TCM Remembers - Females
These are female individuals featured in TCM Remembers.
1995: 1 - 8 (8)
1996: 9 - 20 (12)*
1997: 21 - 26 (6)
1998: 27 - 36 (10)
1999: 37 - 47 (11)*
2000: 48 - 63 (16)
2001: 64 - 76 (13)
2002: 77 - 85 (9)*
2003: 86 - 93 (8)
2004: 94 - 106 (13)
2005: 107 - 122 (16)
2006: 123 - 133 (11)
2007: 134 - 145 (12)
2008: 146 - 162 (17)
2009: 163 - 176 (14)
2010: 177 - 192 (16)
2011: 193 - 224 (32)
2012: 225 - 237 (13)
2013: 238 - 260 (23)
2014: 261 - 279 (19)
2015: 280 - 298 (19)
2016: 299 - 317 (19)
2017: 318 - 337 (20)
2018: 338 - 364 (27)
2019: 365 - 394 (30)
2020: 395 - 422 (28)
2021: 423 - 455 (33)
2022: 456 - 486 (31)*
2023: 487 - 522 (36)
Most inclusives:
1. 2023: 36
2. 2021: 33
3. 2011: 32
4. 2022: 31*
5. 2019: 30
6. 2020: 28
7. 2018: 27
8. 2013: 23
9. 2017: 20
10. 2014, 2015, 2016: 19
11. 2008: 17
12. 2000, 2005, 2010: 16
13. 2009: 14
14. 2001, 2004, 2012: 13
15. 1996*, 2007: 12
16. 1999*, 2006: 11
17. 1998: 10
18. 2002: 9*
19. 1995, 2003: 8
20. 1997: 6
*My revision
1995: 1 - 8 (8)
1996: 9 - 20 (12)*
1997: 21 - 26 (6)
1998: 27 - 36 (10)
1999: 37 - 47 (11)*
2000: 48 - 63 (16)
2001: 64 - 76 (13)
2002: 77 - 85 (9)*
2003: 86 - 93 (8)
2004: 94 - 106 (13)
2005: 107 - 122 (16)
2006: 123 - 133 (11)
2007: 134 - 145 (12)
2008: 146 - 162 (17)
2009: 163 - 176 (14)
2010: 177 - 192 (16)
2011: 193 - 224 (32)
2012: 225 - 237 (13)
2013: 238 - 260 (23)
2014: 261 - 279 (19)
2015: 280 - 298 (19)
2016: 299 - 317 (19)
2017: 318 - 337 (20)
2018: 338 - 364 (27)
2019: 365 - 394 (30)
2020: 395 - 422 (28)
2021: 423 - 455 (33)
2022: 456 - 486 (31)*
2023: 487 - 522 (36)
Most inclusives:
1. 2023: 36
2. 2021: 33
3. 2011: 32
4. 2022: 31*
5. 2019: 30
6. 2020: 28
7. 2018: 27
8. 2013: 23
9. 2017: 20
10. 2014, 2015, 2016: 19
11. 2008: 17
12. 2000, 2005, 2010: 16
13. 2009: 14
14. 2001, 2004, 2012: 13
15. 1996*, 2007: 12
16. 1999*, 2006: 11
17. 1998: 10
18. 2002: 9*
19. 1995, 2003: 8
20. 1997: 6
*My revision
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Eva Gabor was born on February 11, 1919 in Budapest, Hungary, to Jolie Gabor (née Janka Tilleman) and Vilmos Gabor (born Farkas Miklós Grün), a soldier. Her older siblings were Magda Gabor, an actress, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, an actress and socialite. Her parents were both from Jewish families. She went to Hollywood, California, to act in the 1930s. Her mother escaped from Nazi-occupied Budapest in the 1940s, also settling in the U.S.
Eva appeared both in films and on Broadway in the 1950s, as well as in several "A"-movies, including The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), starring Elizabeth Taylor, and Artists and Models (1955), which featured Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
In 1953, she was given her own television talk show, The Eva Gabor Show (1953). Throughout the rest of the 1950s and early 1960s, she appeared on television and in movies. She appeared on one episode of the mystery series Justice (1954), and was on the game show What's My Line? (1950) as the "mystery challenger". Her film appearances during this period include a remake of My Man Godfrey (1957), Gigi (1958) and It Started with a Kiss (1959).
However, she is best remembered as Lisa Douglas, the socialite turned farm wife on Green Acres (1965) with co-star Eddie Albert playing her attorney husband Oliver Wendell Douglas. Eva Gabor died at age 76 from respiratory failure and pneumonia on July 4, 1995 in Los Angeles, California.Actress- Actress
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Lana Turner had an acting ability that belied the "Sweater Girl" image MGM thrust upon her, and even many of her directors admitted that they knew she was capable of greatness (check out The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)). Unfortunately, her private life sometimes overshadowed her professional accomplishments.
Lana Turner was born Julia Jean Mildred Francis Turner in Wallace, Idaho. There is some discrepancy as to whether her birth date is February 8, 1920 or 1921. Lana herself said in her autobiography that she was one year younger (1921) than the records showed, but then this was a time where women, especially actresses, tended to "fib" a bit about their age. Most sources agree that 1920 is the correct year of birth. Her parents were Mildred Frances (Cowan) and John Virgil Turner, a miner, both still in their teens when she was born. In 1929, her father was murdered and it was shortly thereafter her mother moved her and the family to California where jobs were "plentiful". Once she matured into a beautiful young woman, she went after something that would last forever: stardom. She wasn't found at a drug store counter, like some would have you believe, but that legend persists. She pounded the pavement as other would-be actors and actresses have done, are doing and will continue to do in search of movie roles.
In 1937, Lana entered the movie world, at 17, with small parts in They Won't Forget (1937), The Great Garrick (1937) and A Star Is Born (1937). These films didn't bring her a lot of notoriety, but it was a start. In 1938 she had another small part in Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938) starring Mickey Rooney. It was this film that made young men's hearts all over America flutter at the sight of this alluring and provocative young woman--known as the "Sweater Girl"--and one look at that film could make you understand why: she was one of the most spectacularly beautiful newcomers to grace the screen in years. By the 1940s Lana was firmly entrenched in the film business. She had good roles in such films as Johnny Eager (1941), Somewhere I'll Find You (1942) and Week-End at the Waldorf (1945). If her career was progressing smoothly, however, her private life was turning into a train wreck, keeping her in the news in a way no one would have wanted.
Without a doubt her private life was a threat to her public career. She was married eight times, twice to Stephen Crane. She also married Ronald Dante, Robert Eaton, Fred May, Lex Barker, Henry Topping and bandleader Artie Shaw. She also battled alcoholism. In yet another scandal, her daughter by Crane, Cheryl Crane, fatally stabbed Lana's boyfriend, gangster Johnny Stompanato, in 1958. It was a case that would have rivaled the O.J. Simpson murder case. Cheryl was acquitted of the murder charge, with the jury finding that she had been protecting her mother from Stompanato, who was savagely beating her, and ruled it justifiable homicide. These and other incidents interfered with Lana's career, but she persevered. The release of Imitation of Life (1959), a remake of a 1934 film (Imitation of Life (1934)), was Lana's comeback vehicle. Her performance as Lora Meredith was flawless as an actress struggling to make it in show business with a young daughter, her housekeeper and the housekeeper's rebellious daughter. The film was a box-office success and proved beyond a doubt that Lana had not lost her edge.
By the 1960s, however, fewer roles were coming her way with the rise of new and younger stars. She still managed to turn in memorable performances in such films as Portrait in Black (1960) and Bachelor in Paradise (1961). By the next decade the roles were coming in at a trickle. Her last appearance in a big-screen production was in Witches' Brew (1980). Her final film work came in the acclaimed TV series Falcon Crest (1981) in which she played Jacqueline Perrault from 1982-1983. After all those years as a sex symbol, nothing had changed--Lana was still as beautiful as ever.
She died on June 25, 1995, in Culver City, California, after a long bout with cancer. She was 74 years old.Actress- Actress
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From the grand old school of wisecracking, loud and lanky Mary Wickes had few peers while forging a career as a salty scene-stealer. Her abrupt, tell-it-like-it-is demeanor made her a consistent audience favorite on every medium for over six decades. She was particularly adroit in film parts that chided the super rich or exceptionally pious, and was a major chastiser in generation-gap comedies. TV holds a vault full of not-to-be-missed vignettes where she served as a brusque foil to many a top TV comic star. Case in point: who could possibly forget her merciless ballet taskmaster, Madame Lamond, putting Lucille Ball through her rigorous paces at the ballet bar in a classic I Love Lucy (1951) episode?
Unlike the working-class characters she embraced, this veteran character comedienne was actually born Mary Isabelle Wickenhauser on June 13, 1910, in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of a well-to-do banker. Of Irish and German heritage, she grew into a society débutante following high school and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in political science. She forsook a law career, however, after being encouraged by a college professor to try theater, and she made her debut doing summer stock in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The rest, as they say, is history.
Prodded on by the encouragement of stage legend Ina Claire whom she met doing summer theater, she transported herself to New York where she quickly earned a walk-on part in the Broadway play "The Farmer Takes a Wife" starring Henry Fonda in 1934. In the show she also understudied The Wizard of Oz (1939)'s "Wicked Witch" Margaret Hamilton, and earned excellent reviews when she went on in the part. Plain and hawkish in looks while noticeably tall and gawky in build, Wickes was certainly smart enough to see that comedy would become her career path and she enjoyed showing off in roles playing much older than she was. New York stage work continued to pour in, and she garnered roles in "Spring Dance" (1936), "Stage Door" (1936), "Hitch Your Wagon" (1937), "Father Malachy's Miracle (1937) and, in an unusual bit of casting, Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre production of "Danton's Death". All the while she kept fine-tuning her acting craft in summer stock.
A series of critically panned plays followed until a huge door opened for her in the form of Miss Preen, the beleaguered nurse to an acid-tongued, wheelchair-bound radio star (played by the hilarious Monty Woolley) in the George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart comedy "The Man Who Came to Dinner"; for once, it was Wickes doing the cowering. The play was the toast of Broadway for two wacky years and she went on tour with it as well. She also become a Kaufman favorite.
Hollywood took notice as well, and when Warner Bros. decided to film the play, it allowed both Wickes and Woolley to recreate their classic roles. The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941), which co-starred Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan, was a grand film hit and Wickes was now officially on board in Hollywood, given plenty of chances to freelance. At Warners she lightened up the proceedings a bit in the Bette Davis tearjerker Now, Voyager (1942) as the nurse to Gladys Cooper. Elsewhere, she traded quips with Lou Costello as a murder suspect in the amusing whodunit Who Done It? (1942); played a WAC in Private Buckaroo (1942) with The Andrews Sisters; and dished out her patented smart-alecky services in both Happy Land (1943) and My Kingdom for a Cook (1943).
Wickes returned to Broadway for a few seasons, often for Kaufman, and did some radio work as well, but returned to Hollywood and played yet another nurse in The Decision of Christopher Blake (1948), a part written especially for her. She appeared with Bette Davis for a third time in June Bride (1948), finding some fine moments playing a magazine editor. Wickes went on to perform yeoman work in On Moonlight Bay (1951) and its sequel, By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953); I'll See You in My Dreams (1951); White Christmas (1954) and The Music Man (1962), the last as one of the "Pick-A-Little, Talk-A-Little" gossiping housewives of River City.
Television roles also began filtering in for Wickes she continued to put her cryptic comedy spin on her harried housekeepers, teachers, servants and other working commoner types. She played second banana to a queue of comedy's best known legends in the 1950s and 1960s, notably Lucille Ball (who was a long-time neighbor and pal off-screen), Danny Thomas, Red Skelton, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante, Peter Lind Hayes and Gertrude Berg. Her stellar work with Berg on The Gertrude Berg Show (1961) garnered Wickes an Emmy nomination. Among the Baby Boom generation, she may be best remembered as Miss Cathcart in Dennis the Menace (1959).
In later years her gangly figure filled out a bit as she continued to appear here and there on the small screen in both guest star and series' regular parts. Later in life she enjoyed a bit of a resurgence. Recalled earlier for her Sister Clarissa in the madcap comedy films The Trouble with Angels (1966) and its sequel, Where Angels Go Trouble Follows! (1968), both with Rosalind Russell, She donned the habit again decades later as crabby musical director Sister Mary Lazarus in the box-office smash Sister Act (1992) and its sequel, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993). She appeared in Postcards from the Edge (1990) as Meryl Streep's grandmother, and in Little Women (1994) as the matriarchal Aunt March. True to form, the last role in which she appeared was voicing the gargoyle "Laverne" in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), which was released after her death.
The never-married Wickes died in 1995 after entering the hospital with respiratory problems. She suffered a broken hip from an accidental fall and complications quickly set in following surgery. She was 85 years young.Actress- Actress
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Priscilla Lane attended the Eagin School of Dramatic Arts in New York before she began touring with her sisters in the Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians Dance Band. She was a popular singer with her sisters and, after 5 years, she was signed to a Hollywood contract with Warner Brothers in 1937. Her first film was Varsity Show (1937) where she had the hard task of portraying a singer with the Fred Waring Band. Priscilla was to play the nice girl against the temperamental star played by her sister Rosemary Lane. Over the years, Priscilla would play an assortment of girlfriends, daughters and fiancees. She would team with her two sisters, Rosemary Lane and Lola Lane, to make a series of dramas beginning with the film Four Daughters (1938). That film would be the one that made John Garfield a star. In most of her films, all Priscilla had to do was to look attractive and give a good supporting performance. Priscilla would also co-star with Wayne Morris in three 1938 releases. In The Roaring Twenties (1939), she would play the girlfriend of James Cagney. In Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), which was released 3 years after it was filmed, she would play the fiancee of Cary Grant. When Alfred Hitchcock was unable to get Barbara Stanwyck, he cast Priscilla in Saboteur (1942) where she was on the run with the hero. By that time, her movie career was almost finished and she would appear in just a couple of films over the next five years before retiring in 1948.Actress- Actress
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The daughter of a stage entertainer, New York-born actress Genevieve Tobin started treading the boards as a child and appeared in the role of Little Eva in the silent short Uncle Tom's Cabin (1910). Her older brother George Tobin and younger sister Vivian Tobin also became stage and film actors. By her teens Genevieve was appearing as a sparkling blonde ingénue on 20s Broadway, steadily gaining notice with her chic looks and vivacious personality. Considered a medium-weight talent, she nevertheless tackled such roles as Cordelia in "King Lear" (1923) in addition to her usual frothy comedies and musicals such as "Polly Preferred" (1923). Following her New York performance in Cole Porter's musical "Fifty Million Frenchmen" in 1929 in which she introduced the song "You Do Something to Me," Genevieve started focusing squarely on films, particularly screwball farce, starting with a couple of glamorous leading lady roles in the early talkies A Lady Surrenders (1930) and Free Love (1930), one a heavy drama and the other a lighter comedy both co-starring Conrad Nagel. Genevieve moved into second leads as the 1930s flew by, however, often playing the arch or self-involved 'other woman' role. She appeared in fine form as the problematic third wheel in One Hour with You (1932) with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald; Goodbye Again (1933) co-starring Warren William and Joan Blondell; Kiss and Make-Up (1934) with Cary Grant and Helen Mack; The Goose and the Gander (1935) with Kay Francis and George Brent; and, her last, No Time for Comedy (1940) which paired up James Stewart with Rosalind Russell, and was also directed by her husband (and former stage actor) William Keighley. Genevieve abandoned her career for high society after marrying Keighley and never looked back -- her marriage lasting 46 years until his death in 1984 at age 90+. Genevieve herself would live to become a nonagenarian, dying of natural causes in 1995 in Pasadena, California.Actress- Actress
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Ida was born in London to a show business family. In 1932, her mother took Ida with her to an audition and Ida got the part her mother wanted. The picture was Her First Affaire (1932). Ida, a bleached blonde, went to Hollywood in 1934 playing small, insignificant parts. Peter Ibbetson (1935) was one of her few noteworthy movies and it was not until The Light That Failed (1939) that she got a chance to get better parts. In most of her movies, she was cast as the hard, but sympathetic woman from the wrong side of the tracks. In The Sea Wolf (1941) and High Sierra (1940), she played the part magnificently. It has been said that no one could do hard-luck dames the way Lupino could do them. She played tough, knowing characters who held their own against some of the biggest leading men of the day - Humphrey Bogart, Ronald Colman, John Garfield and Edward G. Robinson. She made a handful of films during the forties playing different characters ranging from Pillow to Post (1945), where she played a traveling saleswoman to the tough nightclub singer in The Man I Love (1946). But good roles for women were hard to get and there were many young actresses and established stars competing for those roles. She left Warner Brothers in 1947 and became a freelance actress. When better roles did not materialize, Ida stepped behind the camera as a director, writer and producer. Her first directing job came when director Elmer Clifton fell ill on a script that she co-wrote Not Wanted (1949). Ida had joked that as an actress, she was the poor man's Bette Davis. Now, she said that as a director, she became the poor man's Don Siegel. The films that she wrote, or directed, or appeared in during the fifties were mostly inexpensive melodramas. She later turned to television where she directed episodes in shows such as The Untouchables (1959) and The Fugitive (1963). In the seventies, she made guest appearances on various television show and appeared in small parts in a few movies.Actress- Actress
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Ms. Lindfors was a Swedish-born actress whose stage and screen career in the U.S. and Sweden spanned more than half a century. She was brought to Hollywood in 1946 by Warner Brothers in the hope that she would be a new Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman. She appeared with Ronald Reagan in her first Hollywood film, Don Siegel's Night Unto Night (1949). Perhaps best known as a stage actress, she returned to Sweden in August 1995 to tour with the play "In Search of Strindberg".Actress- Actress
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Ginger Rogers was born Virginia Katherine McMath in Independence, Missouri on July 16, 1911, the daughter of Lela E. Rogers (née Lela Emogene Owens) and William Eddins McMath. Her mother went to Independence to have Ginger away from her husband. She had a baby earlier in their marriage and he allowed the doctor to use forceps and the baby died. She was kidnapped by her father several times until her mother took him to court. Ginger's mother left her child in the care of her parents while she went in search of a job as a scriptwriter in Hollywood and later to New York City. Mrs. McMath found herself with an income good enough to where she could send for Ginger. Lelee became a Marine in 1918 and was in the publicity department and Ginger went back to her grandparents in Missouri. During this time her mother met John Rogers. After leaving the Marines they married in May, 1920 in Liberty, Missouri. He was transferred to Dallas and Ginger (who treated him as a father) went too. Ginger won a Charleston contest in 1925 (age 14) and a 4-week contract on the Interstate circuit. She also appeared in vaudeville acts which she did until she was 17 with her mother by her side to guide her. Now she had discovered true acting.
She married in March 1929, and after several months realized she had made a mistake. She acquired an agent and she did several short films. She went to New York where she appeared in the Broadway production of "Top Speed" which debuted Christmas Day, 1929. Her first film was in 1929 in A Night in a Dormitory (1930). It was a bit part, but it was a start. Later that year, Ginger appeared, briefly, in two more films, A Day of a Man of Affairs (1929) and Campus Sweethearts (1930). For awhile she did both movies and theatre. The following year she began to get better parts in films such as Office Blues (1930) and The Tip-Off (1931). But the movie that enamored her to the public was Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933). She did not have top billing, but her beauty and voice were enough to have the public want more. One song she popularized in the film was the now famous, "We're in the Money". Also in 1933, she was in 42nd Street (1933). She suggested using a monocle, and this also set her apart. In 1934, she starred with Dick Powell in Twenty Million Sweethearts (1934). It was a well-received film about the popularity of radio.
Ginger's real stardom occurred when she was teamed with Fred Astaire where they were one of the best cinematic couples ever to hit the silver screen. This is where she achieved real stardom. They were first paired in 1933's Flying Down to Rio (1933) and later in 1935's Roberta (1935) and Top Hat (1935). Ginger also appeared in some very good comedies such as Bachelor Mother (1939) and Fifth Avenue Girl (1939), both in 1939. Also that year, she appeared with Astaire in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939). The film made money but was not anywhere successful as they had hoped. After that, studio executives at RKO wanted Ginger to strike out on her own.
She made several dramatic pictures, but it was 1940's Kitty Foyle (1940) that allowed her to shine. Playing a young lady from the wrong side of the tracks, she played the lead role well, so well in fact, that she won an Academy Award for her portrayal. Ginger followed that project with the delightful comedy, Tom, Dick and Harry (1941) the following year. It's a story where she has to choose which of three men she wants to marry. Through the rest of the 1940s and early 1950s she continued to make movies but not near the caliber before World War II. After Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (1957) in 1957, Ginger didn't appear on the silver screen for seven years. By 1965, she had appeared for the last time in Harlow (1965). Afterward, she appeared on Broadway and other stage plays traveling in Europe, the U.S., and Canada. After 1984, she retired and wrote an autobiography in 1991 entitled, "Ginger, My Story".
On April 25, 1995, Ginger died of natural causes in Rancho Mirage, California. She was 83.Actress- Actress
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Eileen Evelyn Greer Garson was born on September 29, 1904 in London, England, to Nancy Sophia (Greer) and George Garson, a commercial clerk. Of Scottish and Ulster-Scots descent, Garson displayed no early interest in becoming an actress. Educated at the University of London intending to become a teacher, she opted instead to take a job at an advertising agency. During her off hours she appeared in local theatrical productions, gaining a reputation as an extremely talented and charismatic performer. During a stage production of "Old Music," Garson was offered a studio contract by MGM Vice President of Production Louis B. Mayer while he was on a visit to London looking for new talent. Garson's very first film under that arrangement was the immensely popular Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), earning her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress - the first of six she would receive. The following year would see Greer in the highly acclaimed Pride and Prejudice (1940) as "Elizabeth Bennet". 1941 saw her earn a second nomination for her role as Edna Gladney in Blossoms in the Dust (1941), but it was the moving, if propagandist, Mrs. Miniver (1942), in a role that she would forever be known by, that actually brought her the Oscar statuette as Best Actress.
As Marie Curie in Madame Curie (1943), she would draw yet another nomination, and the same the next year in Mrs. Parkington (1944). It began to seem that any movie she was part of would be an automatic success. Sure enough, in 1945, she won yet another nomination, for her role as "Mary Rafferty" in The Valley of Decision (1945). Still, Garson began to chafe at the unbroken stream of "noble woman" roles in which the studio was casting her. MGM felt that they had an winning formula and saw no compelling reason to alter it. Two standard seven-year contract extensions kept her at MGM until 1954 when, by mutual consent, she left the only studio she had ever known. In 1946, Greer appeared in Adventure (1945), which was a flop at the box-office. 1947's Desire Me (1947) was no less a disaster, downward spiral finally arrested with the hit That Forsyte Woman (1949). The next year, she reprised her role as "Kay Miniver" in The Miniver Story (1950), though audiences were unsurprisingly put off by her character's untimely demise from cancer, leaving screen husband Walter Pidgeon to soldier on alone.
For the remainder of the 1950s, she endured several predictably unappreciated films. Then, 1960 found her cast in the role of Eleanor Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello (1960). This film was, perhaps, her finest work and landed her seventh and final Academy Award nomination. Her final screen appearances were in The Singing Nun (1966) as "Mother Prioress" and The Happiest Millionaire (1967). After a few TV movies, Garson retired to the New Mexico ranch she shared with her husband, millionaire Buddy E.E. Fogelson. She concentrated on the environment and other various charities. By the 1980s, she was suffering from chronic heart problems, prompting her to slow down. That was the cause of her death on April 6, 1996 in Dallas, Texas, at age 91.Actress- Music Artist
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On Saturday, June 15th, 1996, an era in jazz singing came to an end, with the death of Ella Fitzgerald at her home in California. She was the last of four great female jazz singers (including Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and Carmen McRae) who defined one of the most prolific eras in jazz vocal style. Ella had extraordinary vocal skills from the time she was a teenager, and joined the Chick Webb Orchestra in 1935 when she was 16 years old. With an output of more than 200 albums, she was at her sophisticated best with the songs of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, of George Gershwin, and of Cole Porter. Her 13 Grammy awards are more than any other jazz performer, and she won the Best Female Vocalist award three years in a row. Completely at home with up-tempo songs, her scat singing placed her jazz vocals with the finest jazz instrumentalists, and it was this magnificent voice that she brought to her film appearances. Her last few years, during which she had a bout with congestive heart failure and suffered bilateral amputation of her legs from complications of diabetes, were spent in seclusion.Singer- Actress
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Audrey Meadows was born in New York City as Audrey Cotter, the youngest of four children. After she was born, her family returned to Wu'chang, China, where they worked as missionaries. Her family returned to the US and settled in New England when Audrey was age 6, and she and sister Jayne Meadows attended an all-girls boarding school. After high school, Jayne went to NYC with the goal of becoming an actress and finally convinced her little sister to join her in show business, but as a singer instead of an actress. Audrey spent months working on the Broadway show "Top Banana" and then got a job on The Bob & Ray Show (1951). She then replaced Pert Kelton as the most famous and best-loved "Alice Kramden" of The Honeymooners (1955). After "The Honeymooners" ended, she went on to do films, such as Take Her, She's Mine (1963) and That Touch of Mink (1962), and even portrayed Ted Knight's mother-in-law in the 1980s sitcom Too Close for Comfort (1980). But her heart--and ours--will forever remain in that two-burner-stove Chauncey Street kitchen.Actress- Actress
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The daughter of a West Virginia druggist, Joanne Dru came to New York in 1940. In New York she worked as a model and was cast by Al Jolson as one of the showgirls in his Broadway play "Hold Onto Your Hats." When the show closed in 1941, she married popular singer Dick Haymes and went with him to Hollywood. Discovered by a talent scout while working in the theater, Joanne made her screen debut in Abie's Irish Rose (1946), and that picture almost ended her career. Two years later she "redeemed" herself with her role in the classic Howard Hawks western Red River (1948). She followed that with another western, John Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), again playing opposite John Wayne. Unfortunately, her success in those two classics resulted in the scripts being submitted to her consisting of mostly westerns, and she got typecast (this from a woman who said, "I simply hated horses...").
In 1950 she was cast in another John Ford western, Wagon Master (1950), which became the basis for the Ward Bond TV series Wagon Train (1957). Even though she played in films other than westerns--All the King's Men (1949), The Pride of St. Louis (1952) and Hell on Frisco Bay (1955), for example--it was the westerns for which she was remembered. By the late 1950s westerns were running out of steam and so was her screen career, so she turned to TV, where she appeared on shows such as Playhouse 90 (1956).
In 1960 Joanne was cast in the role of the Eastern owner of a dude ranch in the comedy series Guestward Ho! (1960). Perhaps even funnier is that she would play an Easterner after all those westerns is the fact that her character name was Babs. The show ended in 1961.Actress- Editor
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Ms. McLean was a pioneering female film editor for 20th Century Fox. She began her Hollywood career in the 1930s and earned her first film credit for editing The Affairs of Cellini (1934). She joined Fox in 1935 as one of only eight female film editors working in Hollywood in the 1930s. She became Fox' editing division chief in 1949 and retired from the studio in 1969.Editor- Born in Berlin, Germany. After her role in Metropolis (1927) she made a string of movies in which she almost always had the starring role, easily making the transition to sound films. Her last film was An Ideal Spouse (1935) which was released in 1935. She died on June 11th 1996 of heart failure in Ascona, Switzerland.Actress (my revision)
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At age 16, Annabella was chosen by Abel Gance to appear in Napoleon (1927). In the 30s, she became a star of French movies. She made movies in numerous other countries, before being called to Hollywood in 1938, where she met and married Tyrone Power. She remained in the USA until 1947. Then she attempted a comeback in France. She retired from show business in 1954.Actress- Actress
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Arthur Freed discovered Lucille when she was working in a nightclub doing a specialty dance act, and decided to cast her as Rose Smith in Meet Me in St. Louis, and began building up her career which never really took off despite being put in 3 big musical productions at MGM. When she married, she decided to retire.Actress- Actress
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In addition to being Miss New Orleans in 1931, Dorothy Lamour worked as a Chicago elevator operator; band vocalist for her first husband, band leader Herbie Kaye; and radio performer. In 1936 she donned her soon-to-be-famous sarong for her debut at Paramount, The Jungle Princess (1936), and continued to play female Tarzan-Crusoe-Gauguin-girl-with make-up parts through the war years and beyond. The most famous of these was in the popular Bob Hope/Bing Crosby "Road" pictures - a strange combination of adventure, slapstick, ad-libs and Hollywood inside jokes. Of these she said, "I was the happiest and highest-paid straight woman in the business." As she aged, however, the quality of her films dropped. Among her serious films were Johnny Apollo (1940) and A Medal for Benny (1945).Actress- Actress
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Laura La Plante was 15 years old when she entered films as a Christie Comedy Bathing Beauty. By 1921, she had played a number of roles including a Tom Mix Western called The Big Town Round-Up (1921) for Fox and The Old Swimmin' Hole (1921) for First National. Laura, now 17, next signed with Universal, where she appeared in shorts, serials and many supporting roles. Over the next few years, she would become one of the leading stars at Universal and acted in in dramas, mysteries and comedies. Some of her more important films were the adventure Crooked Alley (1923), the comedy Sporting Youth (1924), the drama Smouldering Fires (1925) and the mystery The Cat and the Canary (1927). One of her successful comedies, Skinner's Dress Suit (1926), was directed by her husband, William A. Seiter. When sound came to Universal, she was one of the silent film stars who made the transition. She played a leading role in the sound film Show Boat (1929) and made her first all-talking picture with Hold Your Man (1929). By 1930, she decided that she had enough and left Universal, which terminated her contract. She went to England, where she would appear in a few more films over the years. Laura returned to Hollywood in 1935, where she again retired from the screen.Actress- Actress
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Born in India to South African parents, Juliet studied to be a dancer from the age of 4. Attending the Royal Academy of Dance, by the time Juliet was 14, she was deemed too tall to enter the world of ballet. She signed as a chorus dancer with the London Palladium and then pursued a career as a dancer in European nightclubs. While dancing in Paris, she was spotted by Hollywood choreographer Hermes Pan and signed to a role in the movie Can-Can (1960). While rehearsing for the movie, Soviet Premier Khrushchev was invited to watch the then-unknown Prowse and others rehearsing their steps. The next day, he denounced the dance as immoral and it was Prowse's photo that accompanied the news across newspapers worldwide. An instant celebrity, Juliet shot to stardom with her acting and dancing and the tabloids filled with her romance with star Frank Sinatra. That same year, she also appeared with Elvis Presley in G.I. Blues (1960) and again the tabloids followed her.
She appeared in more films the next year but, as her celebrity status waned, so did her movie career. Her engagement to Sinatra in 1962 fueled her nightclub act, but did nothing for her movie career. In 1965, she moved to television with the series Mona McCluskey (1965), playing a nutty Hollywood starlet, but the show soon ended. Her big-screen career ended with Run for Your Wife (1965) and she, thereafter, appeared on the stage and on the nightclub circuit. Some of her stage shows included "Sweet Charity", "Kismet", "Irma La Douce", "Mame" and "The Pajama Game". She also appeared as a guest on Television but, most of the time, she worked in her nightclub act. In 1994, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.Actress- Actress
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One of the brightest film stars to grace the screen was born Emilie Claudette Chauchoin on September 13, 1903, in Saint Mandé, France where her father owned a bakery at 57, rue de la République (now Avenue Général de Gaulle). The family moved to the United States when she was three. As Claudette grew up, she wanted nothing more than to play to Broadway audiences (in those days, any actress or actor worth their salt went for Broadway, not Hollywood). After her formal education ended, she enrolled in the Art Students League, where she paid for her dramatic training by working in a dress shop. She made her Broadway debut in 1923 in the stage production of "The Wild Wescotts". It was during this event that she adopted the name Claudette Colbert.
When the Great Depression shut down most of the theaters, Claudette decided to make a go of it in films. Her first film was called For the Love of Mike (1927). Unfortunately, it was a box-office disaster. She wasn't real keen on the film industry, but with an extreme scarcity in theatrical roles, she had no choice but to remain. In 1929 she starred as Joyce Roamer in The Lady Lies (1929). The film was a success and later that year she had another hit entitled The Hole in the Wall (1929). In 1930 she starred opposite Fredric March in Manslaughter (1930), which was a remake of the silent version of eight years earlier. A year after that Claudette was again paired in a film with March, Honor Among Lovers (1931). It fared well at the box-office, probably only because it was the kind of film that catered to women who enjoyed magazine fiction romantic stories. In 1932 Claudette played the evil Poppeia in Cecil B. DeMille's last great work, The Sign of the Cross (1932), and once again was cast with March. Later the same year she was paired with Jimmy Durante in The Phantom President (1932). By now Claudette's name symbolized good movies and she, along with March, pulled crowds into the theaters with the acclaimed Tonight Is Ours (1933).
The next year started a little on the slow side with the release of Four Frightened People (1934), where Claudette and her co-stars were at odds with the dreaded bubonic plague on board a ship. However, the next two films were real gems for this young actress. First up, Claudette was charming and radiant in Cecil B. DeMille's spectacular Cleopatra (1934). It wasn't one of DeMille's finest by any means, but it was a financial success and showcased Claudette as never before. However, it was as Ellie Andrews, in the now famous It Happened One Night (1934), that ensured she would be forever immortalized. Paired with Clark Gable, the madcap comedy was a mega-hit all across the country. It also resulted in Claudette being nominated for and winning the Oscar that year for Best Actress. IN 1935 she was nominated again for Private Worlds (1935), where she played Dr. Jane Everest, on the staff at a mental institution. The performance was exquisite. Films such as The Gilded Lily (1935), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and No Time for Love (1943) kept fans coming to the theaters and the movie moguls happy. Claudette was a sure drawing card for virtually any film she was in. In 1944 she starred as Anne Hilton in Since You Went Away (1944). Again, although she didn't win, Claudette picked up her third nomination for Best Actress.
By the late 1940s and early 1950s she was not only seen on the screen but the infant medium of television, where she appeared in a number of programs. However, her drawing power was fading somewhat as new stars replaced the older ones. In 1955 she filmed the western Texas Lady (1955) and wasn't seen on the screen again until Parrish (1961). It was her final silver screen performance. Her final appearance before the cameras was in a TV movie, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (1987). She did, however, remain on the stage where she had returned in 1956, her first love. After a series of strokes, Claudette divided her time between New York and Barbados. On July 30, 1996, Claudette died in Speightstown, Barbados. She was 92.Actress- Actress
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Bright, vivacious Marjorie Reynolds (née Goodspeed) was born in Idaho on August 12, 1917 to a homemaker and a doctor and raised in Los Angeles. She made her film debut at age 6, then "retired" after only a few years to pursue a regular education.
She returned in the mid-1930s as a teenager and began the typical assembly-line route of extra and bit roles for various mega-studios, billed this time as Marjorie Moore. Her first speaking role was in Columbia Studio's Murder in Greenwich Village (1937), this time billed as Marjorie Reynolds; her first husband's last name, this was the moniker she maintained for the duration of her career.
The blonde (originally brunette) actress then went through a rather non-challenging prairie-flower phase opposite Hollywood's top western stars such as Tex Ritter, Buck Jones, Roy Rogers, and Tim Holt. It all paid off, however, when she won the top female role opposite Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire in the seasonal film classic Holiday Inn (1942), a role originally designed for Mary Martin. It remains Marjorie's most popular and cherished role on film, but it did not help her make a permanent transition into 'A' quality fare.
Marjorie continued as a dependable "B" co-lead in such films as Up in Mabel's Room (1944), Meet Me on Broadway (1946), and Heaven Only Knows (1947), with an exciting movie offer such as Fritz Lang's Ministry of Fear (1944) coming her way on a rare occasion.
Along with maturity and a new entertainment medium (television) in the 1950s came a return to her natural hair color. As William Bendix's patient, resourceful brunette wife on the comedy TV series The Life of Riley (1953), Marjorie became a semi-household name. Her career took a steep decline following its demise five years later and she was only sporadically seen in films, commercials, and TV guest spots after that.
She was married twice. Her first husband was Jack Reynolds, an Assistant Casting Director for Samuel Goldwyn. They had one daughter, Linda, before divorcing in 1952 after 16 years. Her second husband, film editor John Whitney, worked for a time in the 1940s as an actor. They were married for 32 years until his death in 1985.
Long retired, Marjorie died in 1997 of congestive heart failure after collapsing while walking her dog. Though she didn't fully live up to her potential as a serious, formidable actress, her gentle charm and obvious beauty certainly spruced up the 60+ films in which she appeared.Actress- Polly Ann Young was born on 25 October 1908 in Denver, Colorado, USA. She was an actress, known for Port of Hate (1939), Turnabout (1940) and The Man from Utah (1934). She was married to Carter Hermann. She died on 21 January 1997 in Los Angeles, California, USA.Actress
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Although this lovely, light brown-haired leading lady would wind up better known as one of Loretta Young's two elder acting sisters, Sally Blane nevertheless enjoyed a lively albeit modest "B" film career during the late 1920s and 1930s. The resemblance to her "A"-level sister was very strong -- the same graceful, elongated face and fawn-like, wide-set eyes. Unlike her younger sister, however, Sally lacked strong determination and ambition. Although she remained on the second or third Hollywood tier throughout her career, her film output was considerable if mostly routine.
Sally was born Elizabeth Jane Young in Salida, Colorado in 1910 while her mother was en route by train to the family home in Salt Lake City, Utah (the train actually had to make an unscheduled stop so that her mother could give birth). Her parents, Gladys and John, separated when she was five years old and her mother moved her four children to Hollywood where one of Gladys's sisters lived, later running a boarding house. All the children pitched in financially by becoming movie extras. Sally and her younger brother John R. Young (better known as Jack) both appeared uncredited in the silent film Sirens of the Sea (1917) starring Jack Mulhall, in which Sally played a sea nymph. Sally also had an unbilled part in Rudolph Valentino's smoldering classic The Sheik (1921).
Her beauty only heightened as she grew up. Director Wesley Ruggles noticed the teen dancing at the Café Montmartre (now known as Montmartre Lounge) and tested her for his "Collegian" film series. She was cast and soon signed by Paramount, which insisted on the new marquee name of Sally Blane. Around the same time, younger (by three years) sister Loretta (born Gretchen Young) signed with First National Pictures. During their early build-up both Sally and Loretta were dubbed "Wampas Baby Stars of 1929". Throughout this time their mother maintained a firm hand in the girls' personal and professional lives.
One of Sally's first leading roles was in the western Shootin' Irons (1927) and she went on to play a number of prairie flowers opposite Hollywood's top cowboys. She starred opposite Tom Mix in three pictures: Horseman of the Plains (1928), King Cowboy (1928), and Outlawed (1929). Her career peaked early, however, and Sally seemed content to freelance for such Poverty Row studios as Monogram, Excelsior, Chesterfield and Artclass in a variety of genres--crime thrillers, light comedies, mysteries, action adventures. She eventually developed a "nice girl" image.
A two-year lull occurred following the filming of Fox's This Is the Life (1935), and Sally never tried very hard to regain her momentum. Much of this had to do with her meeting of (in 1935) and marriage to (in 1937) director and one-time actor Norman Foster, who had once dated Loretta. Although Sally returned to films in 1937, she was already focused on her marriage and having a family. She and sisters Polly Ann Young and Georgiana Young, however, did make it a family affair at Loretta's insistence when they were given featured roles in Loretta's The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939). They all played, of course, Loretta's sisters and this was to be the only time all four girls ever appeared together. One of Sally's last pictures was in the whodunit Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939), directed by her husband. During WWII, the family, which now included a son and daughter, lived in Mexico where Foster was directing Spanish-language pictures. She appeared in one of them (La fuga (1944), with Ricardo Montalban). Later the family relocated to Beverly Hills and Sally officially ended her cinematic career with a small part in A Bullet for Joey (1955).
Comfortably retired for many decades, Foster died of cancer in 1976. Sally herself succumbed to the disease more than two decades later, on August 27, 1997. Cancer had claimed sister Polly just months earlier that same year. John R. Young also died in 1997, of undisclosed causes. Loretta would die of ovarian cancer in 2000. Sally was survived by her two children, Robert and Gretchen.Actress- The daughter of silent-screen star Alma Hanlon and Broadway writer/press agent Walter Kingsley, Dorothy Kingsley began her career as an uncredited gag writer for the Bob Hope Radio Show and, later, the Edgar Bergen Radio Show. Producer Arthur Freed put her under contract to MGM; her first assignment was polishing the Garland-Rooney musical Girl Crazy (1943). She later wrote a number of scripts for Debbie Reynolds and 'Esther Williams (I)'. After leaving Hollywood for Carmel, California, she and her husband William Durney started the Durney Vineyard brand winery.Screenwriter
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This gorgeous green-eyed blonde was born in Canada to British parents and spent her early childhood attending schools in Canada, England, Boston and Los Angeles (where her father worked as a stage carpenter and set designer). She studied ballet for four years and tap dancing for another at the Maurice Kussell Studio, took singing lessons and learned acting under the tutelage of French-Canadian thespian Joseph De Grasse. She performed in school plays during holidays and made her motion picture debut at the age of ten in A Lady of Quality (1924). At thirteen, Rosina appeared in Cecil B. DeMille's The Angel of Broadway (1927) in which she was also used as a hand double for the star Leatrice Joy. For the next seven years she commuted between vaudeville and film work and earned extra dollars as a Hollywood fashion model. She doubled for Sally Eilers (whom she resembled in looks) in both Dance Team (1932) and Disorderly Conduct (1932) but her roles had up to this point amounted to little more than bit parts and walk-ons. A couple of leads eventually came her way, both in second feature mysteries: Welcome Home (1935), opposite James Dunn and Charlie Chan's Secret (1935), with Warner Oland as the screen's first incarnation of the famous detective. Rosina also had two decent production numbers in MGM's marathon biopic The Great Ziegfeld (1936) (her character, Sally Manners, was based on the stage star Marilyn Miller), but those scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. Her career was somewhat revived after she was signed by Hal Roach and found a little niche as the school teacher in the "Our Gang" comedy shorts. She also starred several times in slapstick farce as the wife of Charley Chase and with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in Way Out West (1937) (allegedly the duo's personal favorite).
Rosina left the acting profession upon her marriage to the Brooklyn lawyer Juvenal Marchisio, a union which produced three children. Marchisio died in 1973 and Rosina didn't remarry until 1987. Her second husband was actor, academic and Laurel & Hardy biographer John McCabe.Actress- Actress
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Diana Lewis was born on September 18, 1919 in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Her parents were vaudeville performers. The family moved to Hollywood and Diana, her sister Maxine, and her brother J.C. all went into show business. Diana made her film debut in the comedy It's a Gift (1934). At the age of sixteen she married actor Jay Faye. She landed a contract with MGM and appeared in movies like Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940) and Bitter Sweet (1940). While making Gold Diggers in Paris (1938) she became close friends with actress Carole Landis. Diana's marriage to Jay ended in 1939. That same year she met actor William Powell who was more than twenty years older than her. After a whirlwind courtship the couple eloped on January 6, 1940. Diana had supporting roles in the films Johnny Eager (1941) and Cry 'Havoc' (1943). She decided to quit acting in 1943 and devoted herself to being a full-time wife. By all accounts Diana and William enjoyed one of Hollywood's happiest marriages. He gave her the nickname "Mousie" because she was so petite. They had no children but Diana was very close to her stepson William David Powell. She spent much of her time doing charity work and playing golf. In 1984 William passed away at the age of ninety-one. Diana continued to live a quiet life in Palm Springs. She died from pancreatic cancer on January 18, 1997. Diana is buried with William at Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City, California.Actress- Actress
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As a child she studied at Seattle's Cornish School. Still in her early twenties, after several years of stock work in New York, she joined Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theater where she won critical praise for her title role in "Alice in Wonderland." She came to Hollywood in 1934 under contract with Warners, debuting in Happiness Ahead (1934). She co-starred with Paul Muni in The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and played in many small roles, both in films - e.g., the phony U.N. ambassador's wife in North by Northwest (1959) - and television: The Twilight Zone (1959), Gunsmoke (1955), and Perry Mason (1957) in the fifties and sixties. She died at Manhattan's Florence Nightingale Nursing Home, aged 94.Actress- Actress
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British-born actress who appeared in both British and American films, but who found her greatest success in Hollywood second leads. After a variety of jobs, including nurse, chorus girl and milkmaid, Barnes entered vaudeville. She appeared in more than a score of short comedies with comedian Stanley Lupino before making her feature bow in 1931. Two years later she achieved prominence as one of the half-dozen wives of the King in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). The following year she moved to Hollywood and began a career as the smart-aleck pal of the lead or as the angry "other woman." Barnes also played numerous leading roles, but spent most of the 1930s and 40s in strong supporting parts. In 1940 she married football star (and later producer) M.J. Frankovich and after the war, they moved to Italy and appeared in several films there and elsewhere in Europe. She retired from films in 1954, but returned for a few roles in the late 60s and early 70s. She worked busily with numerous charities until her death in 1998.Actress- Actress
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As A&E's Biography put it, "She rose from the mean streets of New York's Hell's Kitchen to become the most famous singing actress in the world. When the pressures of fame became too much, she had the courage to leave Hollywood on her own terms". Alice Faye was born Alice Jeanne Leppert in NYC on May 5, 1915. She was to become one of Hollywood's biggest stars of the late 1930s and early 1940s. She started her career as a singer, but later gravitated to film roles. Alice's first role was in the film George White's Scandals (1934) in 1934 where she played "Mona Vale". Lilian Harvey was set to play the lead role in this film, but quit. Alice inherited the part. She went on to star in Tinseltown's popular and lucrative cookie-cutter musicals and, with her distinctive contralto, introduced several songs that became pop standards, notably "You'll Never Know" in the film Hello Frisco, Hello (1943) in 1943.
After filming Fallen Angel (1945) in 1945, in which she was very disappointed because many of her best scenes were cut, she walked out on her contract. Her life after Hollywood was charmingly simple. She was married to Hoosier Phil Harris from 1941-1995 in a union that produced two daughters. She had previously been married to Tony Martin for four years. Alice had always said that her family always came before her professional life. She went back to Hollywood to make State Fair (1962) in 1962. At that time, she said "I don't know what happened to the picture business. I'm sorry I went back to find out. Such a shame". Her last film was The Magic of Lassie (1978) in 1978 opposite James Stewart. Most of her films are big hits at revival theaters across the country, confirming the power she had in the wonderful performances she gave. Ironically, Alice is more popular in Britain than in the US. Four days after her birthday on May 9, 1998, Alice Faye died in Rancho Mirage, California. She was 83 years old.Actress- Actress
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Her Orthodox Jewish family was totally averse to her having an entertainment career. Her parents and grandparents forced her to leave the Theatre Guild school (New York) while still a teenager and had their wills drawn up accordingly so as to discourage this career choice.
Studied drama at Columbia University, and belonged to the American Theatre Wing.
When Mae was 17 and living in the South Bronx, she won a local contest to find the girl who most resembled Helen Kane, a popular singer known as the "Boop-Oop-A-Doop Queen". She was promptly signed by an agent and began performing in the Vaudeville circuit. Billing herself as "Mae Questel - Personality Singer of Personality Songs," she performed dead-on vocal imitations of Maurice Chevalier, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and of course Helen Kane, among many others. Her mimic talent also provided duck, dog, chicken, owl, monkey, lion and baby sounds for radio shows.
Betty Boop creator Max Fleischer heard Mae doing her "boop-oop-a-doop" routine and hired her to do the character's voice in 1931. She served as the voice on more than 150 Betty Boop animated shorts until the character was retired in 1939. Her recording of "On The Good Ship Lollipop" sold more than 2 million during the Depression.
Best known as the voice of "Betty Boop", she was also the voice of not-so-less-famous "Olive Oyl" in the Popeye cartoons, as well as the toddler Swee'pea and others. She did Popeye's voice once, in the cartoon Shape Ahoy (1945), because Jack Mercer was serving in the military during World War II. Her versatility is probably better appreciated in the cartoon Never Kick a Woman (1936) in which she provides the quivery, nervous-Nellie voice of Olive Oyl, based on comedic actress Zasu Pitts, and the deep, assured, alluring voice of the blonde saleswoman, based on Mae West.
In 1968, the City of Indianapolis honored her with a "Mae Questel Day". In 1979, she won the Troupers Award for outstanding contribution to entertainment.Voice Talent / Actress- Actress
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Another gorgeous "B" movie blonde who came and went uneventfully in the 1940s, the beautiful Tulsa-born Martha O'Driscoll started off modeling as a child. Her parents were nonprofessionals. Trained in singing and dancing, Martha was discovered by choreographer Hermes Pan in a local theater production in Phoenix, AZ, which led to unbilled bits in musical movies from 1935. Once she had her foot in the door, she was groomed in more visible parts and began pitching products for Max Factor makeup and Royal Crown Cola, among others, in magazine ads while such endorsements promoted her upcoming pictures in return.
Martha attracted film offers from both Paramount and Universal studios in her 12-year Hollywood career, which included musicals, silly slapstick and horror films. She appeared as "Daisy Mae" in Li'l Abner (1940) -- the first screen version of the famous comic strip -- and proved a sexy foil for the teams of Bud Abbott & Lou Costello and Ole Olson & Chic Johnson in their comedy vehicles. She played the pretty prairie flower to a couple of notable western film stars including Tim Holt, and was terrorized by the Wolfman, Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster in her most notable feature, House of Dracula (1945).
In 1943 Martha married a US Navy lieutenant commander but they separated ten months later. Following her last film, Carnegie Hall (1947) and a divorce decree from her first marriage, she married a second time to Chicago businessman Arthur Appleton, heir to an industrial empire, and retired completely (at age 25), In Chicago she became one of the city's more civic-minded leaders, an interest that would last for more than four decades. She also served as an executive for many committees, including the Sarah Siddons Society, and was on the Board of Directors for a few of her husband's companies. From time to time she even appeared in nostalgia conventions. Martha died on November 3, 1998, in Miami.Actress- Actress
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Born January 1, 1928, to acting parents, Helen Westcott's show biz career began at the ripe old age of 4 when she performed on stage with her vaudevillian mother who played piano and drums. Her father was handsome Warner Bros. actor Gordon Westcott who appeared in second leads opposite a number of the top stars of the day including Bette Davis, Joe E. Brown, Joan Blondell, William Powell, James Cagney, etc. His untimely death in Hollywood at age 31 following a horse polo accident robbed Hollywood of a rising talent and deprived Helen, then age 7, of her father. Through her father's connections at Warners, young Helen was able to muster up a couple of pictures, earning a sizable role in the western Thunder Over Texas (1934) and as a little fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935).
After time out for education, Helen returned to films as a beautiful young ingénue in the late 40s. She appeared in both lead and second lead roles in a number of pictures, notably playing Gregory Peck's estranged wife in the classic The Gunfighter (1950), the lovely damsel-in-distress in Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953), and the spurned wife of Aldo Ray in the steamy drama God's Little Acre (1958). She played plucky bobbysoxer co-eds in light comedies and musicals and went on to provide feminine diversion in "B" adventure showcases starring Errol Flynn, George Montgomery, Guy Madison, Lex Barker and Dale Robertson.
When her cinematic career started to slow down significantly in the late 50s, she pursued TV work and showed up in such popular dramas as Perry Mason (1957), Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958), Bonanza (1959), The Twilight Zone (1959) and M Squad (1957). She also returned to the live stage. A founding member of the Stage Society, Helen performed in such plays as "The Golden Fleece" (1968). In the 1970s, she could still be glimpsed occasionally on film and TV. She died of complications from cancer on March 17, 1998, at age 70, far away from the limelight. There were no reported survivors.Actress- Actress
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Born in 1911, Jeanette Nolan began her acting career in the Pasadena Community Playhouse. While still a student at Los Angeles City College, she made her radio debut in 1932, aged 20, in "Omar Khayyam", the first transcontinental broadcast from station KHJ. Her film debut was probably also her best part: Lady Macbeth opposite director/actor Orson Welles's Macbeth (1948). Her final film role was as Tom Booker (Robert Redford)'s mother, Ellen Booker, in The Horse Whisperer (1998).
She appeared in more than 300 television shows, including episode roles in Perry Mason (1957), I Spy (1965), MacGyver (1985), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955), and as a regular on The Richard Boone Show (1963) and The Virginian (1962). She received four Emmy nominations.
Nolan died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, in 1998, aged 86, following a stroke.Actress- Actress
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Sleek, effervescent, gregarious and indefatigable only begins to describe the indescribable Kay Thompson -- a one-of-a-kind author, pianist, actress, comedienne, singer, composer, coach, dancer, choreographer, clothing designer, and arguably one of entertainment's most unique and charismatic personalities of the 20th century. Born in Missouri with the uncharismatic name of Catherine L. Fink, she would reinvent herself as Kay Thompson and become a real-life representation of Auntie Mame, living life to the hilt while sharing with that character an unabashed joie de vivre and "never say die" mantra.
The St. Louis born-and-bred celebrity was the second of four born to Austrian immigrant Leo George Thompson, a jeweler, and Hattie Thompson. Nicknamed Kitty by the time she attended Soldan International Studies High School in St. Louis, and (later) Washington University, she began playing the piano at age 4. Deemed a prodigy, she was performing with the St. Louis Symphony by the time she was 16. While this may have been a strong enough focus for some or most, Kay was not to be confined and decided to instead test her singing talents. Singing with local dance bands, she eventually blossomed into a band vocalist with the Tom Coakley and Fred Waring bands. At this juncture, she met and married one of her band's talented trombone players, Jack Jenney, but the marriage ended quickly. She also took to radio and sang alongside the harmony group The Mills Brothers. Eventually she was handed her own CBS-aired show entitled "Kay Thompson and Company". It was short-lived. Kay and the group did make a special appearance in the film Manhattan Merry-Go-Round (1937).
During the mid-to-late 1930s Kay recorded briefly such songs as "You Hit The Spot", "You Let Me Down", "Don't Mention Love To Me" and "Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind", and toward the end of the decade was cast in "Hooray for What", a political revue, but was fired during the pre-Broadway tour. She never returned to the musical stage arena again as a result of that unhappy experience.
Arthur Freed became her ticket to 1940s Hollywood when he hired her as an arranger, coach and composer at MGM Studios. Such noteworthy films that utilized her multiple skills was I Dood It (1943), The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), in which she had a small role, Ziegfeld Follies (1945), The Harvey Girls (1946), Good News (1947), and The Pirate (1948). While vocal coach to such MGM superstars as Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Lena Horne, Frank Sinatra and June Allyson, Kay forged an extremely tight bond with Garland and was made godmother to first-born, Liza Minnelli. Also during this post-war stage of Kay's life, a second marriage to radio and film writer/producer/director William Spier also came and went. She never had children.
Always on the move, Kay decided to put together her own club act which opened at Ciro's night club in 1947. The singer/comedienne was a sensation with her Coward-esque brand of stylish eccentricity. Her unique, full-throttled blend of sophisticated music, outrageous satire and clever banter made her act a virtual "must see" among the industry's "who's who". Featured with her (in both musical and comedy sketches) was a talented harmony she discovered, the singing Williams Brothers, which featured a young Andy Williams. After a six-year trek the cabaret act was disbanded in the summer of 1953 and Kay spent time designing fashion slacks for long-limbed ladies backed by her clothing line "Kay Thompson Fancy Pants."
The reed-slim, silvery blonde was sadly underused in films, to the detriment of movie lovers alike, appearing in only four films with two of them being specialty cameos. In 1955, however, she nearly stole the thunder from under co-stars Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn as fashion editor Maggie Prescott in the musical classic Funny Face (1957). Her character, inspired by real-life editor Diana Vreeland was expertly showcased in the "Think Pink" number, one of the film's many highlights; Kay was a delight as well in other chic numbers in which she appeared with the stars. While this could have been the start of something big (as a top character player), Kay did not return to films until summoned by goddaughter Liza Minnelli for a featured role in Otto Preminger's Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970).
In 1958, Kay introduced another new successful side of her -- as a children's author. The best-selling "Eloise" series, which was sparked from Kay's own escapades and adventures, chronicle the tale of a precocious, pixilated 6-year-old who lives at New York's Plaza Hotel and turns the place upside down with her brazen antics. All four books were top sellers: (Eloise (1956); Eloise in Paris (1957); Eloise at Christmastime (1958); and Eloise in Moscow (1959)). A fifth book, Eloise Takes a Bawth, which came from a 1964 manuscript blocked originally for publication, was published in 2002. Kay's most enduring achievement, Eloise, finally made it to the TV screen after her death
In 1962 Kay served as creative consultant and vocal arranger for Judy Garland's legendary TV special with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and kept busy with various nightclub/TV performances of her own until she decided to leave the limelight. It was fashion icon Halston who lured Kay out of her self-imposed retirement for a time in the 1970s in order to stage his runway shows. She eventually moved, however, into Liza Minnelli's Upper East Side penthouse in New York City and, contrary to her larger-than-life persona, grew quiet and reclusive with the last decade pretty much confined to a wheelchair. She died at the penthouse on July 2, 1998 at age 88.Actress / Vocal Arranger- Actress
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Elegant, quintessentially British Valerie Hobson was the daughter of a British army officer. She studied dancing at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and appeared onstage for the first time at age 16, but she contracted a case of scarlet fever and decided to give up dancing for acting. She journeyed to Hollywood, but became disillusioned with the studio system and returned to Britain, where she was often cast in aristocratic roles.
She married producer Anthony Havelock-Allan and subsequently appeared in many of his films. They divorced in 1952. She then married politician -- and future notorious sex-and-espionage-scandal figure -- John Profumo and gave up her acting career. She stood strongly by Profumo during that distasteful period. In her later years she was devoted to charity work. She died in 1998, aged 81.Actress- Actress
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Of Irish, English, and Scottish descent, Maureen Paula O'Sullivan was born on May 17, 1911 in Boyle, County Roscommon, Ireland. Her father was Charles Joseph O'Sullivan, an officer in the Connaught Rangers, and his wife, the former Mary Fraser (or Frazer). She was educated at Catholic schools in Dublin, Paris, and London (Convent of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton, where a fellow student was fellow future actress Vivien Leigh). Even as a schoolgirl, Maureen desired an acting career, despite her father's initial opposition. She studied hard and read widely. When the opportunity to be an actress came along, it almost dropped in her lap. American film director Frank Borzage was in Dublin in 1929, filming Song o' My Heart (1930), when the 18 year old met him. He suggested a screen test, which she took. The results were more than favorable and she won the substantial role of Eileen O'Brien, then went to Hollywood to complete filming.
Once in sunny California, Maureen wasted no time landing roles in other films such as Just Imagine (1930), The Princess and the Plumber (1930), and So This Is London (1930). She was perhaps MGM's most popular ingenue throughout the 1930s in a number of non-Tarzan vehicles. In 1932, she teamed up with Olympic medal winner Johnny Weissmuller for the first time in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), as Jane Parker. Five other Tarzan films followed, the last being Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942). The Tarzan epics rank as one of the most memorable series ever made. Most people agree that those movies would not have been as successful as they were, had it not been for the talent, grace, and radiant beauty of O'Sullivan. But she was more than Jane Parker. She went on to roles in such films as The Flame Within (1935), David Copperfield (1935), and Anna Karenina (1935). She turned in another fine performance in Pride and Prejudice (1940). After the 1940s, however, she made fewer films, primarily for personal reasons, i.e. caring for her large family.
It isn't always easy to walk away from a lucrative career, but O'Sullivan did because she wanted to devote more time to her husband, John Farrow, an Australian-American writer, and their seven children: Michael, Patrick, Maria (a.k.a. Mia Farrow), John, Prudence, Theresa (a.k.a. Tisa Farrow), and Stephanie Farrow. The couple were married from 1936 until his death in 1963. After her last Tarzan venture she asked for release from her contract to care for her husband who had just left the U.S. Navy with typhoid. She did not retire completely and still found time to make occasional movies and television programs, as well as operate a bridal consulting service (Wediquette International).
O'Sullivan made her Broadway debut opposite Paul Ford in "Never Too Late" (November 27, 1962-April 24, 1965), a great success. She would appear on Broadway again in various vehicles through 1981, and later also co-produced two Broadway productions. Later movie patrons remember her as Elizabeth Alvorg in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) (playing opposite fellow silver screen film veteran Leon Ames). Her final celluloid role was in The River Pirates (1988). Some made-for-television movies followed and she retired completely in 1996, two years before her death in Scottsdale, Arizona on June 23, 1998 during heart surgery. She was 87 years old.Actress- Actress
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Ellen Corby was born Ellen Hansen on June 3, 1911, in Racine, Wisconsin. She played many uncredited bit parts from the late '20s through the '30s. Ellen would not be seen on the big screen again until 1945 in Cornered (1945). In 1946, she appeared in 14 films, although mostly in small, minor roles. One of them was in the Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946). One of the highlights of her career came about in 1948 in I Remember Mama (1948) as Aunt Trina. Ellen garnered a nomination for Best Supporting Actress, which was ultimately won by Claire Trevor in Key Largo (1948). The Oscar nomination didn't send her to the heights she had hoped. This wonderful actress continued in roles that were mostly minor compared to some of her contemporaries. However, it was television where she would receive the acclaim that had eluded her on the screen. Time after time she played parts that were absolutely outstanding. One of the funniest was as Myrt "Hubcaps" Lesh in The Andy Griffith Show (1960). She was the ringleader of a gang that stole cars and then sold them, and she sold Barney Fife a stolen car that turned out to be a real lemon. The series that brought her worldwide recognition, though, was the highly acclaimed The Waltons (1972) as Esther "Grandma" Walton. The role got her Emmy awards in 1973, 1974, and 1975. Although a stroke in 1976 slowed her down, Ellen still made appearances on the series. Her last TV appearance was in 1997 in the TV movie A Walton Easter (1997). On April 14, 1999, Ellen died at the Motion Picture & Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. She was 87 years old.Actress- Susan Strasberg was born in New York City on May 22, 1938. From the time of her birth, she was destined to be an actress, as her father was Lee Strasberg, acting coach at the famed Actors Studio in New York. In 1953, Susan made her acting debut in the episode Catch a Falling Star (1953) of the Goodyear Playhouse (1951) when she was just 15 years old. However, her true stage debut was on Broadway in the title role of "Diary of Anne Frank" in 1955. From that time on, Susan would devote part time to the stage and part time to the screen. Her first movie role was a fourth-billed part in Picnic (1955). That spot wasn't bad, considering she was still relatively new to the screen and her co-stars were William Holden, Kim Novak, Rosalind Russell, Cliff Robertson and Arthur O'Connell.
After making The Cobweb (1955) later that same year, she went back to perform on the stage. It just wasn't on-screen that she co-starred with big names; in 1957 she shared the stage with Helen Hayes and Richard Burton in "Time Remembered". In 1958, Susan returned to the big screen again in Stage Struck (1958). Although her billing wasn't anywhere near what it was with "Picnic", the picture got good reviews. For the remainder of her acting career, Susan alternated among the stage, screen and television. Wherever there was an acting role, she was there to appear in it. She spent some time in Europe, particularly Italy, making films for the rabid fans there. During the course of her tenure, she appeared in three documentaries about her old friend Marilyn Monroe. The first two were Marilyn Monroe: Beyond the Legend (1986) and Remembering Marilyn (1988). The third was Marilyn Monroe: Life After Death (1994). On January 21, 1999, Susan lost her struggle with breast cancer in New York City. She was a youthful 60 years old.Actress - Actress
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Marguerite Chapman, a small-town secretary and tomboy nicknamed "Slugger", became a model only after friends insisted "you oughta be in pictures", and she went on to act in more than 30 movies. Never a Hollywood wannabe, Chapman grew up in Chatham, New York, with four brothers. She started working as a typist and switchboard operator in White Plains, New York. Praised repeatedly for her beauty, she became a John Powers model in New York City. After she had appeared on the covers of enough magazines, studios beckoned her to Los Angeles. From 1940 to 1943 she appeared in 18 movies, ranging from Charles Chaplin comedies to armed services booster films as a member of the Warner Bros. singing and dancing Navy Blues Sextet. Chapman was cast as the leading lady in Destroyer (1943) with Edward G. Robinson and Glenn Ford. During World War II she entertained troops, kissed purchasers of large war bonds and appeared in a string of war-themed pictures. By the 1950s, however, she had slipped into supporting roles, notably as the secretary Miss Morris in The Seven Year Itch (1955) with Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell. As her film career waned, she made a few appearances on television, and appeared occasionally in small theaters. Her last film, The Amazing Transparent Man (1960), was a low-budget sci-fi quickie shot by cult director Edgar G. Ulmer in a few days on the grounds of the state fair in Texas (she was asked to appear as "Old Rose" Calver in Titanic (1997), but she was too ill at the time, and the role went to Gloria Stuart). She was married and divorced from attorney G. Bentley Ryan and assistant director Richard Bremerkamp. Her acting career is memorialized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Actress- Sultry, brunette Faith Domergue was born in New Orleans, part Creole, but primarily of Irish and English extraction. She was adopted when she was six weeks old. In 1927 her adoptive parents took her to live in California, where she was educated at Catholic schools in Santa Monica. She had her first flirt with the acting profession while still at school, on stage at the Bliss Hayden Theatre. Just after her graduation she suffered a disfiguring injury during a car accident when she was thrown into a windshield, and spent 18 months undergoing intensive plastic surgery. Still in her teens, she was briefly married to Acapulco night club owner and bandleader Teddy Stauffer.
By 1941 she was properly back in circulation. "Discovered" by a Warner Brothers talent scout, she was signed to a contract and her name streamlined a la Hollywood to "Faith Dorn". Sometime at the end of May that year young Faith found herself at a studio party (it was not unheard of for underage ingénues to be thrown together with rich or influential men) given on board the Southern Cross, a yacht owned by billionaire Howard Hughes. Hughes, 21 years her senior, became quickly infatuated with the teenager and bought out her contract from Warner Brothers for $50,000, then signed her to the studio he owned, RKO Pictures. He also mollified her adoptive parents by buying them a house, and he paid for Faith to take lessons to perfect her diction and acting. The romantic affair continued on-and-off until mid-1943, and was eventually scuttled by Hughes' various indiscretions with stars Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth.
In 1945 Faith reclaimed her original name, Domergue (insisting it be pronounced "Dah-mure") and, by the following year, made her screen debut in Young Widow (1946), a film starring another Hughes find, Jane Russell. Hughes then spent the extravagant--for the time--amount of $3.2 million on Vendetta (1950), the picture that was to catapult Faith to stardom. Three directors went to work on the project, only to be fired in quick succession: Max Ophüls, Preston Sturges and Stuart Heisler. Faith's lack of theatrical training also proved to be a detriment. The picture was eventually completed by Mel Ferrer, but not released until 1950. When it finally arrived in cinemas, it--like Hughes other fiasco, the Spruce Goose--failed to take off. An earlier effort, the film noir Where Danger Lives (1950), was also released at this time. It starred Domergue in the role as a homicidal femme fatale, opposite Robert Mitchum as the lover she manipulates into taking the blame for her murdering millionaire hubby Claude Rains. In spite of another huge publicity campaign, with Faith featured on the cover of "Look" Magazine and articles in numerous other publications, this film also performed indifferently at the box office and caused Hughes to lose interest in his erstwhile protégé.
During the next few years Faith began to freelance at other studios, appearing in westerns: The Duel at Silver Creek (1952), with Audie Murphy; The Great Sioux Uprising (1953), with Jeff Chandler; and Santa Fe Passage (1955) with John Payne at Republic. In 1955 she starred in the first of a trio of sci-fi/horror outings for which she is chiefly remembered. In This Island Earth (1955), shot in Technicolor at Universal, she played a scientist kidnapped by aliens and, with her colleagues, pressed into service defending their world against interplanetary attack. Helped by a clever script and make-up artist Bud Westmore's $24,000 creation of a bug-eyed mutant monster, the film was a huge success and has become a cult favorite. Faith essayed yet another scientist engaged in destroying Ray Harryhausen's giant octopus (six-tentacled, because of the minuscule budget) in It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955). In Cult of the Cobra (1955), Faith replaced Mari Blanchard in the role of the high-priestess of a cobra-worshiping cult who assumes the shape of a serpent in order to kill six GIs who have witnessed a secret ceremony.
Following her separation from Argentine writer/director Hugo Fregonese, Faith made three films in England, most notably as queen of the London underworld in Vernon Sewell's Spin a Dark Web (1956) (aka "Spin a Dark Web"). During the 1960s she concentrated on television and appeared in everything from Bonanza (1959) to Combat! (1962), from Perry Mason (1957) to Bronco (1958). After making several films in Italy (and getting married for a third time, to assistant director and theatrical producer Paolo Cossa in 1966)) , she revisited the horror genre in the cheap but cheerful The House of Seven Corpses (1974), as the emotive star of a horror movie who awakens the deceased after reading from the "Tibetan Book of the Dead".
Faith Domergue never quite made it as a major star, unlike Jane Russell. She did, however, acquire something of a cult following because of her involvement in the seminal This Island Earth (1955), as well as her other science-fiction films from this period. Ironically, Faith later confessed that she never much cared for the genre.Actress - Actress
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Francine Everett, who was called the most beautiful woman in Harlem and one of the most beautiful actresses to appear on screen. She became a familiar face with black audiences through the race films, now known as Black Cinema. She was one of the few who became a movie star through Black Cinema and could call themselves a true actress. Blacks could relate to the beauty because despite her roles, she maintained a down to earthness about her, warmth and was attainable more so than Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge who in Hollywood movies developed aloofness and had to please white audiences more so than Blacks and had to let go of some of the black image. The films in Black Cinema may have been low-budgeted but Francine's performances surely weren't, she gave her all in films, as though they were Hollywood movies. Francine didn't have a lot of directions in her movies but being the true actress she was, she didn't need much direction to give a stellar performance.
When she wasn't acting, she was in soundies, singing or dancing, it's said she appeared in over a 100. She modeled clothes and hairstyles for print ads, magazines and newspapers. Also she sang in nightclubs, her lovely singing voice possess soul, allure, and charm which she also showcased in many movies. She was also quite a dancer, dancing in a dance group called The Four Black Cats that traveled the U.S. Her stage appearances included, Humming Sam and Swing It which were both very popular shows on Broadway.
Francine started in show business at a young age. She studied and acted with the Federal Theater in Harlem, which was sponsored by the Works Progress Administration. She married legendary actor 'Rex Ingram' i who gained fame in his starring role on screen in "Green Pastures." It's been said Francine was offered the role of one of the angels but turned it down mainly because it was stereotyped.
Francine appeared in the most important films of Black Cinema, the ones that could be called a true movie. She appeared in Paradise in Harlem (1939), 'Keep Punching (1939), Big Timers (1945),"Stars on Parade," '_Tall, Tan, and Terrific' (1946)_, '_Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A.' (1946)_, '_Ebony Parade' (1947)_ (which also starred Dorothy Dandridge) and its been said she appeared in 2 Hollywood movies, "Lost Boundaries" and 'No Way Out (1950).
In "Paradise In Harlem," Francine shone brighter than any in the cast when she gave a compelling performance doing Shakespeare by portraying Desdemona. Francine was fantastic as the woman who pleads/sings for her life to be spared.
She only appeared in a few films but substantial films where she showed versatility and talent and proves why she's one of the best black actresses in history. She's done more in her few films than most have done in many films.
Hollywood surely wanted Francine, but first Hollywood felt Francine should pay her dues by playing maid roles first, which she refused. She didn't want to play stereotypes when she could play roles suited for an actress in Black Cinema.Actress- Actress
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Madeline Kahn was born Madeline Gail Wolfson of Russian Jewish descent on September 29, 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts, to Freda Goldberg (later known as Paula Kahn), who was still in her teens, and Bernard B. Wolfson, a garment manufacturer. She began her acting career in high school and went on to university where she trained as an opera singer and starred in several campus productions, ultimately earning a doctorate in her chosen field.
Kahn's best-known work came in Paper Moon (1973) with Ryan O'Neal, which was followed the next year by Mel Brooks's outrageous Blazing Saddles (1974) as Lili Von Shtupp, a cabaret singer who was obviously based on Marlene Dietrich's performance in Destry Rides Again (1939). Kahn was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in both movies. In 1998, she lent her voice to the character of "Gypsy" in A Bug's Life (1998).
On December 3, 1999, Madeline Kahn died of ovarian cancer in New York City, after a yearlong or so battle, during part of which time she was a cast member of Cosby (1996), aged 57.Actress- Sylvia Sidney was born in The Bronx, New York City, on August 8, 1910 as Sophia Kosow to Jewish parents. Her father was born in Russia and her mother was born in Romania. They divorced not long after her birth. Her mother subsequently remarried and young Sophia was adopted by her stepfather, Sigmund Sidney.
A shy, only child, her parents tried to encourage her to be more outgoing and gregarious. As an early teen, Sophia (later Sylvia) had decided she wanted a stage career. While most parents would have looked down on such an announcement, Sylvia was encouraged to pursue the dream she had made. She enrolled in the Theater Guild's School for Acting. Sylvia later admitted that when she decided to become a stage actress at 15, it wasn't being star struck that occurred to her, but the expression of beauty that encompassed acting. All she wanted was to be identified with good productions.
One school production was held at a Broadway theater and in the audience there was a critic from the New York Times who had nothing but rave reviews for the young woman. On the strength of her performance in New York, she appeared onstage in Washington, D.C. Further stage productions followed, each better than the last and it wasn't long before the film moguls were at the doorstep. She was appearing in the stage production of "Crime" when she made her first appearance on the silver screen in 1927. The film in question was Broadway Nights (1927) which dealt with stage personalities of which Sylvia, despite her extremely tender age, was one. After the film she returned to the stage where she appeared in creations which were, for the most part, forgettable. She moved to Colorado to tour with a stock company. She later returned to Broadway for a series of other plays. By 1929, she was on the big screen with Thru Different Eyes (1929) as Valerie Briand. This was followed by a short film, Five Minutes from the Station (1930). Sylvia Sidney was slowly leaving the stage for the production studios of Paramount.
1931 saw her appear in five films, one of which, City Streets (1931), made her a star. Aware that she was replacing the great Clara Bow, who was suffering from severe and debilitating health issues, mainly depression. The contrast between the two actresses was great but the movie was a hit. The sad-eyed Sylvia made a tremendous impact and her screen career was off a running. Her next film was Ladies of the Big House (1931) as Kathleen Storm McNeil, part of a couple framed for a murder they didn't commit. The film made huge profits at the box-office. She then made Merrily We Go to Hell (1932), appearing opposite Fredric March. The film was an unqualified success. Later, in Madame Butterfly (1932), she starred as the doomed geisha girl (Cho-Cho San); critics agreed that only her performance saved the film from being a total disaster.
In 1933, she starred in the title role in Jennie Gerhardt (1933). Yet another doom and gloom picture, she played a girl beset with poverty and the death of her young husband before the birth of their child. Sidney received the star spotlight in Good Dame (1934). Despite her fine performance, the film failed at the box-office. She scored big with the film critics as the lead female in Mary Burns, Fugitive (1935), a restaurant owner who falls for a big time gangster. Her performance was overshadowed by Alan Baxter, who gave an outstanding portrayal as the gangster. That film was quickly followed by "Accent On Youth", in which she played Linda Brown, a young lady fascinated by older men. In 1938, Sidney played in "You and Me", opposite George Raft. The film critics gave it mixed reviews but it did not fare well at the box-office. Afterward, the roles began to dissipate. She filmed ...One Third of a Nation... (1939) and would not be seen again onscreen until The Wagons Roll at Night (1941). There was a four year hiatus before Blood on the Sun (1945), opposite James Cagney.
In 1946, she starred in The Searching Wind (1946) as Cassie Bowman. The film was based on a Broadway play but it just didn't transfer well onto the big screen. It was widely considered to be too serious and flopped with the movie fans. After Love from a Stranger (1947), she didn't appear onscreen again until Les Miserables (1952), as "Fantine". Only three more films followed that decade. There were no films throughout the 1960s. After appearing in a made-for-television movie, she returned to the big screen in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973), playing the mother of the character played by Oscar-winning actress Joanne Woodward. For her performance, Sidney received her only Oscar nomination, losing to another actress who also only received one Oscar nomination in her lifetime, Tatum O'Neal (Paper Moon (1973)). O'Neal was 10 years old when she accepted the award.
Aside from a few more supporting role film appearances strewn here and there, Sidney mostly appeared on television thereafter. In 1988, she appeared as Juno in Tim Burton 's hit film Beetlejuice (1988). Her last film for the big screen was Mars Attacks! (1996) as the unlikely heroine whose taste in music saves Earth from an exceptionally brutal Martian victory. She had been seriously injured after being hit by a car but director Burton waited for her to be able to appear (in a wheelchair) rather than recast the role. In 1998, she played Clia, the irritable elderly travel agency clerk, who appeared (along with Fyvush Finkel) at the beginning of every episode of Fantasy Island (1998), the short-lived black-humored reboot of the iconic 1970s series of the same name.
A lifelong heavy smoker, Sidney died on July 1, 1999, aged 88, of throat cancer.Actress - Actress
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This shapely starlet had a minor career at Warner Brothers during the 1930's and 40's. She possessed all the physical endowments that had propelled other screen sirens of the period to stardom. Hollywood's premier glamour photographer, George Hurrell Sr., thought her alluring. Her face adorned covers of Vogue and the rotogravure section of numerous women's magazines. Yet, in spite of this, Maris Wrixon never quite made the grade and is almost forgotten today. She had a smattering of a theatrical background before she began in films in 1939. That year, Warners put her in thirteen films and then in twelve during 1940. For the majority of these, she was glimpsed as uncredited background characters, or, at best, had a line or two. Sometimes, she was a brunette, at other times a blonde. Maris did eventually move up the list of credits to undemanding leads in films like The Case of the Black Parrot (1941) and Bullets for O'Hara (1941). In between these assignments, Maris was loaned out to Monogram, which she likened to "being in a foxhole".
Her best remembered role at the Poverty Row outfit was in The Ape (1940), a lesser entry into the horror genre. Maris co-starred as a crippled girl, whose condition so moves an obsessive country doctor (Boris Karloff), that he endeavours finding a serum to affect her cure by any means, even murder (for which task he disguises himself by wearing the hide of a slain gorilla, hence the film's title). In later years, Maris fondly recalled Karloff regaling her with amusing stories in between takes. Sadly, that was pretty much the high point of her career, though she popped up in a similar offering from Monogram, menaced this time by John Carradine (as another mad doctor) and his voodoo-practising maid in The Face of Marble (1946). She also appeared in a trio of routine wartime propaganda films of negligible artistic merit: Women in Bondage (1943), Waterfront (1944) and The Master Key (1945). None of these were enough to establish her as a star.
Maris made her last film in 1951, then had a few small TV guest spots before retiring from the screen in 1963. Unlike her desultory movie career, her personal life seems to have been rather more of a success story: she was married for 59 years to the German-born editor Rudi Fehr, surely an impressive feat for Hollywood.Actress (my revision)- Producer
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British producer Betty Box started out as a commercial artist. Her brother Sydney Box was a documentary filmmaker, and during World War II he asked Betty to join him at Verity Films. She took to it like a fish to water, and by the time the war ended she was in charge of almost a dozen documentary units at the studio. She stayed at Verity until 1946, when she was hired by Gainsborough Pictures to make features. After making several films at Gainsborough she went over to Pinewood Studios, where she turned out such well-received films as The Clouded Yellow (1950) and Doctor in the House (1954) in partnership with director Ralph Thomas. In fact, "Doctor in the House" was such a hit that the studio insisted that she and Thomas make more of them, despite the fact that they both wanted to move on to bigger and better things. In the end, though, they turned out a string of sequels, one of which (Doctor at Sea (1955)) introduced French sex kitten Brigitte Bardot to British audiences.
While prolific, the quality of her output declined somewhat in the latter part of her career, and by the 1970s she and Thomas were reduced to making smarmy sex comedies such as Percy (1971) and It's Not the Size That Counts (1974), about a young man who had the world's first penis transplant. She made her last film in 1975, and died in 1999 in London, England, of cancer. She was 83.Producer- The attractive daughter of Austrian-Jewish émigrés who fled their homeland to Paris in 1937 before coming to the United States, "B" actress Vanessa Brown grew up exceptionally fluent in German, French, Italian and English. She developed an early interest in acting.
Auditioning for Lillian Hellman at age 13 sporting a perfect Teutonic accent, she then earned the chance to understudy Ann Blyth on Broadway in the classic stage drama "Watch on the Rhine" in 1941. Vanessa was eventually given a featured role and followed that with a tour of the play using the stage name of Tessa Brind.
A gifted student who also wrote and directed plays at her New York high school, she was a pure natural when she appeared on the radio quiz show "Quiz Kid." Hollywood and David O. Selznick took notice of her charms and transferred her to Hollywood High. She quickly made her film debut in Youth Runs Wild (1944) and continued in secondary teen roles with The Girl of the Limberlost (1945), I've Always Loved You (1946), Margie (1946), and The Late George Apley (1947), the last being her best and showiest of her career.
Following high school graduation, the now-billed "Vanessa Brown" progressed to young adult roles. She received lots of attention when she won the role of Jane opposite Lex Barker's loin-clothed swinger in Tarzan and the Slave Girl (1950), but abruptly left the series after only one attempt.
In the 1950s, Vanessa moved to TV where she became a perky panelist in such quiz shows as "Leave It to the Girls" (1949) and "Pantomime Quiz," in addition to regular dramatic programming. After a small part in the classic film The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Vanessa found renewed attention on Broadway co-starring as the girl who lives upstairs in the phenomenal hit "The Seven Year Itch" opposite Tom Ewell. Of course, she wasn't given the chance to repeat her sexy role in Hollywood. The meteoric Marilyn Monroe was an absolute sensation in Vanessa's part opposite Ewell in the 1955 movie version.
On TV, Vanessa replaced Joan Caulfield on the sitcom My Favorite Husband (1953) with Barry Nelson, enjoying a couple of seasons of steady paychecks. Politics overrode all other interests in 1956 when she actively served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Acting took a further back seat in the early 60s when she married her second husband, TV director Mark Sandrich Jr., and gave birth to two children. From then on she was glimpsed here and there in small, matronly roles in such films as Rosie! (1967) and Bless the Beasts & Children (1971). In addition she had some running parts on a couple of daytime and nighttime TV programs.
Vanessa's last years were marred by a second divorce (from Sandrich) and ill health. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1988, she had successful surgery, but the cancer returned and the 71-year-old actress died on May 21, 1999 at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, California.Actress - Actress
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Ruth Roman was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, the youngest of three daughters of Lithuanian-Jewish parents Mary Pauline (Gold) and Abraham Roman. Her father, a carnival barker, died when she was a small child, forcing her mother to support the family by working as a waitress and cleaning woman. Ruth grew up in the poor tenement district of Boston, Massachusetts, where she went to school. However, she left school after just two years to pursue an acting career. Her chosen path proved to be strewn with obstacles: in New York, she obtained a job posing for stills for a crime magazine, but theatrical work eluded her. She then worked as a hat check girl at a night club before calling it quits and returning to Boston. There, she made ends meet as an usherette during the day while at night performing with the New England Repertory Company, her first steady acting job. She also studied drama and eventually graduated from the Bishop-Lee Theatre School.
Trying to get into films, Ruth unsuccessfully made the rounds of agents and producers for two years (1940-42), until a bit part as a WAVE came her way in the film Stage Door Canteen (1943). With $200 to her name, she purchased a one-way ticket to Hollywood, where she found shared accommodation with other aspiring starlets, naming it, optimistically, 'the House of the Seven Garbos'. After a screen test with Warner Brothers failed to result in a contract, Ruth had another run of six hard years playing bit parts, many of them uncredited, some ending up on the cutting room floor. A sole speaking part of consequence was in the titular role of Jungle Queen (1945), a Universal serial (after subsequent acting lessons, Ruth was aghast when the serial was rereleased in 1951).
Ruth finally got her big break when producer Dore Schary cast her (against character, as a murderess) in the RKO thriller The Window (1949). That same year, she successfully auditioned for Stanley Kramer's boxing drama Champion (1949) as the dependable wife of the fighter (Kirk Douglas). After this turning point in her life, the shapely, smoky-voiced brunette secured a contract with Warner Brothers. During the next phase of her career, she moved effortlessly from glamorous and seductive to demure and wholesome in films opposite stars like James Stewart, Errol Flynn, and Gary Cooper. Look Magazine billed her as the 'Big Time Movie Personality of 1950', and by the following year she was receiving some 500 fan letters per week.
While many of her leads were in westerns (albeit mostly A-grade ones), Ruth was somewhat more memorable in support of Farley Granger (as his upper-crust lover and the raison d'etre for the planned murder of his wife) in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951). Another offbeat role was as a gangster's moll in the British-made updated adaptation of Shakespeare's Joe MacBeth (1955). As Lily, she is the power behind angst-ridden Paul Douglas ('Joe'), whom she easily manipulates to do her bidding. In The Bottom of the Bottle (1956), she was at her dependable best as the supportive wife of lawyer Joseph Cotten. Arguably, her last noteworthy performance on the big screen was in Alexander Singer's romance/drama Love Has Many Faces (1965).
By the 1960s, Ruth had made the transition to middle-aged character parts and began to appear mostly on television in shows like The Outer Limits (1963), Mannix (1967), Gunsmoke (1955), and (in a recurring role) in The Long, Hot Summer (1965). She also toured nationally with theatrical productions of "Plaza Suite", "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", and "Two for the Seesaw". For the actress, who was said to disdain the trimmings of Hollywood stardom, real-life drama came when she and her son counted among the 760 survivors of the sinking of the luxury cruise liner 'Andrea Doria' in 1956. In September 1967, she jumped from her burning car but still managed to make her scheduled performance in "Beekman Place" at the Ivanhoe Theatre. Ruth died in September 1999 at her home in Laguna Beach, aged 76.Actress- Nancy Coleman was born on 30 December 1912 in Everett, Washington, USA. She was an actress, known for The Gay Sisters (1942), Her Sister's Secret (1946) and Devotion (1946). She was married to Whitney Bolton. She died on 18 January 2000 in Brockport, Monroe County, New York, USA.Actress
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Born in New York City, Rose Hobart responded to the lure of the theater at a young age, went on stage at 15, then drifted to Hollywood and embarked on a movie career. Hobart film-debuted in the 1930 Fox version of "Liliom" and went on to appear in over 40 additional films, both in the A and B category. But by the late 1940s, her political views and pro-union stance caused her to be blacklisted. After a period of inactivity, she returned to acting in the 1960s on TV's Peyton Place (1964). For many years she resided at the Motion Picture and Television Country House, not far from Hollywood, where she enjoyed editing the House Newsletter.Actress- Muriel Evans was born on 20 July 1910 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. She was an actress, known for Call of the Prairie (1936), Three on the Trail (1936) and Manhattan Melodrama (1934). She was married to Marshall R. Worcester and Michael Cudahy. She died on 26 October 2000 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.Actress
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Gwen Verdon was born to the theater. Her mother, Gertrude, was a vaudevillian and dancer. Her father, Joseph, was an MGM studio electrician. She had to wear corrective boots as a child to straighten out her legs, which were misshapen by childhood illness. Nonetheless, she first appeared as a tapper on stage at age 6. She got her break in Bob Fosse's "Damn Yankees" in 1955. She married Fosse in 1960 and separated from him, although never divorcing him, in the mid-'70s. More stage and screen work quickly followed with highlights in "New Girl In Town", "Redhead", "Sweet Charity", and "Chicago". She and her daughter, Nicole Fosse, created the current stage musical "Fosse". Upon her death, Broadway dimmed all of its marquee lights in tribute.Actress / Dancer- Actress
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Nan Leslie was born on 4 June 1926 in Los Angeles, California, USA. She was an actress, known for Kings Row (1955), Sunset Pass (1946) and Western Heritage (1948). She was married to Albert Jason Coppage and Charles Pawley. She died on 30 July 2000 in San Juan Capistrano, California, USA.Actress- Actress
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A brassy, blue-eyed platinum blonde of the 1930s in the Jean Harlow tradition. Joan was the daughter of Hollywood cinematographer Charles Rosher and appeared as a child in Mary Pickford movies (on which her father worked as cameraman) billed as Dorothy Rosher. She acted in some amateur dramatics as well but seems to have had little professional training. However, The Times in 1929 referred to her "extraordinary speaking and singing voice" at this crucial period when sound pictures began to replace silent cinema. When she was signed by Universal for King of Jazz (1930), she adopted the stage name Joan Marsh. A fairly busy actress alternating leads and second leads throughout the decade and into the mid-40s, she is perhaps best remembered opposite Warner Oland in Charlie Chan on Broadway (1937) and as Dimples in Road to Zanzibar (1941). Long under contract to MGM, she was also featured in two Greta Garbo films, Inspiration (1931) and Anna Karenina (1935). In lighter fare her characters tended to have names like Beanie, Toots or Cuddles. It seems, Joan Marsh was also an accomplished dancer, especially adept at the two most popular dances of the era, the Charleston and the Black Bottom. On screen she performed a ballroom routine with Edward J. Nugent in Dancing Feet (1936). On radio, Joan replaced Beatrice Lillie as hostess of the musical variety show Flying Red Horse Tavern in 1936, as well providing the vocals for Lennie Hayton's Orchestra.
Joan's first husband was the screenwriter Charles Belden, her second, Captain John Morrill of Army Air Transport Command.
Her hobbies included horse riding, tennis and golf.
Joan retired from acting after her final picture for Poverty Row outfit Monogram in 1944 and in later years owned a Los Angeles stationary business, Paper Unlimited.Actress- Actress
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Marie Windsor (born Emily Marie Bertelsen) was born in Marysvale, Utah, and attended Brigham Young University. She trained for the stage under Maria Ouspenskaya before she began playing leading roles in B pictures in the late 1940s. So many B films in fact, that she garnered the title of 'Queen of the Bs'.
She was a talent - to paraphrase a cliché - of the right type and the right time. If film noir could have manufactured an archetype, it would most definitely have been Marie.
With Ms Windsor's bedroom eyes ('they didn't fit for a 'goody-goody wife, or a nice little girlfriend' ) she smouldered on screens, in scenes with John Garfield, and many others, in some of her best work. Marie's femme fatale (Ms Windsor was later quoted as saying a femme fatale is '...usually the woman who gets the man into bed... then into trouble') was on screen, most notably her role as the manipulative, double-crossing wife of Elisha Cook Jr. in The Killing (1956) (which earned her "Look" magazine's Best Supporting Actress award).
Marie later said she loved playing them because they're '... the type of character audience's never forget'.
Some of her favourites amongst her own films, in addition to The Killing (1956), are The Narrow Margin (1952) and Hellfire (1949).
Marie married was married twice before she met Jack Hupp, a realtor with whom she had a son. After retiring from films, Marie took up sculpting and painting.
Marie passed away one day before her 81st birthday. She's interred with her husband in her hometown.
Marie said audience's 'loved to hate her', and this is only partially true; audience's love Ms Windsor for the dynamism she portrayed, and as film noir gains new fans every day - more than 3/4 of a century since their heyday, it's a love affair which shows no signs of abating.Actress- Beah Richards left her native Vicksburg, Mississippi, for New York City in 1950. She would not acquire a significant role on stage until 1955,when she appeared in the off-Broadway show "Take a Giant Step" convincingly portraying an 84-year-old grandmother without using theatrical makeup. In 1962 she appeared in writer James Baldwin's "The Amen Corner" directed by noted actor/director/activist Frank Silvera, who told Richards "Don't act, just be." She credited Silvera with helping her further develop the subtlety and quiet dignity that distinguished all of her performances.
A prolific actress, poet and playwright, her first authored play was "All's Well That Ends" that delved into the issues of racial segregation. Always ahead of her time, she defined herself as "Black" when the term "Negro" was the preferred ethnic/racial label of Black Americans. Richards would bring her salutary satisfaction with being "Black" and her immense acting talents to the role of the peacemaking mother in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), a role for which she was nominated for an Oscar. Additionally, she appeared in "Purlie Victorious" by Ossie Davis and "The Little Foxes" by Lillian Hellman.
In 1988, she won an Emmy Award for her performance in Frank's Place (1987). Although stricken with emphysema, she delivered a tour-de-force performance on the ABC legal drama The Practice (1997) in 2000; she received her second Emmy Award for this performance three days before her death in her native Vicksburg.Actress - Actress
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Julie London recorded 32 albums during her career. Forced to give up band singing when her true age was discovered, she was primarily a torch singer. Her vocal range was described by "sultry" and "low-keyed". Her own favorite singers were Barbra Streisand and Roberta Flack.
She was known in some circles as "The Liberty Girl" for helping establish Liberty Records, where she began singing in 1955, as a successful label. Her many hit albums on that label include "Julie Is Her Name", "Calendar Girl" with some borderline erotic (for the time) cover photography by Gene Lester, "About the Blues", "Your Number, Please", "Send For Me", "Love Letters", "The End of the World", "In Person at the Americana", "The Wonderful World of Julie London" and the provocatively titled "Nice Girls Don't Stay for Breakfast".
Her most popular song, "Cry Me a River", was written by her former classmate/boyfriend Arthur Hamilton and produced by Bobby Troup. Her four most-sought-after and successful albums are "About the Blues (1957), "Feeling Good" (1965), "Easy Does It" (1968) and "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy" (1969). (Her version of "Yummy Yummy Yummy" was featured on the HBO television series Six Feet Under (2001).) Billboard Magazine named her the most popular female vocalist for 1955, 1956 and 1957".Actress- Actress
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The younger sister of actress Alice Day, Marceline achieved stardom in the mid-1920s, appearing opposite such stars as John Barrymore and Lon Chaney. Adept at comedy, she also starred with such top comics as Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon. Her career faltered in the early 1930s, however, and she was soon reduced to appearing in low-budget thrillers and action pictures. She retired in the mid-1930s.Actress- Nancy Marchand's mother, a pianist, sent her shy daughter to acting classes in hopes of breaking her out of her shell. As a student at Carnegie Tech (Carnegie Mellon University), she studied the works of William Shakespeare and the other great playwrights and, upon graduation, set off for New York City. She received acclaim in the part of the tavern hostess in Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" at the City Center in 1951. Her list of theater works include "The Cocktail Hour" and "The Balcony" (an Obie for both), "White Lies and Black Comedy" (Tony nominations for both), "The Octette Bridge Club" and "Morning's at Seven". She worked at many of the great theaters in the United States, including the Brattle Theatre, Long Wharf, Lincoln Center Repertory Company and the Goodman Theatre. During her illustrious theater career, she won the role of Mrs. Pynchon in the TV series Lou Grant (1977) with Ed Asner, for which she won four Emmys. Her last accolade was her role as Livia Soprano in HBO's The Sopranos (1999), for which she won a Golden Globe.Actress
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Ann Doran appeared in over 500 motion pictures and 1000 television shows, by one count. Starting at the age of four, she appeared in hundreds of silent films under assumed names so her father's family wouldn't find out. Rarely a featured player (although Charles Starrett's Rio Grande (1938) is a notable exception), she provided many a wonderful performance in support of the leads.Actress- Actress
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Green-eyed beauty Jean Elizabeth Peters flashed across the screen as a bright star during her relatively brief tenure in Hollywood. After just seven years under contract to 20th Century-Fox (1947-54), she joined in the reclusive lifestyle of her eccentric billionaire husband, Howard Hughes, and all but vanished from public view.
Jean was born in Canton, Ohio, in October of 1926. Her father died when she was ten years old. Her mother owned a tourist camp on the outskirts of town and there was enough money around to send Jean to college. She received the latter part of her tertiary education at Ohio State University and graduated with a diploma qualifying her as an English teacher. A campus popularity contest she won ended her plans as an English teacher because it came with a trip to Hollywood and a screen test. In short order, "Miss Ohio State University" was offered a seven-year contract at 20th Century-Fox with a starting salary of $150 a week.
After being picked by Darryl F. Zanuck to co-star opposite Tyrone Power in the studio's splashy big-budget swashbuckler Captain from Castile (1947), Jean came to the attention of Howard Hughes. She discreetly dated him for the remainder of the decade and continued to live an unpretentious lifestyle, rarely seen in public and eschewing the Hollywood nightlife and parties. A self-confessed tomboy, she rarely wore make-up in private and preferred to dress in jeans rather than glamorous gowns. She and her mother lived in a smallish bungalow in Bel-Air, paid for by Hughes. After relative success in her second feature, Deep Waters (1948), she became increasingly dissatisfied with the prissy roles she was assigned in her subsequent efforts. She was no shrinking violet when it came to defending her interests: she refused outright to appear in Yellow Sky (1948) (a part she thought as "too sexy") and Sand (1949), and her contract was consequently terminated. She returned to farm life in Ohio, but was back in New York in 1951 to be screen-tested by Elia Kazan for the epic biopic of Mexican revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata! (1952), shot on location in Mexico with Marlon Brando in the lead.
Fox wisely used Jean during the next few years for similarly unglamorous outdoor roles, notably as the titular heroine of Anne of the Indies (1951), a tempestuous girl living in the Georgia swamps in Lure of the Wilderness (1952), a gum-chewing dame innocently involved in espionage in Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953) and as Burt Lancaster's Indian squaw in the hard-hitting western Apache (1954). She got good notices in all of these films and was now recognized as a major star. As a result, she was cast in the prestigious film noir Niagara (1953), opposite Joseph Cotten and Marilyn Monroe (both of whom she befriended) and the Spencer Tracy western Broken Lance (1954). Under a new contract with Fox, Jean was now no longer in a position to refuse an assignment and, though basically unhappy with her part in Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), the picture proved to be one of her most popular pictures to date. Her next film, A Man Called Peter (1955), was to be her swan song. Following a 33-day marriage to a Texan oilman which ended in a whirlwind divorce, Jean finally married Howard Hughes in a secret ceremony and left public life for the next 13 years. She never gave interviews and retreated to an isolated hilltop mansion above the Santa Monica Mountains. In 1969 she resurfaced, studying for a degree in sociology at UCLA under an assumed name.
When Jean's marriage to Hughes ended in June 1971, the actress settled for the relatively modest sum of $70,000 a year and happily waived any further claims on the estate. That same year she got married for the third time, to 20th Century-Fox vice-president Stan Hough. Her screen career was briefly resuscitated when she was cast in the miniseries Arthur Hailey's the Moneychangers (1976) and she was last seen in an episode of Murder, She Wrote (1984). She devoted her final years to charitable causes and never spoke in public about her years with Howard Hughes.Actress- Actress
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Sweet, sweeter, sweetest. No combination of terms better describes the screen persona of lovely Loretta Young. A&E's Biography (1987) has stated that Young "remains a symbol of beauty, serenity, and grace. But behind the glamour and stardom is a woman of substance whose true beauty lies in her dedication to her family, her faith, and her quest to live life with a purpose."
Loretta Young was born Gretchen Young in Salt Lake City, Utah on January 6, 1913, to Gladys (Royal) and John Earle Young. Her parents separated when Loretta was three years old. Her mother moved Loretta and her two older sisters to Southern California, where Mrs. Young ran a boarding house. When Loretta was 10, her mother married one of her boarders, George Belzer. They had a daughter, Georgianna, two years later.
Loretta was appearing on screen as a child extra by the time she was four, joining her elder sisters, Polly Ann Young and Elizabeth Jane Young (later better known as Sally Blane), as child players. Mrs. Young's brother-in-law was an assistant director and got young Loretta a small role in the film The Only Way (1914). The role consisted of nothing more than a small, weeping child lying on an operating table. Later that year, she appeared in another small role, in The Primrose Ring (1917). The film starred Mae Murray, who was so taken with little Loretta that she offered to adopt her. Loretta lived with the Murrays for about a year and a half. In 1921, she had a brief scene in The Sheik (1921).
Loretta and her sisters attended parochial schools, after which they helped their mother run the boarding house. In 1927, Loretta returned to films in a small part in Naughty But Nice (1927). Even at the age of fourteen, she was an ambitious actress. Changing her name to Loretta Young, letting her blond hair revert to its natural brown and with her green eyes, satin complexion and exquisite face, she quickly graduated from ingenue to leading lady. Beginning with her role as Denise Laverne in The Magnificent Flirt (1928), she shaped any character she took on with total dedication. In 1928, she received second billing in The Head Man (1928) and continued to toil in many roles throughout the '20s and '30s, making anywhere from six to nine films a year. Her two sisters were also actresses but were not as successful as Loretta, whose natural beauty was her distinct advantage.
The 17-year-old Young made headlines in 1930 when she and Grant Withers, who was previously married and nine years her senior, eloped to Yuma, Arizona. They had both appeared in Warner Bros.' The Second Floor Mystery (1930). The marriage was annulled in 1931, the same year in which the pair would again co-star on screen in a film ironically titled Too Young to Marry (1931). By the mid-'30s, Loretta left First National Studios for rival Fox, where she had previously worked on a loan-out basis, and became one of the premier leading ladies of Hollywood.
In 1935, she made Call of the Wild (1935) with Clark Gable and it was thought they had an affair where Loretta got pregnant thereafter. Because of the strict morality clauses in their contracts - and the fact that Clark Gable was married - they could not tell anybody except Loretta's mother. Loretta and her mother left for Europe after filming on The Crusades finished. They returned in August 1935 to the United States, at which time Gladys Belzer announced Loretta's 'illness' to the press. Filming on Loretta's next film, Ramona, was also cancelled. During this time, Loretta was living in a small house in Venice, California, her mother rented. On November 6, 1935, Loretta delivered a healthy baby girl whom she named Judith. It wasn't until the 1990s when she was watching Larry King Live where she first heard the word 'date rape' and upon finding out exactly what it was, professed to her friend and biographer Edward Funk and her daughter-in-law Linda Lewis, that she had gone through the same with Clark Gable. "That's what happened between me and Clark."
In 1938, Loretta starred as Sally Goodwin in Kentucky (1938), an outstanding success. Her co-star Walter Brennan won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Peter Goodwin.
In 1940, Loretta married businessman Tom Lewis, and from then on her child was called Judy Lewis, although Tom Lewis never adopted her. Judy was brought up thinking that both parents had adopted her and did not know, until years later, that she was actually the biological daughter of Loretta and Clark Gable. Four years after her marriage to Tom Lewis, Loretta had a son, Christopher Lewis, and later another son, Peter Charles.
In the 1940s, Loretta was still one of the most beautiful ladies in Hollywood. She reached the pinnacle of her career when she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in The Farmer's Daughter (1947), the tale of a farm girl who rises through the ranks and becomes a congresswoman. It was a smash and today is her best remembered film. The same year, she starred in the delightful fantasy The Bishop's Wife (1947) with David Niven and Cary Grant. It was another box office success and continues to be a TV staple during the holiday season. In 1949, Loretta starred in the well-received film, Mother Is a Freshman (1949) with Van Johnson and Rudy Vallee and Come to the Stable (1949). The latter garnered Loretta her second Oscar nomination, but she lost to Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress (1949). In 1953, Loretta made It Happens Every Thursday (1953), which was to be her final big screen role.
She retired from films in 1953 and began a second, equally successful career as hostess of The Loretta Young Show (1953), a half-hour television drama anthology series which ran on NBC from September 1953 to September 1961. In addition to hosting the series, she frequently starred in episodes. Although she is most remembered for her stunning gowns and swirling entrances, over the broadcast's eight-year run she also showed again that she could act. She won Emmy awards for best actress in a dramatic series in 1954, 1956 and 1958.
After the show ended, she took some time off before returning in 1962 with The New Loretta Young Show (1962), which was not so successful, lasting only one season. For the next 24 years, Loretta did not appear in any entertainment medium. Her final performance was in a made for TV film Lady in the Corner (1989).
By 1960, Loretta was a grandmother. Her daughter Judy Lewis had married about three years before and had a daughter in 1959, whom they named Maria. Loretta and Tom Lewis divorced in the early 1960s. Loretta enjoyed retirement, sleeping late, visiting her son Chris and daughter-in-law Linda, and traveling. She and her friend Josephine Alicia Saenz, ex-wife of John Wayne, traveled to India and saw the Taj Mahal. In 1990, she became a great-grandmother when granddaughter Maria, daughter of Judy Lewis, gave birth to a boy.
Loretta lived a quiet retirement in Palm Springs, California until her death on August 12, 2000 from ovarian cancer at the home of her sister Georgiana and Georgiana's husband, Ricardo Montalban.Actress- Actress
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Hedy Lamarr, the woman many critics and fans alike regard as the most beautiful ever to appear in films, was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria. She was the daughter of Gertrud (Lichtwitz), from Budapest, and Emil Kiesler, a banker from Lemberg (now known as Lviv). Her parents were both from Jewish families. Hedwig had a calm childhood, but it was cinema that fascinated her. By the time she was a teenager, she decided to drop out of school and seek fame as an actress, and was a student of theater director Max Reinhardt in Berlin. Her first role was a bit part in the German film Geld auf der Straße (1930) (aka "Money on the Street") in 1930. She was attractive and talented enough to be in three more German productions in 1931, but it would be her fifth film that catapulted her to worldwide fame. In 1932 she appeared in a Czech film called Ekstase (US title: "Ecstasy") and had made the gutsy move to appear nude. It's the story of a young girl who is married to a gentleman much older than she, but she winds up falling in love with a young soldier. The film's nude scenes created a sensation all over the world. The scenes, very tame by today's standards, caused the film to be banned by the U.S. government at the time.
Hedy soon married Fritz Mandl, a munitions manufacturer and a prominent Austrofascist. He attempted to buy up all the prints of "Ecstasy" he could lay his hands on (Italy's dictator, Benito Mussolini, had a copy but refused to sell it to Mandl), but to no avail (there are prints floating around the world today). The notoriety of the film brought Hollywood to her door. She was brought to the attention of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, who signed her to a contract (a notorious prude when it came to his studio's films, Mayer signed her against his better judgment, but the money he knew her notoriety would bring in to the studio overrode any moral concerns he may have had). However, he insisted she change her name and make good, wholesome films.
Hedy starred in a series of exotic adventure epics. She made her American film debut as Gaby in Algiers (1938). This was followed a year later by Lady of the Tropics (1939). In 1942, she played the plum role of Tondelayo in the classic White Cargo (1942). After World War II, her career began to decline, and MGM decided it would be in the interest of all concerned if her contract were not renewed. Unfortunately for Hedy, she turned down the leads in both Gaslight (1940) and Casablanca (1942), both of which would have cemented her standing in the minds of the American public. In 1949, she starred as Delilah opposite Victor Mature's Samson in Cecil B. DeMille's epic Samson and Delilah (1949). This proved to be Paramount Pictures' then most profitable movie to date, bringing in $12 million in rental from theaters. The film's success led to more parts, but it was not enough to ease her financial crunch. She made only six more films between 1949 and 1957, the last being The Female Animal (1958).
Hedy retired to Florida. She died there, in the city of Casselberry, on January 19, 2000.Actress- Actress
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Claire Trevor was born Claire Wemlinger in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York, the only child of Fifth Avenue merchant-tailor Noel Wemlinger, an immigrant Frenchman from Paris who lost his business during the Depression, and his Belfast-born wife, Benjamina, known as "Betty". Young Claire's interest in acting began when she was 11 years old. She attended high school in Mamaroneck, Westchester County, New York. After starting classes at Columbia University, she spent six months at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, also in New York. Her adult acting experience began in the late 1920s in several stock productions; she appeared with Robert Henderson's Repertory Players in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1930. That same year, aged 20, she signed with Warner Bros. Not too far from her home haunts was Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn, the last and best of the early sound process studios, which had been acquired by Warner Bros. in 1925 to become Vitaphone. Trevor appeared in several of the nearly 2000 shorts cranked out by the studio between 1926 and 1930. Then she was sent west to do ten weeks of stock productions with other contract players in St. Louis. In 1931 she did summer stock with the Hampton Players in Southampton, Long Island. Finally, she debuted on Broadway in 1932 in "Whistling in the Dark".
Trevor moved to the silver screen, debuting in the western Life in the Raw (1933). There would be three more films (one more western) that year and six or more through the 1930s. Although she had been typed playing gun molls and hard-case women of the world, she displayed her already considerable versatility in these early films, often playing competent, take-charge professional women as well as "shady" ladies. There was a disappointed-pout-vulnerability in her face and that famous slightly New York-burred voice that cracked with a little cry when heightened by emotion that quickly revealed an unusual and sensitive performer. Many of her early films were "B" potboilers, but she worked with Spencer Tracy on several occasions, notably Dante's Inferno (1935).
Hollywood finally took notice of her talents by nominating her for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her standout performance as a slum girl forced by poverty into prostitution in Dead End (1937), opposite Humphrey Bogart. That same year she did the radio drama "Big Town" with Edward G. Robinson, then teamed with he and Bogart again for the slightly hokey but entertaining The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938). Director John Ford tapped her for his first big sound Western film, Stagecoach (1939), the film that made a star of John Wayne. All her abilities to bring complexity to a character showed in her kicked-around dance hall girl "Dallas", one of the great early female roles. She and Wayne were electric, and they were paired in three more films during their careers.
In the 1940s, Trevor began appearing in the genre that brought her to true stardom: "film noir". She started in a big way as killer Ruth Dillon in Street of Chance (1942) with Burgess Meredith. She was equally convincing as the more complex but nonetheless two-faced Mrs. Grayle in the Philip Marlowe vehicle Murder, My Sweet (1944). However, she was something very different and quite extraordinary as washed-up, hopelessly alcoholic former nightclub singer and moll Gaye Dawn in Key Largo (1948), for which she won an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress, again working with Bogart and Robinson. Her pitiful rendition of the torch song "Moanin' Low", which her character was forced to sing, humiliatingly, for the sadistic crime boss played by Robinson (to whom she is, figuratively speaking, permanently tethered) in exchange for a desperately needed drink. There were more quality movies and an additional Academy nomination (The High and the Mighty (1954)) into the 1950s,, but she also was doing work on stage and in television.
She was enthusiastic about live TV and appeared on several famous shows by the mid-1950s. She won an Emmy for Best Live Television Performance by an Actress as the flighty wife of Fredric March in NBC's Dodsworth (1956). She alternated her career among film, stage and TV roles. As she aged she easily transitioned into "distinguished matron" and mother roles, one of her most unusual ones being the murderous Ma Barker in Ma Barker and Her Boys (1959). Her final film role was as Sally Field's mother in Kiss Me Goodbye (1982).
Trevor and her third husband, producer Milton H. Bren, had long been residents of tony Newport Beach, California, to which they returned when she finally retired from screen work. However, she did maintain an active interest in stage work, and became associated with the University of California-Irvine's School of Arts. She and her husband contributed some $10 million to further its development for the visual and performing arts (that included three endowed professorships). After her passing in April 2000 at 90 years of age, the University renamed the school The Claire Trevor School of the Arts. Her presence on the UCI campus is in more than spirit alone. She donated her Oscar and her Emmy to UCI; both are on display in the arts plaza at the campus theatre that bears her name.Actress- Actress
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A genuine model of sincerity, practicality and dignity in most of the roles she inhabited, actress Dorothy McGuire offered Tinseltown more talent than it probably knew what to do with. A quiet, passive beauty, she had a soothing quality to her open-faced looks and voice. She was a natural when he came to tearjerkers and she certainly had a knack for opening up her film-goer's tear ducts with her arresting performances in sentimental drama. She preferred to rest on her acting laurels than engage in publicity-monging to win roles. As a result, Dorothy was surprisingly ill-served in the awards department during her over five-decade film career, yet left a major imprint on celluloid. Touching, complex, immaculate in poise and style, she is now and forever etched in Hollywood's "Golden Age" annals and in the minds of film lovers everywhere.
Dorothy began inconspicuously enough in Omaha, Nebraska on Wednesday, June 14th, 1916. Her parents encouraged her early interest in acting and she made her debut as a teenager in "A Kiss for Cinderella" at the Omaha Community Playhouse which starred visiting alumni member Henry Fonda. She received her education at Omaha Junior College, Ladywood Convent in Indianapolis, and Pine Manor Junior College in Wellesley, Massachusetts before setting her sites on an acting career. Following summer stock she appeared in such 1938 stage productions as "Bachelor Born" and "Stopover" before understudying the role of Emily Gibb in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" on Broadway, which at the time showcased young Martha Scott. Dorothy eventually replaced Scott in the role.
Other experiences came her way on stage with "My Dear Children" starring John Barrymore, "Swingin' the Dream", "Medicine Show", "The Time of Your Life" and "Kind Lady" before she was handed the titular role of "Claudia" in 1941. This gentle comedy became a certifiable Broadway hit and Dorothy simply incandescent as the child-like bride forced to wake up to reality after her sudden marriage. David O. Selznick subsequently signed her to a film contract. Fortunately, 20th Century-Fox, untrue to form, took a chance on the film unknown and allowed her to recreate her stage triumph opposite Robert Young. Claudia (1943) was so beautifully done and warmly received that McGuire and Young went on to recreate their roles three years later with Claudia and David (1946).
Unbelievably, Dorothy topped herself in only her second film role. After a pregnant Gene Tierney became unavailable for the role of Katie Nolan in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), the part fell to Dorothy. It's now hard to believe anyone else in the role. As the impoverished wife of a charming Irish ne'er-do-well and inebriate, Dorothy showed amazing complexity as the detached wife and mother whose painful but necessary decision-making alienates many around her, especially her daughter who is the apple of her daddy's eye. Directed by Elia Kazan, Dorothy was shamefully overlooked at awards time. Young Peggy Ann Garner was given a "special juvenile Oscar" and errant husband James Dunn picked up the Supporting Actor trophy for his work. Dorothy was not of the mind of tooting her own horn and it may have cost her an Oscar nomination -- better yet, the Oscar -- for she was hands down the better performer than eventual winner Joan Crawford, a popular choice for Mildred Pierce (1945).
Dorothy made it four film hits in a row with the success of both the sentimental fantasy The Enchanted Cottage (1945), in which she reunited with Robert Young to play two of society's castoffs who fall in love, and the expert Hitchcockian thriller The Spiral Staircase (1946) as the mute servant who is terrorized by a serial killer. Preferring rich characterizations over glamour, audiences saw Dorothy dolled up a bit more than usual in Till the End of Time (1946) as a war widow who falls for a younger hunk (Guy Madison). Her 40s filming was capped by a Best Actress nomination in Gentleman's Agreement (1947), an-anti-Semitic tale that boasted a topnotch ensemble cast including Gregory Peck, John Garfield and Celeste Holm, who won a supporting Oscar for this.
With nary a weak film yet on her resume, an unpretentious Dorothy still hadn't achieved top cinematic stardom. Preferring to return to her theater roots, she abandoned films for a couple of years and performed in such vehicles as "Tonight at 8:30" (1947) and "Summer and Smoke" (1950). When she did return it was to a different Hollywood and things would not be the same. Instead forgettable fluff such as Mother Didn't Tell Me (1950) and Callaway Went Thataway (1951) were the slim pickings offered. Although she found a popular hit with Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), the film was more notable for its title song and sumptuous settings than for the quality of acting of the three distaff stars -- McGuire, Maggie McNamara and Jean Peters.
Dorothy graciously moved into pillar-of-strength mother roles as she approached her 40s, making fine impressions as a Quaker matriarch in Friendly Persuasion (1956) and as the resourceful mom in three of Disney's endearing classics, Old Yeller (1957), Swiss Family Robinson (1960) and Summer Magic (1963). Her more flawed marital and parenting skills were displayed in the Inge film adaptation of The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), and the huge, sudsy teen hit A Summer Place (1959) with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue as young, star-crossed lovers. McGuire acted as Donahue's mother who rekindles an old love affair with Dee's father (Richard Egan). The 49-year-old McGuire then played the mother of all mothers, the Virgin Mary, in the misguided biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), marred by its overlong narrative and bizarre miscasting, including John Wayne as a Roman centurion. Her last film, the British-made Flight of the Doves (1971) as an Irish granny, had little impact.
In later years Dorothy found rich, rewarding work on TV and received an Emmy nomination for the well-received mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man (1976). She also played Marmee in a TV revisitation of Part I (1978), and ended her career in good company with (what else?) a sentimental tearjerker in the mini-movie The Last Best Year (1990) co-starring Bernadette Peters and Mary Tyler Moore.
Dorothy's longtime husband was photographer John Swope who died in 1979. Her children by him are Mark Swope, an artist and photographer, and former actress Topo Swope. Dorothy's health declined severely after she fell and broke her leg in 2001. She died of heart failure not long after in a Santa Monica hospital on Friday, September 14th at the age of 85.Actress- Actress
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Colorado-born leading lady Julie Bishop, who also acted under her birth name of Jacqueline Wells and the stage name Diane Duval, started off as a silent movie child actress, working with such legends as Clara Bow and Mary Pickford.
The daughter of a wealthy banker and oilman, she was raised in Texas and, eventually Los Angeles, following her parents' divorce. She was signed by Warner Bros in 1940 and played a dutiful sweethearts opposite filmdom's top male stars, notably Errol Flynn in Northern Pursuit (1943), Humphrey Bogart in Action in the North Atlantic (1943), John Wayne in both Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and The High and the Mighty (1954), and Alan Ladd in The Big Land (1957), her last picture. But, for the most part, she was never given anything challenging enough to become a top-flight star.
She also appeared on stage in "Hamlet" and "The Merchant of Venice". A licensed private pilot, Julie painted still lifes and staged several exhibitions in her post-career years. She died at age 87, on her birthday.Actress- Actress
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American leading lady of musical westerns of the 1940s. Born Frances Octavia Smith in Uvalde, Texas. She was raised in Texas and Arkansas. Married at 14 and a mother at 15, she was divorced at 17 (some sources say widowed). Intent on a singing career, she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, and worked in an insurance company while taking occasional radio singing jobs. After another unhappy marriage, she went to Louisville, Kentucky, and became a popular singer on a local radio station. There she took the stage name Dale Evans (from her third husband, Robert Dale Butts, and actress Madge Evans). Divorced in 1936, she moved to Dallas, Texas, and again found local success as a radio singer. She married Butts and they moved to Chicago, where she began to attract increasing attention from both radio audiences and film industry executives. She signed with Fox Pictures and made a few small film appearances, then was cast as leading lady to rising cowboy star Roy Rogers. She and Rogers clicked and she became his steady on-screen companion. In 1946, Rogers' wife died and Evans' marriage to Butts ended about the same time. Rogers and Evans had been close onscreen in a string of successful westerns, and now became close off-screen as well. A year later she married Rogers and the two become icons of American pop culture. Their marriage was dogged by tragedy, including the loss of three children before adulthood, but Evans was able not only to find inspiration in the midst of tragedy but to provide inspiration as well, authoring several books on her life and spiritual growth through difficulty. She and Rogers starred during the 1950s on the popular TV program bearing his name, and even after retirement continued to make occasional appearances and to run their Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum in Victorville, California. Following Dale's death, the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum moved to Branson, Missouri.Actress- Pauline Kael was born in Petaluma, CA, in 1919, and attended the University of California at Berkeley in the 1930s. She tried and failed to work as a playwright in her 20s, and began writing film reviews as a freelance writer for film journals in the 1950s. After success with national magazines in the 1960s and publishing her first book, "I Lost It At the Movies,", she became a film critic for The New Yorker in 1968, and wrote for that magazine until 1991. She published 13 books of her essays and criticism, and won the National Book Award in 1974, and wielded power and influence, even after retiring. She passed away on September 3, 2001.Film Critic / Author
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Known to classic film fans by various nicknames--including Miss Deadpan, Frozen Face, and Miss Ice Glacier--this statuesque, dark-haired singer/actress carved a unique niche for herself on stage and screen by the hilarious Sphinx-like way she delivered a song. The daughter of the captain of detectives of the Los Angeles Police Department, Virginia Lee O'Brien became interested in music and dance at an early age (it didn't hurt her career chances that her uncle was noted film director Lloyd Bacon). Her big show-business break came in 1939 after she secured a singing role in the L.A. production of the musical/comedy "Meet the People". On opening night, when time came for her solo number, Virginia became so paralyzed with fright that she sang her song with a wide-eyed motionless stare that sent the audience (which thought her performance a gag) into convulsions. Demoralized, Virginia left the stage only to soon find out that she was a sensation.
Signed by MGM in 1940, she deadpanned her way to acclaim and immense popularity with appearances in some of the studio's most memorable musicals including Thousands Cheer (1943), The Harvey Girls (1946), Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), Ziegfeld Follies (1945), Panama Hattie (1942), Ship Ahoy (1942), Meet the People (1944) and Du Barry Was a Lady (1943), performing inimitable renditions of such classic songs as "The Wild Wild West" (from The Harvey Girls), "A Fine Romance" (from Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)), "It's a Great Big World" (from The Harvey Girls (1946)), "Poor You" (from Ship Ahoy (1942)), and "Say We're Sweethearts Again" (from Meet the People (1944)).
Although too often relegated to featured songs and small supporting roles, she still managed to become an audience favorite by the sheer force of her personality, polished vocals and way with a comic quip. The latter ability is especially apparent in one of her last MGM films, Merton of the Movies (1947), in which she co-starred with Red Skelton. In 1948, after 17 memorable screen appearances for MGM, the studio unceremoniously dropped her from its roster. She returned to films only twice more after her termination from MGM, in Universal's Francis in the Navy (1955) and Disney's Gus (1976), preferring to focus her energies on television and the stage, where she delighted audiences for three more decades.
In the 1980s the still youthful beauty toured the country in a one-woman show and recorded a live album at the famed Masquers Club entitled, "A Salute to the Great MGM Musicals". One of her last significant stage appearances came in 1984 as Parthy Ann in the Long Beach Civic Light Opera's production of "Showboat", with Alan Young. She remained in semi-retirement in a large home in Wrightwood, California, for most of her later years until her death at the Motion Picture Country Hospital in Woodland Hills in January, 2001.Actress- Actress
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Petite, seductive French leading lady who underwent several early career changes before settling on the acting profession. Corinne Calvet first studied criminal law at France's renowned Sorbonne, but then turned her attention to interior decoration specializing in fine arts and antiques. After studying at the L'Ecole du Cinema in Paris, she made her debut on the stage and also worked as a radio hostess. Small film roles followed. From the time Corinne was 'discovered' by famous producer Hal B. Wallis, brought to America, and signed to a contract with Paramount in 1947, her life developed into a decade-long roller-coaster of feuds, lawsuits, publicity stunts and even an attempted suicide by sleeping pills.
Corinne's Hollywood career got off to a turbulent start, the fiery actress heatedly challenging Wallis over the size of her salary. In spite of growing animosity between her and the producer, she was eventually cast in her first Paramount picture, Rope of Sand (1949) , a film noir set in South Africa and co-starring Burt Lancaster and Paul Henreid. The film emphasized Corinne's sultry appeal and her sexy, somewhat husky voice. She played a nightclub singer, which worked well since she could actually sing (and did so at the famed Manhattan night club Le Cupidon in 1952). The New York Times review (August 4th, 1949) remarked that the cast, though playing somewhat shady characters, were "all products of good acting, and therefore are strangely interesting".
"Rope of Sand" garnered mostly good reviews and was certainly one of the better roles Corinne was to find in Hollywood. Though she featured opposite a number of big-name stars, such as Danny Kaye and James Cagney, she was largely consigned to be the ornamental French dessert. Of her part in On the Riviera (1951), Bosley Crowther commented that she was "pretty, but neglected" (NY Times May 24th, 1951). Corinne (Miss Golden Globe 1952), later gave vent to her frustration at having never been given a proper chance to display her acting range in her 1983 memoir 'Has Corinne Been a Good Girl?'.
The headlines made in her private life often overshadowed her screen career. One highly publicized (and apparently staged) incident had her suing actress Zsa Zsa Gabor over a statement made to, among others, a newspaper columnist, claiming that Corinne's French background was a studio invention. In another, more bizarre, instance in 1967, her then-boyfriend claimed in court that she had 'used voodoo on him' in order to gain control of his finances. There were also two acrimonious and very public divorces from actors John Bromfield and Jeffrey Stone.
From the mid 1950's, Corinne began to appear in international co-productions, dividing her time between Los Angeles and her lavishly furnished top floor apartment at the Avenue MacMahon, near the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris. After the publication of her memoir in 1983, Corinne retired from acting and re-invented herself as a therapist, specializing in hypnosis. She settled down in Santa Monica, California, where she died in June 2001.Actress- Actress
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Rosemary Shirley DeCamp was the quintessential small-town American mother, a calming and steadying presence in scores of films in the 1940s and 1950s. She came to Hollywood after a successful career on the stage and in radio, making her film debut in 1941. Though she worked for many studios, she was most closely associated with Warner Bros., for whom she made many pictures, often playing a young mother or the friend or sister of the heroine. Her best-known role was probably as the mother of George M. Cohan (played by James Cagney) in the classic Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). She also did a lot of work on television; she was a regular on The Bob Cummings Show (1961) and played Marlo Thomas's mother on That Girl (1966).Actress- Actress
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Actress, author, producer, and Photoplay's "Most Popular Actress of 1961," the daughter of Ice Capades skating stars and choreographers Nathan and Edith Walley. She was skating with her parents at age three, but resisted her father's urging to continue, opting to study acting at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her stage debut was at 14, in a summer-stock production of "Charley's Aunt". When she moved to Arizona to raise her three sons, she co-founded two children's theater companies (Pied Piper Productions and Sedona Children's Theater), introducing live theater and teaching acting to disadvantaged children. She also founded the Swiftwind Theater Company, writing film scripts and training American Indian actors and production-crew members. Her 1990 short film Legend of 'Seeks-to-Hunt-Great' (1989), starring Michael Horse, was awarded the National Cine Golden Eagle, the Oklahoma Tribal Council Award for best fiction film, the 1991 Algrave (Portugal) International Video Festival best-of-festival award, and the American Indian Film Festival's best short-subject award. She incorporated the story line -- an Indian boy's appreciation of nature while following a mountain lion -- into her 1993 children's book "Grandfather's Good Medicine." Deborah Walley also wrote scripts for her own production companies, for other children's films, and for Disney Animation, for which she supplied cartoon voice-overs.Actress- Actress
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Kathleen Freeman's introduction to show business came very early in life. Her parents were vaudevillians, and she made her debut at age 2 in their act. Later she attended UCLA with intentions of becoming a pianist, but was bitten by the acting bug and never looked back. She gained experience on stage in various stock and repertory companies, and made her film debut in 1948. One of the most memorable character actresses in recent memory, her stocky build, incredibly expressive face and hearty laugh have kept audiences convulsed for decades, playing a variety of neighborhood gossips, busybodies and eccentrics. Memorable as Sister Mary Stigmata ("The Penguin"), Dan Aykroyd's and John Belushi's nemesis, in The Blues Brothers (1980). She was used as a comic foil by Jerry Lewis in many of his films, always to great advantage. She did much television work, playing in everything from The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961) to Gomer Pyle: USMC (1964) to Hogan's Heroes (1965) to Married... with Children (1987), where she was the voice of Peg's monstrous but never-seen mother, Al Bundy's nemesis. She was working on Broadway in a production of "The Full Monty" when she died of lung cancer in 2001.Actress- Actress
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As a baby, she was winning beauty contests; as a teenager, with good looks and an attractive contralto voice, she was singing with big bands (most notably Enric Madriguera's orchestra in Latin Club Del Rio in Washington, D.C.. She met Rudy Vallee, her first husband, on the radio where she also enjoyed a brief stint as a singer. At age 15, an attack of palsy left her face partially paralyzed. She claimed that it was through facial exercises to overcome the paralysis that she learned the efficacy of facial expression in conveying human emotion, a skill she was renowned for using in her acting.Actress- In her long career, Beatrice Straight did quite a bit of work in the movies, despite plying her trade mostly onstage. When she did grace the silver screen, she did it with great skill. Her first love was theater, having debuted on Broadway in the 1935 "Bitter Oleander". Her work garnered her much acclaim, including laurels in her Tony-winning performance for which she won the award for best supporting actress as Elizabeth Proctor in the 1953 production of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible". In addition to theater and movies, she gave us notable work on television. In 1978, she won an Emmy nomination for her part as the matriarch Alice Dain Leggett in the miniseries The Dain Curse (1978). No less stately, she played the part of Lynda Carter's Queen Mother in the 1970s Wonder Woman (1975) series. Her life was touched by that same kind of elegance and stateliness that she often portrayed onstage and on-screen. She was born Beatrice Whitney Straight in Old Westbury on Long Island. Her father, banker and diplomat Willard Dickerman Straight, associated with the likes of J.P. Morgan. Her mother, Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight, was an heiress of the Whitneys, a dynastic (in the sense of TV's own "Dynasty"), moneyed family on the eastern seaboard. Beatrice went to the best schools and caught the acting bug while a student in Devonshire, England, rendering a critically acclaimed performance in a school production of Ibsen's "A Doll's House." Her studies subsequently turned to acting, and she studied under the tutelage of Michael Chekhov, nephew of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov and a member of the Moscow Art Theatre. Their relationship was somewhat symbiotic in that she persuaded him to start an acting school, later teaching there herself. It was through her work in the theater that she met her husband Peter Cookson, appearing opposite him as leading lady in "The Heiress" in 1948. She is perhaps best known for her achievement in the 1976 movie Network (1976); after only three days of work in that movie in just a few scenes that actually made it into the final cut, Beatrice Straight contributed such a stellar performance that she earned the Academy Award for the best performance by a supporting actress.Actress
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Arlene Francis, the witty actress and popular television personality, was born Arlene Francis Kazanjian on Oct. 20, 1907, in Boston. Her father was an Armenian immigrant, later painter and portrait photographer; her mother was the daughter of actor Alfred Davis. Even at an early age, Arlene said, "I started out with one goal: I wanted to be a serious actress." She studied at the Theatre Guild and then went to Hollywood. Her movie debut was in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), in which Bela Lugosi (often cast as a villain or mad scientist in many of his over 40 horror movies) tied her to an X-cross to extract her blood (trivia: Arlene and Bela were both born on Oct. 20). The live theater, however, was her first love, and she appeared in many plays. In 1935, she married movie executive Neil Agnew; they'd stay together for 10 years. Arlene made her Broadway debut in 1936 and had her first major role in "All That Glitters" two years later. She appeared with Orson Welles in the Mercury Theatre production of "Danton's Death" in 1938, and in "Journey to Jerusalem" in 1940. Her big hit was "The Doughgirls" in 1942; it ran for 1-1/2 years. Arlene had auditioned for her first radio part at the same time she was getting started in the theater; she later recalled, "Radio came easily." In the 1940s, she played in as many as five radio serials a day. Arlene married actor Martin Gabel in 1946 (he died in 1986), and they had a son, Peter. She also was host of a radio dating show called "Blind Date," which was adapted to a TV series in 1949 (Your Big Moment (1949)), and she was the host (1949-1952). It was television that brought Arlene fame, and she became one of the highest-paid women in TV. Arlene was a permanent panelist on CBS' What's My Line? (1950) (a Mark Goodson-Bill Todman production) from 1950 through 1967 and continued as a panelist in a syndicated version that ran until 1975, thus being with the show for its entire 25-year run. She was warm, witty and had a cute laugh--and was always fashionably dressed. She wore a diamond heart-shaped necklace, which started a fad. She was still doing radio while on TV, and in 1960, she was the star of "The Arlene Francis Show," a daily interview show in New York, on WOR; it ran for 23 years. Arlene retired from show business after that and lived comfortably. She was still giving interviews in 1991. Arlene spent her last years living in San Francisco. Arlene died of cancer on Thursday, May 31, 2001, in a San Francisco hospital, at age 93. Her many fans will miss her, Arlene was truly one of the greats.Actress- Actress
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Ann Sothern's film career started as an extra in 1927. Originally a redhead, she began to bleach her hair blonde for comedy roles. After working at MGM and on Broadway, Ann was signed by Columbia Pictures for Let's Fall in Love (1933). The next year she would work with Eddie Cantor in his hit Kid Millions (1934). For the next two years, Ann would appear in a number of "B" pictures until she was dropped by Columbia in 1936. She then went to RKO, where the quality of her films did not improve. She appeared in a series of "B' pictures movies with Gene Raymond, but her career was going nowhere. In 1938 she left RKO and played the tart in Trade Winds (1938), which got her a contract at MGM. She was given the lead in a "B" comedy about a brassy, energetic showgirl not salesgirl--originally intended for Jean Harlow--that wound up becoming a huge hit and spawned a series of sequels that ran until 1947: Maisie (1939). Ann also appeared in such well received features as Brother Orchid (1940), Cry 'Havoc' (1943) and A Letter to Three Wives (1949). After 1950 the roles dried up and Ann turned to television and another hit series, playing the meddlesome Susie in the 1953 series Private Secretary (1953). The series was canceled in 1957 and Ann came back in The Ann Sothern Show (1958), which ran from 1958 to 1961. In 1965, she would be the voice of the 1928 Porter in the camp classic My Mother the Car (1965). While the 1970s and 1980s were relatively quiet for Ann, she would be nominated for an Academy Award for her role as the neighbor of Lillian Gish and Bette Davis in The Whales of August (1987).Actress- Actress
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Young Signe Larsson was only 12 when she started to work as a child extra at The Royal Dramatic Theater and was the youngest ever enrolled for acting studies there at 16. She quickly got leading roles in movies and always received very good reviews. In 1940 she went to Hollywood and signed a contract with RKO. Despite her talent, it didn't lead to any work and she ventured off to New York and the theater. She signed a contract with MGM and made a dozen of movies, including George Cukor's A Double Life (1947), possibly her best. However, she longed to go back to the theater and has worked in London and New York as well as touring around the US.Actress- Actress
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Her father, Donald Cole, was a consulting engineer, and died in 1926 when Kim was only three years old. Her mother, Grace Lind, once performed as a concert pianist. She had one brother who was eight years older than she, and she was educated at Miami Beach High.
According to an in-depth article on Kim Hunter by Joseph Collura in the October 2009 issue of "Classic Images", Kim was quiet and painfully shy as a child and overcame it through the guidance of a local dramatics teacher, a Mrs. Carmine. Included were diction, voice and posture lessons.
She studied at the Actors Studio and her first professional appearance was as "Penny" in "Penny Wise" in Miami in November 1939. Then, she joined a repertory group called "Theatre of Fifteen", but it disbanded in 1942 when WWII took away most of its male members.
She made her Broadway debut performance as "Stella" in "A Streetcar Named Desire" at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York, in December 1947 that was the 1947-1948 season's success and for which she won the Critics Circle and Donaldson awards.
A one-time student of the Pasadena Playhouse, she was appearing in the 1942 production of "Arsenic and Old Lace" when she was discovered by an RKO talent hunter who signed her to a seven-year contract for David O. Selznick's company. Selznick suggested she change her first name to "Kim" and a RKO secretary suggested the last name of "Hunter". A few years later, Irene Mayer Selznick, David's ex-wife by then, recommended Kim for her reprise role of "Stella" in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which she won an Oscar.Actress- Music Artist
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Peggy Lee was Born Norma Dolores Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota, on May 26, 1920. At age four her mother died. Peggy's father, a railroad station agent, remarried but later left home, leaving Peggy's care entrusted to a stepmother who physically abused her. Peggy later memorialized this in the calypso number "One Beating a Day", one of 22 songs she co-wrote for the autobiographical musical "Peg", in which she made her Broadway debut in 1983 at the age of 62. As a youngster Peggy worked as a milkmaid, later turning to singing for money in her teens. While singing on a local radio station in Fargo, the program director there suggested she change her name to Peggy Lee. Peggy's big break came when Benny Goodman hired her to sing with his band after hearing her perform. Peggy shot to stardom when she and Goodman cut the hit record "Why Don't You Do Right?" and went out on her own to record such classics as "Fever", "Lover", "Golden Earrings", "Big Spender" and "Is That All There Is?" - the latter winning her a Grammy Award in 1969. Peggy's vocal style provided a distinctive imprint to countless swing tunes, ballads and big band numbers. She was considered the type of performer equally capable of interpreting a song as uniquely as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Bessie Smith. Her 1989 album, "Peggy Sings the Blues", was a Grammy Award nominee. Peggy was a prolific songwriter and arranger and her 1990 "The Peggy Lee Songbook" contained four songs she wrote with guitarist John Chiodini. Peggy also wrote for jazz greats Duke Ellington, who called her "The Queen", and Johnny Mercer, and composer Quincy Jones. Also in 1990 Peggy was awarded the coveted Pied Piper Award presented by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). She made her mark in Hollywood as an actress, winning an Academy Award nomination for her role as the hard-drinking singer in the jazz saga, Pete Kelly's Blues (1955) and composed songs for the 1955 Walt Disney animated classic Lady and the Tramp (1955). The animated film featured a character named Peg, a broken-down old showgirl of a dog, whose provocative walk was based on the stage-prowl of Peggy Lee. Later she sued Disney and won a landmark legal judgment for a portion of the profits from the videocassette sale of the film. Peggy's private life was racked by physical ailments, a near-fatal fall in 1976, diabetes and a stroke in 1998. She was married four times, all ending in divorce. She and first husband, guitarist Dave Barbour, had a daughter, Nicki, her only child. Peggy and Dave were on the verge of a reconciliation in 1965, but he died of a heart attack before the couple got back together. Peggy has left a vast legend of music that is constantly finding new generations of fans.Singer / Songwriter (my revision)- Actress
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She was the daughter of Andrew and Frances Clooney and grew up in Maysville, Kentucky, where she and her sister Betty Clooney used to sing in her grandfather's mayoral election campaigns, which he won three times. She made her singing debut on Cincinnati radio station WLW in 1941 at 13. On WLW she worked with band leader Barney Rapp, who had also worked with Doris Day and Andy Williams at the same station. She attended high school at Our Lady of Mercy in Cincinnati. In 1946 she appeared with her sister in Atlantic City, New Jersey, at the Steel Pier with Tony Pastor's band. In 1949 she went solo and later appeared in White Christmas (1954), co-starring opposite Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. Her first big hit was "Come On A My House" in 1951. She married José Ferrer in 1953 and they had five children between 1955 and 1960. Her marriage to Ferrer was a tempestuous one and she had a nervous breakdown in 1968, but went on to resume her career in 1976. Her life was dramatized in a 1982 made-for-television movie starring Sondra Locke, who was actually just 16 years Rosemary's junior but constantly lied about her age.
Her son Gabriel is married to singer Debby Boone, daughter of 1950s pop singer Pat Boone. Her brother, Nick Clooney, was an ABC news anchor in Cincinnati, and her nephew George Clooney has developed into one of the biggest movie stars of the 21st century. In 1968 she was standing in the Ambassdor Hotel in Los Angeles with Roosevelt Grier when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in the hotel kitchen after she had participated in his campaign rally. Her top hits include "Hey There" in 1954, "Tenderly", "This Ole House" and "Half As Much" in 1952.Singer / Actress (my revision)- Actress
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Dabbling in practically every facet of show business during her over six-decade career -- nightclubs, cabaret, radio, recordings, TV, film and Broadway -- sultry, opulent, larger-than-life singing star Dolores Gray, distinctive for her sharp, somewhat equine features, lived the high life for most of her time on earth.
She was born Sylvia Dolores Finkelstein in Los Angeles, California on June 7, 1923, the daughter of vaudevillian parents (her father Harry went by the stage name of "Harry Vernon") who divorced when she was quite young. An older brother, Richard Vernon (later Gray) would also go into the entertainment business. Dolores attended Polytechnic High School in the Sun Valley suburb of Los Angeles and, while there, became a member of the girl's glee club.
Singing in Hollywood supper clubs as early as age 14, Dolores was discovered as a teenager by Rudy Vallee, who helped make her a minor celebrity on his self-titled radio show. She went on to earn two brief, uncredited bits as a singer in the films Lady for a Night (1942) (singing "Has Anybody Seen My Man?") and Mr. Skeffington (1944) (singing "It Had to Be You"). Making her Broadway debut in the show "Seven Lively Arts," a Broadway revue produced by Billy Rose, she co-starred in the musical "Are You With It?" with Johnny Downs a year later.
During this time Dolores developed a strong reputation on both coasts as a cabaret and supper club entertainer. By 1945, she was starring in her own radio program. A chance of a lifetime occurred in 1947 when Dolores gussied up London's post-war theater district as marksman "Annie Oakley" in the Broadway musical hit "Annie Get Your Gun." She was afforded this huge opportunity after the Broadway star, Ethel Merman, turned down the tour. Dolores became the toast of the West End for over two years.
Broadway beckoned following her London success and the dusky alto returned to New York. Co-starring with Bert Lahr in the Broadway musical revue "Two on the Aisle" (1951), which had a decent run, she went on to earn raves in the very short-lived 1953 musical "Carnival in Flanders" with John Raitt. She won the Tony award for this in spite of the fact it closed after only six performances! Dolores would return to Broadway in the 1959 musical "Destry Rides Again" co-starring pre-TV star Andy Griffith and earning a Tony nomination. This was followed by the ill-fated 1967 musical "Sherry!" based on the Kaufman/Hart play "The Man Who Came to Dinner."
Not only was Broadway interested when Dolores returned from London, but MGM also wanted in on the action. Signing the leggy star to a short-term contract, the results were disappointing as the "Golden Age of Hollywood" musicals was on a major decline. She did manage, however, to nab a few scene-grabbing second leads in such musicals as It's Always Fair Weather (1955) starring Gene Kelly; Kismet (1955) with Howard Keel and Ann Blyth; The Opposite Sex (1956) starring June Allyson; and in Joan Collins, a rather misguided musical version of "The Women" film classic. She would also co-star in the chic non-musical Designing Woman (1957) starring Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall. And then it was over for Dolores in movies.
As the years went by, Dolores would attract tabloid attention with her extravagant lifestyle, outlandish clothes and "Auntie Mame"-like joie de vivre. Being the trooper she was, she found work on TV variety (she made several appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show"), recorded for Capitol Records (the album "Warm Brandy"), and remained a top-of-the-line nitery star for decades to come. In 1973, she returned to London and replaced Angela Lansbury in the musical "Gypsy" at the Piccadilly Theatre. Over a decade later (1986), she came in as a replacement Dorothy Brock in the Broadway revival of "42nd Street," and, a year later, was featured in the London production of Sondheim's "Follies," earning show-stopping applause for her version of the classic song "I'm Still Here."
Despite her somewhat outré reputation, Dolores married only once -- to California businessman and race horse owner Andrew Crevolin in 1967. Although the marriage lasted only 9 years, the couple never divorced -- in fact, they never even formally separated as she was a devout Catholic. She and Crevolin would remain close friends until his death in 1992. Dolores herself passed away a decade later in her Manhattan apartment of a heart attack at age 78 on June 26, 2002.Actress- Katy Jurado was born María Cristina Estela Jurado García into a wealthy family on January 16, 1924. Her early years were spent amid luxury until her family's lands were confiscated by the federal government for redistribution to the landless peasantry. Despite the loss of property, the matriarch of the family, her grandmother, continued to live by her aristocratic ideals. When movie star Emilio Fernandez discovered Katy at the age of 16 and wanted to cast her in one of his films, Jurado's grandmother objected to her wish to become a movie actress. To get around the ban, Katy slipped from the grasp of her family's control by marrying actor Víctor Velázquez.
Jurado eventually made her debut in No matarás (1943) during the what has been called "The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema". Blessed with stunning beauty and an assertive personality, Jurado specialized in playing determined women in a wide variety of films in Mexico and the United States. Her looks were evocative of the indigenous peoples of Mexico, and she used what she called her "distinguished and sensuous look" to carve a niche for herself in Mexican cinema. Indian features were unusual for a film star in Mexico--despite the success of Fernandez, the fabled "El Indio"--and her ethnic look meant she typically was cast as a dangerous seductress, a popular type in Mexican movies. The Mexican media reported that an American movie director at one of her first Hollywood auditions laughed at her derisively because she spoke English so poorly, and an outraged Jurado promptly stormed out of the audition room, cursing in Spanish. As it turned out, that kind of brazen behavior was exactly the type of personality that the director was looking for.
In addition to acting, Jurado worked as a movie columnist and radio reporter to support her family. She also worked as a bullfight critic, and it was at a bullfight that Jurado was spotted by John Wayne and director Budd Boetticher. Boetticher, who was also a professional bullfighter, cast Jurado in his autobiographical film Bullfighter and the Lady (1951), which he shot in Mexico. She was cast in her part despite having very limited English-language skills and had to speak her lines phonetically. Luis Buñuel cast her in his Mexican melodrama The Brute (1953), and then she made her big breakthrough in American films in the role of Gary Cooper's former mistress, saloon owner Helen Ramirez, in High Noon (1952). The role necessitated her moving to Hollywood. She received two Golden Globe nominations from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for that part, for Most Promising Newcomer and Best Supporting Actress, winning the latter. "She planted the Mexican flag in the U.S. film industry, and made her country proud", said National Actors Association official Mauricio Hernandez. Her "High Noon" performance historically proved to be an important acting watershed for Latino women in American movies. Jurado's portrayal undermined the Hollywood stereotype of the flaming, passionate Mexican "spitfire." Previously, Mexican and Latino women in Hollywood films were characterized by an unbridled sexuality, as exemplified by such diverse actresses as Lupe Velez, Dolores Del Río (who came to loathe Hollywood and returned to Mexico in the 1940s), and Rita Hayworth, nee Margarita Cansino. Although Jurado's character was forced to kow-tow to the stereotype in "High Noon", delivering such lines as, "It takes more than big, broad shoulders to make a man," the actress' great dignity in her role as a moral arbiter among the competing factions of the marshal and his fiancée, the townspeople and the gunmen out to kill the marshal showed her Helen Ramirez to be in control and controlled by nothing, not even her former love for the marshal. Her restrained performance, delivered with a great deal of conviction, emphasized the shortcomings of the rest of the other characters. Her moral integrity is the reason she, like the marshal, must abandon the town.
With her superb performance, Jurado proved that Latino women could be more than just sexpots in the American cinema. Importantly, working against the tropes of a racist cinema, she used her talent to introduce into the American cinema the model of the un-stereotyped Mexican woman who is identifiably Mexican. One of the best examples of this can be seen at the end of the middle of her career, when Jurado played sheriff Slim Pickens' wife and partner in Sam Peckinpah's elegiac Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973). Determined and tough as nails, Jurado's character was clearly her screen husband's equal, and she had a very moving scene with Pickens as his character faced death. Jurado was blessed with extraordinary eyes, which were both beautiful and expressive, their beauty and strength never fading with age. Two years after "High Noon", Jurado received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her role as Spencer Tracy's Indian wife in Edward Dmytryk's Broken Lance (1954), making her the first Mexican actress thus honored.
She refused to sign a contract with a major Hollywood studio in order to be able to return to Mexico between her American roles to star in Mexican films. She +remained in Los Angeles for 10 years, marrying Ernest Borgnine, her co-star in The Badlanders (1958), in 1959. During their tempestuous relationship, Jurado and Borgnine separated and reconciled before finally separating for good in 1961. The tabloids reported that Borgnine had abused her, and their separation proved rocky as well, as they fought over alimony. Their divorce became final in 1964. Borgnine summed up his ex-wife as "beautiful, but a tiger", a bon mot that described her on-screen persona as well (she had two children with former husband Victor Velasquez, a daughter and a son, who tragically was killed in an automobile accident in 1981).
Jurado played the wife of Marlon Brando's nemesis Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) in One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Brando's sole directorial effort. In her role she also was the mother of a young woman who was Brando's love interest, thus marking a career transition point as she assumed the role of a mature woman. As Jurado aged, she appeared in fewer films, but notable among them included Arrowhead (1953) with Charlton Heston, Trapeze (1956) in support of Burt Lancaster and Man from Del Rio (1956) with her fellow Mexican national Anthony Quinn who, unlike Jurado, had become an American citizen. She also appeared with Quinn in _Barabbas (1962)_and The Children of Sanchez (1978).
She appeared on the Western-themed American TV shows Death Valley Days (1952), The Rifleman (1958), The Westerner (1960) and The Virginian (1962). Her career in the US began to wind down, and she was reduced to appearing in "B" pictures like Smoky (1966) with Fess Parker and the Elvis Presley movie Stay Away, Joe (1968). She attempted to commit suicide in 1968, and then moved back home to Mexico permanently, though she continued to appear in American films as a character actress. Her last American film appearance was in Stephen Frears' The Hi-Lo Country (1998), capping a half-century-long American movie career that continued due to her talent and remarkable presence, long after her extraordinary good looks had faded.
Aside from acting in films in the US and Europe, she continued to act in Mexican films. Her most memorable role in Mexican movies was in Nosotros los pobres (1948) (aka "We the Poor") opposite superstar Pedro Infante. Though in the latter part of her career she appeared occasionally in American films shot in Mexico (including an appearance with her former mentor, Emilio Fernandez, in "Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid" and John Huston's Under the Volcano (1984)), she appeared mostly in Mexican movies in the last decades of her career, becoming a prominent and highly respected character actress. She played the leader of a religious cult in the Bunuel-like satire Divine (1998). Jurado won three Ariel awards, the Mexican equivalent of the Oscar, a Best Supporting Actress award in 1954 for Bunuel's The Brute (1953) a Best Actress Award in 1974 for Fe, esperanza y caridad (1974) and a Best Supporting Actress award in 1999 for "El evangelio de las Maravillas". She also was awarded a Special Golden Ariel for Lifetime Achievment in 1997. In the north, she was honored with a Golden Boot Award by the Motion Picture & Television Fund in 1992 and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Jurado was an avid promoter of her home state of Morelos as a location for filmmakers.
Towards the end of her life, she suffered from heart and lung ailments. Katy Jurado died on July 5, 2002, at the age of 78 at her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. She was survived by her daughter.Actress - Versatile, award-winning character actress Eileen Heckart, with the lean, horsey face and assured, fervent gait, was born Anna Eileen Herbert on March 29, 1919, in Columbus, Ohio. An only child, she lived with her mother after her parents separated when she was 2 years old, and was eventually adopted by her grandfather, whose surname (Heckart) she took. Her childhood was an acutely unhappy one. Her mother, an alcoholic, was married five times, and her stern grandmother, with whom Eileen was often shuttled off to stay, was physically abusive. To survive, Eileen escaped into the joy of movies as an adolescent.
She graduated from Ohio State University in 1942 with a degree in English. That same year she married John Harrison Yankee Jr., an insurance broker. They had three sons in a union that lasted 54 years, unusual for a feisty, independent lady of show business. While her husband was off to the war (he joined the Navy), she moved to New York and toiled in a number of day jobs while trying to jump start a career in acting. Beginning in summer stock, she took classes at the American Theatre Wing and apprenticed in a number of obscure plays/revues such as "Tinker's Dam" (1943) and "Musical Moment" (1943).
Following extensive work on the NY stage, which included her Broadway debut as an understudy and eventual replacement in "The Voice of the Turtle" (1945), she established herself as a major force on the Great White Way. Her first big break under the Broadway lights was her portrayal of the arch, lonely schoolteacher in William Inge's "Picnic", which earned her both the Outer Critics Circle and Theatre World awards in 1953. (Rosalind Russell played the role in the film version.)
Heckart was in demand by then as flinty, overwrought, down-to-earth types or wise-to-the-bone old gals. Later award-worthy Broadway hits would include "The Bad Seed" (which earned her the Donaldson award), "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs" (Tony-nom), "Invitation to a March" (Tony-nom), and "Butterflies Are Free" (Tony-nom). Intermixed were live performances on TV for such prestigious programs as "Goodyear Television Playhouse", "Kraft Television Theatre", "Studio One", "Suspense", "The Alcoa Hour", and "Playhouse 90".
Heckart was a dominant yet only intermittent force in films, making her debut in the so-so Miracle in the Rain (1956) featured as Jane Wyman's confidante. Although greatly disappointed at losing the bid to recreate her Broadway role in the film version of Picnic (1955) (Rosalind Russell won the honors), she did receive the satisfaction of transferring her scene-chewing stage role as the despairing, drunken mom whose son falls victim to young Patty McCormack's malevolent mischief in The Bad Seed (1956). For this Eileen copped both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. During this period she fell into a number of dowdy matrons, dour moms and matter-of-fact gal friends with flashy roles in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Bus Stop (1956), Hot Spell (1958) and Heller in Pink Tights (1960).
Earning another Tony nomination and the New York Drama Critics Award for her brittle role in the 1957 production of Inge's "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs", she was pregnant with her third child when the film version of The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960) started rolling and Angela Lansbury stepped in to replace her.
For most of the 1960s, she traded off TV guest parts ("Ben Casey", "Dr. Kildare", "The F.B.I.", "The Defenders") with theater roles ("Pal Joey", "Barefoot in the Park", "You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running"). She was finally rewarded on film as blind Edward Albert's busybody mom in Butterflies Are Free (1972), netting the Academy Award for "Best Supporting Actress". It was a role she had played on Broadway, receiving her fourth Tony nomination.
The Oscar did not bring her the choice roles which other winners had enjoyed but she continued on in all three mediums quite enviably. While not fond of sitcom work, she gave Emmy-style for her guest work on such shows as "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", "Love & War", "Ellen", "Cybill", and was part of a short-lived ensemble series as one of The 5 Mrs. Buchanans (1994). She also put together a one-woman stage tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt and gave assertive theater performances in "The Ladies of the Alamo", "The Cemetery Club", and "Northeast Local".
The Tony Award eluded the four-time nominee during her long, eventful career. The Tony committee finally made up for this oversight in 2000 by awarding her a "special" Tony for "excellence in theater, triggered by her final, multiple award-winning success (Obie, Drama Desk) as an Alzheimer's patient in "The Waverly Gallery" in 2000. In retrospect, it was none too soon as Heckart, who worked nearly until the end, had been diagnosed with lung cancer, which was kept secret until after her death, on December 31, 2001, aged 82.Actress - Phyllis Hannah Bickle was born in Chelsea in 1915 and studied dancing at the Margaret Morris school of dance, until an injury forced her to give up dancing and turn instead to acting. Her 70 year film career began with a bit part in The Arcadians (1927) when she was just 12 years old. Along with over 40 movies, she had a successful stage career, spanning 1925 ('Crossings' with Ellen Terry) to 1994 ('Bed') - appearing in such works as 'Blithe Spirit', 'The Heiress' and 'Peter Pan', as the title role of the boy who never grew up.
Phyllis' film breakthrough came in 1941 in the adaptation of the HG Wells story, The Remarkable Mr. Kipps (1941) in which she was cast as the servant girl, a part which had originally been turned down by Margaret Lockwood. In her next film, she was starring opposite international star Robert Donat, a far cry from the music hall comedians (George Formby, Arthur Askey) she had been acting with only a few years earlier. The Man in Grey (1943) truly catapulted her to stardom and from then on there was no looking back. Phyllis Calvert became one of the names most associated with the Gainsborough costume melodramas of the 1940s, usually as the sweet heroine, or the steadfast non-nonsense leader.
After a small trip to Hollywood in the late 1940s, Phyllis returned to England and earned her one BAFTA nomination for the role of the mother of a deaf girl in Crash of Silence (1952) but after that her film career slowed down, with family taking precedence. While shooting Indiscreet (1958), Phyllis was struck a cruel blow when her husband of 16 years, Peter Murray-Hill, passed away. Her stage career picked up markedly in the 1960s when she began taking more and more roles to better raise their two children solely. She gracefully slid into a niche of character roles, usually the kindly mother or aunt, and in 1970, had her own TV series, Kate (1970). In the 1980s she concentrated more on television, only appearing twice on stage. Her final play was in 1994, film in 1997, and TV appearance in 2000.Actress (my revision) - Editor
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Margaret Booth was born on 14 January 1898 in Los Angeles, California, USA. She was an editor and producer, known for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Murder by Death (1976) and Annie (1982). She died on 28 October 2002 in Los Angeles, California, USA.Editor (my revision)- Actress
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Born Mildred Linton in Ottumwa, Iowa on December 12, 1909, Karen Morley was adopted by a well-to-do family who moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1920s. She enrolled at Hollywood High School and studied for a career in medicine at UCLA, but a class in theater changed her career ambitions.
After studying at Pasadena Playhouse, she was signed by Fox Studios and her big chance came when producer Howard Hughes selected her to play the blond moll in the 1932 crime epic, Scarface (1932), Morley was put on a contract by MGM and starred in such early 1930s movies as Mata Hari (1931) (with Greta Garbo), Arsène Lupin (1932) (with John Barrymore), Dinner at Eight (1933) (with Jean Harlow), as well as films with Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery and Boris Karloff. In 1934, Morley left MGM after arguments about her roles and her private life, including her intention to start a family and her marriage to director Charles Vidor. She continued working as a freelance performer, appearing in King Vidor's Our Daily Bread (1934), Michael Curtiz' Black Fury (1935) and Pride and Prejudice (1940).
In 1947, her screen career came to a halt when she testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and refused to answer questions about her possible enrollment in the Communist Party. Afterward, she continued promoting left-wing causes and married actor Lloyd Gough. In 1954, she ran unsuccessfully as a New York lieutenant governor candidate for the American Labor Party. Morley died March 8, 2003 at the Motion Picture Country House in Woodland Hills.Actress- Actress
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Her father was Irish Philadelphian newspaperman, Benny McNulty. He was related to Jim Farley, Roosevelt's campaign manager and later U.S. Postmaster General. As a child, she sang songs at a silent movie theater. After the sixth grade she joined a touring vaudeville act called "The Kiddie Kabaret." Billed as Penny McNulty, she sang and danced with Milton Berle and Gene Raymond. Her first speaking part was in a Jack Benny Broadway show, "Great Temptations".
Moving to Hollywood, she took a new name after marrying dentist Lawrence Singleton. Her first name derived from having saved large amounts of penny coins. She played a tough nightclub dancer in After the Thin Man (1936) and acted/sang/danced in Swing Your Lady (1938), one of the movies Humphrey Bogart regarded as his worst. Though naturally a brunette, she bleached her hair blonde ever since she got the role of Blondie in that long-lived series.Actress- Producer
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Leni Riefenstahl's show-biz experience began with an experiment: she wanted to know what it felt like to dance on the stage. Success as a dancer gave way to film acting when she attracted the attention of film director Arnold Fanck, subsequently starring in some of his mountaineering pictures. With Fanck as her mentor, Riefenstahl began directing films.
Her penchant for artistic work earned her acclaim and awards for her films across Europe. It was her work on Triumph of the Will (1935), a documentary commissioned by the Nazi government about Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, that would come back to haunt her after the atrocities of World War II. Despite her protests to the contrary, Riefenstahl was considered an intricate part of the Third Reich's propaganda machine. Condemned by the international community, she did not make another movie for over 50 years.Director- Actress
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Martha Ellen Scott was born in Jamesport, Missouri, to Letha (McKinley) and Walter Alva Scott, an engineer and garage owner. She entered films in the early 1940s, following an initial appearance in stock. Her first film appearance was Our Town (1940), playing the same character as she played on the stage. She won an Academy Award nomination for her superb performance in the film. Martha Scott is remembered as a highly talented actress, however her work is often forgotten today as she was never seen as a truly bankable star by the major studios.
A recent memorable performance for Martha was as Sister Beatrice in the camp disaster movie Airport 1975 (1974). She played a dominant experienced nun with Helen Reddy, in a cast of major stars facing disaster on the stricken Boeing 747 jetliner.
She continued to work consistently throughout the 1970s and 1980s, often appearing in television movies and on the stage. She died at the age of 90 in May 2003 and is buried with her husband Mel Powell.Actress- Actress
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One of the most natural beauties of the 1960s with a gentle voice and personality to match, blonde Hope Lange was born in Redding Ridge, Connecticut, and performed on stage from the age of nine. She studied both drama and dance under Martha Graham, did some modeling and then worked in stock companies and on television, dancing on Jackie Gleason shows. She acted in just a handful of motion pictures, garnering an Academy Award nomination for one, and later won two Emmys for her best-loved role on television.
Hope was one of four children of an actress mother, upon whose shoulders fell the responsibility of supporting the family after the premature death of her father, the composer/arranger John Lange, at age 61 in 1942. Along with her siblings, she worked as a waitress in the family's Greenwich Village restaurant, 'Minette's of Washington Square'. By chance, she made the acquaintance of Eleanor Roosevelt, who owned an apartment in the village, and ended up walking the former First Lady's prized Scotch terrier, Fala. This got her photo into a newspaper, which, in turn, led to an advertising job with pictures on the June 1949 cover of 'Radio-Electronics', sporting the futuristic red 'Man from Mars' pith helmet with built-in radio. Still just fifteen years old, Hope spent the next two years at college in Oregon and New York, then found her first job in television and was subsequently signed by 20th Century-Fox.
After successful screen tests, Lange made her motion picture debut in Bus Stop (1956) (Barbara Eden was one of her competitors for the part) opposite Marilyn Monroe and husband-to-be Don Murray. Even the great Marilyn was said to have felt a little threatened by another blonde who was not only beautiful but five years younger and could act as well. After playing the wife of the titular character in The True Story of Jesse James (1957), a picture which she later referred to as a 'turkey', Lange was cast as the fragile Selena Cross in the melodramatic but good-looking soap opera Peyton Place (1957). This movie was regarded as risqué and controversial at the time, dealing with previously taboo subjects such as rape and incest. For her part of the abused girl, raped by her alcoholic stepfather, whom she finally kills in self-defense, Lange received an Academy Award nomination.
The glossy production values of The Best of Everything (1959), a film about ambitious New York career women working in a magazine publishing house, overshadowed most of the character development. However, Lange (who was billed above the established star Joan Crawford) was dealt with most favorably by the critics. According to Bosley Crowther of The New York Times: "Simply because she has the most to do, and does it gracefully, Miss Lange comes off best' (October 9,1959). The following decade was to be a period of mixed fortunes for Hope Lange.
In 1961, Lange began a long-standing relationship with fellow actor Glenn Ford and left husband Don Murray. Ford, in his dual role of star and associate producer, put pressure on director Frank Capra to cast Lange as the female lead in his next motion picture, the whimsical Damon Runyon-inspired comedy Pocketful of Miracles (1961), even though Shirley Jones had already been assigned to the role. Capra reluctantly gave way, though Hope Lange was likely miscast as the wisecracking showgirl. Lange again co-starred with Ford in the glossy romantic melodrama Love Is a Ball (1963), wherein acting took a back seat to sumptuous costumes and the French Riviera. On the negative side of the ledger, Lange had unsuccessfully auditioned for the part of Maria in West Side Story (1961), which ultimately went to Natalie Wood. Instead, she was cast as Elvis Presley's psychiatrist in Wild in the Country (1961), which was generally panned by critics, except for Variety singling out her performance above the rest as 'intelligent' and 'sensitive'. Lange was also slated to appear as love interest to George Peppard in How the West Was Won (1962), but her scenes ended up on the cutting room floor.
Turning increasingly towards television, Hope Lange achieved her most lasting fame as the popular star of the amiable sitcom The Ghost & Mrs. Muir (1968) as a widow who (with two kids and a housekeeper) takes up residence in a quaint cottage also inhabited by the cantankerous ghost of a sea captain (Edward Mulhare). The show ran for three seasons and Lange won two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Comedy Series (1969 and 1970). In her only other recurring TV role, she played Dick Van Dyke's wife in The New Dick Van Dyke Show (1971), but with less rewarding results. She received good notices for portraying Charles Bronson's dying wife, the victim of the original Death Wish (1974) and its raison d'etre. She then acted primarily on television, with few exceptions, including Blue Velvet (1986) and Clear and Present Danger (1994) as a U.S. senator. In 1977, she replaced Tony Award-winning Ellen Burstyn in the starring role of Doris in 'Same Time, Next Year' on Broadway.
In the early '90s, Lange underwent surgery for a brain tumour. While the operation was successful, her health remained precarious and she limited her screen appearances, retiring altogether in 1998. She died of an intestinal infection in December 2003, aged 70.Actress- Actress
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Jeanne Crain was born in Barstow, California, on May 25, 1925. The daughter of a high school English teacher and his wife, Jeanne was moved to Los Angeles not long after her birth after her father got another teaching position in that city. While in junior high school, Jeanne played the lead in a school production which set her on the path to acting. When she was in high school Jeanne was asked to take a screen test to appear in a film by Orson Welles. Unfortunately, she didn't get the part, but it did set her sights on being a movie actress.
After high school, Jeanne enrolled at UCLA to study drama. At the age of 18, Jeanne won a bit part in Fox Studio's film entitled The Gang's All Here (1943) and a small contract. Her next film saw Jeanne elevated to a more substantial part in Home in Indiana (1944) the following year, which was filmed in neighboring Kentucky. The movie was an unquestionable hit. On the strength of that box-office success, Jeanne was given a raise and star billing, as Maggie Preston, in the next film of 1944, In the Meantime, Darling (1944). Unfortunately, the critics not only roasted the film, but singled out Jeanne's performance in particular. She rebounded nicely in her last film of the year, Winged Victory (1944). The audiences loved it and the film was profitable.
In 1945, Jeanne was cast in State Fair (1945) as Margie Frake who travels to the fair and falls in love with a reporter played by Dana Andrews. Now, Jeanne got a bigger contract and more recognition. Later that year, Jeanne married Paul Brooks on New Year's Eve. Although her mother wasn't supportive of the marriage, the union lasted until her husband's death and produced seven children. The year 1947 was an off year for Jeanne, as she took time off to bear the Brooks' first child.
In 1949, Jeanne appeared in three films, A Letter to Three Wives (1949), The Fan (1949), and Pinky (1949). It was this latter film which garnered her an Oscar nomination as Best Actress for her role as Pinky Johnson, a nurse who sets up a clinic in the Deep South. She lost to Olivia de Havilland for The Heiress (1949). Jeanne left Fox after filming Vicki (1953) in 1953, with Jean Peters. She had made 23 films for the studio that started her career, but she needed a well-deserved change. As with any good artist, Jeanne wanted to expand her range instead of playing the girl-next-door types.
She went briefly to Warner Brothers for the filming of Duel in the Jungle (1954) in 1954. The film was lukewarm at best. Jeanne, then, signed a contract, that same year, with Universal Studios with promises of better, high profile roles. She went into production in the film Man Without a Star (1955) which was a hit with audiences and critics. After The Joker Is Wild (1957) in 1957, Jeanne took time off for her family and to appear in a few television programs. She returned, briefly, to film in Guns of the Timberland (1960) in 1960. The films were sporadic after that. In 1967, she appeared in a low-budget suspense yarn called Hot Rods to Hell (1966). Her final film was as Clara Shaw in 1972's Skyjacked (1972).
Jeanne died of a heart attack in Santa Barbara, California, on December 14, 2003. Her husband Paul Brooks had died two months earlier.Actress- Wendy Hiller, daughter of Frank and Marie Hiller, was born on 15th August 1912 in Bramhall, near Stockport, Cheshire, England. She was educated at Winceby House School, Bexhill then moved on to Manchester Repertory Theatre. She appeared on stage in Sir John Barry's tour of Evensong, then as Sally Hardcastle in Love on the Dole. She toured extensively, playing in London and New York. She took leading parts in Pygmalion and Saint Joan at the Malvern Festival in 1936.Actress
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Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born on May 12, 1907 in Hartford, Connecticut to a suffragist, Katharine Martha (Houghton), and a doctor, Thomas Norval Hepburn, who both always encouraged her to speak her mind, develop it fully, and exercise her body to its full potential. An athletic tomboy as a child, she was very close to her brother Tom; at 14 she was devastated to find him dead, the apparent result of accidentally hanging himself while practicing a hanging trick their father had taught them. For many years afterward, she used his November 8 birth date as her own. She became shy around girls her age and was largely schooled at home. She did attend Bryn Mawr College, where she decided to become an actress, appearing in many of their productions.
After graduating, she began getting small roles in plays on Broadway and elsewhere. She always attracted attention, especially for her role in "Art and Mrs. Bottle" (1931). She finally broke into stardom when she took the starring role of the Amazon princess Antiope in "A Warrior's Husband" (1932). The inevitable film offers followed; after making a few screen tests, she was cast in A Bill of Divorcement (1932), opposite John Barrymore. The film was a hit, and after agreeing to her salary demands, RKO signed her to a contract. She made five films between 1932 and 1934. For her third, Morning Glory (1933), she won her first Academy Award. Her fourth, Little Women (1933), was the most successful picture of its day.
But stories were beginning to leak out, of her haughty behavior off- screen and her refusal to play the Hollywood Game, always wearing slacks and no makeup, never posing for pictures or giving interviews. Audiences were shocked at her unconventional behavior instead of applauding it, and so when she returned to Broadway in 1934 to star in "The Lake", the critics panned her, and the audiences, who at first bought up tickets, soon deserted her. When she returned to Hollywood, things didn't get much better. From 1935-1938, she had only two hits: Alice Adams (1935), which brought her her second Oscar nomination, and Stage Door (1937); the many flops included Break of Hearts (1935), Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Mary of Scotland (1936), Quality Street (1937), and the now-classic Bringing Up Baby (1938).
With so many flops, she came to be labeled "box-office poison". She decided to go back to Broadway to star in "The Philadelphia Story" (1938) and was rewarded with a smash. She quickly bought the film rights and so was able to negotiate her way back to Hollywood on her own terms, including her choice of director and co-stars. The Philadelphia Story (1940) was a box-office hit, and Hepburn, who won her third Oscar nomination for the film, was bankable again. For her next film, Woman of the Year (1942), she was paired with Spencer Tracy, and the chemistry between them lasted for eight more films, spanning the course of 25 years, and a romance that lasted that long off-screen. (She received her fourth Oscar nomination for the film.) Their films included the very successful Adam's Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952), and Desk Set (1957).
With The African Queen (1951), Hepburn moved into middle-aged spinster roles, receiving her fifth Oscar nomination for the film. She played more of these types of roles throughout the 1950s, and won more Oscar nominations for many of them, including her roles in Summertime (1955), The Rainmaker (1956), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). Her film roles became fewer and farther between in the 1960s, as she devoted her time to the ailing Tracy. For one of her film appearances in this decade, in Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), she received her ninth Oscar nomination. After a five-year absence from films, she then made Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), her last film with Tracy and the last film Tracy ever made; he died just weeks after finishing it. It garnered Hepburn her tenth Oscar nomination and her second win. The next year, she did The Lion in Winter (1968), which brought her her eleventh Oscar nomination and third win.
In the 1970s, she turned to making made-for-TV films, with The Glass Menagerie (1973), Love Among the Ruins (1975), and The Corn Is Green (1979). She still continued to make an occasional appearance in feature films, such as Rooster Cogburn (1975) with John Wayne and On Golden Pond (1981) with Henry Fonda. This last brought her her twelfth Oscar nomination and fourth win - the latter still the record.
She made more TV-films in the 1980s and wrote her autobiography, 'Me', in 1991. Her last feature film was Love Affair (1994), with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, and her last TV- film was One Christmas (1994). With her health declining, she retired from public life in the mid-1990s. She died at 96 at her home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.Actress- Actress
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The youngest of five children born to a real estate broker, glamorous actress/singer Irene Manning began this world in Cincinatti, Ohio, as Inez Harvuot in 1912. Classically trained at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, she showed great potential for the grand opera scene but an even stronger flair for acting that led her to combine both of her talents and attempt musical theater and film.
Appearing on stage billed as Hope Manning in such late 30s productions as "The Great Waltz," "H.M.S. Pinafore," and "The Gypsy Baron," sagebrush icon Gene Autry offered her a kiss in her very first screen role a year later in The Old Corral (1936) over at Republic Studios. Warner Bros. saw potential in the petite blonde beauty and decided to pick up her option. Amid such standard WWII fare as Spy Ship (1942), she more than made the grade as the colorful soprano opposite Dennis Morgan in Sigmund Romberg's The Desert Song (1943) (which she had done on stage a few years earlier), and is probably best remembered today in the secondary role of diva Fay Templeton in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) opposite the Oscar-winning James Cagney. The early 1940s were fruitful years for Irene appearing romantically opposite Humphrey Bogart in the drama The Big Shot (1942) and Dennis Morgan (again) in Shine on Harvest Moon (1944), in addition to offering added glamour in The Doughgirls (1944) with Ann Sheridan and Alexis Smith and Escape in the Desert (1945) featuring Philip Dorn.
The musical stage took priority in the second half of the decade. Making her Broadway debut with the short-lived musical "Susannah, Don't You Cry" in 1939, she also appeared in the operetta "The Chocolate Soldier" and again on Broadway in Lerner and Loewe's "The Day Before Spring." Irene graced the stage in "DuBarry" and "Serenade" while in London and settled in England for a long spell. She also filmed two movies while there, A Yank in London (1945) [A Yank in London] and Bonnie Prince Charlie (1948), retiring completely from the screen by decade's end. She appeared on her own BBC TV show "An American in England," before returning to the States in 1951 for TV and nightclub work. She subsequently retired altogether and concentrated on teaching acting and voice. She was also an excellent abstract painter.
It was her longtime agent who persuaded Irene to come out of retirement and reappear on the musical stage. Such showcases included "Pal Joey," "Mame," and "The King and I," to mention a few. Ms. Manning died in 2004 of congestive heart failure and was survived by her five stepchildren from her fourth (and final) marriage to space engineer and Lockheed executive Maxwell Hunter II, who died in 2001.Actress- Noted stage actress who has also done limited work in TV and film. Born in Germany and raised in Madison, Wisconsin, she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. Her Broadway debut was in "The Seagull" in 1938. She won her first Tony (and other awards) in 1950 for Clifford Odets "The Country Girl". Her second Tony was for the role of Martha in Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?".
She later became a highly influential acting teacher at New York's HB Studio (founded by Herbert Berghof in 1945) and authored best-selling acting texts, Respect for Acting, with Haskel Frankel, and A Challenge for the Actor. Her most substantial contributions to theater pedagogy were a series of "object exercises" that built on the work of Konstantin Stanislavski and Yevgeni Vakhtangov.
She was elected to the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981. She twice won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play and received a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1999.Actress - A student of Northern Illinois University, Carrie switched to drama at Chicago's Goodman Theatre School where she won the Sarah Siddons Award as outstanding graduate. After graduating, Carrie worked in TV and also appeared in TV movies. She made her big screen debut in Rabbit, Run (1970), working with James Caan. Her next movie was Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) for which her role as Tina Balser gave her an Academy Award nomination. With similar Golden Globe nominations, Carrie was on the brink of stardom when she left it all to live with rock musician Neil Young, the father of her son, Zeke. It would be almost 8 years before she returned to the screen as a supporting actor in Brian De Palma's The Fury (1978). After a few more films, Carrie debuted on Broadway in the 1981 play "A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking." She continued making movies in the 1980s, some of which were good; others were not. In the '90s, most of Carrie's supporting actor roles are being filmed for television. One of the big screen films which she made was the critically acclaimed Blue Sky (1994), which was released years after being shot,and gave Jessica Lange an Oscar. Carrie also turned up on series television in The X-Files (1993) and Murder, She Wrote (1984).Actress
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One of Hollywood's more talented and watchable stars on screen was sullen and thin 50s actress Jan Sterling who didn't quite reach the top echelon of stardom but certainly ensured audiences of a real good time with her sexy pout and flashy style in soaps, film noir and saucy comedy.
Jan was born Jane Sterling Adriance in Manhattan in 1921 to a well-to-do family. Her father was a prominent advertising executive who divorced her mother when the girl was only eight years old. Her mother remarried (to an oilman) when Jan was still a youngster and the family relocated abroad where Jan was schooled by private tutors in Brazil, then later in London and Paris.
Although both sets of parents disapproved, Jan, who by this time possessed a strong British accent, set her sites on acting and was eventually enrolled in Fay Compton's dramatic school in London. A strong-minded young lady with a heartfelt passion for the arts, she returned to Manhattan to conquer Broadway and by the age of 17 had found her first ingénue role in "Bachelor Born," playing (naturally) a young British lady. Over the next 11 years, Jan dominated Broadway as proper British ladies while billing herself as "Jane Adrian."
One of her highlights was working with the legendary Ruth Gordon in 1942 in Gordon's first play entitled "Over 21." As Billie Dawn in the Chicago company of "Born Yesterday," Jan bowled over the critics and seemed almost a shoo-in to do the 1950 film version but she lost out in the end to Judy Holliday. The ash-blonde broke quickly into films supporting Oscar-winning Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda (1948) in a key, emotional role.
To her absolute delight, she left the docile, ladylike image behind her and was allowed to dig her nails into a florid array of cheap floozies, hard-bitten dames, and lethal schemers and stood out well with 'bad girl' parts in the films Caged (1950), Ace in the Hole (1951), Flesh and Fury (1952), The Human Jungle (1954), and Female on the Beach (1955). In between she occasionally made a nicer, or at least a more sympathetic, impression in the movies Sky Full of Moon (1952) and The High and the Mighty (1954), the latter earning her an Oscar nomination.
Married to and divorced from actor John Merivale in the 1940s, Jan later married gruff film star Paul Douglas in 1950. The couple moved away from the Hollywood scene in Burlington, Vermont. The couple appeared together professionally on occasional TV shows and Douglas revived his "Born Yesterday" Harry Brock role with a stage tour starring Jan in the Billie Dawn part. It and they were a solid hit.
Jan's career slowed down considerably after the sudden death of her 52-year-old second husband in 1959. He suffered a massive heart attack at their Hollywood home. She refocused on stage and TV but at a slower step. Incidental filming occurred on occasion, including support roles in Love in a Goldfish Bowl (1961) and The Incident (1967). She also involved herself in humanitarian causes. In the late 1960s she moved to London, England and in the 1970s, she entered into a strong personal relationship with actor Sam Wanamaker. An isolated film role came her way with a small part in First Monday in October (1981). They never married but stayed together until his death in 1993.
Inactive for nearly two decades, Jan made an appearance at the Cinecon Film Festival in Los Angeles in the fall of 2001, still charming audiences at the age of 80. On 26 March 2004, she passed away at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. She was 82.Actress- Actress
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Isabel Sanford was a Broadway actress for over thirty years before moving to Hollywood. She made numerous guest appearances on TV, including a stint as a supporting cast member on The Carol Burnett Show (1967). Until her passing, Isabel continued to act frequently, most recently in a series of commercials for Old Navy stores with The Jeffersons (1975) co-star, Sherman Hemsley. She made several commercials for Nick-at-Nite as well when the cable channel premiered The Jeffersons (1975).Actress- Actress
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Mercedes McCambridge was a highly talented radio performer who won a best supporting Actress Oscar for her film debut.
Mercedes McCambridge was born in Joliet, Illinois, to Marie (Mahaffry) and John Patrick McCambridge, a farmer. She was of mostly Irish (with a small amount of English and German) ancestry. Despite a career full of supporting roles, she later became something of a cult figure. Her memorable voice-over for the demon child in The Exorcist (1973) has secured her place in movie history. Ironically, she took Warner Bros. to court over her being uncredited for the role, which was probably the most important in the film.
Mercedes enjoyed a quiet retirement starting from the early 1980s. She was a special guest star at the 70th Annual Anniversary Academy Awards in 1998 along with many other Oscar winners. Mercedes also made special television appearances to discuss her role in The Exorcist (1973) at the 30th Anniversary of the film's release.
She died in La Jolla in California on 2nd March 2004 from natural causes.Actress- Actress
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Ingrid trained as a ballet dancer and attended Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre. She came to fame thanks to Bergman's "Wild Strawberries". She acted in 9 Ingmar Bergman's films. Her fame allowed her to act in Luchino Visconti's "The Damned" in 1969. Ingrid Thulin lived in Rome since the 1960's. She came back to Sweden for her health treatment recently.Actress