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1-50 of 175
- Before he began his acting career, Saxon was a wrestler ("Lord Spears") whose gimmick was entering the arena in a dress suit and quoting Shakespeare at every opportunity. His cauliflower ears marked him for "mug" roles; after making a few movies, he was able to afford plastic surgery and had an operation in hopes of landing different types of acting assignments. One of his first after the procedure was the part of a newspaper journalist seeking a better understanding of desperado Jesse James in 'The True Story of Jesse James' (1957).
- Englishman Alan Lyle-Smythe was born in 1914. The future film and TV writer-actor trained as an actor before serving for four years with the Palestine Police in the 1930s. At the outbreak of World War II, he joined the British Army; part of their Intelligence Corps, he operated behind enemy lines in Libya and Tunisia, escaped a firing squad execution, and worked with guerrillas in Yugoslavia. ("Alan Caillou" was one of Lyle-Smythe's many wartime aliases; thinking it lucky, he took it in real life.) After the war, he was a police chief in Ethiopia, a district officer in Somalia, and the founder of a theatrical company in Africa. Returning to the old professions of acting and writing, Caillou worked in Canadian TV in the 1950s and later relocated to Hollywood, where he became a familiar name in the credits of movies and TV series.
- Composer
- Music Department
- Actor
One of the most prolific B-movie composers, Albert Glasser started off as a copyist in the music department at Warner Brothers in the late 1930s, learning the art of film scoring from scratch while working under such big guns as Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. He graduated to orchestrating, and by the mid-'40s was composing and directing his own scores. A hard, fast worker, Glasser found his musical skills put to the test in the frantic, down-to-the-wire world of B-picture making. He scored a staggering 135 movies between 1944 and 1962, not counting at least 35 features for which he received no credit. In addition to scoring 300 television shows and 450 radio programs, he arranged and conducted for noted American operetta composer Rudolf Friml and orchestrated for Ferde Grofé Sr. (with whom he first collaborated on the sci-fi classic Rocketship X-M (1950)).- Producer
- Writer
- Casting Director
Alex Gordon and his equally movie-crazy brother Richard Gordon haunted English movie theaters as boys before emigrating to New York in 1947. Richard remained East Coast-based as he forged a career as a film distributor and producer, while Alex set down roots in Hollywood, where he got in on the ground floor at AIP and produced the company's Day the World Ended (1955), The She-Creature (1956) and many more. He later left AIP to become an independent producer, turning out such films as The Atomic Submarine (1959), The Underwater City (1962) and the westerns The Bounty Killer (1965) and Requiem for a Gunfighter (1965). After his producing career wrapped, Alex accepted a position at 20th Century-Fox, where he instituted a film restoration program and rediscovered more than 30 Fox films that had been considered lost. In 1976, he left Fox for the Gene Autry Organization, becoming vice-president of a company owned by the B-western hero he had admired as a boy (Alex had been the president of the British Gene Autry Fan Club) and worked for as a young man (he was advance man on Autry's cross-country personal appearance tours in the 1950s).- Actress
- Stunts
Growing up in the proverbial shadow of the studios, California native Ann Robinson acted in grade-school plays and later fibbed her way into the movie business as a stunt woman on movies such as Black Midnight (1949), The Story of Molly X (1949), and Frenchie (1950). She was part of Paramount's golden circle of new stars in the early 1950s but had only one leading role at the studio, in producer George Pal's The War of the Worlds (1953).
In 1957, she ran off to Mexico to marry a famous matador, Jaime Bravo ("and blew my career right out of the water"). Their son Jaime Jr. became a director with ABC Sports and has won several Emmy awards. Since 1987, Robinson has been married to real estate broker Joseph Valdez. She is a fixture at sci-fi conventions and autograph shows.- Actress
- Soundtrack
The daughter of a clergyman, Anna Lee was born Joan Boniface Winnifrith and encouraged to pursue an acting career by her father. After training at London's Royal Albert Hall, she took to the boards and later began appearing in English films, first as an extra, then working her way up to featured roles and finally earning the unofficial title "The Queen of the Quota Quickies". Lee and her husband, director Robert Stevenson, relocated to Hollywood in the late 1930s, and Lee began starring in stateside productions as well as becoming a fixture of the John Ford stock company (she appeared in How Green Was My Valley (1941), Fort Apache (1948) and a half-dozen others). In 1970, she became the seventh wife of novelist, poet and playwright Robert Nathan (Portrait of Jennie (1948), The Bishop's Wife (1947)); they married three months after they met. Now widowed, Lee continued despite adversity, regularly playing wealthy Lila Quartermaine on the soap opera General Hospital (1963). She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire at the 1982 Queen's Birthday Honours for her services to drama. On May 14, 2004, Anna Lee passed away from pneumonia at age 91 at her home in Beverly Hills, California.- Born in Toronto, Anne Helm's entire Canadian "show biz" career consisted of playing "Alice in Wonderland" at camp and acting in a Christmas pantomime at Montreal's Her Majesty's Theatre. When she was 14, she and her mother relocated to New York, where Helm studied ballet and began modeling for John Robert Powers. The title role in a Shirley Temple's Storybook (1958) TV production of "The Sleeping Beauty" lured her to the West Coast, where she landed roles in a succession of subsequent feature films and TV series (and was briefly Elvis Presley's main squeeze--on-screen and off). More recently billing herself as "Annie Helm", she is also a writer and illustrator of children's books.
- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
The future stage, screen and TV star (real name: Fred Eisley) was born in Philadelphia. His father was general sales manager and "troubleshooter" for a large company, and his work kept the family on the move (up and down the East Coast) throughout Eisley's young life. As early as the days of school plays Eisley knew that he wanted to be an actor, but because he lacked show-business contacts he felt nothing would come of his aspiration. He later took drama courses at the University of Miami, "not because I thought I could really be an actor, but because I was taking the easy way out to get a degree". Finally following up on his longtime ambition, Eisley landed a job with a stock company in Pennsylvania, where he worked opposite James Dunn in a stage production of "A Slight Case of Murder." Later roles in long-running plays like "Mister Roberts", "Picnic" and "The Desperate Hours" ensued, along with some early movie (Operation Pacific (1951), Fearless Fagan (1952)) and television (Racket Squad (1950)) work. Eisley later went on to TV and exploitation movie stardom.- Born in Italy in 1925, Antony Carbone was raised in Syracuse, New York, and credits the area's cold and snow (which he hated) for his determination to move out and become an actor. He has worked on stage, in TV and in a baker's dozen movies, but his best-remembered acting credits are the exploitation flicks he made for Roger Corman (A Bucket of Blood (1959), Last Woman on Earth (1960), Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)). He is now a stage director.
- Producer
- Director
- Script and Continuity Department
Laven, Jules V. Levy and Arthur Gardner met in 1943 in the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Force. They were stationed at the Hal Roach Studio in Culver City, California (with other notables such as Capt. Ronald Reagan, Capt. Clark Gable and Lt. William Holden), making training films. Levy, Gardner and Laven resolved that they would start their own independent motion picture company after they got out of the Air Force; all were discharged in 1945, but their company wasn't formed until 1951 (in the interim, Levy and Laven worked as script supervisors and Gardner as an assistant director and production manager). The first Levy-Gardner-Laven film was Without Warning! (1952). In the decades since they have produced dozens of additional features and several TV series (including The Rifleman (1958), Law of the Plainsman (1959), The Detectives (1959) and The Big Valley (1965)).- Producer
- Additional Crew
In the late 1950s Arthur A. Jacobs joined forces with his friend Richard E. Cunha on the low-budget chiller Giant from the Unknown (1958) and the sci-fi/horror adventure She Demons (1958). Jacobs was also involved with the Wrather Corporation, ending up as vice-president in charge of production and distribution. He later worked for actors-turned-TV producers Danny Thomas, Sheldon Leonard and Aaron Spelling.- Born in Chicago, Illinois, Arthur Ross started writing in high school before making his "show biz" debut, co-writing (as a teenager) a stage show called "Meet the People" that later went to Broadway. Ross' list of film/TV credits began with the all-star spoof Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) and then, after he served in the Army during World War II, continued with crime melodramas, Westerns, comedies, the Oscar-nominated Brubaker (1980) and a host of radio and TV series, among them The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962).
- Producer
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Jules V. Levy, Arthur Gardner and Arnold Laven met in 1943 in the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Force; they were stationed at the Hal Roach Studios in Culver City, CA (with other notables such as Capt. Ronald Reagan, Capt. Clark Gable and Lt. William Holden, etc.), making training films. Levy, Gardner and Laven resolved that they would start their own independent motion picture company after they got out of the Air Force; all were discharged in 1945, but their company wasn't formed until 1951 (in the interim, Levy and Laven worked as script supervisors and Gardner as an assistant director and production manager). The first Levy-Gardner-Laven film was 1952's Without Warning! (1952); in the decades since, they have produced dozens of additional features and several TV series (including The Rifleman (1958), Law of the Plainsman (1959), The Detectives (1959) and The Big Valley (1965).- Producer
- Additional Crew
- Writer
Aubrey Schenck practiced law for seven years (1932-39) in New York City, connected with the legal department of 20th Century-Fox; he was also an assistant to Fox president Spyros P. Skouras, who was based in New York. Schenck wrote a story and submitted it to the studio, asking to be given the chance to produce the picture as well. When the resultant movie (Shock (1946) with Vincent Price) turned out well, Schenck went on to work on other Fox films, then shifted to newly-formed Eagle-Lion Pictures. In the 1950s, Schenck paired with Howard W. Koch and they began their own indie production company (Bel-Air), releasing their features through United Artists. Schenck and Koch later went their separate ways (Koch went to work for Frank Sinatra Enterprises), but Schenck stayed true to his adventure- and horror-picture roots, adding to his filmography such titles as Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), Superbeast (1972), Daughters of Satan (1972), Ambush Bay (1966) and others.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Dublin-born Audrey Dalton knew right from childhood that she wanted to be an actress: She appeared in school plays and (after the family's move to London) applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. While Dalton was at RADA, a London-based Paramount executive saw her in a play and asked her to audition for the upcoming film The Girls of Pleasure Island (1953). Winning the part (and a Paramount contract), Dalton arrived in the U.S. in 1952 and co-starred in "Pleasure Island"; the studio loaned her out to 20th Century-Fox for My Cousin Rachel (1952) and Titanic (1953). Dalton later freelanced, working in films and on TV. Her first husband was assistant director James H. Brown, who is the father of her four children; she is now married to a retired engineer.- Ben Chapman was born in Oakland, California, while his Tahitian parents were on a trip to the United States. He was raised in Tahiti, relocated to the U.S. in 1940 and went to school in the Bay Area of San Francisco. Working as a Tahitian dancer in nightclubs led to his first movie job, a bit in MGM's "Pagan Love Song" (1950); other small film roles followed before Korean War duty temporarily sidetracked his modest screen career. Talent scouts from Universal-International "discovered" Chapman upon his return, and for a year he became a U-I stock player--and, at six-foot-five, an ideal choice for the finny title role in "Creature from the Black Lagoon." (Chapman is the Creature in scenes where the camera is out of water; Ricou Browning is the Creature in scenes where the camera is underwater.) In his later years, Chapman frequently commuted to autograph shows in the mainland United States.
- Producer
- Director
- Actor
Chicago-born Bernard Glasser grew up in what he calls "the movie generation" and fell in love with pictures at the ripe old age of four. In the late 1940s, while working as a teacher at Beverly Hills High School, he got his feet wet in the film industry by working as a production assistant. In 1950 he invested in an old motion picture studio and turned it into a rental lot, Keywest Studios. Glasser leased his facility to producers like Roger Corman (The Fast and the Furious (1954)), Burt Lancaster (Apache (1954)) and others as well as using the facilities to make a five-day, $50,000 film of his own--The Three Stooges' Gold Raiders (1951), directed by Glasser's friend Edward Bernds. When Glasser's studio lease expired in 1955, he and Bernds combined forces on a series of budget features for Robert L. Lippert's Regal Films.
Working overseas during the 1960s, often in collaboration with producer/writer Philip Yordan, Glasser added to his filmography such well-remembered films as Battle of the Bulge (1965), The Day of the Triffids (1963) and Crack in the World (1965).- Director
- Producer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Bernard Kowalski is an important figure in television with a long and impressive list of credits. To mention a select few, he directed the pilots for Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1956), N.Y.P.D. (1967) and The Monroes (1966); executive-produced Baretta (1975); and was co-owner of Mission: Impossible (1966). Kowalski got his first job in the movie business at the age of five as an extra in several Dead End Kids pictures at Warner Brothers, as well as such Errol Flynn vehicles as Dodge City (1939) and Virginia City (1940). His experience behind the camera began at age 17 when he worked as a clerk for his father, who was an assistant director and production manager. TV provided Kowalski with his first opportunity to direct on such Western series as Frontier (1955) and Boots and Saddles (1956); he then made the transition to feature-film directing in 1958 when he was hired by Gene Corman (brother of Roger Corman) to helm the teen exploitation feature Hot Car Girl (1958).- Actress
- Soundtrack
Betsy Jones-Moreland once said that she never decided to be an actress, it just happened, one step after the other, and that she resisted all the way. She started out doing office work in New York, working for the organization that owned TV shows like Gabby Hayes and Howdy Doody. To overcome shyness, she took an acting class, and to prove to herself that the strategy had worked, she got a job as a showgirl. This in turn led to a role in road company of the Broadway hit The Solid Gold Cadillac, which took her to California. There, she began appearing in movies, first in small parts at Columbia, followed by leads in Roger Corman movies. She ended her career playing a judge in the 1990s series of Perry Mason movies with Raymond Burr. A lifelong animal lover, Betsy concentrated on animal rescue work.- Actor
- Stunts
- Additional Crew
In their heyday, stage and movie stars Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson reigned as two of the most outrageous comedians who ever set out to tickle America's collective funnybone. The son of Johnson's daughter, June, Bob May was born in New York in 1939 and put a (very) small foot on the first rung of the show biz ladder two years later, when he replaced a midget in the comics' show "Sons-a-Fun". May later worked with the comedy team on live TV ("Fireball Fun-for-All", "All-Star Revue", "The Colgate Comedy Hour"). A singer and dancer, May danced in some of Elvis Presley's early films and turned up in several Jerry Lewis vehicles. While applying for the job of Red Buttons' stunt double on Stagecoach (1966), May was offered the "role" of the Environmental Control Robot in 20th Century-Fox's TV series Lost in Space (1965). (On the show, May operated the Robot and Dick Tufeld provided its voice.) More recently, May, his wife and kids toured with an Olsen & Johnson-style stage show call ed "Funs-a-Bustin."- Born in Portland, Oregon, and educated at the University of Washington and University of Michigan, Colman served in the Japanese Language Division of U.S. Military Intelligence during World War II. After his discharge, he began acting on the New York stage. In 1951, he headed to Hollywood to make his film debut in 'The Big Sky' (1952). Between movie and TV assignments, Colman kept active with theater work. Since 1981, he played Ebenezer Scrooge more than 500 times on the stage of the Meadow Brook Theatre in Rochester, Michigan.
- Cinematographer
- Script and Continuity Department
- Director
London-born of Irish parents, Geraldine Brianne Murphy was educated in English and American schools before she set her sights on an acting career and attended the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City.
In order to become "more American," she worked as a trick rider with a rodeo for a season, and later "crashed" the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden on opening night, in 1954, performing the entire evening as a clown. The resulting publicity helped her land a job as a still photographer with the traveling circus and eventually led to her arrival in Hollywood, where she began working with low-budget filmmakers Jerry Warren and Ralph Brooke (both of whom she married).
She was the first-ever woman director of photography on a major studio, union picture (Fatso (1980)) and has had several Emmy nominations (and one win) for cinematography. She also won a 1982 "Scientific and Engineering" Academy Award.- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Born of African and West Indian ancestry on July 2, 1927 in New York City, Brock Peters set his sights on a show business career early on, at age ten. A product of NYC's famed Music and Arts High School, Peters initially fielded more odd jobs than acting jobs as he worked his way up from Harlem poverty. Landing a stage role in "Porgy and Bess" in 1949, he quit physical education studies at CCNY and went on tour with the acclaimed musical. His film debut came in Carmen Jones (1954), but he really began to make a name for himself - having dropped his real name, George Fisher, in 1953 - in such films as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and The L-Shaped Room (1962). He received a Tony Award nomination for his starring stint in Broadway's "Lost in the Stars" in 1973. He also appeared in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), two sequels to the popular Star Trek films. Brock Peters died at age 78 of pancreatic cancer on August 23, 2005.- Bryant Haliday was born in Rhode Island and spent time in an English Benedictine monastery. Entering Harvard to study international law, he became involved with a group of students who were interested in putting on plays. He caught the acting bug and abruptly gave up law to become a man of the theater. They bought an abandoned church, converted it into the Brattle Theatre (Haliday called the Cambridge, Massachusetts, landmark "an unashamed imitation of the Bristol Old Vic") and produced 64 plays, joining the cast of over 50. He later opened a small movie revival house and began hunting in Europe for film acquisitions; picking up the rights to classics like The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Bullocks (1953). Haliday and partner Cyrus Harvey founded Janus Films. Haliday was also a movie actor, turning up most regularly in the horror thrillers of his producer friend Richard Gordon (Devil Doll (1964), Voodoo Blood Death (1965), The Projected Man (1966)), among others). Late in life he lived in France, where he worked as a producer, writer and actor in Paris theater and on French TV.
- Born in Detroit and raised in New Orleans, Carolyn Kearney began studying at the Pasadena Playhouse in the mid-1950s, and was soon acting in stage productions, opposite veterans Stuart Erwin, Edward Everett Horton, Gladys Cooper, Leo G. Carroll and Cecil Kellaway. In addition to many TV appearances, her films included the horror thriller, The Thing That Couldn't Die (1958) and Damn Citizen (1958), the latter shot in her old stamping grounds of New Orleans, with Kearney as a drug addict. After two and a half years of addiction to Xanax, due to a physician's error, she kicked the habit in 1987, later writing one of the essays for the book "Prescription Drug Addiction" and helping to found "Benzodiazepine Anonymous", a 12-step program for recovering addicts. Her first husband was screenwriter Harold Jack Bloom; her second, advertising executive-writer Alan Hirshfeld.
- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Born just before the century turned, Charles Bennett made his writing debut as a child in 1911, fought in France during World War I while still a teen and resumed his acting career after the war's end. In 1926 he dropped acting to concentrate on being a playwright, later turning one of his most famous plays, "Blackmail," into a screenplay for production under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock. The affiliation with "Hitch" continued into the early 1940s, by which time both Bennett and the director were working in Hollywood. He wrote for producers ranging from Cecil B. DeMille to Irwin Allen to the penny-pinching folks at AIP. "If I couldn't write, I wouldn't want to live," commented Bennett, who had projects (including a remake of "Blackmail") going right up to the time of his death.- When Charles Bradstreet accompanied his brother to try-outs for a play, a script was thrust into Charles' hands, he was asked to read the part, and he was ultimately given the lead (a Los Angeles production titled "Come to My House"). Later, while managing a bar called Billingsley's (frequented by Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby et al.), he was offered a movie contract at Columbia - then was rejected by studio Harry Cohn, who knew that Bradstreet had once thrown his (Cohn's) nephew out of Billingsley's! Bradstreet did later land an MGM contract, playing a series of small roles there, then freelanced. He played his best-known role in _Bud Abbott, Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)_, accepting it (even though he thought it was a step backwards career-wise) because he was friendly with its director, 'Charles T. Barton'. According to Bradstreet, he was offered the chance to play Tarzan and the lead in TV's "Gunsmoke", but turned down both offers. When "the glamour went out of" acting for him, he got into real estate.
- Actress
- Soundtrack
Named for her birthplace (Charlotte, North Carolina), Charlotte Austin was the daughter of Gene Austin, a top crooner of the 1920s and 1930s and the composer of many popular songs. Dramatic training and a screen test led to a contract at 20th Century-Fox for Charlotte in the early 1950s, when she had parts in the studio's How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), Désirée (1954) and Daddy Long Legs (1955), and she co-starred (on loanout to Columbia) in the musical Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder (1952). Freelancing after the mid-'50s, she moved from musicals to monsters, perhaps most notoriously tackling half of the title role in the Edward D. Wood Jr.-scripted The Bride and the Beast (1958). She is now a dealer in antiques.- Writer
- Director
- Producer
Born in Dresden, Germany, in 1902, Curt Siodmak worked as an engineer and a newspaper reporter before entering the literary and movie fields. It was as a reporter that he got his first break (of sorts) in films: in 1926 he and his reporter-wife hired on as extras on Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) in order to get a story on the director and his film. One of Siodmak's first film-writing assignments was the screenplay for the German sci-fi picture F.P.1 Doesn't Answer (1932) (US title: "Floating Platform 1 Does Not Answer"), based on his own novel. Compelled to leave Germany after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took power, Siodmak went to work as a screenwriter in England and then moved to Hollywood in 1937. He got a job at Universal through his director-friend Joe May, helping write the script for May's The Invisible Man Returns (1940). Because the film went over well, Siodmak says, he fell into the horror/science-fiction "groove."- The adopted daughter of an Air Force colonel, strawberry blonde Cynthia Patrick grew up in Europe, acting and modeling there before relocating (and finding the same sort of work) in Hollywood. A Universal-International contractee, she appeared in a small handful of pictures (mostly bits) before she began to freelance in TV. Patrick later went into real estate.
- Actress
- Writer
- Soundtrack
The daughter of a noted surgeon, Dana Wynter was born Dagmar Winter in Berlin, Germany, and grew up in England. When she was 16 her father went to Morocco, reportedly to operate on a woman who wouldn't allow anyone else to attend her; he visited friends in Southern Rhodesia, fell in love with it and brought his daughter and her stepmother to live with him there. Wynter later enrolled as a pre-med student at Rhodes University (the only girl in a class of 150 boys) and also dabbled in theatrics, playing the blind girl in a school production of "Through a Glass Darkly", in which she says she was "terrible."
After a year-plus of studies, she returned to England and shifted gears, dropping her medical studies and turning to an acting career. She was appearing in a play in Hammersmith when an American agent told her he wanted to represent her. She left for New York on November 5, 1953, "Guy Fawkes Day," a holiday commemorating a 1605 attempt to blow up the Parliament building. "There were all sorts of fireworks going off," she later told an interviewer, "and I couldn't help thinking it was a fitting send-off for my departure to the New World."
Wynter had more success in New York than in London, acting on TV (Robert Montgomery Presents (1950), Suspense (1949), Studio One (1948), among others) and the stage before "going Hollywood" a short time later. The willowy, dark-eyed actress appeared in over a dozen films, worked in "Golden Age" television (such as Playhouse 90 (1956)) and even co-starred in her own short-lived TV series, the globe-trotting The Man Who Never Was (1966). Married and divorced from well-known Hollywood lawyer Greg Bautzer, Wynter, once called Hollywood's "oasis of elegance", divided her time between homes in California and County Wicklow, Ireland until her death.- Actress
- Additional Crew
Chicago-born Darlene Tompkins came from a "show biz family", with relatives who worked in vaudeville and in plays (Tompkins' three-years-younger aunt is actress Beverly Washburn). A beauty contest victory opened some Hollywood doors for Tompkins, who began appearing in commercials, co-starred in Beyond the Time Barrier (1960) (at age 18) and appeared in TV series and additional features, including Elvis Presley's Blue Hawaii (1961). Marriage and motherhood derailed her screen career, but she managed to return in the 1970s to work as an extra, a stand-in and stunt-woman, occasionally stunt-doubling on Charlie's Angels (1976) (for Cheryl Ladd, and in other TV series and movies.- David Duncan didn't begin to write full-time until the age of 33, in 1946, after ten years of work in government administration and public services. He began screenwriting in 1953 and started writing science-fiction movies after one of his SF novels, "Dark Dominion", was serialized in "Collier's" magazine. His favorite among the sci-fi films he wrote is The Time Machine (1960), "by a huge margin."
- Actress
- Soundtrack
An acting career was always in the cards for Debra Paget (nee Debralee Griffin) and her siblings, coming from a show biz family and being the offspring of a "stage mother" anxious to get her kids into the movies. Paget's sister Teala Loring got her movie breaks in the 1940s, Lisa Gaye was a film and TV star in the 50s and 60s, and even brother Frank Griffin (acting as 'Ruell Shayne') landed some film jobs. Paget got a 20th Century-Fox contract at age 14 and her first role in the film noir Cry of the City (1948), her first of nearly 20 movies at the studio, mostly Westerns, swashbucklers and period musicals. Every inch (all five-foot-two of her) the Hollywood star, Paget retired from the screen after marrying a Chinese millionaire in 1962.- Producer
- Actor
- Writer
Del Tenney was born in Mason City, Iowa, and moved to California with his parents when he was 12. Attending Los Angeles City and State college, he developed an interest in the theater, became an actor and made a living at it for most of his young adult life. He acted on stage, did extra work in films (Stalag 17 (1953), The Wild One (1953)) and then came to New York looking for work. He found it--working in restaurants and as a detective--but he also managed to land roles in summer stock. Deciding to move behind the camera, Tenney started off as assistant director on some risqué low-budget pictures, then co-wrote and co-directed (without credit) his production of Violent Midnight (1963), a Connecticut-made suspenser with Shepperd Strudwick, Jean Hale, 'Sylvia Miles' and Margot Hartman (Mrs. Tenney). Tenney next made schlock horror history, bringing to the screen the cheapo classics The Horror of Party Beach (1964) and (his favorite) The Curse of the Living Corpse (1964).- Actress
- Writer
- Composer
Dolores Fuller first got the idea that she wanted to get into the picture business at the age of ten, when she was an extra in the motel sequence of It Happened One Night (1934). She acted in school plays, modeled and landed a few jobs on TV. In the early 1950s, she and her actress-friend, Mona McKinnon, went to a casting call where they met producer-director Edward D. Wood Jr., who became Fuller's boyfriend. Wood's real-life passion for wearing women's clothes was focused upon in the filmmaker's semi-autobiographical Glen or Glenda (1953), in which Wood starred as a cross-dresser and Fuller played his girlfriend. Fuller also appeared in Wood's Jail Bait (1954) and Bride of the Monster (1955) before his drinking caused a split. Fuller turned songwriter, wrote tunes for a number of movies (including Elvis Presley's Blue Hawaii (1961) and Kid Galahad (1962)), founded her own record company (Dee Dee Records) and helped to launch the careers of Johnny Rivers and Tanya Tucker. Fuller is vocal in her dislike of the way she was depicted by Sarah Jessica Parker in director Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994).- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Born in Freeport, Pennsylvania, Don Taylor studied law, then speech and drama at Penn State University, where as a freshman he began taking part in college stage productions. Hitchhiking to Hollywood in 1942, the youthful Taylor screen-tested at Warner Brothers but was rejected because of his draft status. MGM, not as fussy, signed him to a contract and immediately put him to work, assigning him the minuscule role of a soldier in director Clarence Brown's sentimental slice of Americana, The Human Comedy (1943). More minor roles followed before Taylor enlisted in the Army; but even there he continued to act: Playwright/screenwriter Moss Hart chose him to play one of the leads in the United States Army Air Forces' production of Hart's play, "Winged Victory." Taylor met his first wife, actress Phyllis Avery, when she was also in Winged Victory. Returning to civilian life, Taylor resumed his work in pictures with a top role in the trend-setting crime drama The Naked City (1948). In later years Taylor became a film and TV director, being nominated for an Emmy for his direction of an episode of The Farmer's Daughter. Taylor met his second wife Hazel Court when he directed her in a 1958 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955).- Producer
- Writer
- Director
Born in Hollis, Oklahoma, Douglas Benton was an oil field "roughneck, " a wartime bombardier/navigator cadet, a newscaster and an Associated Press bureau chief before moving to Hollywood and becoming story editor, associate producer and ultimately producer of TV's prestigious "General Electric Theater." His other TV producing credits include "Thriller, " "Dr. Kildare, " "The Rookies", "Police Woman", "Ironside", "The Name of the Game, " "The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.", "Magnum, P.I". and "Columbo", for which he won an Emmy.- Music Artist
- Actress
- Soundtrack
An out-of-wedlock child, Eartha Kitt was born in the cotton fields of South Carolina. Kitt's mother was a sharecropper of African-American and Cherokee Native American descent. Her father's identity is unknown. Given away by her mother, she arrived in Harlem at age nine. At 15, she quit high school to work in a Brooklyn factory. As a teenager, Kitt lived in friends' homes and in the subways. However, by the 1950s, she had sung and danced her way out of poverty and into the spotlight: performing with the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe on a European tour, soloing at a Paris nightclub and becoming the toast of the Continent. Orson Welles called her "the most exciting girl in the world". She also spoke out on hard issues. She took over the role of Catwoman for the third and final season of the television series Batman (1966), replacing Julie Newmar. Eartha Kitt died of colon cancer in her home in Weston, Connecticut, on Christmas Day 2008.- Actor
- Special Effects
- Producer
Ed Nelson was aiming for a career in the legal profession until he caught the acting bug during his second year of college. In 1952, he headed off to New York City, where he studied direction and production at the School of Radio Technique. He returned to his native New Orleans where he worked as an assistant director at WDSU-TV; he also narrated (and sometimes wrote) episodes of the New Orleans-made TV series N.O.P.D. (1955) with Stacy Harris. Nelson made the acquaintance of Roger Corman when the maverick movie-maker came to Louisiana to shoot the feature Swamp Women (1956); Nelson says he did "everything" on the picture, from playing a part and working as a location manager to wrestling an alligator(!). Nelson worked in many other Corman movies on Corman's Hollywood home turf, including Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), where Nelson played the crab. In later years, Nelson became one of TV's hottest stars via the nighttime soap opera Peyton Place (1964).- Director
- Sound Department
- Writer
Edward Bernds was born in 1905 in Chicago, Illinois. While in his junior year in Lake View High School, he and several friends formed a small radio club and obtained amateur licenses. In the early '20s there was considerable prestige for an amateur operator (a "ham") to have commercial radio licenses, and Bernds was in a good position to get into broadcasting when he graduated in 1923, a year when radio stations began popping up all over Chicago. He found employment--at age 20--as chief operator at Chicago's WENR. When talking pictures burst onto the scene in the late '20s, Bernds and broadcast operators like him relocated to Hollywood to work as sound technicians in "the talkies". After a brief stint at United Artists, Bernds quit and went to work at Columbia, where he worked as sound man on many of Frank Capra's '30s classics. He later graduated to directing two-reel shorts and then features.- Born in Houston, Texas, and raised in Fort Worth, Eve Brent began her career in radio and early television and later moved on to the college and little theater stage. Arriving in Hollywood with a husband and infant son in the 1950s, she landed some film (Gun Girls (1957), Journey to Freedom (1957), The Bride and the Beast (1958)) and episodic TV roles. Maverick director Samuel Fuller changed her name to Eve Brent when she appeared in his western Forty Guns (1957), the first of dozens of screen roles for her under that name. She then played Jane opposite Gordon Scott's Tarzan in Tarzan's Fight for Life (1958) and in episodes of a Tarzan TV series. In addition to her big-screen and episodic TV assignments, Brent has appeared in hundreds of commercials.
- A dark-haired, brown-eyed daughter of Ireland, Fintan Meyler (one of seven children) knew from girlhood that she wanted to be an actress, and yet as a kid she never revealed her secret ambition. But after completing her early years of schooling at a Dublin convent, she began studying at the Gate Theatre. Meyler next entered a beauty contest on a whim - and won. A two-week vacation in New York was part of the teenager's prize; she "lost her heart to this country" and refused to go home. Moving to California, she worked as a receptionist and an usherette (and did some stage work) before making her TV debut on the live series 'Matinee Theater'. She lost all interest in acting after the birth of her two daughters, Darcy and Rory. In later years, Meyler worked as a literary agent and acted in commercials.
- Actress
- Soundtrack
Dee was born in Los Angeles, where her Army officer father was stationed, and grew up in Chicago after her father was transferred there. In 1929, he was re-assigned to L.A., and, as a lark, the 19 year old Dee began working in motion pictures as an extra. Her debut was in Words and Music (1929) with Lois Moran. After her breakthrough role in Playboy of Paris (1930) opposite Maurice Chevalier, she met Joel McCrea on the set of the 1933 film The Silver Cord (1933).
Following a whirlwind courtship, the two were married later that year in Rye, New York. Their 57-year marriage ended in 1990, when McCrea died. In the 70s, she and McCrea were rumored to be worth between fifty and one hundred million dollars. Dee hasn't acted since the mid-1950s, and said she didn't miss it. The nonagenarian actress was a huge hit at the 1998 Memphis Film Festival in Tunica, Mississippi. She died in 2004.- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
The son of a railroad clerk/pro boxer, Frank Coghlan Jr. was born in Connecticut and soon moved with his parents to California, where all three did extra work in silent pictures. Freckle-faced Coghlan was soon one of the era's most popular child actors, but with the advent of sound (and the onslaught of adolescence) he was reduced to smaller parts. After starring in the milestone serial Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), Coghlan became a naval aviator in World War II. He later headed the Navy's motion picture cooperation program (and other similar programs), acting as liaison between the Navy and the Hollywood studios. When his 23-year active duty stint ended in 1965, he returned to acting in movies and on television (where he had a supporting part in the pilot of the "Captain Marvel"-like comedy series Mr. Terrific (1967)). He wrote his autobiography "because my kids just kept bugging me to do it", does the occasional TV commercial, and is a popular figure at movie conventions, where, to the amazement of the 80-ish "Junior", fans still line up to meet Captain Marvel's alter ego.- Producer
- Actor
- Writer
Gene Corman preceded his more-famous brother Roger in the film business, working as a motion picture agent. Beginning in 1956, he and Roger joined forces as producers to make such films as "Hot Car Girl", "Night of the Blood Beast", "Attack of the Giant Leeches" and "Beast from Haunted Cave" for distributors like AIP, Allied Artists and Roger's own Filmgroup. Gene returned to the exploitation field in the early '70s at MGM when he produced several blaxploitation features such as "Hit Man" and "The Slams" as well as the kinky "Private Parts". His more mainstream credits include "Tobruk, " "F.I.S.T." and "The Big Red One." He was for a time vice-president of 20th Century-Fox Television.- George D. Wallace was born in New York and, at age 13, moved with his mom and her new husband to McMechen, West Virginia, a coal mining town where the boy began working in the mines. He joined the Navy in 1936, got out in 1940, and then went right back in again when World War II started. A chief boatswain's mate, he ended up in Los Angeles after a total of eight years in the service. Wallace supported himself with an array of odd jobs, from working for a meat packer ("knockin' steers in the head") to lumber-jacking in the High Sierras. A stint as a singing bartender attracted the attention of Hollywood columnist Jimmy Fidler, who helped him get his show-biz start. Wallace enrolled in drama school in the late 1940s, while earning his living tending the greens at MGM. He soon began landing jobs in films and TV, most notably as Commando Cody in the Republic serial Radar Men from the Moon (1952). He later made his Broadway debut in Richard Rodgers' "Pipe Dreams," replaced John Raitt in "The Pajama Game" and was nominated for a Tony for his leading role in "New Girl in Town" with Gwen Verdon. Other stage roles have included "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" opposite Ginger Rogers, "Jennie" with Mary Martin, "Most Happy Fella" (during production, he met his present wife, actress Jane A. Johnston), "Camelot" (as King Arthur), "Man of La Mancha," "Company," and more. In 1960, his career was stalled when a horse fell on him and broke his back during the making of an episode of TV's The Magical World of Disney (1954)'s "Swamp Fox." His painful recovery took seven months. He sometimes billed himself George D. H. Wallace, to avoid confusion with comic George Wallace.
- Actor
- Stunts
A champion athlete and trackman in his native northern Australia, Gil Perkins always wanted to get into films; as a teenager he virtually ran away from home, taking a job as a deck hand on a Norwegian freighter. He eventually landed in Hollywood in the late '20s, during the era of part-silent, part-talkie movies, and (because his accent was mistaken for English) he played young Englishmen in some of his first films. He soon drifted into stuntwork, regularly doubling cowboy star William Boyd and putting a red toupee over his own blond hair to double 'Red Skelton', among others. Some of his most notable stunt jobs were in the sci-fi/horror field. He doubled star Bruce Cabot throughout King Kong (1933), stood in for Spencer Tracy as Mr. Hyde in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) and replaced Bela Lugosi as the Monster in the climactic battle sequence of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). In addition to his feature films, Perkins turned up regularly in serials and on TV. On many occasions he worked with special effects and rigging departments, setting up large action scenes. By the 1960s he was doing more acting than stunts; he "officially" retired in 1972, although he took a number of subsequent jobs.- Gloria Talbott was born in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, a city co-founded by her great grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Nye Patterson. Growing up in the shadows of the Hollywood studios, her interests inevitably turned to acting, with the result that she participated in school plays and landed small parts in films such as "Maytime" (1937), "Sweet and Lowdown" (1943) and "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (1945). After leaving school, she started her own dramatic group and played "arena"-style shows at various clubs. After a three-year hiatus (marriage, motherhood and divorce), Talbott resumed her career, working extensively in both TV and films. Her sister is actress Lori Talbott.
- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Gordon Hessler was born in Germany, the son of a Danish mother and an English father. Educated in England, he moved to the US while in his late teens and spent several years working in documentaries. At Universal, "I guess because I had an English accent", Hessler was placed under contract to Alfred Hitchcock and went to work on the master director's TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962), climbing the ladder from story reader to associate producer and finally to producer in the series' final year. A novelette rejected for the show became the basis for The Woman Who Wouldn't Die (1965), Hessler's first feature film as director. When production of the AIP Edgar Allan Poe series was shifted to Britain, Hessler collaborated with producer Louis M. Heyward and horror enthusiast/ screenwriter Christopher Wicking on three Poe films and on the sci-fi shocker Scream and Scream Again (1970). Carrying on in the fantasy field, he also directed the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion swashbuckler The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and additional small-screen suspensers like the Psycho (1960)-inspired Scream, Pretty Peggy (1973) with Bette Davis.