stuck in supporting roles, as in Tod Browning's melodrama Drifting (1923) and the western Thundering Dawn (1923). She even played an Eskimo in The Alaskan (1924). She appeared as Tiger Lily, "Chieftainess of the Indians," in Paramount's prestigious production of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1924), but the role was very small (the film was shot on Santa Catalina Island, where the cast stayed during the production.
The 170-cm-tall (5'7", although other sources cite her height as 5'4½") beauty was known as the world's best-dressed woman and widely considered to have the loveliest hands in the cinema. Her big breakthrough after her auspicious start with "The Toll of the Sea" finally came when Douglas Fairbanks cast her in a supporting role as a treacherous Mongol slave in his Middle Eastern/Arabian Nights extravaganza The Thief of Bagdad (1924). The $2-million blockbuster production made her known to critics and the movie-going public. For better or worse, a star, albeit of the stereotypical "Dragon Lady" type, was born.
Despite her waxing fame, she was limited to supporting roles, as Caucasian actresses, including most improbably Myrna Loy, continued to be cast as Asian women in lead roles from the 1920s through the 1940s, despite the ready availability of Anna May Wong. She was unable to attract lead parts despite her beauty and proven acting talent, even in films featuring Asian women, but she did carve out a career as a supporting player in everything from A-list movies to two-reel comedies and serials. The characters she played typically were duplicitous or murderous vamps who often reaped the wages of their sin by being raped. It was a demeaning apprenticeship that most Caucasian actresses did not have to go through. Anna wanted was to play modern American women all through her career but was thwarted because of racism. Later, when she journeyed to Europe to escape the typecasting of Hollywood, she told journalist Doris Mackie, "I was so tired of the parts I had to play. Why is it that the screen Chinese is always the villain? And so crude a villain--murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass."
Wong embodied the Caucasian ideal of a foreign exotic beauty, an alien presence despite her American citizenship. The movie magazine "Pictures" published a memoir of hers in 1926 in which she complained, "A lot of people, when they first meet me, are surprised that I speak and write English without difficulty. But why shouldn't I? I was born right here in Los Angeles and went to the public schools here. I speak English without any accent at all. But my parents complain that the same cannot be said of my Chinese. Although I have gone to Chinese schools, and always talk to my father and mother in our native tongue, it is said that I speak Chinese with an English accent!". Many Chinese-Americans considered themselves "Chinese in America," an attitude bolstered by the anti-Chinese, anti-Asian attitude of the US government and the American culture. In her memoir, Wong referred to herself as "Chinese" or "Americanized Chinese," but not as an "American" or "Chinese-American."
Anna May Wong appeared as a dancer in a play within a movie shot in Technicolor for the Ronald Colman vehicle His Supreme Moment (1925), but her Hollywood output generally was undistinguished. In 1926 she seems to have appeared in a "race" film made by Chinese-Americans for a Chinese-American audience, The Silk Bouquet (1926) (aka "The Dragon Horse"). Moving between Poverty Row and the majors, she appeared again with Lon Chaney in Mr. Wu (1927) at MGM and with Warner Oland and Dolores Costello in Old San Francisco (1927) at Warner Brothers. Warners also cast her in support of Oriental yellowface queen Myrna Loy in The Crimson City (1928). Despite her WASP looks and red hair, Loy in Chinese yellowface had become a major "Oriental" star in American films desiring an exotic element. This indignity may have been what pushed Wong to seek her future somewhere other than Hollywood.
She moved to Europe in 1928, where she made movies in the UK and Germany. She made her debut on the London stage with the young up-and-coming Laurence Olivier in the play "The Circle of Chalk." After receiving a drubbing for her voice and singing from the London critics, she paid a Cambridge University tutor to improve her speech, with the result that she acquired an upper-crust English accent. Later she appeared in Vienna, Austria, in the play "Springtime."
European directors appreciated Wong's unique talents and beauty, and they used her in ways that stereotype-minded Hollywood, hemmed in by American prejudice, would not or could not. Moving to Germany to appear in German films, she became acquainted with German film personalities, including Marlene Dietrich and actress-filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. She learned German and French and began to develop a continental European attitude and outlook. In Europe she was welcomed as a star. According to her biographer Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Wong hobnobbed with "an intellectual elite that included princes, playwrights, artists and photographers who clamored to work with her." Anna May Wong was featured in magazines all over the world, far more than actresses of a similar level of accomplishment. She became a media superstar, and her coiffure and complexion were copied, while "coolie coats" became the rage. According to Hodges, "[S]he was the one American star who spoke to the French people, more than Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford or Mary Pickford, the top American actresses of the time." But, ironically, "[S]he's the one who's now forgotten." Wong was cast in Ewald André Dupont's silent film Piccadilly (1929) as a maid who is fired from her job at a London nightclub after dancing on top of a table, then rehired as a dancer to infuse the club with exotic glamour. Her first talkie was The Flame of Love (1930) (aka "The Road to Dishonour", although some sources claim it was "Song" aka "Wasted Love" in that same year), which was released by British International Pictures. In a time before dubbing, when different versions of a single film were filmed in different languages, Wong played in the English, French and German versions of the movie.
Paramount Pictures offered her a contract with the promise of lead roles in major productions. Returning to the US in 1930, Wong appeared on Broadway in the play "On the Spot." It was a hit, running for 167 performances, and she moved on to Hollywood and Paramount, where she starred in an adaptation of Sax Rohmer's novel "Daughter of Fu Manchu" called Daughter of the Dragon (1931). She was back in stereotype-land, this time as the ultimate "Dragon Lady," who with her father Fu Manchu (played by ethnic Swede Warner Oland, the future Charlie Chan) embodied the evil "Yellow Peril." While "Daughter of the Dragon" may have been B-movie pulp, it enabled Wong to show off her talent by delivering a powerful performance.
Her best role in Hollywood in the early 1930s was in support of Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's Oscar-winning classic Shanghai Express (1932). However, Hollywood in the 1930s was as racist as it had been in the Roaring Twenties, and MGM refused to cast her in its 1932 production of The Son-Daughter (1932), for which she did a screen-test, as she was "too Chinese to play a Chinese." Helen Hayes played the role in yellow-face. Similarly, she was later kept out of both a lead and supporting role in MGM's prestige production of The Good Earth (1937), its filming of Pearl S. Buck's popular novel, after flunking another screen test for failing to live up to a white man's idea of what "looked" Chinese. MGM screen-tested her for the lead role of O-Lan, the sympathetic wife of Chinese farmer Wang Lung (to be played by Paul Muni, personally cast in the part by Irving Thalberg). She also was considered for the supporting role of Lotus, Wang Lung's concubine. Anna, an ethnic Chinese, lost out on both roles to two Austrian women, Luise Rainer and Tilly Losch, as Albert Lewin, the Thalberg assistant who was casting the film, vetoed Wong and other ethnic Chinese because their looks didn't fit his conception of what Chinese people should look like. Ironically, the year "The Good Earth" came out, Wong appeared on the cover of Look Magazine's second issue, which labeled her "The World's Most Beautiful Chinese Girl." Stereotyped in America as a dragon lady, the cover photo had her holding a dagger. Luise Rainer would win the Best Actress Oscar for her performance of O-Lan in Chinese yellowface.
There were practical considerations for MGM's refusal to cast Wong opposite Muni. It was illegal in many states, including California, for Asians to marry Caucasians, and featuring an interracial couple, even if they were playing the same race, likely would mean the movie would be rejected by many theater chains in regions in which anti-Asian prejudice was particularly severe, such as the South. The new Motion Picture Production Code of 1934 forbid black/white miscegenation and MGM did cast Walter Connelly (a white actor) opposite Soo Yong (a Chines-American actress) as a married couple. Anna May returned to England, reportedly distraught at the injustice perpetrated by MGM and her home country. In England she alternated between films and the stage, but she was obliged to return to the US to fulfill her Paramount contract. She appeared in two Robert Florey-directed pictures, Daughter of Shanghai (1937) as a non-stereotypical Asian-American female lead, and Dangerous to Know (1938). She also appeared in major roles in King of Chinatown (1939) and Island of Lost Men (1939).
Anna May Wong did not appear in films from 1939-41, when she was cast as a supporting player in Ellery Queen's Penthouse Mystery (1941), an entry in the B-movie series. Her last two starring roles in films were in a pair of anti-Japanese propaganda films, Bombs Over Burma (1942) and Lady from Chungking (1942), both of which were made by Producers Releasing Corp., the lowest of the Poverty Row studios. The major studios, when shooting propaganda films requiring a sympathetic Asian lead, reverted to the old practice of casting Caucasians in yellow-face, no matter how absurd the result.
As her movie career went into eclipse in the 1940s (she would not appear in another motion picture until 1949), she found work on the stage and in radio and then in the new medium of television. Wong wrote a preface to the book "New Chinese Recipes" in 1942, which was one of the first Chinese cookbooks printed in the US. The proceeds from the cookbook were dedicated to United China Relief.
Though Wong was vocal in her opposition to stereotypes and typecasting, and was one of Hollywood's more memorable victims of racism in being denied leading roles in A-list pictures because the racist mores of the times prevented an Asian woman from kissing a Caucasian actor, she was considered socially suspect by her own people. The roles she was forced to accept in order to have an acting career, as well as her status as a single woman, disgusted many Chinese in America and in her ancestral homeland, where actresses were equated with prostitutes and where women were still played by men in classical opera. On a trip to China in 1936, Anna May was welcomed by the country's cultural elite in cosmopolitan Beijing and Shanghai, but she had to abandon a trip to her parents' ancestral village when her progress was blocked by a crowd of protesters. Someone in the crowed denounced her with "Down with Huang Liu Tsong, the stooge that disgraces China. Don't let her go ashore." Upon her return from China, Wong was determined to play Chinese characters more authentically, but her only options were to reject roles she deemed racist or to try to soften them from within the belly of the beast. Ultimately for this proud woman, it was a losing battle.
Chinese nationalism had been on the upswing since Yat-sen Sun ended the Manchu Empire in 1911 and was rife in reaction to the war of aggression launched against China by the Empire of Japan. Chinese nationalists, concerned about the portrayal of Chinese people as evil incarnate in American popular culture, were offended by Wong's portrayals of Asians and exotics. Though she would spend the World War II years working for Chinese charities and relief agencies, she was snubbed by Madame Chiang, the sister-in-law of Yat-sen Sun and wife of Kai-Shek Chiang, the army general who led the Nationalist Chinese, during Madame Chiang's 1942-43 propaganda tour of the US. Her biographer Hodges claims this was the beginning of a consensus among Chinese and Chinese-Americans that Wong was an embarrassment. Chinese and Chinese-Americans chose to blame her rather than Hollywood for the demeaning stereotypes she had to play in order to work. The result of this new consensus, according to Hodges, was that "her memory has been washed away."
Anna May's career in motion pictures was virtually finished after the war. She got her own TV series, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong (1951), on the Dumont Network, playing a Chinese detective in a role written expressly for her, a character who was even given her real Chinese name. The half-hour program, which ran weekly from August 27 to November 21, 1951, was the first TV show to star an Asian-American.
Wong's personal relationships typically were with older Caucasian men, but California law forbade marriage between Asians and Caucasians until 1948. One of her white lovers offered to marry her in Mexico, but the couple's intentions became known and he backed off when his Hollywood career was jeopardized. Wong mused about marrying a Chinese man at times, but the Chinese culture held actresses to be on a par with prostitutes, which made her suspect marriage material. She was afraid that the mores of her culture likely meant that marrying a Chinese would force her to quit her career and be an obedient wife.
Anna May Wong appeared in over 50 American, English and German films in her career, making her the first global Chinese-American movie star. She was forced to fight against racism and stereotyping all her professional life, while simultaneously being criticized by Chinese at home and abroad for perpetuating stereotypes in the media. Despite this tremendous burden, the beautiful woman assayed an elegance and sophistication on-screen that made her the paradigm of Asian women for a generation of movie audiences.
Anna May Wong loved reading, and her favorite subjects spanned a wide range, everything from Asian history and Tzu Lao to William Shakespeare. She never married but occupied her time with golf, horses, and skiing. Wong smoked, drank too much, and suffered from depression. She was poised to make a comeback as a character actress on the big screen toward the end of her life, having appeared as Lana Turner's maid in Ross Hunter's sudsy potboiler Portrait in Black (1960). She was cast in the role of Madame Liang in Flower Drum Song (1961), the movie version of Richard Rodgers's and Oscar Hammerstein II's Broadway musical "Flower Drum Song," but before shooting could begin she passed away.
Anna May Wong died of a massive heart attack on February 3, 1961, in Santa Monica, CA, after a long struggle against Laennec's cirrhosis, a disease of the liver. She was 56 years old. Her fame lives on, four decades after her death. She is a part of American popular consciousness, chosen as one of the first movie stars to be featured on a postage stamp. And the interest in her continues: a play about Anna entitled "China Doll--The Imagined Life of an American Actress," written by Elizabeth Wong, had its premiere at Maine's Bowdoin College in 1997. A lecture and film series, "Rediscovering Anna May Wong," was held at the UCLA Film and Television Archive in 2004, sponsored by "Playboy" publisher Hugh Hefner. That same year New York City's Museum of Modern Art held its own tribute to Wong, "Retrospective of a Chinese-American Screen Actress." Finally she was getting the respect in her own country that was denied her during her career.
A biography by Colgate University history professor Graham Russell Gao Hodges, "Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend," was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2004. Hodges considers Anna May's life and career to be amazing, particularly in light of the fact that her star has yet to be eclipsed by any other Asian-American female star, despite the change in attitudes. Finally, in 2004, the British Film Institute restored E.A. Dupont's 1929 silent film "Piccadilly".- Anna Quirentia Nilsson, popularly known as "Anna Q", who was born on March 30th, 1888, in Ystad, Sweden, emigrated to the United States in 1905. The 5'7" Nilsson used her blonde beauty to become a famous model for well-known fashion photographers and fine artists. In 1907 she was chosen the most beautiful girl in the US and in 1911 made her film debut in Molly Pitcher (1911). She was an overnight sensation, becoming a silent film superstar in the first decade of the 20th century. In 1914 she was chosen the most beautiful actress "in the world" and Photoplay magazine named her "the ideal American girl" in 1919.
She appeared in films by the top studios in Hollywood, including Goldwyn, Famous Players (Paramount), Metro and First National. Her movie career continued to flourish in the 1920s, the decade of the flapper and bathtub gin, the so-called Jazz Age. In 1926 she was chosen the most popular actress. However, she suffered a major setback in 1928, when she was thrown off a horse and fractured her thigh. To her relatives in Sweden she wrote " . . . no tragedy is greater than mine. I am still a young star and suddenly everything is lost". Her fans supported her with some 30,000 letters a month and Nilsson tried to rush her convalescence. It made a bad situation worse and doctors needed to shorten her leg.
In 1931 Nilsson was back before the camera, but her stardom was unfortunately in the past. She appeared in approximately 40 more films until she retired in 1954. She was one of the bridge players (a.k.a. the "wax works") in Norma Desmond's mansion in Sunset Boulevard (1950), appearing with her former co-star, silent film superstar and prominent victim of sound, H.B. Warner. Four years later, she appeared in a small part in her motion-picture swan-song, the classic musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).
Anna Q. Nillson died on February 11, 1974, six weeks shy of her 85th birthday. - Director
- Writer
- Actor
British film director Anthony Asquith was born on November 9, 1902, to H.H. Asquith, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his second wife. A former home secretary and the future leader of the Liberal Party, H.H. Asquith served as prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1908-1916 and was subsequently elevated to the hereditary peerage. His youngest child, Anthony, was called Puffin by his family, a nickname given him by his mother, who thought he resembled one. Puffin was also the name his friends called him throughout his life.
Asquith was active in the British film industry from the late silent period until the mid-1960s. As a director he was highly respected by his contemporaries and had a long and successful career; by the 1960s he was one of only three British directors (the others being David Lean and Carol Reed) who were directing major international motion picture productions. However, Asquith's proclivity for adapting plays for the screen caused an erosion in his critical reputation as a filmmaker after his death. He was faulted for what was perceived as his failure to focus, like his contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, on the cinematic. Asquith was known as an actor's director, and solicited some of the finest film performances from Britain's greatest actors, including Edith Evans and Michael Redgrave.
Although Asquith's first love was music, he lacked musical talent. He channeled his artistic ambitions toward the nascent motion picture, and was instrumental in the formation of the London Film Society to promote artistic appreciation of film. Asquith traveled to Hollywood in the 1920s to observe American film production techniques, and after returning to England, he became a director.
Among his best-known films is Pygmalion (1938), an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's stage play, which he co-directed with its star, Leslie Howard. The film was a major critical success, even in the United States, winning multiple Academy Award nominations. Nobel Prize-winner Shaw, who had been a co-founder of the London Film Society along with Asquith, won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for the film. Asquith had a long professional association with playwright Terence Rattigan, and two of Asquith's most famous and successful pictures were based on Rattigan plays, The Winslow Boy (1948) and The Browning Version (1951). Asquith directed the screen version of Rattigan's first successful play, French Without Tears (1940), in 1940.
Asquith's most successful postwar film was, arguably, his adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). More than a half-century after it was made, Asquith's film remains the best adaptation of Wilde's work. Ironically, Asquith's father H.H., while serving as Home Secretary, ordered Wilde's arrest for his homosexual behavior. Wilde's arrest, for "indecent behavior", led to his incarceration in the Reading jail and destroyed the great playwright, personally. The Wilde incident stifled gay culture in Britain for the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Another irony of the situation is that H.H.'s youngest son, Anthony, himself was gay.
By the 1960s Asquith was directing Hollywood-style all-star productions, including the episodic The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), once again from a screenplay by Rattigan, and the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor potboiler The V.I.P.s (1963), also with a screenplay by Rattigan. It is based in an incident in the life of Laurence Olivier, a frequent Asquith collaborator. In 1967 Asquith was tipped to direct the big-screen adaptation of the best-selling novel The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) set to co-star Olivier and Anthony Quinn, but he had to drop out of the production due to ill heath. He died on February 20, 1968, at the age of 65.
The British Academy Award for best music is named the Anthony Asquith Award in his honor.- Franciosa was born Anthony Papaleo on October 25, 1928, in New York City. The son of a construction worker and seamstress who divorced when he was a year old, he seldom saw his father after this and never man really got to know the other. After graduating high school, during a visit to a YMCA to take a free dance lesson, Franciosa came across an audition for a play. Intrigued, he auditioned and was offered a part.
Franciosa began acting professionally, taking his mother's maiden name as his stage name, and had his breakthrough in Calder Willingham's play "End as a Man" (1955), which opened off-Broadway at the Theatre de Lys on September 15, 1953 and transferred to Broadway on October 14 after 32 performances. It was directed by Jack Garfein and co-starred Ben Gazzara (who won a Theatre World Award and would appear in the movie version), both of whom were associated with the Actors Studio, as was Franciosa. His first wife, Beatrice Bakalyar, was a writer.
In 1955, he first appeared in the role that would make him famous: "Polo Pope", the brother of a heroin addict, in an Actors Studio workshop production of Michael V. Gazzo's A Hatful of Rain (1957). The production later moved to Broadway, where Franciosa earned an Outer Critics Circle Award and a Tony Award nomination. Hollywood beckoned, and he made his film debut in Robert Wise's This Could Be the Night (1957) with Paul Douglas and Jean Simmons.
He appeared in Actors Studio co-founder Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957) before reprising the role of "Polo Pope" in Fred Zinnemann's A Hatful of Rain (1957). Franciosa won an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in 1958 for "Hatful" and, with his good looks, was a very hot commodity in Hollywood. He followed up his strong debut by starring in a variety of top A-list films, including George Cukor's Wild Is the Wind (1957), Martin Ritt's The Long, Hot Summer (1958) and The Naked Maja (1958), in which he played painter Francisco Jose de Goya, opposite Ava Gardner.
Franciosa's career began to run out of momentum almost as quickly as it had started, as he rapidly developed a reputation as a combative personality, earning him a reputation as "difficult". Although he starred in George Roy Hill's adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Period of Adjustment (1962), by 1964 he was reduced to appearing in a TV series, Valentine's Day (1964), which lasted a single season. In 1968 he was cast as one of three alternating leads in the television series The Name of the Game (1968), a spin-off from the 1966 TV movie Fame Is the Name of the Game (1966) (the first TV-movie ever made as a pilot for a TV series that was subsequently picked up as a series). Although the show was popular with audiences, Franciosa was fired after appearing in the first two seasons; NBC justified giving him the sack because the actor's mercurial temper was causing too many problems on the set. Looking back at his career in a 1996 interview, Franciosa acknowledged that he was too inexperienced to handle sudden stardom. "It was an incredible amount of attention, and I wasn't quite mature enough psychologically and emotionally for it".
He starred in the series Matt Helm (1975), which only lasted one season, but his talent and charm meant he was in demand throughout the five decades of his career, though not in the kinds of roles that characterized the first two decades of his star period. He continued to act in supporting roles in movies and starring roles in TV movies and series until he retired in 1996. He appeared in one last project, "Manifest Mysteries: Coronation" (2006), shortly before his death on January 19, 2006 in Los Angeles, at the age of 77, five days after that of his ex-wife, actress Shelley Winters. - Script and Continuity Department
- Writer
- Producer
Anthony Minghella was the son of immigrants from Italy, who own an ice-cream factory on the Isle of Wight, where Anthony was born on January 6, 1954. He and his two siblings, Edana Minghella and Dominic Minghella, grew up there, a popular British holiday spot. After graduating from the University of Hull, Minghella took a position as a university lecturer, but quit academia to focus on the theater and songwriting. He oversaw the music in many of his movies.
Minghella was employed as a scriptwriter on the British TV series Maybury (1981) and Inspector Morse (1987) and, as a script editor on the British TV series Grange Hill (1978), before succeeding as a dramatist in the West End, London's equivalent of Broadway. In 1984, the London Theatre Critics named him Most Promising Playwright of the Year and, two years later, his drama "Made in Bangkok" won the the London Theatre Critics' award for best play.
An Anthony Minghella film assured movie-goers would enjoy a film blessed with a literate script, superlative performances and first-rate production values. His great craftsmanship was apparent from the beginning, with the bittersweet comedy Truly Madly Deeply (1990), in which the ghost of Alan Rickman comes back to his lady love, Juliet Stevenson, with unintended consequences. The theme of a ghostly love also was present in The English Patient (1996) his greatest success.
It is for that film he will be best remembered. Minghella claimed that with The English Patient (1996), which won nine Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, that he had reached the heights of his directing career.
In addition to his theater and film awards, in 2001, Anthony Minghella was appointed a Commander of the British Empire, a step just below knighthood, in the Queen's Birthday Honors List.
Anthony Minghella died of a hemorrhage on the morning of March 18, 2008 at Charing Cross Hospital in London, England. The 54-year-old Minghella had undergone an operation to remove a growth on his neck the previous week. He was survived by his wife, Carolyn Choa, and their two children, Max Minghella, who is an actor, and Hannah Minghella, who worked as a production assistant.- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Anthony Quinn was born Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca (some sources indicate Manuel Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca) on April 21, 1915, in Chihuahua, Mexico, to Manuela (Oaxaca) and Francisco Quinn, who became an assistant cameraman at a Los Angeles (CA) film studio. His paternal grandfather was Irish, and the rest of his family was Mexican.
After starting life in extremely modest circumstances in Mexico, his family moved to Los Angeles, where he grew up in the Boyle Heights and Echo Park neighborhoods. He played in the band of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson as a youth and as a deputy preacher. He attended Polytechnic High School and later Belmont High, but eventually dropped out. The young Quinn boxed (which stood him in good stead as a stage actor, when he played Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire" to rave reviews in Chicago), then later studied architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright at the great architect's studio, Taliesin, in Arizona. Quinn was close to Wright, who encouraged him when he decided to give acting a try. Made his credited film debut in Parole! (1936). After a brief apprenticeship on stage, Quinn hit Hollywood in 1936 and picked up a variety of small roles in several films at Paramount, including an Indian warrior in The Plainsman (1936), which was directed by the man who later became his father-in-law, Cecil B. DeMille.
As a contract player at Paramount, Quinn's roles were mainly ethnic types, such as an Arab chieftain in the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope comedy, Road to Morocco (1942). As a Mexican national (he did not become an American citizen until 1947), he was exempt from the draft. With many other actors in military service during WWII, he was able to move up into better supporting roles. He married DeMille's daughter Katherine DeMille, which afforded him entrance to the top circles of Hollywood society. He became disenchanted with his career and did not renew his Paramount contract despite the advice of others, including his father-in-law, with whom he did not get along (whom Quinn reportedly felt had never accepted him due to his Mexican roots; the two men were also on opposite ends of the political spectrum) but they eventually were able to develop a civil relationship. Quinn returned to the stage to hone his craft. His portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire" in Chicago and on Broadway (where he replaced the legendary Marlon Brando, who is forever associated with the role) made his reputation and boosted his film career when he returned to the movies.
Brando and Elia Kazan, who directed "Streetcar" on Broadway and on film (A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)), were crucial to Quinn's future success. Kazan, knowing the two were potential rivals due to their acclaimed portrayals of Kowalski, cast Quinn as Brando's brother in his biographical film of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, Viva Zapata! (1952). Quinn won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for 1952, making him the first Mexican-American to win an Oscar. It was not to be his lone appearance in the winner's circle: he won his second Supporting Actor Oscar in 1957 for his portrayal of Paul Gauguin in Vincente Minnelli's biographical film of Vincent van Gogh, Lust for Life (1956), opposite Kirk Douglas. Over the next decade Quinn lived in Italy and became a major figure in world cinema, as many studios shot films in Italy to take advantage of the lower costs ("runaway production" had battered the industry since its beginnings in the New York/New Jersey area in the 1910s). He appeared in several Italian films, giving one of his greatest performances as the circus strongman who brutalizes the sweet soul played by Giulietta Masina in her husband Federico Fellini's masterpiece The Road (1954). He met his second wife, Jolanda Addolori, a wardrobe assistant, while he was in Rome filming Barabbas (1961).
Alternating between Europe and Hollywood, Quinn built his reputation and entered the front rank of character actors and character leads. He received his third Oscar nomination (and first for Best Actor) for George Cukor's Wild Is the Wind (1957). He played a Greek resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation in the monster hit The Guns of Navarone (1961) and received kudos for his portrayal of a once-great boxer on his way down in Rod Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962). He went back to playing ethnic roles, such as an Arab warlord in David Lean's masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and he played the eponymous lead in the "sword-and-sandal" blockbuster Barabbas (1961). Two years later, he reached the zenith of his career, playing Zorba the Greek in the film of the same name (a.k.a. Zorba the Greek (1964)), which brought him his fourth, and last, Oscar nomination as Best Actor. The 1960s were kind to him: he played character leads in such major films as The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) and The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969). However, his appearance in the title role in the film adaptation of John Fowles' novel, The Magus (1968), did nothing to save the film, which was one of that decade's notorious turkeys.
In the 1960s, Quinn told Life magazine that he would fight against typecasting. Unfortunately, the following decade saw him slip back into playing ethnic types again, in such critical bombs as The Greek Tycoon (1978). He starred as the Hispanic mayor of a southwestern city on the short-lived television series The Man and the City (1971), but his career lost its momentum during the 1970s. Aside from playing a thinly disguised Aristotle Onassis in the cinematic roman-a-clef The Greek Tycoon (1978), his other major roles of the decade were as Hamza in the controversial The Message (1976) (a.k.a. "Mohammad, Messenger of God"); as the Italian patriarch in The Inheritance (1976); yet another Arab in Caravans (1978); and as a Mexican patriarch in The Children of Sanchez (1978). In 1983, he reprised his most famous role, Zorba the Greek, on Broadway in the revival of the musical "Zorba" for 362 performances (opposite Lila Kedrova, who had also appeared in the film, and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance). His career slowed during the 1990s but he continued to work steadily in films and television, including an appearance with frequent film co-star Maureen O'Hara in Only the Lonely (1991).
Quinn lived out the latter years of his life in Bristol, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his time painting and sculpting. Beginning in 1982, he held numerous major exhibitions in cities such as Vienna, Paris, and Seoul. He died in a hospital in Boston at age 86 from pneumonia and respiratory failure linked to his battle with throat cancer.- Antoinette Concello was a member of the famous "Flying Concello" aerial troupe, a family of flying trapeze artists. In the 20th Century multi-ring circus, the flying trapeze was the main attraction in the center ring of the "Big Top." The Flying Concellos were the premier troupe of aerialists in the 1920s, and Antoinette became known as the "greatest woman flyer of all time" because she was the only woman to complete the fabled "triple" (see Carol Reed's 1956 film "Trapeze" for background about this legendary stunt). A triple means that the aerialist completes three full somersaults while "flying" through the air after leaving their bar and being caught by a "catcher" hanging upside down on the opposite bar. It is a dangerous stunt.
Antoinette appeared with the troupe as one of the acts in Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 Best Picture Oscar-winning movie "The Greatest Show on Earth," which uses Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Baily Circus as a backdrop. The red-coated Ringling ringmaster Fred Brandna would introduce her act by announcing that Antionette was the first and only woman to achieve the triple, and added that she did it with "incomparable grace". The legendary flyer did not disappoint her audience, performing the fabled triple at every performance.
Antoinette Concello was inducted into the Circus Hall of Fame in 1963. - Actor
- Additional Crew
Anton Diffring was a character actor who worked continuously in motion pictures due to his aristocratic face and cool, clipped diction, making him ideal for typecasting in British and later American motion pictures as Nazis and other vile, despicable characters. What was ironic about his typecasting as a Nazi is that Diffring, born in Koblenz, Germany, on October 20, 1916, fled Nazi Germany in 1939.
He was the son of Bertha (Diffring) and Solomon/Samuel Pollack, a Jewish shop owner. He was born into a family that boasted generations of actors, and studied drama in Berlin and Vienna. At the outbreak of World War II, he fled Germany and wound up in Canada, where he was interned as an enemy alien for the duration of the war. It was in Canada where he began his acting career after World War II, working primarily there and in the US before moving to Britain in 1950.
He became popular playing Nazis in the postwar period, as the British film industry turned out film after film about the war, which created a great demand for actors who could convincingly play Nazis, the nastier the better. Diffring could play nasty, and his career as a character actor soared. He was still going at it in the 1960s, when he began appearing in American and international co-productions as German soldiers from both WW I and WW II, including The Blue Max (1966), Counterpoint (1967) and that Turner Network Television staple, Where Eagles Dare (1968). He was still going at it in the 1970s and 1980s, as he continued a nearly 40-year-long acting career that was terminated only by his death.
He was a much better actor than most of his roles required. Diffring broadened his range as an actor with stage and television work, but the movies continually beckoned, as casting agents were hooked on him when it came to Nazi roles. It was that face that did it; it was both his blessing and his curse. He had the light hair, the piercing blue eyes and the chiseled face of the haughty aristocrat, the German Junker, but it was a face that could telegraph much in the few seconds that was the average shot of a motion picture. As a character actor, he got much done with less (time).
In François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1966) he was cast in all likelihood as a counterpart to the Austrian actor Oskar Werner, so that Werner's own Teutonicness in the English setting wouldn't be as arch. He excelled as Werner's nemesis, as he could create a mood or signal an entire story line with just a look; dialog didn't matter (he likely would have been a superstar in silent films, when it was "the faces" that mattered).
Diffring tried to break out of those silken villain roles, moving to Rome in 1968, but producers turned to him again and again to fill their needs for a foreign heavy. He appeared as one of the most infamous Nazis of all, Adolf Hitler's hangman Reinhard Heydrich, in Operation Daybreak (1975), and as Hitler's foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in the American mini-series The Winds of War (1983). It made him a good living and it made him known, even if it did not fulfill his artistic ambitions.
What made his career such a success in terms of its longevity and fecundity was that Diffring was an actor who was enjoyable to watch. From Jack Clayton's I Am a Camera (1955) to Terence Fisher's The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), from Samuel Fuller's Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße (1972) to Ken Russell's Valentino (1977), Diffring gave memorable performances, sandwiched in with all the Nazi heavies one career could possibly bear.
Anton Diffring died at his home in Chateauneuf-de-Grasse, France, on May 20, 1989. He was 72 years old.- Archibald "Arch" Selwyn, the theater impresario who was one of the founders of the Goldwyn Studios, was born Archibald Simon in 1877. As a child he and his family, including older brother Edgar Selwyn, lived in Toronto, Ontario, before moving to Selma, Alabama, where his parents died. Arch followed his brother to New York in the 1890s, where Edgar was establishing himself as an actor.
Arch used his brother's theatrical connections to go into business with a loan from theatrical literary agent Elisabeth Marbury. He had acquired the rights to operate a Coney Island concession that required the purchase of a penny-slot-weighing machine, which he did with Marbury's money. After much frustration with the rusting machine, Arch and his partner garnered 1,300 pennies in one day from a Coney Island crowd mindful of their waists. The two partners promptly lost their loot, which was wrapped in a blanket, although they did recover it from a restaurant trash can. It was time for a new career for Arch.
In 1914 Edgar, Arch and future Broadway producer-director Crosby Gaige launched Selwyn & Company, Inc., a theatrical production company and play brokerage. In addition to producing plays, the company owned and operated Broadway theaters. The Selwyn Theater, which was built in 1918 on 42nd St. behind their six-floor New York City office building, was inaugurated on Oct 2, 1918, with the play "Information Please". The money for constructing the theater, which was re-christened the American Airlines Theater in the year 2000, was obtained by Arch from gambler 'Arnold Rothstein' (qv, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series (one of the inspirations for the character of Meyer Wolfsheim in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," Rothstein pioneered New York's narcotics trade, in addition to being a gangster, swindler and political fixer. He financed the first of George White's "Scandals" in 1918. His henchman Nicky Arnstein was the husband of Fanny Brice, who appeared in the rival Ziegfeld Follies). Rothstein, who liked to date Broadway showgirls, relied on his gal pals to steer patrons to his gambling parlors.
The most popular play to appear at the Selwyn was Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman's "The Royal Family," which burlesqued the Barrymore family. Opening on December 28, 1927, the play, which was produced by Broadway legend Jed Harris, ran for 345 performances. The Selwyns also built the Times Square Theater on 42nd Street in 1920. The theater opened with Edgar's own play, "The Mirage," which turned out to be a hit that ran for six months. The second play at the theater, Avery Hopwood's "The Demi-Virgin," ran for eight months. Eight of the 23 plays that followed these two inaugural hits were successful, and its boards were tread by the likes of Beatrice Lillie, Tallulah Bankhead and Robert Cummings. Gertrude Lawrence co-starred with the young Laurence Olivier and Noël Coward in Coward's 1931 hit comedy "Private Lives" at the theater. Other famous productions at the theater were "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" in the 1926-27 season, "The Front Page" in 1928 and "Strike Up the Band" in 1930.
The Times Square Theater's exterior featured an open-colonnaded limestone facade that had an entrance for the Selwyn's Apollo Theater. Built in 1919 as a movie-cum-vaudeville house named The Bryant, it was taken over by the Selwyns in 1920 and rebuilt. The renamed Apollo was converted to a legitimate theater showcasing plays and musicals, sharing a single marquee with the Times Square Theater. The Apollo didn't have its first hit until 1923's "Poppy," starring W.C. Fields. The theater then was taken over exclusively for George White's "Scandals," a Ziegfeld Follies-like show that ran annually from 1924-31. The "Scandals" was famous for its chorus line of undressed showgirls.
This was the Jazz Age, a period that saw the maturation of the American theater. The first great American playwright, Eugene O'Neill, made his mark in the era. Many of the musicals and popular songs launched in the 1920s are still with us, though, ironically, most of the popular playwrights of the era, like Avery Hopwood (who once had five hits running simultaneously on Broadway) have been forgotten. It was the time of Damon Runyon's "Bloodhounds of Broadway," when men like Rothstein and the swindler Julius "Nicky" Arnstein, the real-life models for Runyon's Nathan Detroit and Sky Masterson, strutted their stuff in the theater district amongst the other Guys & Dolls. Flush with money from securities swindles and other dubious endeavors, they were anxious to launder their dirty money as well as rubs shoulders with the showgirls and well-heeled sheep they were born to fleece. Silent partners putting up the capital for the construction of theaters or the production of shows, they embodied a Promethean race of theatrical angels who stole the light of heaven and gifted it to Broadway, making it shine. The Jazz Babies were ecstatic, and the box office boomed. The apogee of the Great White Way, so called due to the proliferation of white light given off by the plethora of uncolored light bulbs on theater marquees, was the Broadway season of 1927-28, when Broadway featured over 250 productions in over 70 legitimate theaters. Broadway was the heart of popular culture, as the shows that debuted there would segue to neighborhood theaters in metropolitan New York, and then work their way out to the stock companies in the hinterlands, even penetrating to the sticks populated by hicks before the advent of the sound flicks. According to the book "Broadway" (1974) by "New York Times" drama critic Brooks Atkinson (for whom the Richard Mansfield Theatre was renamed in 1960), the traffic in the Times Square area was so intense, due to the conglomeration of taxis and trolley cars, that most people out for a night at the theater walked. The theaters were built close together in the district to create a kind of entertainment bazaar, enabling theatergoers to shop for a show to attend, much as modern moviegoers mull their choices at a multiplex. Walking from theater to theater, this crowd in evening dress provided audiences for less-popular works, as many shows had sold out. Theaters still holding empty seats sent batches of tickets to broker Joe Leblang to be sold at half price. Producers of hit shows often resorted to the practice of "icing," hoarding tickets and selling them through scalpers at a higher price, then splitting the profits. When Lee Shubert, the head of the Shubert theatrical empire, died in 1953, his safe unexpectedly held several million dollars ($1 million in 1953 is equivalent to approximately $6.6 million in 2003 dollars), likely the profits from icing. Broadway was hit hard by the Great Depression that came after the 1929 stock market crash. Attendance dropped off sharply in the 1930s (just as movie attendance would drop off sharply in the late 1940s and early 1950s, due to the inroads of television), and there were fewer productions mounted. The Chanin Brothers went bankrupt in 1933 and lost everything. The Shubert Theater Corp., the premier Broadway theater operator, went bankrupt in 1934, though the canny Lee Shubert proved to be the only bidder when the organization's theaters were auctioned worth, outfoxing his brother J.J.
As a new decade dawned, many theaters that once were home to legitimate productions converted to movie houses or retail space, while others were torn down. The Shuberts did manage to preserve many of Broadway's most significant theaters, but other impresarios like the Selwyns exited the business. The Apollo closed as a legitimate theater after the musical "Blackbirds of 1933" flopped. It then began showing movies, until it was acquired by the Minskys, who turned it into a burlesque theater from 1934-37. In 1938 it transformed itself into a movie theater specializing in foreign films, then evolved into a Times Square grindhouse, closing in 1978. It was reopened as a legitimate house with "On Golden Pond" in 1979, but now is just an empty shell.
In 1933 the Times Square Theater ceased to be a legitimate theater after the closing of the play "Forsaking All Others," starring Tallulhah Bankhead. Produced by Arch, the play opened on March 1, 1933, and closed after 110 performances. The theater was refitted as a movie house in 1934, as was The Selwyn that same year, before being converted into a retail store in 1940. The Selwyn degenerated into one of Times Squares' many double-feature grindhouses before being reclaimed as a theater in the 1990s, when the Wooster Group staged Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape" there in 1997.
The source of the Selwyn family's fortune wasn't solely the theater. To capitalize on Edgar's popularity as a Broadway actor and playwright, the Selwyn brothers started producing movies in 1912 through their All Star Feature Films Corp. Arch produced a film of Upton Sinclair's sensational expose "The Jungle" in 1914--The Jungle (1914))--with a script based on his sister-in-law Virginia Mayo's dramatization of Sinclair's novel. Mayo was a successful actress-playwright herself, who also wrote novels.
In December 1916 the Selwyns merged their movie company with that of producer Samuel Goldfish, creating the Goldwyn Pictures Corp. The symbol of the new company was a reclining lion, surrounded by a banner made from a strip of celluloid film, reading, in Latin, "Ars Gratia Artis" ("Art for Art's Sake"). Designed by advertising-publicity man Howard Dietz, who later became a Broadway lyricist and movie executive, it adorned the front gate of the studio's Culver City, California, production facilities, which ranked with the finest in Hollywood (the inspiration for the original "Leo the Lion" likely were the stone lions fronting the New York Public Library on 44th St., which was across from the All Star Feature Corp.'s offices).
Margaret Mayo and Broadway impresario Arthur Hopkins also were partners in the deal, but the dominant figure at Goldwyn Pictures and Goldwyn Distributing was Sam Goldfish. Goldfish, a founding partner of the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Film Co. in 1914, was forced out of the company in early 1916 when Jesse Lasky more closely integrated his production company with Adolph Zukor's Famous Players Film Co. The two firms would serve as the basis of Paramount Pictures. Goldfish, who had immigrated to Canada as Schmuel Gelbfisz before coming to the United States, liked the name of his new company so well, he adopted it as his surname, thus becoming Samuel Goldwyn.
Goldwyn Pictures rented studio space in Fort Lee, NJ, at the Solax studios, and then at the larger studios owned by the Universal Film Manufacturing Co. In September 1917, Goldwyn released its first movie, Polly of the Circus (1917), based on Margaret Mayo's 1907 play, starring Mae Marsh. In addition to Marsh, Goldwyn's stable of stars included Tallulah Bankhead, Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand, and Will Rogers. Its directors included Ralph Ince, Frank Lloyd and Raoul Walsh.
Sam Goldwyn dominated Goldwyn Pictures for three years, until he lost an ownership struggle in September 1920. He resigned and, tired of partners, became an independent producer for the rest of his career. Subsequently, the Goldwyn-less Goldwyn bought the Triangle Studios in Los Angeles and leased two more New York studios while ceasing operations in New Jersey. The company eventually was merged with Loew's Inc.'s Metro Pictures in 1924 through a stock swap, creating Metro-Goldwyn, which subsequently merged with Louis B. Mayer's Louis B. Mayer Productions. The Leo the Lion trademark would be adopted by MGM, and after being modified, would become one of the most famous and enduring trademarks in history. Under the guidance of Mayer and his central producer, former Universal production executive Irving Thalberg, MGM became the greatest studio in the world.
Arch's brother Edgar, who was the brother-in-law of MGM chief Nicholas Schenck through his second marriage to the former Ruth Wilcox, eventually became a producer at MGM and Mayer's editorial assistant. While Edgar concentrated on his career at MGM, Arch continued with his life in the theater, producing plays through 1939.
Between 1912 and 1942 Arch and Edgar, singularly and together, produced over 80 plays on Broadway and at least a score of motion pictures. Arch Selwyn died in Los Angeles on June 21, 1959, having outlived his brother and former business partner Edgar by 15 years. - Editor
- Editorial Department
- Producer
Archie F. Marshek was an American movie and TV editor whose 44-year career spanned six decades from 1927 to 1971. Born on February 15, 1902 in Cass Lake, Minnesota, he started his career at Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) in 1927. When Kennedy formed R.K.O. in 1929 by merging F.B.O. with the Keith-Orpheum vaudeville circuit and striking a deal with David Sarnoff of Radio Corporation of America in order to access his sound technology patents, Marshek moved to the new studio. He served as a staff editor at R.K.O.-Radio Pictures from 1929 to 1936 and then at Paramount Pictures from 1937 to 1967. He also was the associate producer on Son of Kong (1933), his only foray beyond the movieola.
Marshek's main claim to fame is that he was the first editor to cut a three-strip, live-action Technicolor film, the 1934 short La Cucaracha (1934). The next year, he became the first to cut a full-length, three-strip Technicolor feature movie, Becky Sharp (1935). He worked with such top directors as King Vidor, Gregory La Cava, Lewis Milestone, and Rouben Mamoulian. He also was the editor for the feature film directing debuts of the Oscar-winning actors Anthony Quinn (The Buccaneer (1958)) and Marlon Brando (One-Eyed Jacks (1961)). At Paramount, he edited films featuring the studio's top stars, including Bing Crosby and Bob Hope both individually and as a team, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis as a team and Lewis as a solo act, and Elvis Presley.
Archie Marshek died on March 29, 1992 in Lawton, Oklahoma. He was 90 years old.- Aristole Onassis was an ethnic Greek born in Smyrna in the Ottoman Empire in what is now Turkey, who became a billionaire shipping tycoon when the number of billionaires could be counted on one hand. He is known to history as the second husband of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.
He was the son of Socrates Onassis, a ship owner with a modest fleet of 10 ships manned by 40 sailors. The relative wealth of his father got the young Ari a good education, and he became fluent in English, Spanish and Turkish. In the aftermath of World War One, when the Ottoman Empire was broken up by the victorious Allies and modern Turkey was created by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, many ethnic Greeks were expelled from the new country. The Onassis family fled to Greece as refugees.
Aristotle Onassis emigrated to Argentina in 1923 with 60 dollars (approximately $800 in 2011 dollars, when factored for inflation). He became an importer of Turkish tobacco and eventually became an owner of ships. Eventually, he held Argentine and Greek passports and dual citizenship.
Onassis switched to transporting oil for the major petroleum companies, who could save money by not owning their own fleets. It was the introduction of the supertanker to transport Middle Eastern oil that made Onassis one of the richest men in the world. A supertanker could be paid for with one six-month lease, meaning that the majority of the 20-year life-span of a tanker could result in extraordinary profits. Onassis invested his vast fortune wisely, including in the petroleum industry itself, transportation, and other businesses.
Outside of the business world, Aristole Onassis was little known, and if he was known at all, it was for his romance with the opera singer Maria Callas. However, his 1968 marriage to the widow of the late President John F. Kennedy made him a world-wide figure whose life was chronicled in newspapers around the globe. - Director
- Producer
- Writer
Armand Denis was an Anglo-Belgian filmmaker known known for his documentaries for both the silver screen and television, primarily about Africa. The son of a judge, he was born on December 2, 1896 in Brussels. He moved to England after his World War One military service, where he studied chemistry at Oxford. After working for a chemist in England and Belgium, he moved to America in 1926. His invention of an automatic volume control for radio brought him enough income to travel and shoot movies of exotic locales.
He worked as a cameraman in Hollywood in the late silent era before hooking up with Theodore Roosevelt's French-born cousin Andre Roosevelt to travel to Bali in 1928, which they documented on film. Roosevelt wanted to develop the tourist industry in Bali in the 1920s in order to preserve the native culture by turning the island into a national park. As part of his aspirations, he wrote the screenplay for the 1932 movie "Goona-Goona, An Authentic Melodrama" (a.k.a. Kriss (1931)) that he co-produced and co-directed with Denis.
The two had begun filming Bali on their '28 trip and eventually combined their documentary footage with a fictional romantic story about the love between a native prince and a servant girl. The first version of the film, called "Love Powder", was released in 1930. Two years later, a re-edited version that conformed to censorship strictures was released and was a hit, creating a Bali craze in The States. Denis subsequently married Roosevelt's daughter Leila and they had four children.
Denis capitalized on the success of the picture and directed the 1934 African jungle adventure film Wild Cargo (1934), which starred great white hunter Frank Buck. Subsequently, he and Leila traveled to the Belgian Congo in 1934-35 and shot sound footage that could be used in movies set in Africa. Their footage included the first recordings of the dances and music of the Tutsi and Mangbetu tribes. In addition to releasing the music commercially, the created a movie of their trip, called "Wheels Across Africa" (1936).
The couple worked making documentary shorts in the 1930s and '40s, but Denis divorced his wife to marry English dress designer Michaela Holdsworth, whom he met in 1948. Along with Michaela, with whom he lived in Nairobi, Kenya, Denis continued to make documentaries in Africa. Their TV program "Filming Wild Animals" was broadcast on the British Broadcasting Co. in 1954, and thereafter, they regularly contributed African documentaries to the BBC and ITV.
Armand Denis died from Parkinson's disease on April 15, 1971. He was 74 years old.- Actor
- Soundtrack
The English actor Arthur Brough, who achieved fame as senior clothing salesman Mr. Grainger on the BBC-TV comedy series Are You Being Served? (1972) in the 1970s, after almost half-a-century on the stage, was born Frederick Arthur Baker on February 26, 1905 in Petersfield, Hampshire, England. After indulging in amateur theatrics with future star Alistair Sim, Brough attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in the early 1920s. After graduating, he joined a Shakespearean theatrical troupe where he met his wife-to-be, actress Elizabeth Addeyman. After they married, they used their wedding dowry as collateral to rent the Leas Pavilion, a repertory theater in Folkestone.
Arthur both ran the company and acted in the shows, and once the new Folkestone rep was established, he began establishing new repertory companies in Bradford, Bristol, Blackpool, Keighley, Leeds, Lincoln, Oxford and Southampton, as well as other acting companies throughout the country. With the advent of World War II, he enlisted in the Royal Navy, where he served for the duration. Upon being demobilized, he resumed his acting career by reopening the Folkestone rep.
Arthur Brough dedicated his life to the theater, and "Are You Being Served?" co-star Mollie Sugden credits him with helping train a generation of actors. In the 1950s, he established repertory theaters at Southend and Eastbourne. However, with the rise of television, he predicted the eclipse of repertory theater as a viable entertainment venue. In the 50s, he began seeking roles in the mass media, appearing in small roles in movies and television. His daughter, Joanna Hutton, said about his forecast of the decline of repertory theater, "He was very astute and unsentimental about it. He realized the era was over and that he must diversify. One of the first jobs he did away from the stage was the film The Green Man (1956) with Alastair Sim."
According to his daughter, he found it hard adjusting from stage to screen at first. "He realized how hammy he was. He used to take the mickey out of himself; he'd always acted in a Shakespearean manner and suddenly realized he had to tone down his performance for film."
Brough appeared in a wide variety of small and bit parts, including a small role opposite Jayne Mansfield in It Takes a Thief (1960), and made guest appearances in TV shows such as Upstairs, Downstairs (1971), Dad's Army (1968), and Z Cars (1962). He also continued to appear in theatrical productions, including Half a Sixpence (1967), playing a shopkeeper. The Folkestone Rep continued until 1969 before closing.
Throughout his time on the hit show, Brough's personal life was beset with sadness, as his beloved wife was seriously ill.
A crisis hit "Are You Being Served?" after it completed its fifth season (1977). All was going well: Producer David Croft had hired Bob Spiers, a BBC director who'd recently directed Fawlty Towers (1975) and who later helmed the Emmy-winning Absolutely Fabulous (1992), to direct the sixth season. However, on Easter Sunday 1978, Arthur Brough's wife of 50 years, Elizabeth, passed away, and the emotionally devastated Brough announced he was quitting acting.
According to his daughter, he stayed with her for a few weeks, during which time David Croft] and Jeremy Lloyd made contact to say they were writing him into the next series. But unfortunately he died before filming commenced.
Brough died six weeks after his wife, on May 28, 1978, in Folkestone. Croft decided not to have another actor take over the part of Mr. Grainger, so his character in "Are You Being Served"? was replaced by Mr. Tebbs, played by James Hayter.
His co-workers have fond memories of working with Arthur, who - as his daughter noted - "was a highly respected actor who'd spent forty years in the profession." At the time of Arthur's death, David Croft said: "Arthur created a living character who was the inspiration for much of the humour His personality made him a pivot round which a whole lot of laughter and affection revolved."- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Arthur was known as one of Hollywood's most accomplished lighting cameramen, a master at black and white cinematography. Miller began his career at 13, serving as an assistant to cinematographer Fred J. Balshofer. (They co-authored a book entitled "Two Reels and a Crank" in 1967.) Miller photographed the serial "The Perils of Pauline" in 1914, later joining director George Fitzmaurice. He later signed on with Cecil B. DeMille and in 1932 received a long term contract with Fox Studios. Retiring in 1951, Miller served as president of the American Society of Cinematographers and in the 1960s he set up an extensive exhibit of vintage camera equipment for the ASC. Miller passed away shortly after completing the documentary entitled "The Moving Picture Camera."- Arthur Kennedy, one of the premier character actors in American film from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, achieved fame in the role of Biff in Elia Kazan's historic production of Arthur Miller's Pultizer-Prize winning play "Death of a Salesman." Although he was not selected to recreate the role on screen, he won one Best Actor and four Best Supporting Academy Award nominations between 1949 and 1959 and ranked as one of Hollywood's finest players.
Born John Arthur Kennedy to a dentist and his wife on February 17, 1914 in Worcester, Massachusetts. As a young man, known as "Johnny" to his friends, studied drama at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. By the time he was 20 years old, he was involved in local theatrical groups. Kennedy's first professional gig was was with the Globe Theatre Company, which toured the Midwest offering abbreviated versions of Shakespearian plays. Shakesperian star Maurice Evans hired Kennedy for his company, with which he appeared in the Broadway production of "Richard II" in 1937. While performing in Evans' repertory company, Kennedy also worked in the Federal Theatre project.
Arthur Kennedy made his Broadway debut in "Everywhere I Roam" in 1938, the same year that he married Mary Cheffrey, who would remain his wife until her death in 1975. He also appeared on Broadway in "Life and Death of an American" in 1939 and in "An International Incident" in 1940 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, in support of the great American actress the theater had been named after.
Kennedy and his wife moved west to Los Angeles, California in 1938, and it was while acting on the stage in L.A. that he was discovered by fellow actor James Cagney, who cast him as his brother in the film City for Conquest (1940). The role brought with it a contract with Warner Bros., and the studio put him in supporting roles in some prestigious movies, including High Sierra (1940), the film that made Humphrey Bogart a star, They Died with Their Boots On (1941) with Errol Flynn, and Howard Hawks's Air Force (1943) alongside future Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner Gig Young and the great John Garfield. His career was interrupted by military service in World War Two.
After the war, Kennedy went back to the Broadway stage, where he gained a reputation as an actor's actor, appearing in Arthur Miller's 1947 Tony Award-winning play "All My Sons," which was directed by Kazan. He played John Proctor in the original production of Miller's reflection on McCarthyism, "The Crucible" - which Kazan, an informer who prostrated himself before the forces of McCarthyism, refused to direct - and also appeared in Miller's last Broadway triumph, "The Price."
When Kennedy returned to film work, he quickly distinguished himself as one of the best and most talented of supporting actors & character leads, appearing in such major films as Boomerang! (1947), Champion (1949) (for which he received his first Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor) and The Glass Menagerie (1950), playing Tom in a mediocre adaptation of Tennessee Williams's classic play. Kennedy won his first and only Best Actor nomination for Bright Victory (1951), playing a blinded vet, a role for which he won the New York Film Critics Circle award over such competition as Marlon Brando and Humphrey Bogart. Other films included Fritz Lang's 'Rancho Notorious (1951)', Anthony Mann's Bend of the River (1952), William Wyler's The Desperate Hours (1955), Richard Brooks' Elmer Gantry (1960), David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn (1964).
In 1956, Kennedy won another Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his role in Trial (1955), plus two more Supporting nods in 1958 and 1959 for his appearances in the screen adaptations of Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1957), and James Jones Some Came Running (1958).
Kennedy returned to Broadway frequently in the 1950s, and headlined the 1952 play "See the Jaguar", a flop best remembered for giving a young actor named James Dean one of his first important parts. A decade later, Kennedy replaced his good friend Anthony Quinn in the Broadway production of "Becket", alternating the roles of Becket and Henry II with Laurence Olivier, who was quite fond of working with him. In the 1960s, the prestigious movie parts dried up as he matured, but he continued working in movies and on TV until he retired in the mid-1980s. He moved out of Los Angeles to live with family members in Connecticut. In the last years of his life, he was afflicted with thyroid cancer and eye disease. He died of a brain tumor at 75, survived by his two children by his wife Mary, Terence and actress Laurie Kennedy. He is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Lequille, Nova Scotia, Canada. - Writer
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City, one of three children born to Augusta (nee Barnett) and Isidore Miller. His family was of Austrian Jewish descent. His father manufactured women's coats, but his business was devastated by the Depression, seeding his son's disillusionment with the American Dream and those blue-sky-seeking Americans who pursued it with both eyes focused on the Grail of Materialism. Due to his father's strained financial circumstances, Miller had to work for tuition money to attend the University of Michigan, where he wrote his first plays. They were successful, earning him numerous student awards, including the Avery Hopwood Award in Drama for "No Villain" in 1937.
The award was named after one of the most successful playwrights of the 1920s, who simultaneously had five hits on Broadway, the Neil Simon of his day. Now almost forgotten except for his contribution to Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Hopwood achieved a material success that the older Miller could not match, but he failed to capture the immortality that would be Miller's. Hopwood's suicide, on the beach of the Cote d'Azur, reportedly inspired Norman Maine's march into the southern California surf in A Star Is Born (1937).
Like Fitzgerald, Miller tasted success at a tender age. In 1938, upon graduating from Michigan, he received a Theatre Guild National Award and returned to New York, joining the Federal Theatre Project. He married his college girlfriend, Mary Grace Slattery, in 1940; they would have two children, Joan and Robert. In 1944, he made his Broadway debut with "The Man Who Had All the Luck", a flop that lasted only four performances. He went on to publish two books, "Situation Normal" (1944) and "Focus" (1945), but it was in 1947 that his star became ascendant. His play "All My Sons", directed by Elia Kazan, became a hit on Broadway, running for 328 performances. Both Miller and Kazan received Tony Awards, and Miller won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. It was a taste of what was to come.
Staged by Kazan, "Death of a Salesman" opened at the Morosco Theatre on February 10, 1949, and closed 742 performances later on Nov 18, 1950. The play was the sensation of the season, winning six Tony Awards, including Best Play and Best Author for Miller. Miller also was awarded the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play made lead actor Lee J. Cobb, as Willy Loman, an icon of the stage comparable to the Hamlet of John Barrymore: a synthesis of actor and role that created a legend that survives through the bends of time. A contemporary classic was recognized, though some critics complained that the play wasn't truly a tragedy, as Willy Loman was such a pathetic soul. Given his status, Loman's fall could not qualify as tragedy, as there was so little height from which to fall. Miller, a dedicated progressive and a man of integrity, never accepted that criticism. As Willy's wife Linda said at his funeral, "Attention must be paid", even to the little people.
In 1983, Miller himself directed a staging of "Salesman" in Chinese at the Beijing People's Art Theatre. He said that while the Chinese, then largely ignorant of capitalism, might not have understood Loman's career choice, they did have empathy for his desire to drink from the Grail of the American Dream. They understood this dream, which Miller characterizes as the desire "to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be loved, and above all, perhaps, to count." It is this desire to sup at the table of the great American Capitalists, even if one is just scrounging for crumbs, in a country of which President Calvin Coolidge said, "The business of America is business," this desire to be recognized, to be somebody, that so moves "Salesman" audiences, whether in New York, London or Beijing.
Miller never again attained the critical heights nor smash Broadway success of "Salesman," though he continued to write fine plays that were appreciated by critics and audiences alike for another two decades. Disenchanted with Kazan over his friendly testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the two parted company when Kazan refused to direct "The Crucible", Miller's parable of the witch hunts of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Defending her husband, Kazan's wife, Molly, told Miller that the play was disingenuous, as there were no real witches in Puritan Salem. It was a point Miller disagreed with, as it was a matter of perspective--the witches in Salem were real to those who believed in them. However, subsequent research has shown that the cursorily-researched (at best) play contains fictional motifs (regarding Goodman and Goodwife Putnam and their offspring), limited research, and carelessness in identifying (or not identifying, as with William Stoughton) the true authors of the witch trials. Directed by another Broadway legend, Jed Harris, the play ran for 197 performances and won Miller the 1953 Tony Award for Best Play. Miller had another success with "A View from the Bridge", a play about an incest-minded longshoreman written with overtones of classical Greek tragedy, which ran for 149 performances in the 1955-56 season.
It was in 1956 that Miller made his most fateful personal decision, when he divorced his first wife, Mary Slattery Miller, and married movie siren-cum-legend Marilyn Monroe. With this marriage Miller achieved a different type of fame, a pop culture status he abhorred. It was a marriage doomed to fail, as Monroe was, in Miller's words, "highly self-destructive". In his 1989 autobiography, "Timebends", Miller wrote that a marriage was a conspiracy to keep out the light. When one or more of the partners could no longer prevent the light from coming in and illuminating the other's faults, the marriage was doomed. In his own autobiography, "A Life", Kazan said that he could not understand the marriage. Monroe, who had slept with Kazan on a casual basis, as she did with many other Hollywood players, was the type of woman someone took as a mistress, not as a wife. Miller, however, was a man of principle. He was in love. "[A]ll my energy and attention were devoted to trying to help her solve her problems", Miller confessed to a French newspaper in 1992. "Unfortunately, I didn't have much success."
The conspiracy collapsed during the filming of The Misfits (1961) (1961), with John Huston shooting the original script Miller had written expressly for his wife. The genesis of the story had come to him while waiting out a divorce from his first wife Mary in Nevada. Monroe hated her character Roslyn, claiming Miller had made her out to be the dumb blond stereotype she so loathed and had been trying to escape. Withering in her criticism of Miller, and ultimately unfaithful to him, she and Miller separated. Norman Mailer, in his 1973 biography, "Marilyn", ridiculed Miller for not doing enough to help Monroe. Film critic Pauline Kael lambasted Mailer by imputing petty machismo and jealousy as the cause of his animus against Miller. Miller would later reunite with Kazan to launch the new Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, with the play "After the Fall", a fictionalization of his relationship with Monroe. "Fall" ran for 208 performances in repertory in 1964 and 1965 and won 1964 Tony Awards for Jason Robards and Kazan's future wife Barbara Loden, playing the Miller and Monroe stand-ins Quentin and Maggie. Miller's own "Incident at Vichy" played in repertory with "Fall" in the 1965 season, but lasted only 32 performances.
On June 1, 1957, Miller was found in contempt of Congress for refusing to name names of a literacy circle suspected of Communist Party affiliations. The State Department deprived him of his passport, and he became a left-wing cause célèbre. In 1967 Miller became President of P.E.N., an international literacy organization that campaigned for the rights of suppressed writers. He published a collection of short stories entitled "I Don't Need You Any More", that same year. Returning to the Morosco Theatre, the site of his greatest triumph, "The Price" was Miller's last unqualified hit in America, running for 429 performances between February 7, 1968 and February 15, 1969. Though Miller won a 1968 Tony Award for Best Play, the bulk of his success as an original playwright was over. The Price (1971) (a 1971 teleplay) was nominated for six Emmy awards, including Outstanding Single Program-Drama or Comedy, and won three, including Best Actor for George C. Scott, who would later win a 1976 Tony playing Willy Loman in a 1975 Broadway revival.
Miller never again achieved success on Broadway with an original play. In the 1980s, when he was hailed as the greatest living American playwright after the death of Tennessee Williams, he even had trouble getting full-scale revivals of his work staged. One of his more significant later works, "The American Clock", based on Studs Terkel's oral history of the Great Depression, "Hard Times", ran for only 11 previews and 12 performances in late 1980 at the Biltmore Theatre. Also in 1980, Miller courted controversy by backing the casting of the outspokenly anti-Zionist Vanessa Redgrave as a concentration-camp Jewess in his teleplay Playing for Time (1980), an adaptation of the memoir "The Musicians of Auschwitz". Despite the fallout in the United States for America's then-greatest living playwright, his works were popular in Great Britain, whose intellectual and theatrical communities treated him as a major figure in world literature. The universality of his work was highlighted with his own successful staging of "Death of a Salesman" in Beijing in 1983.
"Death of a Salesman" has become a standard warhorse, now revived each decade on Broadway, and internationally. In addition to George C. Scott and Lee J. Cobb (who received an Emmy nomination for the 1966 teleplay; Miller himself received a Special Citation from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for the production), Dustin Hoffman and Brian Dennehy have garnered kudos for playing Willie Loman. The 1984 Broadway revival of "Salesman" won a Tony for best Reproduction and helped revive Miller's domestic reputation, while Volker Schlöndorff's 1985 film (Death of a Salesman (1985)) of the production won 10 Emmy nominations, including one for Miller as executive producer of the Outstanding Drama/Comedy Special. Hoffman won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for playing Willy Loman. The 1999 revival won four Tonys, including Dennehy for Best Actor, and ran for 274 performances at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. Arthur Miller died in Roxbury, Connecticut in 2005, aged 89. He had been suffering from cancer, pneumonia and a heart condition.
Miller based his works on American history, his own life, and his observations of the American scene. His stature is traditionally based on his perceived refusal to avoid moral and social issues in his writing. His willingness to fight for what he believed in his chosen art form made him a literary icon whose name will live on in world letters.- Actor
- Writer
Aubrey Lyles was an African American songwriter and lyricist who also was a Broadway actor and vaudeville performer as part of a duo with Flournoy Miller (who was better known as F.E. Miller). Born in Jackson, Tennessee in 1883, Lyles met Miller when he was studying medicine at Fisk University. The two went to work at the first African American theatrical company, Chicago's Pekin Theater Stock Company, from 1906 to 1909.
The duo's Broadway debut was in August 1907 at the Harlem Music Hall, when the Pekin Theater Company brought the musical comedy "The Husband" to New York. Miller and Lyles wrote the book and lyrics. Independent of the Pekin Theater, they had a second Broadway show in 1907, "The Oyster Man".
Lyles made his Broadway debut as a performer in the 1912 musical "The Charity Girl", playing the character "Jumbo" (Miller played "Mumbo"). They did not contribute any writing to the show. By this time, they were a vaudeville act billed as Miller and Lyles, touring the U.S. and England.
They wrote the book for the 1921 Broadway musical "Suffle Along", collaborating with Eubie Blake (who wrote the music) and lyricist Noble Sissle. Lyles and Miller also were performers in the show, which was a huge hit, playing for 484 performances. They also worked on another Broadway show, "Runnin' Wild" in 1923, providing the book and performing in the production. It also was a hit, running for 228 performances.
Lyles and Miller performed in the 1926 hit musical revue "The Great Temptations", which racked up 226 performances. The following year, they not only performed in but made their directing debut in "Rang Tang", a musical revue that ran for 119 performances. In 1928, they wrote the book and performed in the musical comedy "Keep Shuffling", which featured music by Fats Waller. Their last successful Broadway show, it played for 104 performances.
In 1929, Miller and Lyles appeared in the musical comedy "Great Day". It closed after only 36 performances. That same year, Lyles split with Miller, though in December 1931, they were back on Broadway together, in the musical comedy "Sugar Hill", a flop that closed in January 1932 after only 11 performances. Later that year, they started to develop a new show, "Shuffle Along of 1933", but their partnership was terminated with finality when Lyles died of tuberculosis in July.- Augustus Henry Glossop Harris was an English playwright, theatrical impresario and actor who was knighted for his services to the theater. He was born on March 18, 1852 in Paris to the dramatist Augustus Glossop Harris and his wife Maria, a wardrobe designer. Augustus Henry was raised in London until returning to Paris at the age 12 to get his education.
He took over management of London's Drury Lane Theatre in 1879 and won the sobriquet "Father of Modern Pantomime". His first play, "The World" (co-written with Paul John Meritt and Henry Pettitt) was put on at the Drury Lane in 1880. He co-wrote many more plays with both Meritt and Pettitt singularly, never again as a trio; he also collaborated with Henry Hamilton multiple times and had other co-writers. Harris & Hamilton's 1889 play The Royal Oak (1923) was made into a movie in 1923, while their The Derby Winner (1915), which was co-written with Cecil Raleigh, 1895, was adapted for the screen in both 1915 and 1923
Harris's involvement in politics led to him becoming a member of the London County Council in 1890 and being appointed a sheriff in 1891. He also was a deputy lieutenant of the city of London. He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1891.
Augustus Harris died at Folkestone, England on June 22, 1896 at the age of 44. He was buried in Brompton Cemetery, London. - Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Most of Babe Ruth's records have been broken. In 1961, not only did Roger Maris break The Babe's 34-year-old record for most home runs in a season with 61* (2001), but Maris' teammate on the '61 Yankees, pitcher Whitey Ford broke the Babe's 43-year-old record for most scoreless innings pitched in a World Series when the Yankees dispatched the Reds that year in the postseason. (When asked how it felt to have beat the Babe's "other" record, Whitey responded, "It was a bad year for the Babe".)
Though Barry Bonds now holds the record for most home runs in a season (73), most home runs in a career (762), highest slugging percentage, most intentional walks, etc., The Babe still must be considered the greatest player who ever graced the game. In addition to his record 12 home run titles, his 13 slugging titles, his six R.B.I. titles, and his solo batting title (.378 in 1924; The Babe placed in the top five hitters in terms of batting average eight times, including a career high of .393 in 1923, when Harry Heilmann hit .403), The Babe won 18, 23 and 24 games as a left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox in 1915, 1916 and 1917, and won the American League E.R.A. title in '16. He set his first home run title in 1918, another year the Sox won the World Series, as a part-time position player and part-time pitcher, notching up 11 homers and nine wins. George Herman Ruth likely will remain the sole player in major league baseball history to win batting, home run, R.B.I., slugging *and* E.R.A. titles, plus eat a dozen hot dogs and drink the better part of a keg of bootleg "needle" beer before suiting up for a game.
From 1914 to 1919, The Babe played for the Boston Red Sox, with whom he appeared on three World's Championship teams. Sold to the New York Yankees by Red Sox owner and theatrical impresario Harry Frazee, he led the-then no pennant American League franchise in Gotham to seven A.L. pennants and four World Series titles from 1920-1934. He played out his string with the Boston Braves in 1935; even a washed-up Babe was still able to pole three circuit clouts in one game before calling it quits after 28 games and six in that last season. The following year, he was one of the inaugural inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Yes, the Babe was mighty, and he did prevail more often than naught except over one opponent: Father Time.
The Babe ended his 22 years in the Big Leagues with 2,873 hits good for a career batting average of .342, 714 home runs, 2,217 R.B.I.s, and 2,174 runs scored in 2,503 games. (From his debut in 1914 through the 1918 season, when he was making his transition to becoming a full time position player, Ruth only appeared in 261 ball games as he was considered the top left-handed pitcher in the American League.) In the record books, Ty Cobb scored more runs and Hank Aaron hit more homers and racked up more R.B.I.s (Interestingly, Hammerin' Hank and The Babe ended their careers with the exact same number of runs scored.), but they played in far more games than the The Babe, with 3,035 and 3,298 games, respectively. Among modern players, Rickey Henderson, who surpassed Cobb's record for runs after 25 years in The Show, played in 3,081 games, and Barry Bonds appeared in almost 3,000 games.
No player ever had the impact, both on and off the field, as did the charismatic Babe. When he died of cancer in 1948, the New York Times headline read, "Babe Ruth/Idol of Millions of Boys/Dead".- Music Department
- Actor
- Composer
Baker Knight, who wrote hundreds of songs during his career spanning the 1950s to the 1970s, was born Thomas Baker Knight, Jr., in Birmingham, Alabama on the Fourth of July, 1933. His family lived in various places in the South, but most of his youth was spent in the shadow of Vulcan, who stood on hill overlooking the steel-producing city of Birmingham. After graduating from high school in Birmingham, he spent three years in the Air Force. It was during his three year hitch in the service that he learned to play guitar. After leaving the Air Force, he matriculated for a year at the University of Alabama but could not afford to return for his sophomore year. Instead, he enrolled at a Birmingham art school and learned technical illustration and draftsmanship.
When Elvis Presley took the nation by storm in the mid-'50s and a new genre - rock n' roll -- was launched out of the fusion of country with rhythm and blues, Knight forged a Birmingham band, Baker Knight and the Knightmares, in 1956. The band became popular in Birmingham, and within a year, it was successful enough to serve as the opening act for rockabilly star Carl Perkins and country singer Conway Twitty. A
n agent from Hollywood scouting steel city signed the band to a recording contract. One of Knight's compositions, "Bring My Cadillac Back," charted and sold 40,000 hot-wax platters in two weeks before the song was removed from radio play as an unpaid commercial for General Motors' luxury division. The band's momentum was lost, and they eventually broke up.
With only $80 in his pockets of his jeans, Baker moved to Los Angeles to capitalize on an offer of movie role that didn't pan out. The lonely time he spent prowling Los Angeles, looking for a break, influenced the writing of his most famous song, "Lonesome Town," a commentary about being lost in a crowd all alone in a strange town like Hollywood.
By the time he had written the song, Knight was down to his last 36 cents. Fate intervened when a mutual friend introduced him to Ricky Nelson, Ozzie & Harriet's youngest boy who was carving out a career for himself as a pop star.
"I played a few songs for him," Knight recalled, "and much to my surprise, his manager called two days later and told me Ricky wanted to record two of the songs. They offered me a $2,000 advance, which was unexpected but most welcome at the time, considering I was flat broke."
Within six months, Nelson's version of "Lonesome Town cracked Billboard's Top 10, peaking at #6, while ts B-side, "I Got a Feeling," another song written by Knight, charted at #11. Nelson eventually recorded 21 original songs written by Knight.
Knight wrote almost 1,000 songs, which were recorded by over 40 singers, including The King himself, Elvis Presley, who had a hit in 1970 with The Wonder of You." Dean Martin had a hits with Knight's "Somewhere There's a Someone" and "That Old Time Feelin'" He also recorded the Knight songs "Not Enough Indians" and "If You Ever Get Around To Loving Me."
Other singers of the first rank who recorded Knight's work were Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Sammy Davis Jr. In 1976, Mickey Gilley won the "Song of the Year" award from the Academy of Country Music for Knight's "Don't The Girls All Get Prettier At Closing Time."
Knight's song-writing career waned in the 1980s due to health problems, but his work remained as alive and as vital as ever. In 1999, Paul McCartney included a cover of "Lonesome Town" on his album "Run Devil Run." More significantly, Paul also sang the song at a London tribute to his late wife, Linda.
Baker Knight returned to Birmingham in 1985. His songwriting lapsed when he became plagued by agoraphobia, chronic fatigue syndrome and continued to suffer from tremendous pain on a daily basis. He died on October 12, 2005 from a self inflicted gun shot wound to the head. He was found a few days later by a neighbor and his daughter, actress Tuesday Knight was notified. Soon after Baker's suicide, funeral arrangements were made by the family. He was cremated and his ashes were spread across his property in Birmingham, as well as in the pacific ocean near Santa Monica, California by his daughter. He was 72 years old.- Emmy and Tony Award-winner Barnard Hughes forged a career as one of American's most successful character actors, equally at home and successful on stage, the silver screen, and television. Most of his success came after middle-age. He made his Broadway debut in 1939 in Mary McCarthy's "Please, Mrs. Garibaldi", a flop that lasted only four performances. He appeared in another 22 Broadway shows, his last being Noël Coward's "Waiting in the Wings, which closed in the year 2000. His Broadway career lasted spanned 61 years and eight decades. Along the way, he won the 1978 Tony Award as best Actor in a play for Da (1988), his most famous role, which also brought him the Drama Desk Award as Outstanding Actor in a Play. (He won a lifetime achievement Drama Desk Award in 2000.) He also was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play in 1973 for Much Ado About Nothing (1973), which was fitting, as it was in Shakespeare repertory that he honed his craft. Hughes was born Bernard Aloysius Kiernan Hughes on July 16, 1915, in Bedford Hills, New York, to Irish immigrants Marcella "Madge" (Kiernan) and Owen Hughes. Bedford Hills is a hamlet lying 41 miles north of the heart of Broadway in Times Square (He changed the spelling of his Christian name on the advice of a numerologist; thespians are very superstitious). After graduating from the La Salle Academy and attending Manhattan College, he joined New York City's Shakespeare Fellowship Repertory Co. He was a member of the company for two years. He did not actually appear on Broadway in Shakespeare until 1964, when he played Marcellus to Richard Burton's Hamlet (1964). Off-Broadway, he played Polonius to Stacy Keach's Obie Award-winning Hamlet in 1972. His only other Shakespearean turn on the boards of the Great White Way was as Dogberry in "Much Ado About Nothing" in the 1972-73 season, which brought him his first Tony nomination. Off-Broadway, he also appeared as the Chorus in "Pericles, Prince of Tyre" and Sir John Falstaff in "The Merry Wives of Windsor". Back on Broadway, his most prominent role other than "Da" (which he also played in the roadshow tour) was as the Old Man opposite Alec Baldwin in Prelude to a Kiss (1992). Hughes had a 54 year-long screen career, equally adept in television as in movies. He was a regular on the soap opera Guiding Light (1952) from 1961-66. Though Hughes was a highly effective dramatic actor, he had a flair for comedy and appeared on such sit-coms as _"The Phil Silvers Show" (TV series) and _"Car 54, Where Are You?" (1962)_ before having recurring roles on "All In the Family" (1971) as a priest and on The Bob Newhart Show (1972) as Bob's father in the 1970s. He eventually headlined his own sit-com in the mid '70s, Doc (1975), which had a successful first season but was canceled early into its second after the network demanded changes to boost ratings. Instead, the ratings sank. His break-through performance in the movies arguably was a the messianic doctor who was a victim of malpractice and turned avenger in Paddy Chayefsky's The Hospital (1971) in 1971. It came two years after a small but memorable part in Best Picture Oscar winner Midnight Cowboy (1969), as he middle-aged gay mamma's boy who picks up self-styled "hustler" Joe Buck with disastrous consequences. Hughes married actress Helen Stenborg in 1950 and they remained married until his death on July 11, 2006, five days before what would have been his 91st birthday. The couple had two children, theatrical director Doug Hughes (who was also a Tony-winner) and a daughter, actress Laura Hughes.
- Actor
- Director
- Soundtrack
Patrick Barry Sullivan was born on August 29, 1912 in New York City. While never a major movie star, he established himself as a well-known and highly regarded character lead and second lead in motion pictures and television in a career that lasted 50 years. Legend has it that Sullivan was counseled to consider a life in the theater due to his height (6'3") and good looks. He was supporting himself as a theater usher and department store employee when made his Broadway debut in "I Want a Policeman" at the Lyceum Theatre in January 1936. Unfortunately, the show lasted only 47 performances.
In 1936, he appeared in three other plays on the Great White Way, the drama "St. Helena" and the comedies "All That Glitters" and "Eye On the Sparrow." All three were flops. Sullivan finally appeared in a hit play when he transferred into the role of Bert Jefferson in The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941) by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. However the 1941-42 season brought three more flops: "Mr. Big", "Ring Around Elizabeth", and "Johnny 2 X 4". Wisely, he stayed away from Broadway for a decade, when he again transferred into a hit, "The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial," taking over the role of Barney Greenwald from Henry Fonda. Sullivan was nominated for a Best Actor Emmy Award in 1955 when he reprised the role on The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1955). His last appearance on Broadway, in the original "Too Late the Phalarope" in 1956, was, true to his performance record, a flop. Barry Sullivan's talent was meant for the screen.
In the late 1930s, he gained movie acting experience in two-reel comedies produced by the Manhattan-based Educational Studios. After giving up on his Broadway career and moving to Hollywood, Sullivan appeared in an uncredited bit part in "The Green Hornet Strikes Again! (1940) (1941) at Universal before making his official film debut in the Chester Morris B-picture High Explosive (1943) (1943) at Paramount. His next picture was The Woman of the Town (1943), which was released by United Artists that same year.
Barry Sullivan never broke through to become a major star -- but he did establish himself firmly in character lead and second lead roles. He excelled at roles in which he could play aggressive characters that highlighted his centered masculinity. His most notable roles in the early part of his movie career were as the eponymous The Gangster (1947), Tom Buchanan in the Alan Ladd version of The Great Gatsby (1949) (second lead), and as the movie director in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) as part of a first rate ensemble. He had his own TV series Harbourmaster (1957) in 1957-58 and The Tall Man (1960) in 1960-62. A decade later, his acting skills were used to fine effect in two prestigious productions of stage plays as George C. Scott's brother in the Emmy Award-winning TV adaptation of Arthur Miller's The Price (1971) and the amoral patriarch in Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest (1972). He continued acting in movies until 1977, rounding off a near 40-year movie career with an appearance in Oh, God! (1977). He continued to appear periodically on television until retiring in 1980.
Sullivan was married three times and fathered three children, Johnny and Jenny Sullivan by his first wife, and Patsy Sullivan-Webb by his second wife Gita Hall. The Sullivan talent has run into three generations. Jenny Sullivan became an actress and a playwright, writing the drama "J for J" ("Journal for John") based on the correspondence between her father and her brother, who was mentally disabled. She was married to the rock star Jim Messina.
Patsy Sullivan-Webb was a successful model who appeared as the face of Yardley Cosmetics in the Swinging '60s, starting at the age of twelve. She appeared with her father in the episode of That Girl (1966) that opened the series' third season and was a contestant on The Dating Game (1965). She married the great songwriter Jimmy Webb, by whom she had six children. Two of her sons formed the rock group The Webb Brothers.
Barry Sullivan died of a respiratory ailment on June 6, 1994 in Sherman Oaks, California. He was 81 years old.- Beau Jack, considered one of the greatest lightweight boxers who ever laced on the gloves, was born Sidney Walker in Waynesboro, Georgia on April 1, 1921. After the death of his mother, young Sidney was raised in Augusta by his maternal grandmother, Evie Mixom, who called him the nickname "Beau Jack".
The young Jack worked as a shoe-shine boy in Augusta at the corner of Broad and Ninth streets. To make extra money, at the age of 15, he began fighting in "battles royal", a sports tradition in the Jim Crow-era South that pitted five to ten African Americans youths against each other in a no-holds-barred fight. The fighters were blindfolded, and the last man standing was the winner, receiving a typically meager purse put up by prosperous white men who put on the brutal spectacle for their own entertainment. Though the young Jack was not big (he was 5'6" tall and weighed 133 pounds), he often emerged victorious in the bouts. This was his introduction to pugilism in the racist South of the inter-war period. (For a vivid description of "battles royal", and the racism that underlied them, see Ralph Ellison's classic 1952 novel about African American alienation, "Invisible Man".) After fighting a battle royal at the Augusta National Golf Club, Jack got a position as a shoeshine at the club, before graduating to caddie. Working at the club enabled the personable Beau Jack to make the acquaintance of the great golfer `Bobby Jones', who gave him the money so that he could travel north and partake in formal boxing training. Turning professional as Beau Jack in 1940, he began his pro boxing career fighting in Massachusetts, where he ran up a record of 27 wins, four losses and two draws while establishing a reputation as a relentless and powerful fighter, traits that made him hugely popular among fight fans. He became renowned for a swarming style and for the high volume of his punches.
In 1941, he moved to New York City, the major leagues of professional boxing at the time, as the New York Boxing Commission and National Boxing Association (NBA) titles were then considered the equivalent of the world's championship. Major fights had taken place at New York City's Madison Square Garden since John L. Sullivan, "The Boston Strongboy", won the heavyweight crown in 1882, when the Garden went through its first incarnation as a showplace for the Barnum & Bailey's circus. Beau Jack became one of the most popular fighters in the history of New York fisticuffs, eventually headlining 21 bouts at the third and most famous incarnation of Madison Square Garden, a record that still stands in an era in which Madison Square Garden is in its fourth building. At the time, the sport was heavily controlled by organized crime, though there is no evidence of outright mob control of Jack.
Beau Jack knocked out 3-to-1 favorite Allie Stolz in the ninth round in their November 1942 match to determine the #1 challenger for New York's version of the world lightweight title. He won the crown from NBA champ Tippy Larkin, knocking him out in the third round, but lost it six months later to fellow future International Boxing Hall of Fame member Bob Montgomery, who bested Beau Jack on points in a unanimous decision. The two had three more memorable fights, starting with Beau Jack regaining the title from Montgomery before losing it to him once again in March 1944. And it was Montgomery who was the antagonist in the most famous fight of Jack's career.
Meeting lightweight champ Montgomery for a fourth time, their August 4, 1944 bout was proclaimed "The War Bonds Fight" as tickets were only made available to interested parties who purchased war bonds. Jack and Montgomery were enlisted men in the U.S. Army at the time of the contest, and both refused to take purses for the fight. Although it was not a title fight, interest was so great that the gate raked in a record $36 million, with 15,822 war bonds being sold. Many people who purchased war bonds left their tickets at the box office for distribution to U.S. servicemen, who were among the almost 16,000 fans who saw Jack best Montgomery on points after 10 rounds. One memorable moment in the evening was the spotlit appearance of heavyweight champ (and U.S. Army Sergeant) Joe Louis, who stood up from his seat in the front row, to a standing ovation from the crowd. Patriotism seldom go better than this until V-E and V-J days in 1945. Beau Jack was named "Ring Magazine" Fighter of the Year for 1944.
Beau Jack's next shot at the lightweight title was against another future hall-of-famer, Ike Williams, a protégé of Mafiosi boxing promoter Blinky Palermo. Palermo was partnered with former Murder Inc. button man Frankie Carbo, a Mafiosi and convicted murderer based in Philadelphia who was considered the "Czar of Boxing". Unlicensed to be a fight manager, Carbo operated his stable of fighters, which later included world heavyweight champ Sonny Liston, through a New York bookie operation. Palermo regularly shortchanged Williams on his purses and ordered him to throw fights. The two manipulated odds and then fixed the fights to maximize their returns. In the early 1940s, Abe "Kid Twist" Reles and Allie "Tick Tock" Tannenbaum agreed to testify against Carbo, but Reles' apparent suicide by throwing himself through a window of the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island while under heavy police guard, an incident dramatized in the 1960 movie _Murder Inc. (1960)_ -- Peter Falk won a Best Supporting Actor nomination played Reles -- would eventually cause the case to be dismissed. Carbo was not portrayed in the film, though his bosses, Albert Anastasia and Louis Lepke were. (It was Palermo and Carbo who ordered Jake LaMotta's to take a dive against Billy Fox in 1946, an incident that is limned in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), widely considered the greatest boxing movie ever made.) The two were later jailed after a successful prosecution headed by none other than U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
Williams, whom "Ring Magazine" later named as one of the "100 greatest punchers of all time", was two years younger than Beau Jack in a sport when a year was quite a very long time. The title bout, held on July 12, 1948, saw Williams K.O. Jack in the sixth round. This was the beginning of a rivalry that saw the two fighters matched three more times over the next ten years, with Jack failing to win on each occasion as his knowledge of the sweet science was clearly on the decline.
Williams took their first rematch by a split decision, while the second rematch was a draw on April 9, 1956 in Jack's hometown of Augusta. Meeting for a fourth and final fight (once again in August) on August 12th of the same year, Williams won the third as an exhausted 37-year old Jack was unable to answer the bell at the beginning of the ninth round. (Williams, usually ranked in the Top 10 in most lists of the all-time lightweight champions, held the NBA world title from April of 1945, when he beat champ Juan Zurita, until May 1951, when he was beaten by Jimmy Carter.) This was the last fight of both men's careers. Beau Jack retired with an official pro record of 83 wins (though some credit him with 88), including 40 K.O.'s, 24 losses and five draws.
After retiring from the ring, Beau Jack ran a drive-in Bar-B-Q stand, operated a small farm, and then refereed wrestling matches. After his boxing earnings were exhausted, Jack returned to shining shoes, this time at the reportedly Mafia-owned Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami, Florida. Jack became an advocate of a pension scheme for boxers, so that no former pro pug would be reduced to the dire straights he faced. Jack also trained fighters at Miami's Fifth Street Gym.
Despite suffering from poverty, Beau Jack did not ask for pity. "I've been to the top of the mountain," he said. "I was champion of the world. I've worked hard all my life, and I'm happy doing what I'm doing."
Beau Jack eventually was affected by pugilistic Parkinson's syndrome (which also claimed Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali). He died from its complications in a Miami nursing home on February. 9, 2000, nine years after being inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1991. - Writer
- Additional Crew
Ben Barzman was an Anglo-Canadian best known as a screenwriter who was blacklisted during the post-World War II "Red scare" in Hollywood. Born on October 12, 1910, in Toronto, he moved to the United States, where he established himself as a screenwriter during the war. He is probably best known for The Boy with Green Hair (1948), his adaptation of Betzi Beaton's novel that was an allegory against intolerance that bears witness to post-war American attitude that demanded conformity. The movie was directed by Joseph Losey, who also would be blacklisted and with whom Barzman would work in the future.
In Hollywood Ben and his wife Norma Barzman became members of the Communist Party and remained so in exile. After Barzman traveled to England in 1949 to work on a movie, he decided to stay in Europe, and he and Norma moved to Paris, where they had the freedom to associate with Communists, left-wingers and anyone else they wanted to. However, Ben grew to dislike the milieu, and moved the family to the south of France in the 1950s. They broke with the Party after the student riots of 1968 due to the French Communist Party's failure to support a general strike called by labor unions in solidarity with the students.
Norma Barzman claims that Ben rewrote the screenplay of the Oscar-winning Z (1969) for director Costa-Gavras, but did not receive credit. He also helped arrange for the filming of the movie in Algeria. In addition to his screen work, Barzman wrote the science-fiction novel "Out of This World" in 1960.
He died on December 15, 1989, in Santa Monica, California, at the age of 79.- Actor
- Writer
- Additional Crew
Ben Blue was a movie and TV comedian born on September 12, 1901, in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Emigrating to the US, he became a dance instructor and dance school owner, as well as a nightclub proprietor. He began his film career in short subjects for Warner Brothers in 1926, and later worked at the Hal Roach Studios, Paramount and MGM. He also, like his The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938) co-star Bob Hope, was a radio comedian. In 1950 he had his own TV series, The Ben Blue Show (1950), and was a regular on The Frank Sinatra Show (1950).
In 1951 Blue began concentrating on managing and appearing in the nightclubs he owned in Hollywood and San Francisco. He made the cover of "TV Guide"'s June 11, 1954, Special Issue along with Alan Young, headlining an edition featuring that season's summer replacement shows. He made a handful of appearances on Ed Sullivan's The Ed Sullivan Show (1948) variety series in 1956 and 1957, and appeared sporadically on other shows, including The Jack Benny Program (1950) in 1960.
In 1958 he shot a pilot for a proposed CBS series, "Ben Blue's Brothers," but it was not picked up, although the pilot was later shown in 1965. Coming out of his self-imposed near-retirement with a bit part in Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), Blue began making cameo appearances in movie comedies. He also had a regular role on Jerry Van Dyke's short-lived TV series Accidental Family (1967). He made his last appearance on film in the Doris Day comedy Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? (1968) and his last TV appearance on Land of the Giants (1968) in 1969.
He died in 1975, and his career papers covering the years 1935 to 1955 were deposited in the Special Collections at the UCLA Library.- Actor
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- Producer
Ben F. Wilson, the prolific actor and director of the silent era, was born on July 7, 1876, in Corning, NY. His career as an actor began as most other thespians did in that era--as a member of a theatrical stock company. The stock companies that employed Wilson worked the East Coast circuits.
The original "Hollywood" was Fort Lee, NJ, since the "inventor" of the motion picture (movie cameras and projection equipment), Thomas Edison, was a resident of New Jersey. Edison made the first movies himself and soon consolidated his movie equipment patents with those of others and formed the Motion Picture Trust. The Trust virtually bound movie production to New Jersey and the metropolitan New York City area at the turn of the last century, as Edison wanted to closely supervise--and, of course, make sure he got a cut of the profits from--those using his equipment.
Wilson, in fact, began his film career as an employee of Thomas Edison. Billed as "Benjamin Wilson," he made his film debut in Edwin S. Porter's Silver Threads Among the Gold (1911) for the Edison Co. From 1911-13 Wilson appeared in 13 movies directed by J. Searle Dawley, including The Priest and the Man (1913), the first cinematic adaptation of a work by popular Canadian novelist and short-story writer Gilbert Parker. Wilson first directed himself as an actor in A Shot in the Dark (1912). He directed 88 movies in which he appeared as an actor, mostly in the period of 1915-16. He left Edison for the Nestor Co. and eventually started his own production company, with a distribution deal with the Universal Film Manufacturing Co., which was still headquartered on the East Coast. He was popular enough as an actor by 1916 to be featured on his own "trading card" in an issue from Piedmont Cigarettes. Other honorees included Florence Lawrence, E.K. Lincoln and Pearl White. The next year he appeared on a card issued by Egyptian Oasis cigarettes along with such other stars as King Baggot, Sidney Drew, Mrs. Sidney Drew, Marshall Neilan and Anna Q. Nilsson. In 1918 Wilson hooked up again with Universal, this time as a producer. He produced and directed the 18-part action-adventure serial The Brass Bullet (1918). Eventually, he served on the board of directors of the Motion Picture Directors' Association of America, a fraternal organization created by J. Searle Dawley and others in 1915 to promote the interests of movie directors.
In addition to appearing in 168 films as an actor, Wilson directed 123 movies, produced 69 and wrote 11 screenplays. By the late 1920s, however, he was reduced to grinding out cheap fodder for Poverty Row, producing, directing and writing silent films up through 1930 for Morris R. Schlank Productions, pretty much the bottom of the barrel of Hollywood studios. He made the transition to sound as an actor only: Wilson's last film was an acting gig in the Buck Jones western Shadow Ranch (1930) for Columbia Pictures, which was released in 1930. It remains his only sound picture, as his career was cut short by ill health.
Ben F. Wilson died from complications of heart disease on August 25, 1930, in Glendale, CA. He was 54 years old.- Writer
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Ben Hecht, one of Hollywood's and Broadway's greatest writers, won an Oscar for best original story for Underworld (1927) at the first Academy Awards in 1929 and had a hand in the writing of many classic films. He was nominated five more times for the best writing Oscar, winning (along with writing partner and friend Charles MacArthur, with whom he wrote the classic play "The Front Page") for The Scoundrel (1935) (the other nominations were for Viva Villa! (1934) in 1935, Wuthering Heights (1939) (shared with MacArthur), Angels Over Broadway (1940) and Notorious (1946), the latter two for best original screenplay). Hecht wrote fast and wrote well, and he was called upon by many producers as a highly paid script doctor. He was paid $10,000 by producer David O. Selznick for a fast doctoring of the Gone with the Wind (1939) script, for which he received no credit and for which Sidney Howard won an Oscar, beating out Hecht and MacArthur's Wuthering Heights (1939) script.
Born on February 28, 1894, Hecht made his name as a Chicago newspaperman during the heady days of cutthroat competition among newspapers and journalists. As a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, he wrote the column "1001 Afternoons in Chicago" and broke the "Ragged Stranger Murder Case" story, which led to the conviction and execution of Army war hero Carl Wanderer for the murder of his pregnant wife in 1921. The newspaper business, which he and MacArthur famously parodied in "The Front Page", was a good training ground for a screenwriter, as he had to write vivid prose and had to write quickly.
While in New York in 1926 he received a telegram from friend Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had recently arrived in Hollywood. The telegram read: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." Hecht moved to Hollywood, winding up at Paramount, working uncredited on the script for Lewis Milestone's adaptation of Ring Lardner's story The New Klondike (1926), starring silent superstar Thomas Meighan. However, it was his script for Josef von Sternberg's seminal gangster picture Underworld (1927) that got him noticed. From then until the 1960s, he was arguably the most famous, if not the highest paid, screenwriter of his time.
As a playwright, novelist and short-story writer, Hecht always denigrated writing for the movies, but it is for such films as Scarface (1932) and Nothing Sacred (1937) as well The Front Page (1931), based on his play of the same name, for which he is best remembered.
He died on April 18, 1964, in New York City from thrombosis. He was 70 years old.