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1-50 of 353
- Actress
- Composer
- Producer
Suzanne Somers was the third of four children born to Frank and Marion Mahoney.
Her father worked loading beer onto boxcars, and her mother was a medical secretary. She grew up living in constant fear of being hurt or even
killed at the hands of her verbally and physically abusive, alcoholic father. She was diagnosed with dyslexia when she was young, and was a poor student. She excelled, however, in the arts and was active in her school's theater program. She won a music scholarship to college, but became pregnant after six months. She married the baby's father, Bruce Somers, and her only child, Bruce Somers, was born in November 1965. She was unhappy in her marriage and began an affair with her former drama teacher. Her husband found out about it and the marriage ended after just two years, in 1967. A single mom, she turned to modeling in San Francisco to support herself and her son. She also distanced herself from her family because her older brother and sister by then were also alcoholics.
In 1968, she won a job as a prize model on a game show hosted by her future husband, Alan Hamel, who was married at the time. The two began dating, and she became pregnant while Hamel was still married. They came to the conclusion that Suzanne should have an abortion, from which she suffered severe complications for several days.
In 1971, her son Bruce was severely injured when he was hit by a car, and the therapist counseling him only charged the financially struggling Somers $1 per week. She underwent therapy herself to overcome the problems of her dysfunctional childhood. In the early 1970s, she landed minor roles in film and TV, and finally won a role on the series Three's Company (1976). She married Hamel in 1977. She was fired from the series after she asked for a raise at the beginning of the fifth season.
She then headed to Las Vegas, where
she performed extensively in the mid-1980s. In 1986, she began writing her autobiography, "Keeping Secrets", which was later made into a TV
movie. In 1991, she landed the role of "Carol Foster", opposite Patrick Duffy, on the TV series Step by Step (1991). After the end of that show, she began co-hosting Candid Camera (1992).- Actress
- Soundtrack
Eleanor Jean Parker was born on June 26, 1922, in Cedarville, Ohio, the last of three children born to a mathematics teacher and his wife.
Eleanor caught the acting bug early and began performing in school plays. She was was so serious about becoming an actor, that she attended the Rice Summer Theatre on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, beginning
when she was 15 years old. She was offered her first screen test by a
20th Century-Fox talent scout while attending Rice, but turned the opportunity down to gain professional stage experience in Cleveland
after graduating from high school.
She moved on to California to continue her acting studies at the Pasadena Playhouse. It was there, while sitting in the audience of a play being put on at the Playhouse, that she was again offered a screen test - this time from a Warner Brothers' scout - and again declined, wanting to finish her first year at the Playhouse. When the year was up, Eleanor contacted Warner Brothers to take them up on their offer of a screen test and was signed as a contract player two days after it was shot.
She was cast in Raoul Walsh's
They Died with Their Boots On (1941), but her performance was left on the cutting room floor.
She was then cast in short subjects and given other assignments typical of novice
film actors, to enable them to learn their craft, such as voice-acting and appearances in other actors' screen tests. Finally, she was promoted
to the B-picture unit, making her feature debut in
Busses Roar (1942).
Her beauty meant she was not forgotten, and she was cast in one of Warner Brothers' biggest productions for the 1943 season, the pro-Soviet
Mission to Moscow (1943), directed by Michael Curtiz and starring
Walter Huston as the U.S. ambassador to the USSR. Eleanor played his daughter in the film, which became
notorious in the McCarthy era for its glorification of "Uncle Joe" Stalin. The film proved significant to Eleanor, as she met a future husband on the set, Navy Lieutenant. Fred L. Losse, Navy dentist. The
marriage was a brief wartime affair, lasting from March 21, 1943, to December 5, 1944.
She went back to the B's with
The Mysterious Doctor (1943),
then bounced back to the A-list for
Between Two Worlds (1944), a
remake of the Leslie Howard
vehicle Outward Bound (1930) in
which she played Paul Henreid's fiancee (both die from suicide, but in Hollywood logic that didn't mean they couldn't frolic together on the silver screen). Eleanor then made
two more B-quickies in 1944,
Crime by Night (1944) and
The Last Ride (1944), before
graduating to the A-list for good with
Pride of the Marines (1945)
with John Garfield.
In the 1946 Warner Bros. remake of Of Human Bondage (1946), she took the role
that Bette Davis had made good in 1934 (ironically, at rival RKO). Though
Parker would be gaining kudos and Oscar nominations by the beginning of the next decade, her portrait of Mildred was weak in comparison with
Davis's dynamic performance.
Parker received the first of her three Best Actress Oscar nominations
for playing a prisoner in Caged (1950), and won the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival. She
was also nominated the next year for playing the cop's wife who shared a secret with the neighborhood abortionist in
William Wyler's
Detective Story (1951). Her third
and last Oscar nod came for
Interrupted Melody (1955),
wherein she played an opera singer struck down by polio. She could easily have
been nominated that same year for her portrayal of
Frank Sinatra's faux crippled wife in
Otto Preminger's brooding masterpiece
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955),
adapted from the novel by Nelson Algren.
Parker proved herself to be a supremely talented and very versatile lead actress. The versatility was likely one of the reasons she never quite became a major star. Audiences attending a movie starring Parker never knew quite what to expect of her; if they even remembered she was the same actress they had seen before in a different type of role in another picture. Her turns in Detective Story (1951) and
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)
could not have been more different. Parker's stardom and subsequent
fame (and remembrance) suffered from her focusing on being a serious
actress and creating a character who fit the motion picture she was in,
rather than playing a character over and over, as most actors
do. She probably best remembered for the relatively tame part as the Baroness in
The Sound of Music (1965).
She received an Outstanding Lead Actress Emmy nomination in 1963 for
her appearance in
The Eleventh Hour (1962)
episode Why Am I Grown So Cold? Despite the success of
The Sound of Music (1965) being completely attributed to #1 box office sensation
Julie Andrews, it's probably Parker's best-remembered role.
Her appearances in such fare as The Oscar (1966) (the cast of which the Playboy Magazine reviewer derided as "has-beens and never-will-bes")
and the movie adaptation of
Norman Mailer's indescribable
existential potboiler
An American Dream (1966) with
fellow Oscar-nominee Stuart Whitman
signaled that Miss Parker was now inscribed on the list of the
has-beens.
She had one last hurrah, winning a Golden Globe nomination in 1970 as
best lead actress for her role in the TV series
Bracken's World (1969), but
unfortunately times had changed during the tumultuous 1960s. Her last
film role was in a Farrah Fawcett bomb,
Sunburn (1979). Subsequently, she
appeared very infrequently on TV, most recently in
Dead on the Money (1991).
Eleanor Parker retired far too soon for those who were her fans, and those who appreciated a superb actress.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Tall, dark, and handsome is how Hollywood liked their leading men back
in the 1950s and 1960s, and actor Paul Burke certainly fitted the bill.
While his career fell short of outright stardom, he managed to stand
out in a couple of acclaimed TV cop series in the 1960s and
"enjoyed" semi-cult status by co-starring in one of the screen's most
celebrated "turkeys" of all time.
The New Orleans-born actor was born on July 21, 1926, the son of
Martin Burke, a prizefighter who
later became a well-known promoter and French Quarter nightclub owner
("Marty Burke's"). Educated at prep schools, he was drawn to acting and
moved to Hollywood in the late 1940s, studying at the Pasadena
Playhouse for a couple of years. Screen director
Lloyd Bacon, a friend of his father Marty,
helped the fledgling actor along by giving him an unbilled part in the
Betty Grable musical
Call Me Mister (1951). From there,
he managed to scrounge up bit/uncredited parts in such 1950s films as
Fearless Fagan (1952);
Francis Goes to West Point (1952),
Three Sailors and a Girl (1953),
South Sea Woman (1953), and
Spy Chasers (1955). He moved up the
ladder a bit to featured status in another Francis the talking mule
picture,
Francis in the Navy (1955),
and in Screaming Eagles (1956),
then earned a starring role in the voodoo/jungle horror flick
The Disembodied (1957), opposite
the "50-Foot Woman," herself,
Allison Hayes.
Better yet, Burke found steady work on the small tube with grim-faced
roles in a number of crime series such as
Highway Patrol (1955),
The Lineup (1954),
M Squad (1957), and
Dragnet (1951). He also appeared in
Adventures of Superman (1952).
Via an association with "Dragnet" producer/director
Jack Webb, he received his own TV
series, albeit short lived, in the form of
Noah's Ark (1956), portraying
veterinarian "Dr. Noah McCann." He followed that by co-starring with
Barry Sullivan in another one-season
series, Harbourmaster (1957), a
New England coast adventure yarn, and then in
Five Fingers (1959), a spy drama
headlining David Hedison. Another hit
series came with
12 O'Clock High (1964), based
on the hit film drama of the same name.
Burke's best-known TV role, however, was as "Detective Adam Flint" in
the highly praised police series
Naked City (1958), replacing
James Franciscus. He joined the cast in the second season as the young partner of "Lt. Mike Parker"
(portrayed by Horace McMahon), just as
the half-hour show format was being extended to an hour. Based on the
gritty, groundbreaking cop movie
The Naked City (1948), the series
did the film more than justice with excellent story lines, and Burke
walked away with two Emmy nominations out of the three seasons he
appeared.
His only movie role in the early 1960s was Della (1965) (aka Fatal Confinement) starring
Joan Crawford which
was actually a failed pilot to a prospective TV series. Winning the
co-lead role of fledgling writer "Lyon Burke" in the highly-anticipated
film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's
monstrous best seller,
Valley of the Dolls (1967).
It could have been the break to turn things around on film. It did
not...far from it. The Susann book was, if anything, a guilty pleasure as
readers were reeled in by the trashy Hollywood themes of drugs, fame,
and sex. The movie was a laughable misfire-riddled with bad acting, bad
dialogue and inept directing. It earned instant cult infamy, making
many "top 10" lists for worst movie ever. It also damaged the screen
careers of many of the actors involved. In reality, Burke and
Barbara Parkins, who played his paramour
in the movie, actually came off better and more grounded than most.
Unfortunately, good or bad, they were identified with a huge "turkey",
and it stuck.
Despite Burke's co-star cop role, opposite
Steve McQueen and
Faye Dunaway, in the stylish thriller
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968),
the very next year, it was not able to right the wrong of "Dolls".
Thereafter, Burke tended to be overlooked in his later film career, which
included standard starring roles both in the U.S. and abroad in such fare as
Daddy's Gone A-Hunting (1969),
Once You Kiss a Stranger... (1969),
and Maharlika (1970). TV crime,
however, proved again to be reliable income for Burke with guest
roles in such popular 70s series as
The Rookies (1972),
The New Perry Mason (1973),
Police Woman (1974),
Harry O (1973),
Mannix (1967),
Ironside (1967), and the acclaimed
Police Story (1973) series. TV
movies also came his way, as well, with the starring role of tycoon
"C.C. Capwell" (replacing
Peter Mark Richman), in the daytime
soap opera, Santa Barbara (1984). Burke
himself was replaced after a relatively brief time.
Following assured roles in the series
Hot Shots (1986) and
Dynasty (1981), the latter as
scheming "Congressman Neal McVane", who frames
Joan Collins' character for murder,
Burke's career hit an irreversible snag in 1989, when he and three
others, including New Orleans' district attorney
Harry Connick Sr. (yes, father of the crooning junior, Harry Connick Jr.), were tried on federal
racketeering charges, aiding and abetting a gambling operation, and
committing perjury before a grand jury. The seven-week trial in 1990
resulted in his and Connick's acquittal (the other two were found
guilty) but the damage was done and he wasn't able to find work when he
returned to California. Burke's last film,
(The Fool (1990), shot in
England, and his last TV guest role (in an episode of Columbo (1971)) both came out in 1990.
Divorced from Peggy Pryor, the mother of his three children, Burke
married actress Lyn Peters in 1979. They met
while she was appearing in the
12 O'Clock High (1964)
episode
Siren Voices (1966).
The couple eventually retired to Palm Springs, where the actor died at
age 83 of leukemia and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in September of 2009.- Actress
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Betty Hutton was born Elizabeth June Thornburg on February 26, 1921, in
Battle Creek, Michigan. Two years later, Betty's father decided that the
family way of life wasn't for him, so he left (he committed suicide 16
years later). Having to fend for themselves, Mrs. Thornburg moved the
family to Detroit to find work in the numerous auto factories there,
but times were hard and she decided to take advantage of Prohibition
and opened a small tavern, at the time called a speakeasy. The police
were always looking for those types of operation, both big and small,
and when they detected one, they swooped in and closed it down. Mrs.
Thornburg was no different from the other owners, they simply moved
elsewhere. Poverty was a constant companion. In addition to that, Mrs.
Thornburg was an alcoholic.
At nine years old, Betty began singing publicly for the first time in a
school production. Realizing the voice Betty had, her mother took her
around Detroit to have her sing to any group that would listen. This
was a small way of getting some money for the poor family. When she was
13, Betty got a few singing jobs with local bands in the area. Thinking
she was good enough to make the big time, she left for New York two
years later to try a professional career. Unfortunately, it didn't work
out and Betty headed back to Detroit.
In 1937, Betty was hired by
Vincent Lopez who had a popular
band that appeared on the local radio. Later, she would return to New
York and it was here that her career took off. Betty found herself on
Broadway in 1940, and it was only a matter of time before her career
took off to bigger heights. The following year, she left New York for
Hollywood, where she was to find new life in films. She was signed by
Paramount Pictures and made her debut, at 21, in
The Fleet's In (1942), along with
Eddie Bracken,
William Holden and
Dorothy Lamour. Reviews were better than
expected, with critics looking favorably upon her work. She had
previously appeared in a few musical shorts, which no doubt helped her
in her first feature film. She made one more musical in 1942 and two
more in 1943.
In 1944, she tried to break away from musicals and try her hand in a
screwball comedy,
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943).
She proved - to herself, the public and the critics - that she was
marketable outside musicals. In subsequent films, Betty was able to show
her comedic side as well as her singing. In 1948, she appeared in her
first big box-office bomb,
Dream Girl (1948), which was ripped to
shreds by critics, as was Betty's acting, and the movie flopped at the
box office. It wasn't long before Betty became unhappy with her career.
In truth, she had the acting talent, but the parts she got weren't the
types to showcase that. Though she did appear in three well-received
films later,
Red, Hot and Blue (1949),
Annie Get Your Gun (1950) and
The Greatest Show on Earth (1952),
her career was winding down.
Later, after filming
Somebody Loves Me (1952), Betty
was all but finished. She had married Charles O'Curran that year and he wanted to direct her in
an upcoming film. Paramount didn't like the idea and the temper
tantrum-prone Betty walked out of her contract and movies. She did
concentrate on the relatively new medium of television and the stage,
but she never recovered her previous form. Her final film was a minor
one, Spring Reunion (1956). Her TV
series,
The Betty Hutton Show (1959),
didn't fare too well at all. Betty lived in quiet retirement in Palm
Springs, California until her death on March 11, 2007. She was 86 years old.- Actor
- Soundtrack
William Hopper was born on 26 January 1915 in New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Perry Mason (1957), 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). He was married to Jeanette Juanita Ward and Jane Gilbert. He died on 6 March 1970 in Palm Springs, California, USA.- Actress
- Writer
- Producer
Jane Wyman was born Sarah Jane Mayfield on January 5, 1917, in St.
Joseph, Missouri (she was also known later as Sarah Jane Fulks). When
she was only eight years old, and after her parents filed for divorce,
she lost her father prematurely. After graduating high school she
attempted, with the help of her mother, to break into films, but to no
avail. In 1935, after attending the University of Missouri, she began a
career as a radio singer, which led to her first name change to Jane
Durrell. In 1936 she signed a contract with Warner Bros. Pictures and
that led to another name change, the more familiar one of Jane Wyman.
Under that name she appeared in "A" and "B" pictures at Warners,
including two with her future husband,
Ronald Reagan:
Brother Rat (1938) and its sequel,
Brother Rat and a Baby (1940).
In the early 1940s she moved into comedies and melodramas and gained
attention for her role as Ray Milland's
long-suffering girlfriend in
The Lost Weekend (1945). The
following year she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role
as Ma Baxter in The Yearling (1946),
and won the coveted prize in 1949 as deaf-mute rape victim Belinda
MacDonald in
Johnny Belinda (1948). She
followed that with a number of appearances in more prestigious films,
such as Alfred Hitchcock's
Stage Fright (1950),
Frank Capra's
Here Comes the Groom (1951),
Michael Curtiz's
The Story of Will Rogers (1952)
and the first movie version of
The Glass Menagerie (1950).
She starred opposite Bing Crosby in the
musical Just for You (1952). She was
Oscar-nominated for her performances in
The Blue Veil (1951) and
Magnificent Obsession (1954).
She also starred in the immensely popular
So Big (1953),
Lucy Gallant (1955),
All That Heaven Allows (1955)
and
Miracle in the Rain (1956).
In addition to her extensive film career, she hosted TV's
Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theatre (1955)
and starred in most of the episodes of the show, which ran for three
seasons. She came back to the big screen in
Holiday for Lovers (1959),
Pollyanna (1960) and her final film,
How to Commit Marriage (1969).
Although off the big screen, she became a presence on the small screen
and starred in two made-for-TV movies, including
The Incredible Journey of Doctor Meg Laurel (1979).
In early 1981, in the 49th year of her career, she won the role of
conniving matriarch Angela Channing Erikson Stavros Agretti in the
movie "The Vintage Years", which was the unaired pilot for the
prime-time soap opera
Falcon Crest (1981), later in
the year. For nine seasons she played that character in a way that
virtually no other actress could have done, and became the moral center
of the show. The show was a ratings winner from its debut in 1981, and
made stars out of her fellow cast members
Robert Foxworth,
Lorenzo Lamas,
Abby Dalton and
Susan Sullivan. At the end of the
first season the story line had her being informed that her evil son,
played by David Selby, had inherited 50% of
a California newspaper company, and the conflicts inherent in that
situation led to even bigger ratings over the next five years. Wyman
was nominated six times for a Soap Opera Digest Award, and in 1984 she
won the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a TV Series
Drama. By the show's eighth season, however, she was emotionally
drained and the strain of constantly working to keep up the quality of
a hit show took its toll on her. In addition, there was friction on the
set among cast members. All of these events culminated in her departure
from the show after the first two episodes of the ninth season (her
character was hospitalized and slipped into a coma) for health reasons.
After a period of recuperation, she believed that she had recovered
enough to guest-star in the last three episodes of the season (her
doctor disagreed, but she did it anyway). She then guest-starred as
Jane Seymour's mother on
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993)
and three years later appeared in
Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick (1995).
In the late 1990s she purchased a home in Rancho Mirage, California,
where she lived in retirement. Her daughter,
Maureen Reagan (who died in August 2001),
was a writer who also involved herself in political issues and
organized a powerful foundation. Also, she placed her 3200-sq.-ft.
Rancho Mirage condominium on the market. Jane Wyman died at the age of
90, at her Palm Springs, California home, on September 10, 2007, having
long suffered from arthritis and diabetes. It was reported that Wyman
died in her sleep of natural causes at the Rancho Mirage Country Club.- Actor
- Producer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Alan Walbridge Ladd was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the only child of Ina Raleigh (aka Selina Rowley) and Alan Harwood Ladd, a freelance accountant. His mother was English, from County Durham. His father died when he was four. At age five, he burned his apartment playing with matches, and his mother moved them to Oklahoma City. He was malnourished, undersized and nicknamed Tiny. His mother married a house painter who moved them to California--a la "The Grapes of Wrath"--when he was eight. He picked fruit, delivered papers, and swept stores. In high school he discovered track and swimming. By 1931 he was training for the 1932 Olympics, but an injury put an end to those plans. He opened a hamburger stand called Tiny's Patio, and later worked as a grip at Warner Brothers Pictures. He married his friend Midge in 1936, but couldn't afford her, so they lived apart. In 1937, they shared a friend's apartment. They had a son, Alan Ladd Jr., and his destitute alcoholic mother moved in with them, her agonizing suicide from ant poison witnessed a few months later by her son. His size and coloring here regarded as not right for movies, so he worked hard at radio, where talent scout and former actress Sue Carol discovered him early in 1939. After a string of bit parts in "B" pictures--and an unbilled part in Orson Welles' classic Citizen Kane (1941)--he tested for This Gun for Hire (1942) late in 1941. His fourth-billed role as psychotic killer Raven made him a star. He was drafted in January 1943 and discharged in November with an ulcer and double hernia. Throughout the 1940s his tough-guy roles packed audiences into theaters and he was one of the very few males whose cover photos sold movie magazines. In the 1950s he was performing in lucrative but unrewarding films (an exception being what many regard as his greatest role, Shane (1953)). By the end of the 1950s liquor and a string of so-so films had taken their toll. In November 1962 he was found unconscious lying in a pool of blood with a bullet wound near his heart, a probable suicide attempt. In January 1964 he was found dead, apparently due to an accidental combination of alcohol and sedatives.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Herbert Anderson was born on 30 March 1917 in Oakland, California, USA. He was an actor, known for Battleground (1949), The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941) and The Male Animal (1942). He was married to Mary Virginia Palmer. He died on 11 June 1994 in Palm Springs, California, USA.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Janet Gaynor was born Laura Gainor on October 6, 1906, in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. As a child, she & her parents moved to San Francisco,
California, where she graduated from high school in 1923. She then
moved to Los Angeles where she enrolled in a secretarial school. She
got a job at a shoe store for the princely sum of $18 per week.
However, since L.A. was the land of stars and studios, she wanted to
try her hand at acting. She managed to land unbilled bit parts in
several feature films and comedy shorts. She bided her time, believing
"Good things come to those who wait." She didn't have to wait too long,
either. In 1926, at the age of 20, she turned in a superb performance
as Anna Burger in The Johnstown Flood (1926). The Hollywood moguls knew they had a top
star on their hands and cast her in several other leading roles that
year, including The Shamrock Handicap (1926), The Blue Eagle (1926), The Midnight Kiss (1926) and The Return of Peter Grimm (1926). The next year
she turned in acclaimed performances in two classic films, 7th Heaven (1927) and
Sunrise (1927). Based on the strength of those two films plus Street Angel (1928), Janet
received the very first Academy Award for best actress. This was the
first and only time an actress won the Oscar for multiple roles. When
"talkies" replaced silent films, Janet was one of the few who made a
successful transition, not only because of her great acting ability but
for her charming voice as well. Without a doubt, Janet had already
lived a true rags-to-riches story. Throughout the mid-1930s she was the
top drawing star at theaters. She turned in grand performances in
several otherwise undistinguished films.
Then came A Star Is Born (1937). She was very convincing as Vicki Lester (aka Esther
Blodgett), struggling actress trying for the big time. Told by the
receptionist at Central casting "You know what your chances are? One in
a hundred thousand," Esther/Vicki replies, "But maybe--I'm that one."
For her outstanding performance she was nominated for another Oscar,
but lost to Luise Rainer's performance in The Good Earth (1937), her second in as many
tries. After appearing in The Young in Heart (1938), Janet didn't appear in another film
until 1957's Bernardine (1957). Her last performance was in a Broadway version of
Harold and Maude. Although the play was a flop, Janet's performance
salvaged it to any degree - she still had what it took to entertain the
public. On September 14, 1984, Janet passed away from pneumonia in Palm
Springs, California, at the age of 77.- Actor
- Soundtrack
William Powell was on the New York stage by 1912, but it would be ten
years before his film career would begin. In 1924 he went to Paramount
Pictures, where he was employed for the next seven years. During that
time, he played in a number of interesting films, but stardom was
elusive. He did finally attract attention with
The Last Command (1928) as Leo,
the arrogant film director. Stardom finally came via his role as Philo
Vance in
The Canary Murder Case (1929),
in which he investigates the death of
Louise Brooks, "the Canary."
Unlike many silent actors, sound boosted Powell's career. He had a
fine, urbane voice and his stage training and comic timing greatly
aided his introduction to sound pictures. However, he was not happy
with the type of roles he was playing at Paramount, so in 1931 he
switched to Warner Bros. There, he again became disappointed with his
roles, and his last appearance for Warners was as Philo Vance in
The Kennel Murder Case (1933).
In 1934 Powell went to MGM, where he was teamed with
Myrna Loy in
Manhattan Melodrama (1934).
While Philo made Powell a star, another detective, Nick Charles, made
him famous. Powell received an Academy Award nomination for
The Thin Man (1934) and later
starred in the Best Picture winner for 1936,
The Great Ziegfeld (1936).
Powell could play any role with authority, whether in a comedy,
thriller, or drama. He received his second Academy Award nomination for
My Man Godfrey (1936) and was on
top of the world until 1937, when he made his first picture with
Jean Harlow,
Reckless (1935). The two clicked,
off-screen as well as on-screen, and shortly became engaged. One day,
while Powell was filming
Double Wedding (1937) on one MGM
sound stage, Harlow became ill on another. She was finally taken to the
hospital, where she died. Her death greatly upset both Powell and
Myrna Loy, and he took six weeks off from
making the movie to deal with his sorrow. After that he traveled, not
making another MGM film for a year. He eventually did five sequels to
"The Thin Man," the last one in 1947. He also received his third
Academy Award nomination for his work in
Life with Father (1947). His
screen appearances became less frequent after that, and his last role
was in 1955. He had come a long way from playing the villain in 1922.- Director
- Producer
- Writer
What do the classic films Scarface (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), Sergeant York (1941), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Rio Bravo (1959) have in common? Aside from their displays of great craftsmanship, the answer is director Howard Hawks, one of the most celebrated of American filmmakers, who ironically, was little celebrated by his peers in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences during his career.
Although John Ford--his friend, contemporary and the director arguably closest to him in terms of his talent and output--told him that it was he, and not Ford, who should have won the 1941 Best Director Academy Award (for Sergeant York (1941)), the great Hawks never won an Oscar in competition and was nominated for Best Director only that one time, despite making some of the best films in the Hollywood canon. The Academy eventually made up for the oversight in 1974 by voting him an honorary Academy Award, in the midst of a two-decade-long critical revival that has gone on for yet another two decades. To many cineastes, Hawks is one of the faces of American film and would be carved on any film pantheon's Mt. Rushmore honoring America's greatest directors, beside his friend Ford and Orson Welles (the other great director who Ford beat out for the 1941 Oscar). It took the French "Cahiers du Cinema" critics to teach America to appreciate one of its own masters, and it was to the Academy's credit that it recognized the great Hawks in his lifetime.
Hawks' career spanned the freewheeling days of the original independents in the 1910s, through the studio system in Hollywood from the silent era through the talkies, lasting into the early 1970s with the death of the studios and the emergence of the director as auteur, the latter a phenomenon that Hawks himself directly influenced. He was the most versatile of American directors, and before his late career critical revival he earned himself a reputation as a first-rate craftsman and consummate Hollywood professional who just happened, in a medium that is an industrial process, to have made some great movies. Recognition as an influential artist would come later, but it would come to him before his death.
He was born Howard Winchester Hawks in Goshen, Indiana, on Decoration Day, May 30, 1896, the first child of Franklin Winchester Hawks and his wife, the former Helen Brown Howard. The day of his birth the local sheriff killed a brawler at the town saloon; the young Hawks was not born on the wild side of town, though, but with the proverbial silver spoon firmly clenched in his young mouth. His wealthy father was a member of Goshen's most prominent family, owners of the Goshen Milling Co. and many other businesses, and his maternal grandfather was one of Wisconsin's leading industrialists. His father's family had arrived in America in 1630, while his mother's father, C.W. Howard, who was born in Maine in 1845 to parents who emigrated to the U.S. from the Isle of Man, made his fortune in the paper industry with his Howard Paper Co. Ironically, almost a half-year after Howard's birth, the first motion picture was shown in Goshen, just before Christmas on December 10, 1896. Billed as "the scientific wonder of the world," the movie played to a sold-out crowd at the Irwin Theater. However, it disappointed the audience, and attendance fell off at subsequent showings. The interest of the boy raised a Presbyterian would not be piqued again until his family moved to southern California.
Before that move came to pass, though, the Hawks family relocated from Goshen to Neenah, Wisconsin, when Howard's father was appointed secretary/treasurer of the Howard Paper Co. in 1898. Howard grew up a coddled and spoiled child in Goshen, but in Neenah he was treated like a young prince. His maternal grandfather C.W. lavished his grandson with expensive toys. C.W. had been an indulgent father, encouraging the independence and adventurousness of his two daughters, Helen and Bernice, who were the first girls in Neenah to drive automobiles. Bernice even went for an airplane ride (the two sisters, Hawks' mother and aunt, likely were the first models for what became known as "the Hawksian women" when he became a director). Brother Kenneth Hawks was born in 1898, and was looked after by young Howard. However, Howard resented the birth of the family's next son, William B. Hawks, in 1902, and offered to sell him to a family friend for ten cents. A sister, Grace, followed William. Childbirth took a heavy toll on Howard's mother, and she never quite recovered after delivering her fifth child, Helen, in 1906. In order to aid her recovery, the family moved to the more salubrious climate of Pasadena, California, northeast of Los Angeles, for the winter of 1906-07. The family returned to Wisconsin for the summers, but by 1910 they permanently resettled in California, as grandfather C.W. himself took to wintering in Pasadena. He eventually sold his paper company and retired. He continued to indulge his grandson Howard, though, buying him whatever he fancied, including a race car when the lad was barely old enough to drive legally. C.W. also arranged for Howard to take flying lessons so he could qualify for a pilot's license, an example followed by Kenneth.
The young Howard Hawks grew accustomed to getting what he wanted and believed his grandfather when C.W. told him he was the best and that he could do anything. Howard also likely inherited C.W.'s propensity for telling whopping lies with a straight face, a trait that has bedeviled many film historians ever since. C.W. also was involved in amateur theatrics and Howard's mother Helen was interested in music, though no one in the Hawks-Howard family ever was involved in the arts until Howard went to work in the film industry.
Hawks was sent to Philips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, for his education, and upon graduation attended Cornell University, where he majored in mechanical engineering. In both his personal and professional lives Hawks was a risk-taker and enjoyed racing airplanes and automobiles, two sports that he first indulged in his teens with his grandfather's blessing.
The Los Angeles area quickly evolved into the center of the American film industry when studios began relocating their production facilities from the New York City area to southern California in the middle of the 1910s. During one summer vacation while Howard was matriculating at Cornell, a friend got him a job as a prop man at Famous Players-Lasky (later to become Paramount Pictures), and he quickly rose trough the ranks. Hawks recalled, "It all started with Douglas Fairbanks, who was off on location for some picture and phoned in to say they wanted a modern set. There was only one art director . . . and he was away on another location. I said, 'Well, I can build a modern set.' I'd had a few years of architectural training at school. So I did, and Fairbanks was pleased with it. We became friends, and that was really the start."
During other summer vacations from Cornell, Hawks continued to work in the movies. One story Hawks tells is that the director of a Mary Pickford film Hawks was working on, A Little Princess (1917), became too inebriated to continue working, so Hawks volunteered to direct a few scenes himself. However, it's not known whether his offer was taken up, or whether this was just one more of his tall tales. During World War I Hawks served as a lieutenant in the Signal Corps and later joined the Army Air Corps, serving in France. After the Armistice he indulged in his love of risk, working as an aviator and a professional racing car driver. Drawing on his engineering experience, Hawks designed racing cars, and one of his cars won the Indianapolis 500. These early war and work experiences proved invaluable to the future filmmaker.
He eventually decided on a career in Hollywood and was employed in a variety of production jobs, including assistant director, casting director, script supervisor, editor and producer. He and his brother Kenneth shot aerial footage for motion pictures, but Kenneth tragically was killed during a crash while filming. Howard was hired as a screenwriter by Paramount in 1922 and was tasked with writing 40 story lines for new films in 60 days. He bought the rights for works by such established authors as Joseph Conrad and worked, mostly uncredited, on the scripts for approximately 60 films. Hawks wanted to direct, but Paramount refused to indulge his ambition. A Fox executive did, however, and Hawks directed his first film, The Road to Glory (1926) in 1926, also doubling as the screenwriter.
Hawks made a name for himself by directing eight silent films in the 1920s, His facility for language helped him to thrive with the dawn of talking pictures, and he really established himself with his first talkie in 1930, the classic World War I aviation drama The Dawn Patrol (1930). His arrival as a major director, however, was marked by 1932's controversial and highly popular gangster picture Scarface (1932), a thinly disguised bio of Chicago gangster Al Capone, which was made for producer Howard Hughes. His first great movie, it catapulted him into the front rank of directors and remained Hawks' favorite film. Unnder the aegis of the eccentric multi-millionaire Hughes, it was the only movie he ever made in which he did not have to deal with studio meddling. It leavened its ultra-violence with comedy in a potent brew that has often been imitated by other directors.
Though always involved in the development of the scripts of his films, Hawks was lucky to have worked with some of the best writers in the business, including his friend and fellow aviator William Faulkner. Screenwriters he collaborated with on his films included Leigh Brackett, Ben Hecht, John Huston and Billy Wilder. Hawks often recycled story lines from previous films, such as when he jettisoned the shooting script on El Dorado (1966) during production and reworked the film-in-progress into a remake of Rio Bravo (1959).
The success of his films was partly rooted in his using first-rate writers. Hawks viewed a good writer as a sort of insurance policy, saying, "I'm such a coward that unless I get a good writer, I don't want to make a picture." Though he won himself a reputation as one of Hollywood's supreme storytellers, he came to the conclusion that the story was not what made a good film. After making and then remaking the confusing The Big Sleep (1946) (1945 and 1946) from a Raymond Chandler detective novel, Hawks came to believe that a good film consisted of at least three good scenes and no bad ones--at least not a scene that could irritate and alienate the audience. He said, "As long as you make good scenes you have a good picture--it doesn't matter if it isn't much of a story."
It was Hawks' directorial skills, his ability to ensure that the audience was not aware of the twice-told nature of his films, through his engendering of a high-octane, heady energy that made his films move and made them classics at best and extremely enjoyable entertainments at their "worst." Hawks' genius as a director also manifested itself in his direction of his actors, his molding of their line-readings going a long way toward making his films outstanding. The dialog in his films often was delivered at a staccato pace, and characters' lines frequently overlapped, a Hawks trademark. The spontaneous feeling of his films and the naturalness of the interrelationships between characters were enhanced by his habit of encouraging his actors to improvise. Unlike Alfred Hitchcock, Hawks saw his lead actors as collaborators and encouraged them to be part of the creative process. He had an excellent eye for talent, and was responsible for giving the first major breaks to a roster of stars, including Paul Muni, Carole Lombard (his cousin), Lauren Bacall, Montgomery Clift and James Caan. It was Hawks, and not John Ford, who turned John Wayne into a superstar, with Red River (1948) (shot in 1946, but not released until 1948). He proceeded to give Wayne some of his best roles in the cavalry trilogy of Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950), in which Payne played a broad range of diverse characters.
During the 1930s Hawks moved from hit to hit, becoming one of the most respected directors in the business. As his fame waxed, Hawks' image replaced the older, jodhpurs-and-megaphone image of the Hollywood director epitomized by Cecil B. DeMille. The new paradigm of the Hollywood director in the public eye was, like Hawks himself, tall and silver-haired, a Hemingwayesque man of action who was a thorough professional and did not fail his muse or falter in his mastery of the medium while on the job. The image of Hawks as the ultimate Hollywood professional persists to this day in Hollywood, and he continues to be a major influence on many of today's filmmakers. Among the directors influenced by Hawks are Robert Altman, who used Hawksian overlapping dialog and improvisation in M*A*S*H (1970) and other films. Peter Bogdanovich, who wrote a book about Hawks, essentially remade Bringing Up Baby (1938) as What's Up, Doc? (1972). Brian De Palma remade "Scarface" (Scarface (1983)). Other directors directly indebted to Hawks are John Carpenter and Walter Hill.
Hawks was unique and uniquely modern in that, despite experiencing his career peak in an era dominated by studios and the producer system in which most directors were simply hired hands brought in to shoot a picture, he also served as a producer and developed the scripts for his films. He was determined to remain independent and refused to attach himself to a studio, or to a particular genre, for an extended period of time. His work ethic allowed him to fit in with the production paradigms of the studio system, and he eventually worked for all eight of the major studios. He proved himself to be, in effect, an independent filmmaker, and thus was a model for other director-writer-producers who would arise with the breakdown of the studio system in the 1950s and 1960s and the rise of the director as auteur in the early 1970s. Hawks did it first, though, in an environment that ruined or compromised many another filmmaker.
Hawks was not interested in creating a didactic cinema but simply wanted to tell, give the public, a good story in a well-crafted, entertaining picture. Like Ernest Hemingway, Hawks did have a philosophy of life, but the characters in his films were never intended to be role models. Hawks' protagonists are not necessarily moral people but tend to play fair, according to a personal or professional code. A Hawks film typically focuses on a tightly bound group of professionals, often isolated from society at large, who must work together as a team if they are to survive, let alone triumph. His movies emphasize such traits as loyalty and self-respect. Air Force (1943), one of the finest propaganda films to emerge from World War II, is such a picture, in which a unit bonds aboard a B-17 bomber and the group is more than the sum of the individuals.
Aside from his interest in elucidating human relationships, Hawks' main theme is Hemingwayesque: the execution of one's job or duty to the best of one's ability in the face of overwhelming odds that would make an average person balk. The main characters in a Hawks film typically are people who take their jobs with the utmost seriousness, as their self-respect is rooted in their work. Though often outsiders or loners, Hawksian characters work within a system, albeit a relatively closed system, in which they can ultimately triumph by being loyal to their personal and professional codes. That thematic paradigm has been seen by some critics and cinema historians as being a metaphor for the film industry itself, and of Hawks' place within it.
In a sense, Hawks' oeuvre can be boiled down to two categories: the action-adventure films and the comedies. In his action-adventure movies, such as Only Angels Have Wings (1939), the male protagonist, played by Cary Grant (a favorite actor of his who frequently starred in his films between 1947 and 1950), is both a hero and the top dog in his social group. In the comedies, such as Bringing Up Baby (1938), the male protagonist (again played by Grant) is no hero but rather a victim of women and society. Women have only a tangential role in Hawks' action films, whereas they are the dominant figures in his comedies. In the action-adventure films society at large often is far away and the male professionals exist in an almost hermetically sealed world, whereas in the comedies are rooted in society and its mores. Men are constantly humiliated in the comedies, or are subject to role reversals (the man as the romantically hunted prey in "Baby," or the even more dramatic role reversal, including Cary Grant in drag, in I Was a Male War Bride (1949)). In the action-adventure films in which women are marginalized, they are forced to undergo elaborate courting rituals to attract their man, who they cannot get until they prove themselves as tough as men. There is an undercurrent of homo-eroticism to the Hawks action films, and Hawks himself termed his A Girl in Every Port (1928) "a love story between two men." This homo-erotic leitmotif is most prominent in The Big Sky (1952).
By the time he made "Rio Bravo," over 30 years since he first directed a film, Hawks not only was consciously moving towards parody but was in the process of revising his "closed circle of professionals" credo toward the belief that, by the time of its loose remake, "El Dorado" in 1966, he was stressing the superiority of family loyalties to any professional ethic. In "Rio Bravo" the motley group inside the jailhouse eventually forms into a family in which the stoical code of conduct of previous Hawksian groups is replaced by something akin to a family bond. The new "family" celebrates its unity with the final shootout, which is a virtual fireworks display due to the use of dynamite to overcome the villains who threaten the family's survival. The affection of the group members for each other is best summed up in the scene where the great character actor Walter Brennan, playing Wayne's deputy Stumpy, facetiously tells Wayne that he'll have tears in his eyes until he gets back to the jailhouse. The ability to razz Wayne is indicative of the bond between the two men.
The sprawl of Hawks' oeuvre over multiple genres, and their existence as high-energy examples of film as its purest, emphasizing action rather than reflection, led serious critics before the 1970s to discount Hawks as a director. They generally ignored the themes that run through his body of work, such the dynamics of the group, male friendship, professionalism, and women as a threat to the independence of men. Granted, the cinematic world limned by Hawks was limited when compared to that of John Ford, the poet of the American screen, which was richer and more complex. However, Hawks' straightforward style that emphasized human relationships undoubtedly yielded one of the greatest crops of outstanding motion pictures that can be attributed to one director. Hawks' movies not only span a wide variety of genres, but frequently rank with the best in those genres, whether the war film ("The Dawn Patrol"), gangster film ("Scarface"), the screwball comedy (His Girl Friday (1940)), the action-adventure movie ("Only Angels Have Wings"), the noir (The Big Sleep (1946)), the Western ("Red River") and "Rio Bravo"), the musical-comedy (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)) and the historical epic (Land of the Pharaohs (1955)). He even had a hand in creating one of the classic science-fiction films,
The Thing from Another World (1951), which was produced by Hawks but directed by Christian Nyby, who had edited multiple Hawks films and who, in his sole directorial effort, essentially created a Hawks film (though rumors have long circulated that Hawks actually directed the film rather than Nyby, that has been discounted by such cast members as Kenneth Tobey and James Arness, who have both stated unequivocally that it was Nyby alone who directed the picture).
Though Howard Hawks created some of the most memorable moments in the history of American film a half-century ago, serious critics generally eschewed his work, as they did not believe there was a controlling intelligence behind them. Seen as the consummate professional director in the industrial process that was the studio film, serious critics believed that the great moments of Hawks' films were simply accidents that accrued from working in Hollywood with other professionals. In his 1948 book "The Film Till Now," Richard Griffin summed this feeling up with "Hawks is a very good all rounder."
Serious critics at the time attributed the mantle of "artist" to a director only when they could discern artistic aspirations, a personal visual style, or serious thematic intent. Hawks seemed to them an unambitious director who, unlike D.W. Griffith or the early Cecil B. DeMille, had not made a major contribution to American film, and was not responsible for any major cinematic innovations. He lacked the personal touch of a Charles Chaplin, a Hitchcock or a Welles, did not have the painterly sensibility of a John Ford and had never matured into the master craftsman who tackled heavy themes like the failure of the American dream or racism, like George Stevens. Hawks was seen as a commercial Hollywood director who was good enough to turn out first-rate entertainments in a wide variety of genre films in a time in which genre films such as the melodrama, the war picture and the gangster picture were treated with a lack of respect.
One of the central ideas behind the modernist novel that dominated the first half of the 20th-century artistic consciousness (when the novel and the novelist were still considered the ultimate arbiters of culture in the Anglo-American world) was that the author should begin something new with each book, rather than repeating him-/herself as the 19th century novelists had done. This paradigm can be seen most spectacularly in the work of James Joyce. Of course, it is easy to see this thrust for "something new" in the works of D.W. Griffith and C.B. DeMille, the fathers of the narrative film, working as they were in a new medium. In the post-studio era, a Stanley Kubrick (through Barry Lyndon (1975), at least) and Lars von Trier can be seen as embarking on revolutionary breaks with their past. Howard Hawks was not like this, and, in fact, the latter Hawks constantly recycled not just
themes but plots (so that his last great film, "Rio Bravo," essentially was remade as "El Dorado (1966)" and Rio Lobo (1970)). He did not fit the "modernist" paradigm of an artist.
The critical perception of Hawks began to change when the auteur theory--the idea that one intelligence was responsible for the creation of superior films regardless of their designation as "commercial" or "art house"--began to influence American movie criticism. Commenting on Hawks' facility to make films in a wide variety of genres, critic Andrew Sarris, who introduced the auteur theory to American movie criticism, said of Hawks, "For a major director, there are no minor genres." A Hawks genre picture is rooted in the conventions and audience expectations typical of the Hollywood genre. The Hawks genre picture does not radically challenge, undermine or overthrow either the conventions of the genre or the audience expectations of the genre film, but expands it the genre by revivifying it with new energy. As Robert Altman said about his own McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), he fully played on the conventions and audience expectations of the Western genre and, in fact, did nothing to challenge them as he was relying on the audience being lulled into a comfort zone by the genre. What Altman wanted to do was to indulge his own artistry by painting at and filling in the edges of his canvas. Thus, Altman needed the audience's complicity through the genre conventions to accomplish this.
As a genre director, Hawks used his audience's comfort with the genre to expound his philosophy on male bonding and male-female relationships. His movies have a great deal of energy, invested in them by the master craftsman, which made them into great popular entertainments. That Hawks was a commercial filmmaker who was also a first-rate craftsman was not the sum total of his achievement as a director, but was the means by which he communicated with his audience.
While many during his life-time would not have called Hawks an artist, Robin Wood compared Hawks to William Shakespeare and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, both of whom created popular entertainments that could also appeal to elites. According to Wood, "The originality of their works lay not in the evolution of a completely new language, but in the artist's use and development of an already existing one; hence, there was common ground from the outset between artist and audience, and 'entertainment' could
happen spontaneously without the intervention of a lengthy period of assimilation."
The great French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who began his cinema career as a critic, wrote about Hawks, "The great filmmakers always tie themselves down by complying with the rules of the game . . . Take, for example, the films of Howard Hawks, and in particular 'Rio Bravo'. That is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception, but Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed without disturbing the audience that has come to see a Western like all the others. Hawks is the greater because he has succeeded in fitting all that he holds most dear into a well-worn subject."
A decade before Godard's insight on Hawks, in the early 1950s, the French-language critics who wrote for the cinema journal "Cahiers du Cinema" (many of whom would go on to become directors themselves) elevated Howard Hawks into the pantheon of great directors (the appreciation of Hawks in France, according to Cinématheque Francaise founder Henri Langlois, began with the French release of "Only Angels Have Wings." The Swiss Éric Rohmer, who would one day become a great director himself, in a 1952 review of Hawks' "The Big Sky" declared, "If one does not love the films of Howard Hawks, one cannot love cinema." Rohmer was joined in his enthusiasm for Hawks by such fellow French cineastes as Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. The Cahiers critics claimed that a handful of commercial Hollywood directors like Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock had created films as artful and fulfilling as the masterpieces of the art cinema. André Bazin gave these critics the moniker "Hitchcocko-Hawksians".
Rivette wrote in his 1953 essay, "The Genius of Howard Hawks," that "each shot has a functional beauty, like a neck or an ankle. The smooth, orderly succession of shots has a rhythm like the pulsing of blood, and the whole film is like a beautiful body, kept alive by deep, resilient breathing." Hawks, however, considered himself an entertainer, not an "artist." His definition of a good director was simply "someone who doesn't annoy you." He was never considered an artist until the French New Wave critics crowned him one, as serious critics had ignored his oeuvre. He found the adulation amusing, and once told his admirers, "You guys know my films better than I do."
Commenting on this phenomenon, Sarris' wife Molly Haskell said, "Critics will spend hours with divining rods over the obviously hermetic mindscape of [Ingmar Bergman], [Michelangelo Antonioni], etc., giving them the benefit of every passing doubt. But they will scorn similar excursions into the genuinely cryptic, richer, and more organic terrain of home-grown talents."
Hawks' visual aesthetic eschews formalism, trick photography or narrative gimmicks. There are no flashbacks or ellipses in his films, and his pictures are usually framed as eye-level medium shots. The films themselves are precisely structured, so much so that Langlois compared Hawks to the great modernist architect Walter Gropius. Hawks strikes one as an Intuitive, unselfconscious filmmaker.
Hawks' definition of a good director was "someone who doesn't annoy you." When Hawks was awarded his lifetime achievement Academy Award, the citation referred to the director as "a giant of the American cinema whose pictures, taken as a whole, represent one of the most consistent, vivid, and varied bodies of work in world cinema." It is a fitting epitaph for one of the greatest directors in the history of American, and world cinema.- Noble Willingham appeared in more than 30 feature films, including Up Close & Personal (1996), Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), Chinatown (1974), City Slickers (1991), and The Distinguished Gentleman (1992).
He was born in the small town of Mineola, Texas, east of Dallas. After graduating from North Texas State College in 1953, he earned a master's degree in educational psychology from Baylor University. Willingham was a teacher before following his long-time dream of becoming an actor. Willingham auditioned for a part in the Academy Award-winning film The Last Picture Show (1971), which was filmed in Texas. He won the role, which led to another, in the Academy Award-winning comedy Paper Moon (1973).
On television, he had recurring roles on Home Improvement (1991) and Walker, Texas Ranger (1993), and appeared as a guest star on other television series, including Matlock (1986), L.A. Law (1986), Quantum Leap (1989), Murder, She Wrote (1984), and Northern Exposure (1990), as well as such films and made-for-television movies as Men Don't Tell (1993), Woman with a Past (1992), The Alamo: Thirteen Days to Glory (1987), and Unconquered (1989). - Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Handsome American leading man Guy Madison stumbled into a film career
and became a television star and hero to the Baby Boom generation. As a
young man he worked as a telephone lineman, but entered the Coast Guard
at the beginning of the Second World War. While on liberty one weekend
in Hollywood, he attended a Lux Radio Theatre broadcast and was spotted
in the audience by an assistant to
Henry Willson, an executive for
David O. Selznick. Selznick wanted an
unknown sailor to play a small but prominent part in
Since You Went Away (1944),
and promptly signed Robert Moseley to a contract. Selznick and Willson
concocted the screen name Guy Madison (the "guy" girls would like to
meet, and Madison from a passing Dolly Madison cake wagon). Madison
filmed his one scene on a weekend pass and returned to duty. The film's
release brought thousands of fan letters for Madison's lonely,
strikingly handsome young sailor, and at war's end he returned to find
himself a star-in-the-making. Despite an initial amateurishness to his
acting, Madison grew as a performer, studying and working in theatre.
He played leads in a series of programmers before being cast as
legendary lawman Wild Bill Hickok in the TV series
Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (1951).
He played Hickok on TV and radio for much of the 1950s, and many of the
TV episodes were strung together and released as feature films. Madison
managed to squeeze in some more adult-oriented roles during his
off-time from the series, but much of this work was also in westerns.
After the Hickok series ended Madison found work scarce in the U.S. and
traveled to Europe, where he became a popular star of Italian westerns
and German adventure films. In the 1970s he returned to the U.S., but
appeared mainly in cameo roles. Physical ailments limited his work in
later years, and he died from emphysema in 1996. His first wife was
actress Gail Russell.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Popular Hollywood leading man of late silents and early talkies. He is
best remembered for his teaming with Janet Gaynor in 12 screen romances
between 1927 and 1934. He retired from films in the early 1940s, but
TV audiences of the 1950s would see him as Gale Storm's widower dad in
the popular television series My Little Margie (1952).- Actress
- Soundtrack
Morgana King was born on 4 June 1930 in Pleasantville, New York, USA. She was an actress, known for The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974) and The Godfather Saga (1977). She was married to William Dennis DeBerardinis and Tony Fruscella. She died on 22 March 2018 in Palm Springs, California, USA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
A stocky, serious-looking character, Carl William Demarest started off in vaudeville in 1905 along with two older brothers. At one time he also performed in a stage act with his wife Estelle Collette (billed as 'Demarest and Collette') and then moved on to Broadway. He entered movies in 1926 and first appeared in Vitaphone one-reelers and in films for Warner Brothers, which included the first sound picture, The Jazz Singer (1927). In his later years, he became a household name on TV as retired sea captain Uncle Charley, replacing a seriously ill William Frawley in My Three Sons (1960). However, Demarest was truly at his best during the 1940s as a member of Preston Sturges's unofficial stock company of players, noted for his trademark deadpan or exasperated expressions. He made his reputation in eccentric comic supporting roles, invariably seen as pushy, wary or droll cops, business guys or wisecracking, jaundiced friends of the hero with names like Mugsy, Kockenlocker or Heffelfinger. The Great McGinty (1940), Sullivan's Travels (1941) and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943) are often cited as his best films. When movie offers began to diminish, Demarest segued into television work with many guest spots and a regular co-starring role as a ranch foreman in the western series Tales of Wells Fargo (1957). As a character actor, his quiet intensity and comic timing kept him in demand well into his eighties. Nominated just once for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor in the biopic The Jolson Story (1946), he lost out to Harold Russell for his performance in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).- Actor
- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Oscar-winning director John Schlesinger, who was born in London,
on February 16, 1926, was the eldest child in a solidly
middle-class Jewish family. Berbard Schlesinger, his father, was a
pediatrician, and his mother, Winifred, was a musician. He served in the
Army in the Far East during World War II. While attending Balliol
College at Oxford, Schlesinger was involved with the Undergraduate
Dramatic Society and developed an interest in photography. While at
Oxford, he made his first short film, "Black Legend," in 1948. He took
his degree in 1950 after reading English literature and then went into
television. From 1958 through 1961, he made documentaries for the
British Broadcasting Corp.
His 1960 documentary, Terminus (1961),
which was sponsored by British-Transport, won him a British Academy
Award and the Gold Lion at the Venice Film Festival. He made the
transition to feature films in 1962, with the "kitchen sink" drama
A Kind of Loving (1962), which
got him noticed on both sides of the Atlantic. His next film, the
Northern comedy Billy Liar (1963), was
a success and began his association with actress
Julie Christie, who had a
memorable turn in the film. Christie won the Best Actress Academy Award
and international superstardom and Schlesinger his first Oscar
nomination as Best Director with his next film, the watershed
Darling (1965), which dissected Swinging
London. Subsequently, Schlesinger and Christie collaborated on
Far from the Madding Crowd (1967),
an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's
classic novel, in 1967. The movie was not a success with critics or at
the box office at the time, though its stature has grown over time.
His next film,
Midnight Cowboy (1969), earned
him a place in cinema history, as it was not only a huge box office
hit but also widely acclaimed as a contemporary classic. It won the
Oscar for Best Picture and garnered Schlesinger an Oscar for Best
Director.
Schlesinger earned his third, and last, Oscar nomination for the highly
acclaimed
Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971).
He continued to operate at a high state of aesthetic and critical
achievement with
The Day of the Locust (1975),
Marathon Man (1976) and
Yanks (1979), but his 1981 comedy,
Honky Tonk Freeway (1981), was
one of the notable flops of its time, bringing in only $2 million on a
$24-million budget when breakeven was calculated as three times
negative cost. Although Schlesinger continued to work steadily as a
director in movies and TV, he never again tasted the sweet fruits of
success that he had for more than a decade, beginning in the mid-'60s.
Schlesinger's artistic fulfillment increasingly came from directing for
the stage and, specifically, opera. He directed
William Shakespeare's "Timon
of Athens" for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1964, and after
his movie career faded, he directed plays, musicals, and opera
productions. After Laurence Olivier was
eased out of the National Theatre in 1973, Schlesinger was named an
associate director of the NT under Olivier's successor, Sir
Peter Hall of the RSC.
Schlesinger suffered a stroke in December 2000. His life partner,
Michael Childers, took him off
life support, and he died the following day, July 24, 2003, in Palm
Springs, Claifornia. He was 77 years old.- Actress
- Soundtrack
All this shapely character "broad" had to do was open her mouth to
induce laughter--and so she did, primarily on TV during the '50s and
'60s. And although she milked that unmistakable rasp for all its worth,
she also showed great comedy sense. Born Jean Leete on February 23,
1923, in Charleston, West Virginia, actress Jean Carson (not to be
confused with pert British actress
Jeannie Carson of
Hey, Jeannie! (1956) TV fame)
was trained in music and dance and started performing by age 12. With
high aspirations of becoming an actress, she subsequently studied at
Carnegie-Mellon University.
She was first discovered appearing on Broadway in 1948 in
George S. Kaufman's "Bravo!" with a
cast including Kevin McCarthy and
Oscar Homolka. Set in New York, the show
was a bust (running only 44 performances), but Jean made a wonderful
comic impression and earned a Theatre World award in the process. She
followed this with another Kaufman-staged play, "Metropole," in 1949 as
well as "The Bird Cage" (1950) with
Melvyn Douglas and
Maureen Stapleton and "Men of
Distinction" (1953) with
Robert Preston, but these shows
fared just as badly. A hit Broadway comedy finally came her way with
"Anniversary Waltz" in 1954, which ran 544 performances. Jean stood out
among the cast just for those inimitable deep tones alone.
She was typically on display throughout the '50s and '60s, gracing many
of the popular shows of the day, including "The Red Buttons Show," "The
Tom Ewell Show," "Wagon Train," "Sugarfoot," "Perry Mason," "The
Untouchables" and "Gomer Pyle." Surprisingly, she never had her own TV
sitcom, although she did appear as a regular on the short-lived
The Betty Hutton Show (1959)
playing a girlfriend to the star. A single standout episode of "The
Twilight Zone" had Jean and
Fred Clark as a pair of thieves who
discover that a camera they've stolen takes pictures of the future.
Jean essayed a number of bleached blonde floozies, jailbirds, party
girls and gold diggers over the course of her career but was never
better than as both convict Jalene Naomi and good time girl Daphne on
The Andy Griffith Show (1960).
In one classic episode, her character Jalene was partnered up with
cohorts Jane Dulo and
Reta Shaw as three dames hiding out from the
law who hold both Deputy Barney and Floyd hostage while putting designs
on them at the same time.
An unfortunate alcohol problem dogged Jean's career for many years.
Active with Alcoholics Anonymous, she eventually retired from Hollywood
in the early 1980s and moved to the Palm Springs area to be closer to
family. There she appeared occasionally in such local theater
productions as "The Elephant Man" and "Steel Magnolias." Jean had been
in spiraling health since suffering a paralytic stroke in September of
2005. She died in a Palm Desert convalescent home on November 2, 2005,
at age 82. Two sons survive.- Actor
- Writer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Peter Crombie was born on 26 June 1952 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for Se7en (1995), My Dog Skip (2000) and The Blob (1988). He was married to Nadine Kijner. He died on 10 January 2024 in Palm Springs, California, USA.- Actor
- Director
- Writer
American character actor who specialized in underworld types, despite a far greater range. A native of the Bronx, he participated in plays in school, then attended City College of New York. In 1930, he was accepted into Eva Le Gallienne's company, where he became friendly with another young actor, one day to be known as John Garfield. The two appeared in a number of plays, both with Le Gallienne's company and with the highly-politicized Group Theatre, before Lawrence was given a film contract with Columbia Pictures. His scarred complexion and brooding appearance made him a natural for heavies, and he played scores of gangsters and mob bosses over the next six decades. Nevertheless, he could turn in fine performances in very different kinds of roles as well, such as his bewildered mountain boy in The Shepherd of the Hills (1941).
Following the Second World War, as anti-Communist fervor gripped America, Lawrence found himself under scrutiny for his political leanings. When called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), he admitted he had once been a member of the Communist Party. The Committee broke down his resolve and he "named names" (including Sterling Hayden, Lionel Stander, Anne Revere, Larry Parks, Karen Morley and Jeff Corey). Nonetheless, he was blacklisted and departed for Europe, where he continued to make films, often in leading roles. Following the demise of the blacklist, he returned to America and resumed his position as a familiar and talented purveyor of gangland types. He was also a writer and director.- Actress
- Soundtrack
This alluring hazel-eyed 1940s leading lady was born Ardis Ankerson on the Philippine island of Negros, one of two siblings. Her father was Otto Peter Ankerson who held an important position as overseer of a large sugar plantation. Following the premature death of her mother in 1925, Ardis and her sister were packed off to San Antonio to complete their education. Ardis was voted Freshman Class Beauty of 1934 at Texas State College, acted in amateur dramatics and worked hard on diction and improvisation. By then, she was clearly determined to become a professional actress. Following her graduation, she moved to New York where she studied drama under the tuition of actor Richard Gaines (and eventually married him in 1936). Gaines helped her secure acting work in stock companies under the Federal Theatre Project, sponsored by the Works Progress Administration as part of the New Deal. While in New York, Ardis successfully auditioned for Paramount, but studio executives dropped the option to sign her due to what they deemed her excessive salary demands. Warner Brothers viewed the screen test some time later and proved less squeamish about picking her up. With the inevitable name change prompted by the studio, 'Brenda Marshall' went Hollywood. During her tenure in Tinseltown, she made it clear to friends and co-workers alike, that she be addressed not by her studio-fabricated cognomen, but by her given name (with the addition of her married name of Gaines).
Brenda made an almost immediate impact in her fourth outing for Warners as Doña Maria, providing the romantic interest in Errol Flynn's classic swashbuckler The Sea Hawk (1940). This should have established the brunette beauty as a tangible box office attraction. Alas, only routine material followed and Brenda saw out the remainder of her contract as exotic leads in second features like East of the River (1940), South of Suez (1940) and Singapore Woman (1941). There were to be two more A-grade productions, but Brenda ended up playing second fiddle to James Cagney's aviation heroics in Captains of the Clouds (1942) and was overshadowed in the charisma department by Joan Fontaine and Alexis Smith in The Constant Nymph (1943). By 1950, she quit the acting profession and devoted herself to other causes. A year after her divorce from Gaines in 1940, Brenda had wed the actor William Holden in Las Vegas. She was of help to him in setting up the Mt. Kenya Safari Club as a means of protecting African wildlife. The couple seemed content for a while. However, the marriage proved to be increasingly volatile and began to unravel by 1963, ending up in divorce eight years later. Brenda died from throat cancer in Palm Springs in 1992 at the age of 76.- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
Hardy Kruger was born Eberhard August Franz Ewald Krüger in Wedding, Berlin, thee son of Auguste (Meier) and Max Krüger. At thirteen years, he became a member of the "Hitler Jugend" (Hitler Youth), as did all 13-year-old boys in Germany then. The purpose of the organization was to prepare the boys for military service. At age 15, Hardy made his film debut in a German picture (Junge Adler (1944)), but his acting career was interrupted when he was drafted into the German army in 1944 at age 16 and posted to an infantry regiment.
Years later, Hardy related how he "hated that [Nazi] uniform." During the filming of A Bridge Too Far (1977) in which he portrayed a Nazi general, he wore a top-coat over his S.S. uniform between takes so as "not to remind myself of my childhood in Germany during W.W.II." It is said, that during his war years, Hardy was captured and taken prisoner by U.S. forces but attempted to escape thrice, the third time successfully.
After the war, Hardy returned to acting, and eight years later was "discovered" by foreign film distributor J. Arthur Rank who promptly cast him in three British pictures, practically filmed back-to-back: The One That Got Away (1957), Bachelor of Hearts (1958) and Chance Meeting (1959), in which he appeared simply as a foreigner and not a German, as was usually the case. Following the release of these films, Hardy's career took off. Despite anti-German sentiment that still prevailed in postwar Europe, Hardy, described as "ruggedly handsome" and a "blond heartthrob," became an international favorite, paving the way to his first American role as co-star with John Wayne in the Tanganyika-shot wildlife adventure Hatari! (1962).
Hardy was so taken aback by the beauty of the land, that he bought the film's location ("Momilla Farm") and built a small home for himself and a small bungalow hotel for tourists to see the animals. Hunting was forbidden on the property, and, later, a cattle farm was started with the meat being sold to local hotels. Hardy described his home there as "a sort of African Walden where I can get away from the world from time to time."
In 1979, due to the dissolution of the alliance of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika), the border with Kenya was closed and remained so for half a decade which caused a serious decline in tourism. The business aspects of his property were shut down for a period of time, but eventually things picked up and the place was transformed into a proper tourist hotel, known (fittingly) as Hatari Lodge.
Fluent in English, French and German, Hardy found himself in much demand by British, French, American and German producers and became more selective in his scripts. "I'd rather sit out a picture than take a role I don't think is right for me" he would later say. He died in January 2022, in Palm Springs, California, 11 years after his last film credit.- Actor
- Writer
- Director
John Dixon Paragon was born in Alaska, but grew up and attended schools in Fort Collins, Colorado. He got his start in the Los Angeles-based improvisation group The Groundlings alongside Paul Reubens and Phil Hartman. John is best known for his work on children's show Pee-wee's Playhouse where he played Jambi the Genie and voiced Pterri the Pterodactyl. In addition to writing many of the regular season episodes of Pee-wee's Playhouse (1986), John also co-wrote with Paul Reubens the acclaimed "Pee-wee's Playhouse Christmas Special" in 1988, for which they were nominated an Emmy Award for Best Writing in a Children's Special. He has also collaborated with fellow Groundling Cassandra Peterson on numerous projects, including the recurring role of The Breather, an annoying caller, for her first television series Movie Macabre on KHJ-TV-Los Angeles and was co-writer on her 1988 feature film, Elvira Mistress of the Dark. Some of his other memorable roles include Cedric, one half of the homosexual couple Bob and Cedric on the television series Seinfeld; the title character in the children's movie The Frog Prince; the sex shop salesman in the cult favorite Eating Raoul; and the owner of a Strip-o-gram business in the 1986 film Echo Park. In recent years, John has worked with Walt Disney Imagineering on ways to incorporate improvisational performance into attractions at Disney parks. He returned to his performance as Jambi the Genie in the Broadway outing of the new "Pee-wee Herman" stage show that began performances October 26, 2010 at the Stephen Sondheim Theater.- Actress
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Emmaline Henry was born on 1 November 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. She was an actress and writer, known for Rosemary's Baby (1968), I Dream of Jeannie (1965) and I'm Dickens, He's Fenster (1962). She was married to Mark Roberts. She died on 8 October 1979 in Palm Springs, California, USA.- Born Phyllis Callow in Hollywood -- to Ridgeway Callow, a native of the Isle of Man (UK), and his wife, Peggy Watts, a Ziegfeld Girl and socialite -- at age two Phyllis Douglas played the baby "Bonnie Blue Butler" in Gone with the Wind (1939).
Her father, who had served in the RAF, was hired by Howard Hughes as an accountant in New York. The Callows later moved to Hollywood where their children grew up in Malibu and West Los Angeles. Ridgeway worked in the motion picture industry as an award winning second unit director. - Actor
- Soundtrack
Brash, virile Italian-American lead and supporting "tough guy" Harry Guardino, with dark, wavy hair and a perpetual worried look on his craggy-looking mug, was born Harold Vincent Guardino on December 23, 1925, in Manhattan but raised as a Brooklynite. Serving with the U.S. Navy during World War II, he joined the Merchant Marine.
He would start out in the late 1940s in the school hard knocks, training in dramatic workshops and slumming for nearly half a decade in small, obscure 'tough guy' film bits in early '50s Universal and Columbia pictures including an orderly in the service comedy Up Front (1951); soldiers in both Sirocco (1951) and Purple Heart Diary (1951); and two Tony Curtis films where he was the star--(Son of Ali Baba (1952) and Flesh and Fury (1952)).
After making his Broadway debut in 1953 with a small cadet role in the play "End as a Man," Harry earned his first big break as the Broadway understudy to Ben Gazzara in the acclaimed drama "A Hatful of Rain." He later took over the role and then went on the national tour. Although it did little to elevate his bit part standing in Hollywood, he figured in more prominently on the smaller screen with parts on "I Led Three Lives," "The Millionaire," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Suspect" and several TV anthologies.
Making a play for film once again, Harry received "second lead" status in the family comedy Houseboat (1958), stealing scenes from both stars Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. As Italianate truck driver/handyman Angelo, he earned a Golden Globe nomination for his hilarious supporting turn as the guy who sells Cary the titled boat after completely destroying their other home in a truck accident.
With and without a comic edge, Harry played several other guy-guy co-star types after this in such crime/war stories as Pork Chop Hill (1959), 5 Branded Women (1960), Hell Is for Heroes (1962), Madigan (1968), Dirty Harry (1971) and The Enforcer (1976), the last two pairing him up with Clint Eastwood as his beleaguered superior, Lt. Bressler. At one point, the New Yorker even played "Barabbas" in the classic biblical epic King of Kings (1961) and a scurrilous poacher in the Ivan Tors African adventure Rhino! (1964), just for a distinct change of pace and scenery.
Harry returned to the Broadway stage and was Tony nominated for the play "One More River" in 1960 despite its extremely short run. He would return again again to Broadway throughout the rest of the 1960's in "Natural Affection" (1963), the musical "Anyone Can Whistle," "The Rose Tattoo" (1966) and "The Seven Descents of Myrtle" (1968).
TV, he became more and more, however, the favorite medium of choice. Progressing to top guest parts in such TV programs as "Johnny Staccato," "Checkmate," "The Untouchables," "Dr. Kildare," "Route 66," "Naked City," "The Outer Limits," "Ben Casey," "The Virginian," "Twelve O'Clock High" and "Run for Your Life," Harry was given three short-run series to star or co-star in -- as an overly gregarious newsman in The Reporter (1964); the title government agent Monty Nash (1971); and the perpetually losing district attorney "Hamilton Burger" in The New Perry Mason (1973) revival.
Harry co-starred in dozens of TV projects as a scruffy, hard-nosed, street-smart cop or detective. These included the TV movie The Lonely Profession (1969), plus the shows "McCloud," "The Name of the Game," "Get Christie Love!," "Kojak," "Police Story," "Fantasy Island," "The Sophisticated Gents" and "Murder, She Wrote." He also enjoyed an unlikely outlet in musical theatre in later years, co-starring in the Broadway production of "Woman of the Year" (1981) opposite and as Billy Flynn in stock production of "Chicago."
Harry died of lung cancer on in 1995 at age 69, and was survived by his third wife and four children from various marriages.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Donald Woods, a prolific cinema and television character actor whose
career spanned 75 films and 150 TV programs over 40 years, was born
Ralph L. Zink on December 2, 1906, in Brandon, Manitoba. (He legally
changed his name to Donald Woods in 1945.) His family eventually
departed Canada for California, and young Ralph was raised in Burbank.
He became an actor after graduating from the University of California
at Berkeley.
The self-described "King of the Bs" made his reputation playing in
low-budget, B-unit westerns and mysteries, and later was a popular
guest actor on TV programs, including western shows such as Wagon Train (1957). He
also appeared in nearly 100 stage productions and was busy on the
radio. In the 1950s, Woods hosted two TV series, The Orchid Award (1953) and Hotel Cosmopolitan (1957)
and was a regular on the series Tammy (1965).
After his acting career was over, Donald Woods established himself as a
successful real estate broker in Palm Springs, California. It was there
that he died on March 5, 1998, at the age of 91.- Elisabeth Brooks Luyties was born on July 2, 1951 in Toronto, Ontario,
Canada. Elisabeth Brooks began acting at age five with her career
encompassing both stage and screen. She started appearing in television
roles in the mid-1970s and managed to pursue her acting career as a
single mother while working a variety of jobs to support herself and
her son. She regularly appeared on the daytime soap opera
Days of Our Lives (1965),
and in such popular television series as
The Rockford Files (1974),
Hart to Hart (1979),
Starsky and Hutch (1975),
The Six Million Dollar Man (1974)
and Emergency! (1972). She is
probably best remembered for her role as the villainess Marsha Quist in
the horror film The Howling (1981), a
role that brought her considerable notoriety within the genre.
Brooks was not only a beautiful actress, but also an accomplished
writer, poet and musician. She had a wonderful deep, sultry voice and
can be heard singing briefly in the film
The Forgotten One (1989) - a
horror film she appeared with longtime friend
Kristy McNichol. She and McNichol had
separated, but McNichol came back to care for Brooks on her final days.
Brooks was also known for her spirituality and her encouragement to
others. She created her own production company and became an
established acting coach. She wrote and produced plays that taught
children about the environment, and how they could work with parents to
improve their community. An example of this was "Orphan Dreams", which
she directed first at Calabasas High School and again at Chamber
Theatre in Studio City.
Elisabeth Brooks, after a three-year struggle with cancer, died in a
hospice near her Palm Springs, California home at age 46. As
Gigi Bannister wrote in a
Tribute to Elisabeth Brooks, "let it be said, Elisabeth Brooks was no
quitter. She was a fighter... a true warrior to the end". - Actor
- Writer
Scott Atkinson was born on 23 July 1966 in Pennsylvania, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for Windtalkers (2002), Dexter (2006) and JAG (1995). He died on 26 February 2021 in Palm Springs, California, USA.- Charles Robinson graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from
Princeton in 1958. His theatrical family opened his acting career, at
age three, on Broadway. After college, his first film was
Splendor in the Grass (1961),
to be followed by
The Singing Nun (1966),
Shenandoah (1965) and
Take Her, She's Mine (1963).
After "Tall Story", "The Pleasure of His Company" and "The Good Soup",
all on Broadway, plus an army hitch, he and Mrs. Robinson set up house
in Los Angeles--close to film work and his television appearances on,
for instance, Laramie (1959),
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955)
and Bachelor Father (1957). - Sultry, smoky-voiced brunette actress, a former model, who was put under contract by 20th Century-Fox in the early 1950s. She had a showy
role and acquitted herself well in the thriller Violent Saturday (1955), but her career quickly lost momentum when Fox didn't renew her contract in 1956.
She later achieved cult status as the disembodied fiancée in the cheapjack sci-fi film "classic" The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962). - Actor
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Jerry Vale was born on 8 July 1930 in The Bronx, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000), Casino (1995) and Donnie Brasco (1997). He was married to Rita Grapel. He died on 18 May 2014 in Palm Springs, California, USA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Short, chubby-framed, twinkle-eyed, ever-huggable Charles Winninger was a veteran vaudevillian by the time he arrived in talking films. Born in a trunk to Austrian immigrant show biz folk in Athens, Wisconsin, on May 26, 1884, he was the son of Rosalia (Grassler) and Franz Winninge, a violinist. He was initially christened Karl Winninger. He left school while quite young (age 8) to join and tour with his parent's vaudeville family act which was called Winninger Family Concert Co. Upon his parents' retirement, he and his five brothers went off to play in various stock and repertory companies. On film Charlie found an "in" with silent comedy shorts between 1915-1916 but never truly settled into the movie business until the advent of sound.
In the meantime Broadway made great use of his musical comedy talents, marking his debut with "The Yankee Girl" in 1910 which also featured actress (and later stage star) Blanche Ring. He married Blanche in 1912 and the couple went on to star together quite frequently in vaudeville and on Broadway, including the musical "When Claudia Smiles" (1914) in which Blanche played the title role. Throughout the 1920s there were plenty of roles for Charlie on the Great White Way including a stint with the Ziegfeld Follies (1920), several Winter Garden productions, and in such musical comedy showcases as "The Broadway Whirl" (1921) (with Blanche), "The Good Old Days" (1923), "No, No, Nanette" (1925) and "Yes, Yes, Yvette" (1927). His most significant contribution was originating the role of beloved Cap'n Andy in "Showboat" (1927). Playing the Kern/Hammerstein musical for two years straight, he eagerly returned to the role on Broadway in 1932.
With the success of "Show Boat," Hollywood started taking more of an interest in the grey-haired song-and-dance man for character roles. Such early talking movies included the slapstick comedy Soup to Nuts (1930) with Ted Healy and The Three Stooges. Though Charlie was known for adding his immeasurable touch to the comedy genre (Flying High (1931) and Woman Chases Man (1937)), he was also a warm-hearted presence in heavier pictures as well, including the melodramas Bad Sister (1931) with Bette Davis and The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931) with Helen Hayes, and rugged adventures Gun Smoke (1931) and White Fang (1936). Although he did not play his famous stage role in the 1929 version, Charlie was thankfully able to preserve his beloved Cap'n Andy to film in the superb Irene Dunne/Allan Jones remake of Show Boat (1936). He became so associated with the riverboat captain that he was asked to create several variations of the character on radio.
Charlie was relied upon for his benign, errant dads, old-theater entertainers, lovable drunks and other rather wanderlust types in film, characters that usually represented old-fashioned common sense or mores. He was quite entertaining in such classics as Nothing Sacred (1937), Three Smart Girls (1936) and Destry Rides Again (1939). In the 1940s he brightened up a number of MGM comedies and musicals including Babes in Arms (1939), Little Nellie Kelly (1940), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), When Ladies Meet (1941), Broadway Rhythm (1944), and Living in a Big Way (1947). One of his last important roles was playing Will Rogers' Judge Priest role in director John Ford's film The Sun Shines Bright (1953), is only leading film role. He and wife Blanche never appeared together in a film although Blanche did play herself in the film If I Had My Way (1940), a film that featured Charlie. His Broadway swan song was in "Music in the Air" in 1951 and his final film occurred about a decade later with Raymie (1960). He also played Santa Claus in the hour-long entertainment The Miracle of the White Reindeer (1960) that same year.
TV roles dominated much of his work in the 50s. On the one-season The Charles Farrell Show (1956) he played the star's dear old dad. Divorced from wife Blanche in 1951, Charlie subsequently married stage actress-turned-novelist and screenwriter Gertrude Walker whom he originally met on Broadway when he returned to "Show Boat" in 1932 (Gertrude played the role of Lottie). Retired for many years, Charlie died in 1969 following an extended illness at the age of 84.- Actor
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Most remembered for his extravagant costumes and trademark candelabra
placed on the lids of his flashy pianos, Liberace was loved by his
audiences for his music talent and unique showmanship. He was born as
Wladziu Valentino Liberace on May 16, 1919, into a musical family, in
Wisconsin. His mother, Frances Liberace
(née Zuchowski), whose parents were Polish, played the piano. His
father, Salvatore Liberace, an immigrant from Formia, Italy, played the
French horn for the Milwaukee Symphony. His siblings,
George Liberace,
Angie Liberace and
Rudy Liberace, also had musical ability.
Liberace's own extraordinary natural talent became evident when he
learned to play the piano, by ear, at the age of four. Although
Salvatore tried to discourage his son's interest in the piano, praises
from Ignacy Jan Paderewski, a
famous Polish pianist, helped the young musician follow his musical
career.
As a teenager, Liberace earned wages playing popular tunes at movie
theaters and speakeasies. Despite being proud of his son's
accomplishments, Salvatore strictly opposed Liberace's preference for
popular music over the classics. Pianist Florence Bettray Kelly took
control of Liberace's classical training when he was 14.
He debuted as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony, under the direction
of Dr. Frederick Stock. At age 17, Liberace joined the Works Progress
Administration Symphony Orchestra. He received a scholarship to attend
the Wisconsin College of Music. In 1939, after a classical recital,
Liberace's audience requested the popular tune, "Three Little Fishes".
Liberace seized the opportunity and performed the tune with a
semi-classical style which the audience loved. Soon, this unique style
of playing the piano got Liberace bookings in large nightclubs.
By 1940, Liberace was traveling with his custom-made piano, on top of
which he would place his candelabrum. He then took Paderewski's advice
and dropped Wladziu and Valentino to become simply Liberace.
South Sea Sinner (1950), a movie
with Shelley Winters, was Liberace's
film debut. He played a honky tonk pianist in the movie, which opened
in 1950.
In 1952,
The Liberace Show (1952), a
syndicated television program, turned Liberace into a musical symbol.
It began as a summertime replacement for
The Dinah Shore Show (1951),
but after two years, the show was one of the most popular on TV. It was
carried by 217 American stations and could be seen in 20 foreign
countries. Sold-out live appearances at Madison Square Garden enhanced
the pianist's popularity even more. Soon, Liberace added flamboyant
costumes and expensive ornaments to his already unique performances.
His second movie,
Sincerely Yours (1955), opened in
1955, and Liberace wrote his best-selling autobiography, "Liberace", in
1972. His first book, "Liberace Cooks", went into seven printings.
In 1977, Liberace founded the non-profit "Liberace Foundation for the
Performing and Creative Arts". The year 1978 brought the opening of
"The Liberace Museum" in Las Vegas, Nevada, which serves as key funding
for the Liberace Foundation. The profits from the museum provide
scholarship money for financially needy college musicians. He continued
performing until the fall of 1986, despite suffering from heart disease
and emphysema during most of the 1980s. A closeted homosexual his
entire life, Liberace was secretly diagnosed with AIDS sometime in
August 1985, which he also kept secret from the public until the day he
died. His last concert performance was at Radio City Music Hall on
November 2, 1986. He passed away in his Palm Springs home on February
4, 1987 at age 67.
Liberace was bestowed with many awards during his lifetime including:
Instrumentalist of the Year, Best Dressed Entertainer, Entertainer of
the Year, two Emmy Awards, six gold albums, and two stars on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame. In The Guinness Book of World Records, he has
been listed as the world's highest paid musician and pianist. Liberace
was an extremely talented and versatile man. He not only played the
piano, but sang, danced and joked during his performances. In fact, one
of Liberace's biggest accomplishments was his ability to turn a recital
into a show full of music, glitter and personality.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Mary Castle was born on 22 January 1931 in Pampa, Texas, USA. She was an actress, known for The Lawless Breed (1952), Stories of the Century (1954) and Gunsmoke (1953). She was married to Edward Frezza, Wayne Cote and William Grant. She died on 29 April 1998 in Palm Springs, California, USA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Though born in Georgia and having a Russian-sounding name, Akim Tamiroff
is actually of Armenian descent. At 19 he decided to pursue acting as a
career and was chosen from among 500 applicants to the Moscow Art
Theater School. There he studied under the great
Konstantin Stanislavski, and
launched a stage career. This included road company productions, in one
such tour in 1920 Tamiroff came to New York City, which he liked so
much he decided to stay there. Broadway suited him, and he worked
steadily with the Theatre Guild from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s.
He was a short, stout man with a guttural baritone voice and a thick
but rather generic Russian accent that, with his skill in
characterizations, seemed to mesh with any role calling for a foreign
type--whether European, West Asian or even East Asian. His voice became his
principal asset. He came west to Hollywood in 1932 to break into the
movie business, and first appeared on screen in a bit part in
Okay America! (1932). Until 1934
his appearances were usually uncredited, but he managed to stand out in
several films, one of his best roles of the time being the servant
Pedro of John Gilbert
Queen Christina (1933). By early
1934 he was much in demand, appearing in 12 films during that year. The
next year was even busier for him, with roles in 15 films altogether,
and not just bit parts--he was getting more feature supporting roles,
such as Gopal the emir in
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)
and the comic puppet master Rudolpho in the adapted operetta
Naughty Marietta (1935). He
signed with Paramount in 1936 but was often loaned out to other
studios. He went to Warner Bros. for one of his earliest big supporting
characters: the sly Cuban mercantile agent Carlo Cibo in
Anthony Adverse (1936). For
Paramount, his General Yang in
The General Died at Dawn (1936)
brought him his first of two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting
Actor. Along with substantial supporting roles in top movies, Tamiroff
was getting starring roles in "B" pictures, allowing him to show his
range by playing everything from amiable rogues to thoroughly evil
villains. Two of his roles from that time exemplify what a versatile
actor he was. As French trapper and scout Dan Duroc of
North West Mounted Police (1940),
he was something of a rascal but with a sense of humor and dignity.
However, as the vile Colonna in
The Corsican Brothers (1941),
he is irredeemably wicked, and deservedly dies in the longest sword
duel on film. For his role as the self-serving guerrilla Pablo in
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943),
Tamiroff received his second Oscar nomination. He continued through the
decade with more fine work, and in 1949 he joined the cast of
Black Magic (1949) and met
Orson Welles, who played late 18th-century
charlatan Cagliostro. The two became friends and associates in Welles'
later film projects. Through the 1950s Tamiroff's time was fairly
divided between T.V. productions and films earlier in the decade and a
surprising number of episodic TV and more films later. His three films
with Welles, as director and sometime actor, were:
Confidential Report (1955) with its Wellesian
maze of flash-backs; the over-the-top
Touch of Evil (1958) with its
gritty surrealism and incredible cast; and
The Trial (1962) (The Trial), Welles'
stylistic spin on the Franz Kafka story.
Certainly it was in "Touch of Evil" that
Tamiroff's Tijuana boss Uncle Joe Grandi--outlandishly bug-eyed
alternately with fear or mercurial anger intensified by Welles' wild
camera angles--stood out as a most intriguing character. He took a last
fling at Broadway in 1959. For the 1960s Tamiroff continued to sample
American T.V. but was still very active in American, French and Italian
movies. His voice and talent were still a draw in films like
Topkapi (1964) and
Alphaville (1965).
In addition, he remained on call for Welles' meandering/unfinished
Don Quixote (1992)
as Sancho Panza for nearly twenty years. One of the great character
actors of film history, Akim Tamiroff appeared in over 150 screen
projects.- An arch-villain -- the ultimate henchman -- Chris Alcaide appeared in scores of film noirs (mainly vintage Columbia B detective movies) and Westerns. His tall frame, steely look, and deep voice menaced such TV and movie stars as Glenn Ford, Tyrone Power, Lorne Greene, Richard Boone, Clint Walker, and even Elvis Presley, for decades. In 2003, Alcaide won a well-deserved Crystal Samuelian Golden Boot several months before his death.
- Actor
- Director
- Producer
From his birthplace in South Africa, Louis Charles Hayward was brought
to England and was educated there and on the Continent. He spent a
short time managing a London nightclub, displayed some acting talent
and decided on acting, and was quickly tapped by playwright
Noël Coward, who became his patron.
Matinee-idol-handsome, Hayward developed his acting skills on the
London stage in various versions of Broadway plays, such as "Dracula"
and "Another Language". He began his film career in the British romance
drama Self Made Lady (1932), which
was followed by five British films through 1933.
Hayward came to New York and Broadway in 1935 to star in "Point
Verlaine". It was his only Broadway venture, but it brought him a
Hollywood contract. His first American film role was in
The Flame Within (1935). After
several supporting roles in 1936, he got his real break starring in the
extended romantic prologue of Warner Bros.'
Anthony Adverse (1936). As
dashing officer Denis Moore, he was Anthony's father, rescuing his
soon-to-be mother Maria from an arranged marriage to the Marquis Don
Luis, brilliantly played by Claude Rains.
Shot with gauze focus in part to increase the dreamlike romantic
interlude of the lovers, the prologue played to a bitter end with
Hayward dispatched in a sword duel with the outraged Don Luis, and
Maria, now pregnant, forced to return to her husband. However, Hayward
had had his defining moment. He was now a romantic leading man, and a
swashbuckler at that. Through the remainder of the 1930s he would have
ample opportunities to vary that class of character, starting with some
early "B"-tier efforts. His good looks were complemented by an airy
manner of speaking, which worked as both hero and rogue or occasional
suave villain. The familiar British Simon Templar character was brought
to the screen by Hayward in
The Saint in New York (1938)
to cap his "B"-picture career. He was destined for plenty of sword
point adventure. The stylish
The Man in the Iron Mask (1939),
the third volume in the
Alexandre Dumas musketeer
trilogy, gave Hayward the opportunity to play the good and evil royal
twins, which he did with impressive flair. However, his swashbuckling
efforts did not pan out as well as they did for
Errol Flynn.
The Son of Monte Cristo (1940),
with Hayward paired with
Joan Bennett again (as they were in
"Iron Mask") was a
The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)
rip-off that fell flat. Another sort of bad break was his 1941 casting
in a pivotal role in Orson Welles'
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942),
his part was edited out of the final print.
World War II brought Hayward a respite from the vagaries of Hollywood
luck. He was a United States Marine combat photographer, and his work
during the invasion of the Japanese-held island of Tarawa earned him a
Bronze Star for courage under fire. Overcoming the psychological stress
of his war experiences, Hayward returned to the Hollywood spotlight. He
had already notched a few mysteries on his belt when he was cast in the
Agatha Christie thriller
And Then There Were None (1945),
which was a hit. His subsequent list of romantic parts included yet
another "Monte Cristo" adventure: the Robin Hood-like
Robert Louis Stevenson
adventure The Black Arrow (1948)
and a succession of pirate parts. He played in two "Captain Blood"
sequels, neither of which turned out well for him. There was also yet
another "twin" sequel, this time a twist of the Jekyll/Hide story but
with the doctor's twin sons, called
The Son of Dr. Jekyll (1951).
There was also one more outing in an "Iron Mask" vehicle, this time
with twin royal sisters and Hayward as a mature D'Artagnan. Amid all
this blandness - and seeing double - Hayward had the good sense to
develop a business sense in case his career kept on its downward
spiral. He was one of the first to incorporate the one
percentage-of-profits deal for both the theatrical and television
releases of his post-1949 films, ensuring him comfortable lifelong
income.
Although he continued to make movies, Hayward ventured enthusiastically
into television, not only with some ten American playhouse theater
productions and episodic television through the 1960s but productions
of his own. In 1954, Hayward produced and starred in the 39-week
television series
The Lone Wolf (1954) (aka
"Streets of Danger") after buying exclusive rights to several of
Louis Joseph Vance's original "Lone
Wolf" stories. He also produced the British series
The Pursuers (1961) and the
American The Survivors (1969).
He bowed out of acting in the mid 1970s, not the screen legend that he
had hoped to be, but wiser and certainly comfortable. On February 21,
1985, Louis Hayward died at age 75 of lung cancer in his home in Palm
Springs, California.- Producer
- Additional Crew
- Actor
Gary Morton was a comedian who worked the famed "Borscht Belt" of
resorts in the Catskills Mountains. Never as talented nor as renowned
as such fellow Borscht Belt comics like Milton Berle, whom he caricatured in
one of his few film roles in Lenny (1974), Morton nonetheless was personally
popular among his fellow performers. Due to his personable nature,
Morton made a living as the opening act for many major artistes,
including Tony Bennett.
Morton met his future wife Lucille Ball while headlining at New York's
Copacabana night club in 1960, when he went on a blind date with the
famous redhead, who had recently divorced Desi Arnaz. Morton's
indifference to Lucy's celebrity at first infuriated her but,
eventually, she was won over by Morton's charm and married him within a
year.
Morton gave up his nightclub career after marrying Lucy, at her
request, and became a producer of her television shows. Morton also
served as a warm-up comic for The Lucy Show (1962)'s live audience, content with his
role as "Mr. Lucille Ball".- Actress
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Joan Huntington was born on 31 May 1934 in New York City, New York, USA. She was an actress and writer, known for What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969), The Honkers (1972) and Burke's Law (1963). She was married to Laurence Merrick. She died on 26 June 2021 in Palm Springs, California, USA.- Actress
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
This young, pleasant actress was under contract to MGM during the war
years. Dorothy Morris was groomed by the studio starting in 1941 and
for the first couple of years barely earned a screen credit. She rose
gradually in the ranks to secondary ingenue roles as the daughter or
friend of the star. She was pretty, delicate-looking and fairly demure
along the lines of a Barbara Bates or Cathy O'Donnell, and was probably
best featured in such films as Someone to Remember (1943), The Human Comedy (1943), Rationing (1944), and None Shall Escape (1944). Dorothy
willingly gave up her modest career when she married a math instructor
in 1943. The marriage, which produced two sons, lasted 23 years before
it ended. She returned to her acting craft in the late 50s and appeared
in minor roles on TV, as well as two films Macabre (1958), the William
Castle 'shocker' and Seconds (1966) starring Rock Hudson. A second
marriage to a minister took her, again, away from the camera lights and
this time it was permanent, save for some amateur theatricals. Her
sister, Caren Marsh, was an MGM dancer who also was Judy Garland's
frequent stand-in.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Fiery brunette Andalusian-born singer, dancer and actress, in the U.S. from 1928. Using the stage name "Isabelita", she performed with Xavier Cugat and His Orchestra and was spotlighted at the Mocambo and Ciro's night clubs on the Sunset Strip. There, she came to the attention of up-and-coming movie star (and future husband) Rory Calhoun and was quickly destined to be in pictures. Continuing to be billed as "Isabelita" in her first few films -- invariably as south-of-the-border señoritas -- she mostly free-lanced for the smaller studios like Republic, Monogram, RKO and PRC. In 1948, she adopted her mother's maiden name and called herself Lita Baron. She had exotic leads in a couple of Boy's Own Paper-type adventures (with Johnny Sheffield in Bomba on Panther Island (1949) and opposite Sabu in Savage Drums (1951)). Latino actresses were often typecast in westerns and Lita was no exception: she played a dance hall singer in The Broken Star (1956), looked fetching as a female gunslinger in the (otherwise) mediocre Jesse James' Women (1954) and guested several times in her husband's hit CBS-Desilu series The Texan (1958). A memorable guest role was as Cuban bombshell Renita Perez, Ricky Ricardo's ex-dance partner, in a 1952 episode of I Love Lucy (1951).
Since her screen career had turned out to be somewhat desultory, Lita continued to perform on the nightclub circuit (in L.A. and, occasionally, in Vegas). From 1949, she co-hosted "Latin Cruise" on KTLA local television, a pioneering weekly musical variety show which showcased Latin tunes. In the 70's, she moderated a popular radio program, "Lunch with Lita", broadcast from Ingleside Inn in Palm Springs, featuring interviews with stars from her Hollywood past. When that ended, she found a new vocation in real estate marketing.- Julian Burton was born on 4 June 1932 in Detroit, Michigan, USA. He was an actor, known for A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Outer Limits (1963) and Mission: Impossible (1966). He died on 27 March 2006 in Palm Springs, California, USA.
- Magda Gabor was born on 11 June 1914 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary [now Hungary]. She was an actress, known for Mai lányok (1937), Tokaji rapszódia (1937) and The Colgate Comedy Hour (1950). She was married to Tibor Heltai, George Sanders, Tony Gallucci, Sidney R. Warren, William Rankin and Jan de Bichovsky. She died on 6 June 1997 in Palm Springs, California, USA.
- Actor
- Visual Effects
- Soundtrack
Tony winner ("The Producers") and popular Broadway veteran Gary Beach
is a native of Alexandria, Virginia and a graduate of the North
Carolina School of the Arts. He and his partner, Jeff Barnett, live in
New York City.
Beach received the 2001 Tony Award, as well as the Drama Desk and Outer
Critics Circle awards, for his performance as Roger DeBris in Mel
Brooks' smash "The Producers." According to Ben Brantley writing for
The New York Times, "Mr. Beach proves himself fluent in every idiom of
musical comedy. Variously bringing to mind Al Jolson, Judy Garland,
Robert Preston, Van Johnson, and Eddie Cantor." Beach recreated this
award winning performance in the 2005 film version of the show.
In 1994, Beach created the role of Lumiere in Disney's inaugural
Broadway production, "Beauty and the Beast," garnering both Tony and
Ovation award nominations. He received another Tony nomination for his
touching and hilarious performance as Albin in the 2004 revival of "La
Cage Aux Folles."
Most recently, Beach co-starred in Cameron Mackintosh's revival of "Les
Miserables" playing the "Master of the House", Monsieur Thenardier.
Other Broadway credits include "Annie" (as "Rooster"), "Doonesbury" (as
"Uncle Duke"), "The Moony Shapiro Songbook," "Broadway Bash," "Sweet
Adeline" (for the Encores series), "Something's Afoot" and "1776" (as
"Rutledge").
Beach appeared in the original Los Angeles productions of both "Beauty
and the Beast" and "Les Miserables," and toured nationally with the
James Kirkwood comedy "Legends!" starring real-life legends Mary Martin
and Carol Channing. Regional credits include: "Closer Than Ever" (L.A.
premiere), "Lend Me a Tenor," "She Loves Me" (Comet Award) and "Of Thee
I Sing" (Helen Hayes nomination).- Ben Masters was born on 6 May 1947 in Corvallis, Oregon, USA. He was an actor, known for Passions (1999), All That Jazz (1979) and Mandingo (1975). He died on 11 January 2023 in Palm Springs, California, USA.
- Additional Crew
- Director
- Music Department
Busby Berkeley was one of the greatest choreographers of the US movie
musical. He started his career in the US Army in 1918, as a lieutenant
in the artillery conducting and directing parades. After the World War
I cease-fire he was ordered to stage camp shows for the soldiers. Back
in the US he became a stage actor and assistant director in smaller
acting troupes. After being forced to take over the direction of the
musical "Holka-Polka" he discovered his talent for staging extravagant
dance routines, and he quickly became one of Broadway's top dance
directors. Producer
Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. called him to
direct the dance routines for his production of "A Connecticut Yankee
in King Arthur's Court". Eddie Cantor, who
starred in the long-running Ziegfeld production "Whoopee!", suggested
Berkley create the dance routines in the film version
)Whoopee! (1930) and Ziegfeld agreed.
At first in Hollywood Berkeley wasn't satisfied with the possibilities
of his job--at the time, dance directors trained the dancers and staged
the dances. The director chose camera positions and the editor chose
which of the takes were shown to the audience. Berkeley wanted to
direct the dances himself and convinced producer
Samuel Goldwyn to let him try. One of the
first chances he took was that he used only one camera in his films. He
also showed close-ups of the chorus girls. Asked about this, he
explained, "Well, we've got all the beautiful girls in the picture, why
not let the public see them?" With the decline of musicals in 1931 and
1932, he was thinking of returning to Broadway when
Darryl F. Zanuck, chief producer at
Warner Brothers, called him in to direct the musical numbers of
Warners' newest project, the backstage drama
42nd Street (1933). Berkeley accepted
and directed great numbers like "Shuffle Off To Buffalo", "Young and
Healthy" and the grandiose story of urban life, the finale "42nd
Street". The film was a smash hit, and Warner Brothers knew who made it
such an extraordinary success--Berkeley, as well as composer
Harry Warren and lyricist
Al Dubin, got seven-year contracts. Berkeley
created musical numbers for almost every great musical that Warner
Brothers produced from 1933 to 1937. His overhead shots forced him to
drill holes in the studio roofs, and he used more dancers with each
succeeding picture. However, by the late 1930s the musical was in
decline once again, and Berkeley had nothing to do as a choreographer.
He directed two non-musical pictures for Warner Brothers then went to
MGM, where he choreographed the final number from
Broadway Serenade (1939) with
Jeanette MacDonald. As a director and
choreographer he worked on four pictures with teenage stars
Judy Garland and
Mickey Rooney. He also
choreographed the "Fascinatin' Rhythm" finale for MGM's reigning
tapping star, Eleanor Powell in
Lady Be Good (1941). He directed
Gene Kelly in his first picture,
For Me and My Gal (1942).
Kelly, who choreographed his own numbers, learned a lot from Berkeley.
Berkeley worked for 20th Century-Fox in
The Gang's All Here (1943)
with its surrealistic number "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat". In
1949 he directed his last picture,
Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949),
but this time the choreography was by
Gene Kelly. Berkeley did a few
numbers in the early 1950s but, by the end of the decade, he was all
but forgotten. A revival of his films in the late 1960s brought him
some popularity and he was asked to return to Broadway and supervise
the dance direction in the revival of a
Vincent Youmans musical comedy from
1925. One of the actresses in this production was
Ruby Keeler, one of his leading ladies in
Warner musicals. When the production went on tour in 1972, one of the
road cast was Eleanor Powell. The
production was a smash hit. When he walked on stage after one opening
night, the house exploded with applause.
A strange fact is that Busby Berkeley never had a dancing lesson and,
in his early days, was very afraid of people finding out. He often
drove his producers crazy when he gave orders to build a set and then
sat in front of it for a few days, thinking up the numbers.- Duke Fishman was born on 15 July 1906 in Manila, Philippines. He was an actor, known for The Doris Day Show (1968). He died on 22 December 1977 in Palm Springs, California, USA.
- Actress
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Widely popular comedienne appeared in some movies and on radio in the
40s and on early television. She starred in the popular television
series, I Married Joan (1952),
with Jim Backus as her husband and her
real-life daughter, Beverly Wills as her
sister.
Joan died of a sudden heart attack in 1961. Two years later, a fire
tragically claimed the lives of her mother, daughter and two grandsons.- Actor
- Soundtrack
The youngest of The Marx Brothers, Zeppo was put into the role of the straight
man after his brother Gummo left the act. Zeppo also acted as an
understudy to all three of his brothers, and he has been said to have
played Grouchos part better than Groucho himself. After playing small
parts in the first five Marx Brothers movies, Zeppo felt his talent
wasn't being used to its full extent and left the act to join Gummo as
an agent. Somewhat of a mechanical whiz, Zeppo invented a wristwatch
that would monitor the pulse rate of cardiac patients, and his company,
Marman Products, produced clamping devices which were used in the first
atomic bomb raids over Japan in 1945. Zeppo died on November 30, 1979,
from cancer.