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1-8 of 8
- Actor
- Soundtrack
Pittsburgh-born and -raised character actor Regis Toomey, of Irish descent, took an early interest in the performing arts and initially studied drama at the university of his home town. One of four children of Francis X. and Mary Ellen Toomey, John Regis Toomey initially pondered a law career, but acting won out and he gradually established himself as a musical stage performer. Dropping his first name for acting purposes, he was touring in a production of "Little Nellie Kelly" in England when he developed an acute case of laryngitis. The severity of the problem forced a serious rethinking of his career goals.
With the birth of sound pictures, Toomey made an auspicious debut with Alibi (1929) starring Chester Morris where a climactic death scene sparked controversy--and a movie career that would include almost 200 pictures and a number of other notorious death scenes. His lead/second lead status opposite such stars as Clara Bow, Constance Bennett, Barbara Stanwyck and Evelyn Brent fell away within a few years, and he found more work in streetwise character roles. Fast-paced crime action was his forte and he was prevalent throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He appeared in many classic films including 'G' Men (1935), Meet John Doe (1941), The Big Sleep (1946), Rachel and the Stranger (1948) and Spellbound (1945). In 1955 he played Uncle Arvide of The Salvation Army in Guys and Dolls (1955) alongside Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Jean Simmons and Vivian Blaine, a role for which he is still well remembered.
In the 1950s he found employment on TV as a good guy, typically playing judges, sheriffs, businessmen and police sergeants. He was a regular on The Mickey Rooney Show (1954). Fellow one-time singer Dick Powell became a friend and Powell, having turned producer, saw to it that Toomey had involving roles on a couple of his TV series such as Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1956) and Burke's Law (1963). He was later a regular on Petticoat Junction (1963). Toomey played roles well past his 80th year.
His marriage (from 1925) to Kathryn Scott produced two children. They met in 1924 when he appeared in a musical production of "Rose Marie" that Kathryn assistant choreographed. Toomey died of natural causes on October 12, 1991, at the Motion Picture Country House in Woodland Hills, California at age 93.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Aline MacMahon was born of Scottish-Irish and Russian-Jewish ancestry on May 3,1899, the daughter of William Marcus MacMahon and Jennie Simon MacMahon. Her father became editor-in-chief of Munsey's Magazine, while her mother pursued a theatrical acting career from middle-age and lived to age107. After the family moved to Brooklyn, Aline was educated at then-prestigious Erasmus Hall High School. She later attended Barnard College where she was graduated in 1920.
MacMahon first appeared onstage in 'The Madras House' at the Neighborhood Playhouse Theater and subsequently made her bow on Broadway in "The Mirage" in 1921. During the 1920s, she had a prolific career on Broadway, first, as a comedienne adept at impersonations (notably, in "The Grand Street Follies" and "Artists and Models"). By 1926, she proved to be equally adept at dramatic roles, making an impact in Eugene O'Neill's "Beyond the Horizon." Noël Coward described her as "astonishing, moving and beautiful", while critic Alexander Woollcott commented on her "extraordinary beauty, vitality and truth" (New York Times, October 14, 1991). Her distinguished career on the stage went on for five and a half decades, highlighted by many critically acclaimed performances in plays like "The Eve of St. Mark" (1942-43), "The Confidential Clerk" (1954), "Pictures in the Hallway" (1956) and "All the Way Home" (1960-61). Her somewhat melancholic, heavy-lidded and thickly eye-browed features inspired sculptor Isamu Noguchi and photographer Cecil Beaton.
MacMahon's film career began on the strength of her wisecracking voice-culture teacher, May Daniels, in the Kaufman and Hart comedy 'Once in a Lifetime', which she had created onstage in Los Angeles in 1931. She reprised her role on screen the following year and was, prior to that, cast in similar roles as feisty secretaries in Five Star Final (1931), (her debut) and The Mouthpiece (1932). Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) afforded her a well-received co-starring role as the hard-boiled "Trixie Lorraine". McMahon managed to escape typecasting with several strong dramatic performances: Edward G. Robinson's sad, cast-off wife in Silver Dollar (1932); the sympathetic self-sacrificing Mrs. Moore of The Life of Jimmy Dolan (1933); her co-starring role as Guy Kibbee's long-suffering wife Myra in Babbitt (1934); and kindly spinster aunt Lily Davis in Ah Wilderness! (1935). She effortlessly made the transition from Pre-Code films to Post-Code.
In the 1940s, she began playing lower-billed character parts, but was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as the Chinese mother of Katharine Hepburn's character, Ling Tan, in Dragon Seed (1944). After that, she played a succession of gentle mothers and grandmothers, as, for example, in The Eddie Cantor Story (1953). She was also occasionally employed in meatier outdoor roles in anything from swashbucklers, like The Flame and the Arrow (1950), to westerns, such as her ranch owner in The Man from Laramie (1955). More exotically cast, she portrayed James Darren's Hawaiian mother, Kapiolani Kahana, in Diamond Head (1962). In her last motion picture performance, she re-created her stage role as Aunt Hannah for the Paramount film version of All the Way Home (1963). Based on the novel "A Death in the Family" by James Agee, the picture was a huge success with the critics but performed less well at the box office.
Aside from a handful of guest appearances on television, she retired from the screen after 1964 and died of pneumonia at her Manhattan home at the age of 92 in 1991. She was married to Clarence S. Stern, who predeceased her in 1975.- Actress
- Script and Continuity Department
- Soundtrack
Sheila Florance was born on 24 July 1916 in St. Kilda East, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. She was an actress, known for Prisoner (1979), Mad Max (1979) and A Woman's Tale (1991). She was married to Jan (John) Adam Balawaider and Roger Lightfoot Oyston. She died on 12 October 1991 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.- Born on August 28, 1925 in Batumi, Georgian SSR, Transcaucasian SFSR, USSR (now in Georgia), Arkadiy Natanovich Strugatskiy was a Soviet/Russian sci-fi writer, often writing in collaboration with his younger brother Boris Strugatskiy. Strugatskiys' father Natan Strugatskiy was a Jewish art critic and their mother was a Russian Orthodox teacher. When Arkadiy was a child, the family moved to Leningrad. He was evacuated from the city during the siege of Leningrad in 1942 along with his father, who didn't survive the journey. The following year he was drafted into the Soviet army and went to study at the artillery school in Aktyubinsk. In 1949 he graduated the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow as Japanese and English interpreter. He worked for the military until 1955, when he became a writer instead. In 1958 the Strugatskiy brothers begun their artistic collaboration, which lasted until Arkadiy's death. In 1979, the brothers' best-known novel, "Piknik na obochine" ("Roadside Picnic") was loosely adapted for the screen by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker (1979). Arkadiy died on October 12, 1991 in Moscow, USSR (now in Russia). Writings of the Strugatskiys continue to inspire creators of movies (such as Dark Planet (2008)) and video games (such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007) and its sequels).
- American leading lady, born Rosemary LaBie in Chicago, Illinois, and educated at Our Lady of Loretto Academy. Diana came equipped with some stage training (from a stint with Chicago's Goodman Theatre) and had won several beauty contests before moving to Los Angeles as a high fashion model. She also posed for commercial artists. Before long, she was noticed by talent scouts and spent most of the 1930s as a minor starlet at Universal and RKO. Unfortunately, her one leading role was in what some regard as John Wayne's worst-ever film, Adventure's End (1937), effectively short-circuiting Diana's career. She made several more films until exiting stage right to become a bigger fish in a smaller pond, as Mrs. Rosemary Schropp (wife of John Jack Schropp), resident of Mount Gretna, Pennsylvania, where she performed to great acclaim in such local stage productions as 'Tillie the Mennonite Maid'.
- Additional Crew
- Location Management
- Production Manager
Ami Agmon was born on 11 May 1949. Ami was a production manager, known for Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), Halloween II (1981) and Fade to Black (1980). Ami died on 12 October 1991 in Westwood, California, USA.- Anton Färber was born on 20 July 1906. He was an actor, known for Der Feuerteufel (1940), Wo ist Herr Belling? (1945) and Die Mühle im Schwarzwäldertal (1953). He died on 12 October 1991.
- Music Department
- Writer
- Composer
Victor Skaarup was born on 1 December 1906 in Denmark. He was a writer and composer, known for Reptilicus (1961), Det var paa Rundetaarn (1955) and Panik i familien (1945). He died on 12 October 1991 in Denmark.