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George Burns was an American actor, comedian, singer, and published author. He formed a comedy duo with his wife Gracie Allen (1895-1964), and typically played the straight man to her zany roles. Following her death, Burns started appearing as a solo performer. He once won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and continued performing until his 90s. He lived to be a centenarian, was viewed as an "elder statesman" in the field of comedy.
Burns was born under the name "Nathan Birnbaum" in 1896, and was nicknamed "Nattie" by his family. His father was Eliezer "Louis" Birnbaum (1855-1903), a coat presser who also served a substitute cantor at a local synagogue in New York City. His mother was Hadassah "Dorah" Bluth (1857-1927), a homemaker. Both parents were Jewish immigrants, originally from the small town of Kolbuszowa in Austrian Galicia (currently part of Poland). Kolbuszowa had a large Jewish population until World War II, when the German occupation forces in Poland relocated the local Jews to a ghetto in Rzeszów.
The Birnbaums were a large family, and Burns had 11 siblings. He was the 9th eldest of the Birnbaum Children. In 1903, Louis Birnbaum caught influenza and died, during an ongoing influenza epidemic. Orphaned when 7-years-old, Burns had to work to financially support his family. He variously shined shoes, run errands, selling newspapers, and worked as a syrup maker in a local candy shop.
Burns liked to sing while working, and practiced singing harmony with three co-workers of similar age. They were discovered by letter carrier Lou Farley, who gave them the idea to perform singing in exchange for payment. The four children soon started performing as the "Pee-Wee Quartet", singing in brothels, ferryboats, saloons, and street corners. They put their hats down for donations from their audience, though their audience was not always generous. In Burns' words: "Sometimes the customers threw something in the hats. Sometimes they took something out of the hats. Sometimes they took the hats."
Burns started smoking cigars c. 1910, when 14-years-old. It became a lifelong habit for him. Burns' performing career was briefly interrupted in 1917, when he was drafted for service in World I. He eventually failed his physical exams, due to his poor eyesight.
By the early 1920s, he adopted the stage name "George Burns", though he told several different stories of why he chose the name. He supposedly named himself after then-famous baseball player George Henry Burns (1897-1978), or the also famous baseball player George Joseph Burns (1889-1966). In another version, he named himself after his brother Izzy "George" Birnbaum, and took the last name "Burns" in honor of Burns Brothers Coal Company.
Burns performed dance routines with various female partners, until he eventually married his most recent partner Gracie Allen in 1926. Burns made his film debut in the comedy short film "Lambchops" (1929), which was distributed by Vitaphone. The film simply recorded one of Burns and Allen's comedy routines from vaudeville.
Burns made his feature film debut in a supporting role of the musical comedy "The Big Broadcast" (1932). He appeared regularly in films throughout the 1930s, with his last film role for several years appearing in the musical film "Honolulu" (1939). Burns was reportedly considered for leading role in "Road to Singapore" (1940), but the studio replaced him with Bob Hope (1903-2003).
Burns and Allen started appearing as comic relief for a radio show featuring bandleader Guy Lombardo (1902-1977). By February 1932, they received their own sketch comedy radio show. The couple portrayed younger singles, until the show was retooled in 1941 and started featuring them as a married couple. By the fall of 1941, the show had evolved into a situational comedy about married life. Burns and Allen's supporting cast included notable voice actors Mel Blanc, Bea Benaderet, and Hal March.
The radio show finally ended in 1949, reworked into the popular television show "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show" (1950-1958). Allen would typically play the "illogical" housewife, while Burns played the straight man and broke the fourth wall to speak to the audience. The couple formed the production company McCadden Corporation to help produce the show.
Allen developed heart problems during the 1950s, and by the late 1950s was unable to put up the energy needed for the show. She fully retired in 1958. The show was briefly retooled to "The George Burns Show" (1958-1959), but Burns comedic style was not as popular as that of his wife. The new show was canceled due to low ratings.
Following Allen's death in 1964, Burns attempted a television comeback by creating the sitcom "Wendy and Me" (1964-1965) about the life of a younger married couple. The lead roles were reserved for Ron Harper and Connie Stevens, while Burns had a supporting role as their landlord. He also performed as the show's narrator.
As a television producer, Burns produced the military comedy "No Time for Sergeants", and the sitcom "Mona McCluskey". As an actor, he mostly appeared in theaters and nightclubs. Burns had a career comeback with the comedy film "The Sunshine Boys" (1975), his first film appearance since World War II. He played faded vaudevillian Al Lewis, who has a difficult relationship with his former partner Willy Clark (played by Walter Matthau). The role was met with critical success, and Burns won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. At age 80, Burns was the oldest Oscar winner at the time. His record was broken by Jessica Tandy in 1989.
Burns had his greatest film success playing God in the comedy film "Oh, God!" (1977). The film 51 million dollars at the domestic box office, and was one of the greatest hits of 1977. Burns returned to the role in the sequels "Oh, God! Book II" (1980) and "Oh, God! You Devil" (1984). He had a double role as both God and the Devil in the last film.
Burns had several other film roles until the 1990s. His most notable films in this period were the musical comedy "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (1978), the comedy film "Just You and Me, Kid" (1979), the caper film "Going in Style" (1979), and the fantasy-comedy "18 Again!" (1988). The last of the four featured him as a grandfather who exchanges souls with his grandson.
Burns' last film role was a bit part in the mystery film "Radioland Murders" (1994), which was a box office flop. In July 1994, Burns fell in his bathtub and underwent surgery to remove fluid in his skull. He survived, but his health never fully recovered. He was forced to retire from acting and stand-up comedy.
On January 20, 1996, Burns celebrated his 100th birthday, but was in poor health and had to cancel a pre-arranged comeback performance. In March 1996, he suffered from cardiac arrest and died. He was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, Glendale, next to Gracie Allen.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Olivia Mary de Havilland was born on July 1, 1916 in Tokyo, Japan to British parents, Lilian Augusta (Ruse), a former actress, and Walter Augustus de Havilland, an English professor and patent attorney. Her sister Joan, later to become famous as Joan Fontaine, was born the following year. Her surname comes from her paternal grandfather, whose family was from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Her parents divorced when Olivia was just three years old, and she moved with her mother and sister to Saratoga, California.
After graduating from high school, where she fell prey to the acting bug, Olivia enrolled in Mills College in Oakland, where she participated in the school play "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and was spotted by Max Reinhardt. She so impressed Reinhardt that he picked her up for both his stage version and, later, the Warner Bros. film version in 1935. She again was so impressive that Warner executives signed her to a seven-year contract. No sooner had the ink dried on the contract than Olivia appeared in three more films: The Irish in Us (1935), Alibi Ike (1935), and Captain Blood (1935), this last with the man with whom her career would be most closely identified: heartthrob Errol Flynn. He and Olivia starred together in eight films during their careers. In 1939 Warner Bros. loaned her to David O. Selznick for the classic Gone with the Wind (1939). Playing sweet Melanie Hamilton, Olivia received her first nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, only to lose out to one of her co-stars in the film, Hattie McDaniel.
After GWTW, Olivia returned to Warner Bros. and continued to churn out films. In 1941 she played Emmy Brown in Hold Back the Dawn (1941), which resulted in her second Oscar nomination, this time for Best Actress. Again she lost, this time to her sister Joan for her role in Suspicion (1941). After that strong showing, Olivia now demanded better, more substantial roles than the "sweet young thing" slot into which Warners had been fitting her. The studio responded by placing her on a six-month suspension, all of the studios at the time operating under the policy that players were nothing more than property to do with as they saw fit. As if that weren't bad enough, when her contract with Warners was up, she was told that she needed to make up the time lost because of the suspension. Irate, she sued the studio, and for the length of the court battle she didn't appear in a single film. The result, however, was worth it. In a landmark decision, the court said that not only would Olivia not need to make up the time, but also that all performers would be limited to a seven-year contract that would include any suspensions handed down. This became known as the "de Havilland decision": no longer could studios treat their performers as chattel. Olivia returned to the screen in 1946 and made up for lost time by appearing in four films, one of which finally won her the Oscar that had so long eluded her: To Each His Own (1946), in which she played Josephine Norris to the delight of critics and audiences alike. Olivia was the strongest performer in Hollywood for the balance of the 1940s.
In 1948 she turned in another strong showing in The Snake Pit (1948) as Virginia Cunningham, a woman suffering a mental breakdown. The end result was another Oscar nomination for Best Actress, but she lost to Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda (1948). As in the two previous years, she made only one film in 1949, but she again won a nomination and the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Heiress (1949). After a three-year hiatus, Olivia returned to star in My Cousin Rachel (1952). From that point on, she made few appearances on the screen but was seen on Broadway and in some television shows. Her last screen appearance was in The Fifth Musketeer (1979), and her last career appearance was in the TV movie The Woman He Loved (1988).
Her turbulent relationship with her only sibling, Joan Fontaine, was press fodder for many decades; the two were reported as having been permanently estranged since their mother's death in 1975, when Joan claimed that she had not been invited to the memorial service, which she only managed to hold off until she could arrive by threatening to go public. Joan also wrote in her memoir that her elder sister had been physically, psychologically, and emotionally abusive when they were young. And the iconic photo of Joan with her hand outstretched to congratulate Olivia backstage after the latter's first Oscar win and Olivia ignoring it because she was peeved by a comment Joan had made about Olivia's new husband, Marcus Goodrich, remained part of Hollywood lore for many years.
Nonetheless, late in life, Fontaine gave an interview in which she serenely denied any and all claims of an estrangement from her sister. When a reporter asked Joan if she and Olivia were friends, she replied, "Of course!" The reporter responded that rumors to the contrary must have been sensationalism and she replied, "Oh, right--they have to. Two nice girls liking each other isn't copy." Asked if she and Olivia were in communication and spoke to each other, Joan replied "Absolutely." When asked if there ever had been a time when the two did not get along to the point where they wouldn't speak with one another, Joan replied, again, "Never. Never. There is not a word of truth about that." When asked why people believe it, she replied "Oh, I have no idea. It's just something to say ... Oh, it's terrible." When asked if she had seen Olivia over the years, she replied, "I've seen her in Paris. And she came to my apartment in New York often." The reporter stated that all this was a nice thing to hear. Joan then stated, "Let me just say, Olivia and I have never had a quarrel. We have never had any dissatisfaction. We have never had hard words. And all this is press." Joan died in 2013.
During the hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of GWTW in 1989, Olivia graciously declined requests for all interviews as the last of the four main stars. She enjoyed a quiet retirement in Paris, France, where she resided for many decades, and where she died on 26 July, 2020, at the age of 104.
As well as being the last surviving major cast member of some of cinema's most beloved pre-war and wartime film classics (including The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Gone with the Wind (1939)), and one of the longest-lived major stars in film history, Olivia de Havilland was unquestionably the last surviving iconic figure from the peak of Hollywood's golden era during the late 1930s, and her passing truly marked the end of an era.- Actor
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Comedian Bob Hope was born Leslie Townes Hope in Eltham, London, England, the fifth of seven sons of Avis (Townes), light opera singer, and William Henry Hope, a stonemason from Weston-super-Mare, Somerset. His maternal grandmother was Welsh. Hope moved to Bristol before emigrating with his parents to the USA in 1908. After some years onstage as a dancer and comedian, he made his first film appearance in The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938) singing "Thanks for the Memory", which became his signature tune.
In partnership with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, he appeared in the highly successful "Road to ..." comedies (1940-52), and in many others until the early 1970s. During World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars he spent much time entertaining the troops in the field. For these activities and for his continued contributions to the industry he received five honorary Academy Awards.- Producer
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Hal Roach was born in 1892 in Elmira, New York. After working as a mule skinner, wrangler and gold prospector, among other things, he wound up in Hollywood and began picking up jobs as an extra in comedies, where he met comedian Harold Lloyd in 1913 in San Diego. By all accounts, including his own, he was a terrible actor, but he saw a future in the movie business and in Harold Lloyd. Roach came into a small inheritance and began producing, directing and writing a series of short film comedies, under the banner of Phun Philms (soon changed to Rolin, which lasted until 1922), starring Lloyd in early 1915. Initially these were abysmal, but with tremendous effort, the quality improved enough to be nominally financed and distributed by Pathe, which purchased Roach's product by the exposed foot of film. The Roach/Lloyd team morphed through two characters. The first, nominally tagged as "Will E. Work", proved hopeless; the second, "Lonesome Luke," an unabashed imitation of Charles Chaplin, proved more successful with each new release. Lloyd's increasing dissatisfaction with the Chaplin clone character irritated Roach to no end, and the two men engaged in a series of battles, walkouts and reconciliations. Ultimately Lloyd abandoned the character completely in 1917, creating his now-famous "Glasses" character, which met with even greater box-office success, much to the relief of Roach and Pathe. This new character hit a nerve with the post-war public as both the antithesis and complement to Chaplin, capturing the can-do optimism of the age. This enabled Roach to renegotiate the deal with Pathe and start his own production company, putting his little studio on a firm financial foundation. Hal Roach Productions became a unique entity in Hollywood. It operated as a sort of paternalistic boutique studio, releasing a surprising number of wildly popular shorts series and a handful of features. Quality was seldom compromised and his employees were treated as his most valuable asset.
Roach's relationship with his biggest earner was increasingly acrimonious after 1920 (among other things, Lloyd would bristle at Roach's demands to appear at the studio daily regardless of his production schedule). After achieving enormous success with features (interestingly, his only real feature flop of the 1930s was with General Spanky (1936), a very poorly conceived vehicle for the property), Lloyd had achieved superstar status by the standards of "The Roaring Twenties" and wanted his independence. The two men severed ties, with Roach retaining re-issue rights for Lloyd's shorts for the remainder of the decade. While both men built their careers together, it was Lloyd who first recognized his need for creative freedom, no longer needing Roach's financial support. This realization irked Roach, and from this point forward he found it difficult, if not impossible, to offer unadulterated praise for his former friend and star (while Lloyd himself was far more generous in his later praise of Roach, he, too, could be critical, if more accurate, in his recollections). Lloyd went on to much greater financial success at Paramount.
Despite facing the prospect of losing his biggest earner, Roach was already preoccupied with building his kiddie comedy series, Our Gang, which became an immediate hit with the public. By the time he turned 25 in 1917, Roach was wealthy and increasingly spending time away from his studio. He traveled extensively across Europe. By the early 1920s he had eclipsed Mack Sennett as the "King of Comedy" and created many of the most memorable comic series of all time. These included the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Charley Chase, Edgar Kennedy, 'Snub' Pollard and especially the long-running Our Gang series (AKA "The Little Rascals" in TV distribution). Pathe, which distributed his films, shut down its U.S. operations after its domestic representative, Paul Brunet, returned to France in 1927. But Roach was able to secure an even better deal with MGM (his key competitor, Mack Sennett, was also distributed by Pathe, but he was unable to land a deal, ultimately declaring bankruptcy in 1933). For the next eleven years Roach shored up MGM's bottom line, although the deal was probably more beneficial to Roach. In the mid-'30s Roach became inexplicably enamored of 'Benito Mussolini', and sought to secure a business alliance with the fascist dictator's recently completed film complex, Cinecitta. After Roach asked for (and received) assurances from Mussolini that Italy wasn't about to seek sanctions against the Jews, the two men formed RAM ("Roach And Mussolini") Productions, a move that appalled the powers at MGM parent company, Leow's Inc. These events coincided with Roach selling off "Our Gang" to MGM and committing himself solely to feature film production. In September 1937, Il Duce's son, Vittorio Mussolini, visited Hollywood and Roach's studio threw a lavish party celebrating his 21st birthday. Soon afterward the Italian government took on an increasingly anti-Semitic stance and, in retribution, Leow's chairman Nicholas Schenck canceled his distribution deal. Roach signed an adequate deal with United Artists in May 1938 and redeemed his previous record of feature misfires with a string of big hits: Topper (1937) (and its lesser sequels), the prestigious Of Mice and Men (1939) and, most significantly, One Million B.C. (1940), which became the most profitable movie of the year. Despite the nearly unanimous condemnation by his industry peers, Roach stubbornly refused to re-examine his attitudes over his dealings with Mussolini, even in the aftermath of World War II (he proudly displayed an autographed portrait of the dictator in his home up until his death). His tried-and-true formula for success was tested by audience demands for longer feature-length productions, and by the early 1940s he was forced to try his hand at making low-budget, full-length screwball comedies, musicals and dramas, although he still kept turning out extended two-reel-plus comedies, which he tagged as "streamliners"; they failed to catch on with post-war audiences. By the 1950s he was producing mainly for television (My Little Margie (1952), Blondie (1957) and The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna (1956), for example). His willingness to delve into TV production flew in the face of most of the major Hollywood studios of the day. He made a stab at retirement but his son, Hal Roach Jr., proved an inept businessman and drove the studio to the brink of bankruptcy by 1959. Roach returned and focused on facilities leasing and managing the TV rights of his film catalog.
In 1983 his company developed the first successful digital colorization process. Roach then became a producer for many TV series on the Disney Channel, and his company still produces most of their films and videos. He died peacefully just shy of his 101st birthday, telling stories right up until the end.- Actress
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Gloria Stuart was born on a dining room table on 4th Street in Santa Monica, California on July 4, 1910. Her early roles as a performing artist were in plays she produced in her home as a young girl. She was the star of her senior class play at Santa Monica High School in 1927. Attending the University of California, at Berkeley, she continued to perform on the stage. Stuart married and move to Carmel, where she performed in a production of "The Seagull" which was transferred to the Pasadena Playhouse in 1932. It was there that talent scouts for both Paramount and Universal saw her. In a famous dispute, the heads of the two studios flipped a coin and Universal won. She played lead roles for director James Whale, including (The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933)). The hard work at the studio estranged her from her first husband (Stuart helped create the Screen Actors Guild). She played the leading lady in Roman Scandals (1933), on the set of which she met her husband Arthur Sheekman. She was dissatisfied with the roles in which she was cast at Universal and played roles in films for other studios. Ultimately, a few years after having her daughter Sylvia (named after the role she was playing when she met Sheekman), she left the cinema and sought roles on the stage in New York. In the 1940s, she opened an art furniture shop where she created decoupage lamps, tables and trays, many of which sold to stars like Judy Garland and others. Later, Stuart took up oil painting and was very prolific, showing and selling her work in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Her landscapes of The Watts Towers are on permanent collection at The Los Angeles County Museum. She also took up and mastered the art of bonsai and some of her trees are on permanent collection in the Huntington Library Japanese Garden. When her husband fell ill in the 1970s (he died in 1978), she returned to acting doing a range of television series. In 1982, she returned to the screen appearing in a brief dance scene with Peter O'Toole in My Favorite Year (1982).
About this time a friend, she knew half a century earlier in Carmel, who was a master printer, re-entered her life and from him, Stuart learned the craft of fine printing. She established a printing press in her home studio called Imprenta Glorias. where she created a body of fine artist's books. Her greatest book, "Flight of Butterfly Kites" is in permanent collection at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Gloria Stuart won a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Oscar-nomination for her performance as the Old Rose in Titanic (1997). In July 2010, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences honored Gloria Stuart with a Centennial Celebration. She was the first such honoree to be living for a centennial. At 100 years of age, she had completed her greatest artist's book with her great-granddaughter working as her apprentice and also her final appearance on film in her grandson's documentary about her, entitled Secret Life of Old Rose: The Art of Gloria Stuart (2012) when she died at home at the age of 100 on September 26, 2010.- Actress
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When Estelle saw the girl on a white horse at the circus, she then decided that she wanted to be an actress. And she was from the age of 5, to the disapproval of her father. Her mother had her train with the Liverpool Repertory Company, and Estelle performed in many plays and many roles in the West End. In 1916, she made her debut on Broadway and worked with a number of acclaimed stage actors. Estelle spent the rest of the 'teens and '20s working in plays on both sides of the Atlantic. Being an actor in the theater, Estelle was not about to be one of those who acted in flicks and held out for a very long time. In fact, besides a small role in a few English films in the early 1930s, her real debut was Quality Street (1937), a picture that she undertook when she was in her 50s. Anyway, that was enough as it would be almost two decades before she would return to the big screen. She appeared on the stage in the plays "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "Ten Little Indians," and "The Importance of Being Earnest." But, in 1955, Estelle did return to the movies as Leslie Caron's "fairy godmother" in The Glass Slipper (1955). Estelle would spend the next 10 years appearing in films, often cast as eccentric, frail old ladies, some of whom could be deadly. Not to be left out, Estelle also would work on Television, doing guest spots in a number of shows. At 84, Estelle played a woman who was enamored by crooked Zero Mostel in the comedy The Producers (1967). Her last film would be the detective spoof Murder by Death (1976). When Estelle was asked, on the occasion of her 100th birthday, how she felt to have lived so long, she replied, "How rude of you to remind me!".- Professor Irwin Corey, "The World's Foremost Authority," was born on July 29, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York. He and his five siblings were wards of the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum, and during the Great Depression, he worked for the Civilian Conservation Corp. Possessing brawn as well as brains, Professor Irwin Corey is proud to tell anyone who will listen that he was the C.C.C.'s boxing champ in the 112-pound weight class.
Before becoming certified (as a professor purveying the surreal), the young Irwin caught the performing bug by appearing in a borscht belt show, "Pots and Pans," in a bit part. He made his debut in a musical comedy in a U.S.O. presentation of "Oklahoma" in Europe, in which he played the part of the Arab peddler Ali Hakim.
Perfecting his crazy professor shtick, who always appeared in an old-fashioned tuxedo with tails like Groucho Marx, Corey broke through as a stand-up comic at San Francisco's "hungry i" and New York City's Copacabana and Village Vanguard nightclubs. His lectures, characterized by a constant barrage of non-sequitur and double-talk, were rooted in the word-play epitomized by Groucho Marx and Chico Marx in such classic routines as "Why a Duck?" However, whatever "logic" The Marx Brothers might display (at least in exasperated double takes by Groucho) was missing in the Professor's shtick. Before the Talking Heads ever sang about it, Professor Irwin Corey made an art form out of "Stop Making Sense."
Theater critic Kenneth Tynan said of the Professor, "[Corey is] a cultural clown, a parody of literacy, a travesty of all that our civilization holds dear and one of the funniest grotesques in America. He is Chaplin's clown with a college education."
Corey thrived on the radio, memorably appearing on Edgar Bergen's radio show as a tutor to Charlie McCarthy. Television was another natural medium for the professor, and he appeared as a regular on The Jackie Gleason Show (1952) and also made the rounds of the talk show circuit of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, appearing with 'Steve Allen', Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, Merv Griffin, and Mike Douglas. He also was on "The Ed Sullivan Show" (aka The Ed Sullivan Show (1948)) as well as appeared with the new lessor of the Ed Sullivan Theater, David Letterman.
Irwin Corey also has appeared on Broadway, in "Heaven on Earth," "Happy as Larry," "Fla-hooley," and "Mrs. McThing," as well as recent productions of "The Taming of the Shrew" and "Hamlet." Off-Broadway, he appeared as the eponymous lead in "The Good Soldier Schweik" and as Marlo Thomas' father in Herb Gardner's play "Thieves," reprising the role in the film (Thieves (1977)). He also appeared in numerous episodes of series television, including The Andy Griffith Show (1960), "Doc" (with Barnard Hughes), The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967), and Pat Paulsen's Half a Comedy Hour (1970).
The Professor's last film was Woody Allen's The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). At 91, and still going strong, Professor Irwin Corey truly is the dean of stand-up comedians, if not quite at the head of his class. - Actress
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The multifaceted Ellen Albertini was a student of dance and piano at the age of five, and obtained a B.A. and M.A. in theater from Cornell University. She moved to New York, and studied and worked with the legendary likes of Hanya Holm, Martha Graham, Michael Shurtleff, Uta Hagen, Marcel Marceau, and Jacques Lecoq in Paris. She was an acting coach before she made her debut film appearance in American Drive-in (1985), and later became memorable as the rapping grandmother in The Wedding Singer (1998), "Disco Dottie" in 54 (1998) and the homophobic grandmother in Wedding Crashers (2005).- Actor
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Mean, miserly and miserable-looking, they didn't come packaged with a more annoying and irksome bow than Charles Lane. Glimpsing even a bent smile from this unending sourpuss was extremely rare, unless one perhaps caught him in a moment of insidious glee after carrying out one of his many nefarious schemes. Certainly not a man's man on film or TV by any stretch, Lane was a character's character. An omnipresent face in hundreds of movies and TV sitcoms, the scrawny, scowling, beady-eyed, beak-nosed killjoy who usually could be found peering disdainfully over a pair of specs, brought out many a comic moment simply by dampening the spirit of his nemesis. Whether a Grinch-like rent collector, IRS agent, judge, doctor, salesman, reporter, inspector or neighbor from hell, Lane made a comfortable acting niche for himself making life wretched for someone somewhere.
He was born Charles Gerstle Levison on January 26, 1905 in San Francisco and was actually one of the last survivors of that city's famous 1906 earthquake. He started out his working-class existence selling insurance but that soon changed. After dabbling here and there in various theatre shows, he was prodded by a friend, director Irving Pichel, to consider acting as a profession. In 1928 he joined the Pasadena Playhouse company, which, at the time, had built up a solid reputation for training stage actors for the cinema. While there he performed in scores of classical and contemporary plays. He made his film debut anonymously as a hotel clerk in Smart Money (1931) starring Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney and was one of the first to join the Screen Actor's Guild. He typically performed many of his early atmospheric roles without screen credit and at a cost of $35 per day, but he always managed to seize the moment with whatever brief bit he happened to be in. People always remembered that face and raspy drone of a voice. He appeared in so many pictures (in 1933 alone he made 23 films!), that he would occasionally go out and treat himself to a movie only to find himself on screen, forgetting completely that he had done a role in the film. By 1947 the popular character actor was making $750 a week.
Among his scores of cookie-cutter crank roles, Lane was in top form as the stage manager in Twentieth Century (1934); the Internal Revenue Service agent in You Can't Take It with You (1938); the newsman in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); the rent collector in It's a Wonderful Life (1946); the recurring role of Doc Jed Prouty, in the "Ellery Queen" film series of the 1940s, and as the draft board driver in No Time for Sergeants (1958). A minor mainstay for Frank Capra, the famed director utilized the actor's services for nine of his finest films, including a few of the aforementioned plus Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and State of the Union (1948).
Lane's career was interrupted for a time serving in the Coast Guard during WWII. In post-war years, he found TV quite welcoming, settling there as well for well over four decades. Practically every week during the 1950s and 1960s, one could find him displaying somewhere his patented "slow burn" on a popular sitcom - Topper (1953), The Real McCoys (1957), The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959), Mister Ed (1961), Bewitched (1964), Get Smart (1965), Gomer Pyle: USMC (1964), The Munsters (1964), Green Acres (1965), The Flying Nun (1967) and Maude (1972). He hassled the best sitcom stars of the day, notably Lucille Ball (an old friend from the RKO days with whom he worked multiple times), Andy Griffith and Danny Thomas. Recurring roles on Dennis the Menace (1959), The Beverly Hillbillies (1962) and Soap (1977) made him just as familiar to young and old alike. Tops on the list had to be his crusty railroad exec Homer Bedloe who periodically caused bucolic bedlam with his nefarious schemes to shut down the Hooterville Cannonball on Petticoat Junction (1963). He could also play it straightforward and serious as demonstrated by his work in The Twilight Zone (1959), Perry Mason (1957), Little House on the Prairie (1974) and L.A. Law (1986).
A benevolent gent in real life, Lane was seen less and less as time went by. One memorable role in his twilight years was as the rueful child pediatrician who chose to overlook the warning signs of child abuse in the excellent TV movie Sybil (1976). One of Lane's last on-screen roles was in the TV-movie remake of The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1995) at age 90. Just before his death he was working on a documentary on his long career entitled "You Know the Face".
Cinematically speaking, perhaps the good ones do die young, for the irascible Lane lived to be 102 years old. He died peacefully at his Brentwood, California home, outliving his wife of 71 years, former actress Ruth Covell, who died in 2002. A daughter, a son and a granddaughter all survived him.- Actress
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, Lupita Tovar appeared first in silent Fox films before making the move to Universal and co-starring in the Spanish-language version of 1930's "The Cat Creeps" (La voluntad del muerto (1930)). For the same producer, Czech-born Paul Kohner, she appeared as Eva Seward (the Spanish-language counterpart of Helen Chandler's Mina) in Universal's Spanish Dracula (1931). In 1932, she married Kohner, who later became one of the top agents in Hollywood. (Their actress-daughter, Susan Kohner, was Oscar-nominated for her performance in Universal's 1959 Imitation of Life (1959); their son, Pancho Kohner, is a producer). Tovar gave up films in the 1940s and has been widowed since 1988.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Irving Benson was born on 31 January 1914 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Scanty Panties (1961), Here's Lucy (1968) and The Milton Berle Show (1948). He was married to Lillian Benson. He died on 19 May 2016 in Port Jefferson, New York, USA.- Helen Bray was born on 25 November 1889 in Missouri, USA. She was an actress, known for Big Timber (1917), Little Miss Optimist (1917) and Bob's Love Affairs (1915). She was married to George C. Pearce. She died on 15 October 1990 in Redwood City, California, USA.
- Additional Crew
- Producer
- Actor
Adolph Zukor was a poor Hungarian immigrant when he arrived in the United States in 1889. He tried his hand in the fur trade (starting as a sweeper for $2 a week pay) and proved his entrepreneurial acumen by steady advancement, eventually setting up successful businesses in New York and Chicago. By the time he reached thirty, he had already amassed a considerable personal fortune. As early as 1903, Zukor astutely forecast the prospective financial rewards to be made from the burgeoning celluloid medium. Within a decade, he became heavily involved in the independent production of 'flickers', setting up penny arcades with nickelodeons and shooting galleries. In partnership with Marcus Loew, Zukor soon operated a major chain of cinemas. In 1912, he acquired the American rights to a popular French four-reel feature film, Les amours de la reine Élisabeth (1912), starring Sarah Bernhardt. The picture premiered at New York's Lyceum Theatre and its inevitable box office success led Zukor to challenge the notion -- commonly held by thespians of the period -- that motion pictures were inferior to the stage and were 'beneath' stage actors. In short order, he succeeded in persuading important Broadway-based stars like Minnie Maddern Fiske and James K. Hackett to join his Famous Players Film Company (set up in partnership with Loew Enterprises and veteran impresario Daniel Frohman). Other big names soon followed: Marie Doro, Pauline Frederick, Henry Ainley, Florence Reed, to name but a few. The undisputed star on the Famous Players roster, however, was Mary Pickford -- signed for two years in August 1916.
Four days after Pickford signed her contract, Zukor inaugurated the forthcoming wave of Hollywood mergers by combining his interests with those of pioneer producer Jesse L. Lasky to create Famous Players-Lasky. Several other companies -- Morosco, Bosworth and Pallas -- were also acquired. The distribution chain Paramount Pictures Corporation, jointly created by Zukor and Lasky in 1914, served to ensure nationwide distribution (more than a hundred additional cinemas were purchased near the end of the decade, including prestige venues such as the Rialto and Rivoli on Broadway). By 1919, Zukor effectively dominated the film industry in America. At least half of the major stars in the business were on his payroll. Realart Pictures Corporation was added to the mix as an outlet for second features while the A-grade output was released through Artcraft. Two production facilities were in place, one in Hollywood, the other, Astoria Studios, in New York. A partnership between Zukor and newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst also resulted in the formation of Cosmopolitan Productions (as a vehicle for films starring Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies). In 1924, Zukor's theatres began to proliferate even in Europe with the opening of the Paris Paramount and the London Plaza. Zukor further cemented this preeminent position in the industry by promoting the practice of 'block-booking'. This was a way of coercing independent theatre owners who wished to exhibit the films of a bankable box office star to also take a package -- sight unseen -- which was bound to include much of the lesser Realart product.
Between 1920 and 1923, Paramount averaged an annual profit of $4.5 million. By 1930, that figure had risen to $18.4 million. Wile this was largely the result of clever marketing and effective distribution, Zukor's shrewd, multifarious financial machinations had also contributed greatly to that success. He was not particularly concerned with film making itself, other than the monetary aspects (a long-standing dispute between Zukor and Cecil B. DeMille over budgets and salary demands led to Paramount's premier director departing the company in 1925). The artistic impetus for Paramount's rise to preeminence in the 20's was provided by the likes of Lasky and the creative genius of B.P. Schulberg (an independent producer with a keen eye for talent, hired in 1926 to head the West Coast studios as vice president in charge of production). Zukor, conversely, rarely left New York (except for a brief visit West in 1936 to help restructure the company).
In 1932, Paramount went bankrupt and declared a $ 15.8 million deficit. Chiefly to blame for this decline was an over-expansion propelled by Zukor himself, in particular the acquisition of the Publix theatre chain which had been bought with Paramount stock -- stock rendered all but worthless after the Wall Street Crash. Heads rolled, including those of Schulberg, sales chief Sidney Kent, and, ultimately, Lasky. Zukor, the consummate survivor, remained in place as company president until 1936, thereafter holding the position of chairman of the board and chairman emeritus until his death at the extraordinary age of 103. He went on to preside over a revitalised and profitable organisation (though no longer the industry leader it had been the 1920's -- a mantle now held by MGM). During the 1940's, Paramount showed record profits ($39.2 million in 1946)), a trend which continued through the 50's.
Zukor was described as mild-mannered, lean and aquiline in appearance, a reserved man who did not make friends easily. He also had a reputation for ruthlessness, which people like Samuel Goldwyn and Lewis J. Selznick could certainly attest to. Above all, he was a shrewd financier, never more than a self-proclaimed merchant with a 'calculated vision' who 'looked ahead a little and gambled a lot'.- Editor
- Producer
- Director
Elmo Williams was born James Elmo Williams in Lone Wolf, Oklahoma. Orphaned at 16, he attended schools in Oklahoma and New Mexico before moving to Los Angeles. In 1933 he struck up a relationship with film editor Merrill G. White, who hired Williams as his assistant on a business trip to England. He learned the basics of film editing from White and soon gained a reputation as a first-rate editor, doing much work at RKO. In 1947 Williams edited the documentary Design for Death (1947), which earned an Oscar as Best Documentary, and in 1952 he received an Oscar for his editing of the western classic High Noon (1952). He soon branched out into directing, turning out several low-budget efforts for Lippert Pictures and Republic Pictures. Williams journeyed to Europe in 1958 to work as editor and second-unit director on The Vikings (1958) and wound up staying there for several years when he was hired to produce and direct the TV series Tales of the Vikings (1959).
Upon his return to the US, Williams was hired by 20th Century-Fox as a second-unit director. In that capacity, and as associate producer, he was sent back to Europe to work on the WW II epic The Longest Day (1962), helping to stage the film's spectacular battle scenes. He had another extended stay in Europe when he was given the job of Managing Director of European Production for Fox, a position he held until 1966, when he returned to the US to work on another World War II epic, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). In 1970 Williams was appointed Vice President in charge of Worldwide Production at Fox, a job he left in 1973 to go into independent production.- Animation Department
- Writer
- Director
Myron "Grim" Natwick was born in 1890 in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, where he is still considered a favorite son and, throughout his lifetime, displayed exhibitions of his work there. He is best known as the creator of the animated character, "Betty Boop", which often in the past was credited to Max Fleischer as she debuted in his "Out of the Inkwell" series. Natwick also worked for Disney Studios and worked on the film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), as the lead animator of the character. Mr. Natwick was given a huge tribute party for his 100th birthday. He died not long after and received tributes from many of the famous in the animation field. He was considered one of the masters of his craft.- Actor
- Director
- Soundtrack
Frantisek Lederer was born on November 6th, 1899, in Czechoslovakia. His father was a leather merchant, and young Frantisek began his working life as a department store delivery boy in Prague. He fell in love with acting from a young age, and was soon on stage touring Moravia and then all over Central Europe with people like Peter Lorre.
Lederer was easily lured into film by German actress Henny Porten and her producer husband. And it wasn't long before he was starring in the legendary German silent movie Pandora's Box (1929).
Whilst Lederer, who was using the German name of Franz, shifted from silents to talkies easily and was fast becoming one of Germany's top stars, he hadn't yet learned to speak any English.
By 1934, Lederer, (now using Francis), had begun working in America. And he was getting top billing too. Irving Thalberg had planned to make Lederer "the biggest star in Hollywood" but Thalberg's untimely death put a stop to that. But Lederer continued successfully in film and TV for many years.
After two brief marriages his third lasted 59 years. He invested in property well and made a fortune in the Canoga Park, California area. He founded the National Academy of Performing Arts on which his close friend Joan Crawford was on the Advisory Board. He loved to teach.
Lederer was still teaching the week before he died in 2000, aged 100 years.- Producer
- Additional Crew
Born in Brooklyn, New York on June 21, 1911, Irving Ashley Fein was found to be an excellent student and skipped several elementary school grades. His interest in acting and writing was developed during the summer months between college terms at various summer camps. After working in the publicity department of Warner Brothers, Irving jumped ship for MGM. His major fame was from working for decades as publicity agent for both Jack Benny and George Burns. He is still with us approaching the age of 100 just as his last client George Burns did. (2008)- Actress
- Soundtrack
In addition to her vocal dubbing and on-screen film credits, Etta Moten played the role of Bess in the 1943 revival of "Porgy and Bess" at the personal request of Ira Gershwin (not George, who had died in 1937). Etta and husband Claude Barnett, founder of the Negro Associated Press, served as US representatives to the independence celebrations of Ghana and several other African countries. Also a radio journalist, Etta interviewed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after the ceremonies in Ghana on March 6, 1957, and conducted her own radio show for WMAQ/NBC in Chicago for many years.- Helen Shaw was born on 25 July 1897 in Michigan, USA. She was an actress, known for Parenthood (1989), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) and Wicked Stepmother (1989). She died on 8 September 1997 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Cleft-chinned, steely-eyed and virile star of international cinema who rose from being "the ragman's son" (the name of his best-selling 1988 autobiography) to become a bona fide superstar, Kirk Douglas, also known as Issur Danielovitch Demsky, was born on December 9, 1916 in Amsterdam, New York. His parents, Bryna (Sanglel) and Herschel Danielovitch, were Jewish immigrants from Chavusy, Mahilyow Voblast (now in Belarus). Although growing up in a poor ghetto, Douglas was a fine student and a keen athlete and wrestled competitively during his time at St. Lawrence University. Professional wrestling helped pay for his studies as did working on the side as a waiter and a bellboy. However, he soon identified an acting scholarship as a way out of his meager existence, and was sufficiently talented to gain entry into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He made his Broadway debut in "Spring Again" before his career was interrupted by World War II. He joining the United States Navy in 1941, and then after the end of hostilities in 1945, returned to the theater and some radio work. On the insistence of ex-classmate Lauren Bacall, movie producer Hal B. Wallis screen-tested Douglas and cast him in the lead role in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). His performance received rave reviews and further work quickly followed, including an appearance in the low-key drama I Walk Alone (1947), the first time he worked alongside fellow future screen legend Burt Lancaster. Such was the strong chemistry between the two that they appeared in seven films together, including the dynamic western Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), the John Frankenheimer political thriller Seven Days in May (1964) and their final pairing in the gangster comedy Tough Guys (1986). Douglas once said about his good friend: "I've finally gotten away from Burt Lancaster. My luck has changed for the better. I've got nice-looking girls in my films now."
After appearing in "I Walk Alone," Douglas scored his first Oscar nomination playing the untrustworthy and opportunistic boxer Midge Kelly in the gripping Champion (1949). The quality of his work continued to garner the attention of critics and he was again nominated for Oscars for his role as a film producer in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and as tortured painter Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956), both directed by Vincente Minnelli. In 1955, Douglas launched his own production company, Bryna Productions, the company behind two pivotal film roles in his career. The first was as French army officer Col. Dax in director Stanley Kubrick's brilliant anti-war epic Paths of Glory (1957). Douglas reunited with Kubrick for yet another epic, the magnificent Spartacus (1960). The film also marked a key turning point in the life of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy "Red Scare" hysteria in the 1950s. At Douglas' insistence, Trumbo was given on-screen credit for his contributions, which began the dissolution of the infamous blacklisting policies begun almost a decade previously that had destroyed so many careers and lives.
Douglas remained busy throughout the 1960s, starring in many films. He played a rebellious modern-day cowboy in Lonely Are the Brave (1962), acted alongside John Wayne in the World War II story In Harm's Way (1965), again with The Duke in a drama about the Israeli fight for independence, Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), and once more with Wayne in the tongue-in-cheek western The War Wagon (1967). Additionally in 1963, he starred in an onstage production of Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," but despite his keen interest, no Hollywood studio could be convinced to bring the story to the screen. However, the rights remained with the Douglas clan, and Kirk's talented son Michael Douglas finally filmed the tale in 1975, starring Jack Nicholson. Into the 1970s, Douglas wasn't as busy as previous years; however, he starred in some unusual vehicles, including alongside a young Arnold Schwarzenegger in the loopy western comedy The Villain (1979), then with Farrah Fawcett in the sci-fi thriller Saturn 3 (1980) and then he traveled to Australia for the horse opera/drama The Man from Snowy River (1982).
Unknown to many, Kirk has long been involved in humanitarian causes and has been a Goodwill Ambassador for the US State Department since 1963. His efforts were rewarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1981), and with the Jefferson Award (1983). Furthermore, the French honored him with the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. More recognition followed for his work with the American Cinema Award (1987), the German Golden Kamera Award (1987), The National Board of Reviews Career Achievement Award (1989), an honorary Academy Award (1995), Recipient of the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award (1999) and the UCLA Medal of Honor (2002). Despite a helicopter crash and a stroke suffered in the 1990s, he remained active and continued to appear in front of the camera. Until his passing on February 5 2020 at the age of 103, he and Olivia de Havilland were the last surviving major stars from the Golden Years of Hollywood.- Connie Sawyer was born on 27 November 1912 in Pueblo, Colorado, USA. She was an actress, known for Dumb and Dumber (1994), Pineapple Express (2008) and Out of Sight (1998). She was married to Marshall Schacker. She died on 21 January 2018 in Woodland Hills, California, USA.
- Producer
- Actor
- Director
Norman Lloyd was born Norman Perlmutter in Jersey City, New Jersey, to Sadie (Horowitz), a housewife and singer, and Max Perlmutter, a furniture store manager. His family was Jewish (from Hungary and Russia). He began his acting career in the theater, first "treading the boards" at Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory in New York. Aspiring to work as a classical repertory player, he gradually shed his Brooklyn accent and became a busy stage actor in the 1930s; he next joined the original company of the Orson Welles-John Houseman Mercury Theatre. Lloyd was brought to Hollywood to play a supporting part (albeit the title role) in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942). Hitchcock, who later used the actor in Spellbound (1945) and other films, made him an associate producer and a director on TV's long-running Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) (then in its third year). In the course of his eight years on the series, Lloyd became a co-producer (with Joan Harrison) and then executive producer. He has since directed for other series (including the prestigious Omnibus (1952)) and for the stage, produced TV's Tales of the Unexpected (1979) and Journey to the Unknown (1968), and played Dr. Auschlander in TV's acclaimed St. Elsewhere (1982).- Actress
- Soundtrack
Woefully misused while in her prime screen years at Paramount during the late '30s and '40s, Patricia Morison, lovely and exotic with Rapunzel-like long, dark hair, nevertheless became a star in her own right -- as a supremely talented diva on the singing stage.
Born on March 19, 1915, in New York City, her father, William Morison, was a playwright and occasional actor who billed himself under the name Norman Rainey. Patricia's mother worked for British Intelligence during WWI. Graduating from Washington Irving High School in New York, Patricia studied at the Art Students League and proceeded to take acting classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse while also studying dance with the renowned Martha Graham. She earned a steady check at the time as a dress shop designer.
At age 19 Patricia made her Broadway debut in the short-lived play "Growing Pains" and proceeded to understudy the legendary Helen Hayes in her classic role of "Victoria Regina". She never went on. In 1938, shortly after opening in the musical "The Two Bouquets" opposite musical star Alfred Drake, Paramount talent scouts, looking for exotic, dark-haired glamour types then to rein in their star commodity, Dorothy Lamour, scoped Patricia out and tested her. The blue-eyed beauty who indeed resembled Lamour was signed and made her film debut the following year, showing bright promise in the "B" film Persons in Hiding (1939).
Patricia's stock did not improve, however, despite such promise, and she was relegated to such second-string westerns as I'm from Missouri (1939), Rangers of Fortune (1940), Romance of the Rio Grande (1940), and The Round Up (1941). When things didn't improve with such stilted fare as Night in New Orleans (1942), Beyond the Blue Horizon (1942), and Are Husbands Necessary? (1942), she left Paramount. She freelanced in 'other woman' roles which included the Tracy/Hepburn vehicle Without Love (1945) and The Fallen Sparrow (1943), and played Empress Eugenie in The Song of Bernadette (1943), but the focus was seldom on her. Overlooked when cast in top leads at 'poverty row' programmers, her best chance at film stardom came as Victor Mature's despairing wife who takes her own life (which was to have been shown on screen) in Kiss of Death (1947), but her juicy role was excised from the film by producers (or, more likely, the Breen Commission) who felt audiences weren't ready for such shocking displays.
During the war years, Patricia had trained her voice and performed in USO tours. Cole Porter heard her sing in Hollywood one evening and decided she had the right tenacity, feistiness and vocal expertise to play the female lead in his new show. In 1948, over the objections of both the producer and director, stardom was clenched in the form of Porter's classic musical-within-a-musical "Kiss Me Kate." As the sweeping, vixenish Lilli Vanessi, a severe-looking stage diva whose own volatile personality coincided with that of her onstage role (Kate from "The Taming of the Shrew"), Patricia found THE role of her career, giving over 1,000 performances in all. Playing again alongside her former Broadway co-star Alfred Drake, Patricia basked in the multitude of glowing reviews, and such songs as "I Hate Men," "Wunderbar" and "So In Love" rightfully became signature songs. Following this triumph, film work never became a top priority again.
Patricia continued on successfully in the London version of "Kate" and went on to conquer other classic leads in the musicals "The King and I," "Kismet," "The Merry Widow," "Song of Norway" and Pal Joey," among others. Her last movie role was a cameo part as writer George Sand in the mildly received biopic Song Without End (1960) starring Dirk Bogarde as composer Franz Liszt.
On TV Patricia recreated her Kate role with Mr. Drake and made a few scattered but lively appearances over the years. One of her later guest shots was on a 1989 episode of "Cheers" and a 1991 episode of "Gabriel's Fire." In later years the never-married actress devoted herself to painting (an early passion) and enjoyed many showings in the Los Angeles area. The lovely lady with the trademark long hair died in L.A. at the age of 103, on May 20, 2018.- Producer
- Director
- Actress
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.- Herman Brix was a star shot-putter in the 1928 Olympics. After losing the lead in MGM's Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) due to a shoulder injury, he was contracted by Ashton Dearholt for his independent production of The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935), a serial and the only Tarzan film between the silents and the 1960s to present the character accurately, as a sophisticated, educated English nobleman who preferred living in the jungle and was able to speak directly with animals in their own language. He subsequently found himself typecast and confined to starring roles in other serials and character and even bit parts in poverty row features and two-reeler comedies. After starring in the Republic Pictures serial Hawk of the Wilderness (1938) as the Tarzan-like Kioga, he dropped out of films for a few years, took acting lessons, and changed his name to Bruce Bennett. He made many movies after that, gaining fame as a leading man in many Warners products. In 1960, he retired from acting and went into business, becoming sales manager of a major vending machine company, making only occasional TV guest appearances. A reclusive man, he eschewed interviews, although he did appear at one Burroughs-oriented convention in the 1970s and discussed some of his experiences during the making of his Tarzan serial. In 2001, he allowed himself to be interviewed for a slender biography by a Mike Chapman, and held signings at local bookstores, enjoying his "rediscovery" by the general public in the few years remaining before his death.
- Music Department
- Composer
- Writer
Irving Berlin was born Israel Isidor Baline on May 11, 1888 in Mogilev, Belarus, Russian Empire. Towering composer, songwriter, ("God Bless America", "Always", "Blue Skies", "White Christmas") author and publisher, he came to the United States at age 5 and was educated in New York's public schools. His earliest musical education was from his father, a cantor. He earned Honorary degrees from Bucknell University and Temple University. Beginning his career as a song-plugger for publisher Harry von Tilzer, Berlin worked as a singing waiter in Chinatown. In 1909, he was hired as a staff lyricist by the Ted Snyder Company, and became a partner to that firm four years later.
In 1910, he began doing vaudeville appearances in the United States and abroad, and also appeared with Snyder in the Broadway musical "Up and Down Broadway", that ran for 72 performances. He joined ASCAP as a charter member in 1914, and served on its first board of directors between 1914-1918. Berlin enlisted the United States Army infantry in World War I, and was a sergeant at Camp Upton, New York. After the war, he established his own public-relations firm, and in 1921, he built the 1025-seat Music Box Theatre (at 239 W. 45th Street, New York) with Sam H. Harris. After Harris' death in 1941, Berlin assumed full ownership and the theatre remains a Broadway institution to this day.
Among his many awards was the Medal for Merit for his 1942 all-soldier show "This Is the Army", which toured the United States, Europe and South Pacific battle zones; all proceeds were assigned to Army Emergency Relief and other service agencies. Berlin was also a member of the French Legion of Honor and held the Congressional Medal of Honor for "God Bless America", the proceeds from which went to the God Bless America Fund. His songs were sung by Fred Astaire, Al Jolson, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, Dick Powell, Alice Faye and many others. Irving Berlin died at the age of 101 of natural causes on September 22, 1989 in New York City.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Luise Rainer, the first thespian to win back-to-back Oscars, was born on January 12, 1910 in Dusseldorf, Germany, into a prosperous Jewish family. Her parents were Emilie (Königsberger) and Heinrich Rainer, a businessman. She took to the stage, and plied her craft on the boards in Germany. As a young actress, she was discovered by the legendary theater director Max Reinhardt and became part of his company in Vienna, Austria. "I was supposed to be very gifted, and he heard about me. He wanted me to be part of his theater," Rainer recounted in a 1997 interview. She joined Reinhardt's theatrical company in Vienna and spent years developing as an actress under his tutelage. As part of Reinhardt's company, Rainer became a popular stage actress in Berlin and Vienna in the early 1930s. Rainer was a natural talent for Reinhardt's type of staging, which required an impressionistic acting style.
Rainer, who made her screen debut as a teenager and appeared in three other German-language films in the early 1930s, terminated her European career when the Austrian Adolf Hitler consolidated his power in Germany. With his vicious anti-Semitism bringing about the Draconian Nuremberg Laws severely curtailing the rights of Germany's Jews, and efforts to expand that regime into the Sudetenland and Austria, Hitler and his Nazi government was proving a looming threat to European Jewry. Rainer had been spotted by a talent scout, who offered her a seven-year contract with the American studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The 25-year-old Rainer took the deal and emigrated to the United States.
She made her American debut in the movie Escapade (1935), replacing Myrna Loy, who was originally slated for the part. It was her luck to have William Powell as her co-star in her first Hollywood film, as he mentored her, teaching her how to act in front of the camera. Powell, whom Rainer remembers as "a dear man" and "a very fine person," lobbied MGM. boss Louis B. Mayer, reportedly telling him, "You've got to star this girl, or I'll look like an idiot."
During the making of "Escapade", Rainer met, and fell in love with, the left-wing playwright Clifford Odets, then at the height of his fame. They were married in 1937. It was not a happy union. MGM cast Rainer in support of Powell in the title role of the The Great Ziegfeld (1936), its spectacular bio-epic featuring musical numbers that recreated his "Follies" shows on Broadway. As Anna Held, Ziegfeld's common-law wife, Rainer excelled in the musical numbers, but it is for her telephone scene that she is most remembered. "The Great Ziegfeld" was a big hit and went on to win the Academy Award as Best Picture of 1936. Rainer received her first of two successive Best Actress Oscars for playing Held. The award was highly controversial at the time as she was a relative unknown and it was only her first nomination, but also because her role was so short and relatively minor that it better qualified for a supporting nomination. (While 1936 was the first year that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences honored supporting players, her studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, listed her as a lead player, then got out its block vote for her.) Compounding the controversy was the fact that Rainer beat out such better known and more respected actresses as Carole Lombard (her sole Oscar nomination) in My Man Godfrey (1936), previous Best Actress winner Norma Shearer (her fifth nomination) in Romeo and Juliet (1936), and Irene Dunne (her second of five unsuccessful nominations) in Theodora Goes Wild (1936). Some of the bitchery was directed toward Louis B. Mayer, whom non-MGM Academy members resented for his ability to manipulate Academy votes. Other critics of her first Oscar win claimed it was the result of voters being unduly impressed with the great budget ($2 million) of "The Great Ziegfeld" rather than great acting. Most observers agree that Rainer won her Oscar as the result of her moving and poignant performance in just one single scene in the picture, the famous telephone scene in which the broken-hearted Held congratulates Ziegfeld over the telephone on his upcoming marriage to Billie Burke while trying to retain her composure and her dignity. During the scene, the camera is entirely focused on Rainer, and she delivers a tour-de-force performance. Seventy years later, it remains one of the most famous scenes in movie history. With another actress playing Held, the scene could have been mawkish, but Rainer brought the pathos of the scene out and onto film. She based her interpretation of the scene on Jean Cocteau's play "La Voix Humaine". "Cocteau's play is just a telephone conversation about a woman who has lost her beloved to another woman", Rainer remembered. "That is the comparison. As it fit into the Ziegfeld story, that's how I wrote it. It's a daily happening, not just in Cocteau." In an interview held 60 years after the film's release, Rainer was dismissive of the performance. "I was never proud of anything", she said. "I just did it like everything else. To do a film - let me explain to you - it's like having a baby. You labor, you labor, you labor, and then you have it. And then it grows up and it grows away from you. But to be proud of giving birth to a baby? Proud? No, every cow can do that."
Rainer would allay any back-biting from Hollywood's bovines over her first Oscar with her performance as O-Lan in MGM producer Irving Thalberg's spectacular adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth", the former Boy Wonder's final picture before his untimely death. The role won Rainer her second Best Actress Award. The success of The Good Earth (1937) was rooted in its realism, and its realism was enhanced by Rainer's acting opposite the legendary Paul Muni as her husband. When Thalberg cast Muni in the role of Wang Lung, he had to abandon any thought of casting the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong as O-Lan as the Hays Office would not allow the hint of miscegenation, even between an actual Chinese woman and a Caucuasian actor in yellow-face drag. So, Thalberg gave Rainer the part, and she made O-Lan her own. She refused to wear a heavy makeup, and her elfin look helped her to assay a Chinese woman with results far superior to those of Myrna Loy in her Oriental vamp phase or Katharine Hepburn in Dragon Seed (1944). In the late 1990s, Rainer praised her director, Sidney Franklin, as "wonderful", and explained that she used an acting technique similar to "The Method" being pioneered by her husband's Group Theatre comrades back in New York. "I worked from inside out", she said. "It's not for me, putting on a face, or putting on makeup, or making masquerade. It has to come from inside out. I knew what I wanted to do and he let me do it." The win made Rainer the first two-time Oscar winner in an acting category and the first to win consecutive acting awards (Spencer Tracy, her distaff honoree for Captains Courageous (1937) would follow her as a consecutive acting Oscar winner the next year, and Walter Brennan, Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner for Come and Get It (1936) the year Rainer won her first, would tie them both in 1937 with his win for Kentucky (1938) and trump them with his third win for The Westerner (1940), a record subsequently tied by Ingrid Bergman, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, and surpassed by Katharine Hepburn.)
Rainer's career soon went into free-fall and collapsed, as she became the first notable victim of the "Oscar curse", the phenomenon that has seem many a performer's career take a nose-dive after winning an Academy Award. "For my second and third pictures I won Academy Awards. Nothing worse could have happened to me", Rainer said. A non-conformist, Rainer rejected Hollywood's values of Hollywood. In the late 1990s, she said, "I came from Europe where I was with a wonderful theater group, and I worked. The only thing on my mind was to do good work. I didn't know what an Academy Award was." MGM boss Mayer, the founding force behind the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, had to force her to attend the Awards banquet to receive her Oscar. She rebelled against the studio due to the movies that MGM forced her into after "The Good Earth".
In one case, director Dorothy Arzner had been assigned by MGM producer Joseph M. Mankiewicz (whose wife, Rose Stradner had been Rainer's understudy in the Vienna State Theater) in 1937 to direct Rainer in "The Girl from Trieste", an unproduced Ferenc Molnár play about a prostitute trying to go reform herself who discovers the hypocrisies of the respectable class which she aspires to. After Thalberg's death in 1936, Mayer's lighter aesthetic began to rule the roost at MGM. Mayer genuinely believed in the goodness of women and motherhood and put women on a pedestal; he once told screenwriter Frances Marion that he never wanted to see anything produced by MGM that would embarrass his wife and two daughters.
Without the more sophisticated Thalberg at the studio to run interference, Molnar's play was rewritten so that it was no longer about a prostitute, but a slightly bitter Cinderella story with a happy ending. Retitled by Mankiewicz as The Bride Wore Red (1937), Rainer withdrew and was replaced by Joan Crawford. In a 1976 interview in "The New York Times", Arzner claimed that Rainer "had been suspended for marrying a Communist" (Clifford Odets). This is unlikely as MGM, like all Hollywood studios, had known or suspected communists on its payroll, most of whose affiliations were known by MGM vice president E.J. Mannix. (Mannix, one of whose functions was responsibility for security at the studio, once said it would have been impossible to fire them all, as "the communists" were the studio's best writers.) The studio never took action against alleged communists until an industry-wide agreement to do so was sealed at the Waldorf Conference of 1947, which was held in reaction to the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launching a Hollywood witch hunt.
It was more likely that Rainer, fussy over her projects and wanting to use her Academy Award prominence to ensure herself better roles, withdrew on her own due to her lack of enthusiasm for the reformulated product. In the late 1990s, Rainer recalled the satisfaction of being a European stage actress. "One day we were on a big tour", she told an interviewer in the late 1990s. "We did a play by Pirandello, and Reinhardt was in the theater. I shall never forget, it was the greatest compliment I ever got, better than any Academy Award. He came to me, looked at me and said - we were never called by first names - 'Rainer, how did you do this?' It was so wonderful. 'How did you create this?' I was so startled and happy. That was my Academy Award." Rainer still is dismissive of the Academy Awards. "I can't watch the Oscars," she said. "Everybody thanking their mother, their father, their grandparents, their nurse - it's a crazy, horrible." She blames the studio and Mayer for the rapid decline in her career. "What they did with me upset me very much", she said in a 1997 interview. "I was dreaming naturally like anyone to do something very good, but after I got the two Academy Awards the studio thought, it doesn't matter what she gets. They threw all kinds of stuff on me, and I thought, no, I didn't want to be an actress."
Mayer pulled his famous emotional routines when Rainer, whom he wanted to turn into a glamorous star, would demand meatier roles. "He would cry phony tears", she recalled. Mayer had opposed her being cast as O-Lan in "The Good Earth", but Thalberg, who had a connection with MGM capo di tutti capi Nicholas Schenck, the president of MGM corporate parent Loew's, Inc., appealed to Schenck, who overrode Mayer's veto. (Mayer, who was involved in a power struggle with Thalberg before the latter's death, had opposed his filming Pearl Buck's novel. Mayer's reasoning was that American audiences wouldn't patronize movies about American farmers, so what made anyone think they'd flock to see a film about Chinese farmers, especially one with such a big budget, estimated at $2.8 million. (Upon release, the film barely broke even.) Thalberg died during the filming of "The Good Earth" (the only film of his released by MGM whose title credits bore his name, in the form of a posthumous tribute).
Rainer felt lost without her protector. She recalled that Mayer "didn't know what to do with me, and that made me so unhappy. I was on the stage with great artists, and everything was so wonderful. I was in a repertory theater, and every night I played something else." Rainer asked to play Nora in a film of Ibsen's "A Doll's House" or portray Madame Curie, but instead, Mayer - now in complete control of the studio - had her cast in The Toy Wife (1938), a movie she actually wound up liking, as she was charmed by her co-star, the urbane, intellectually and politically enlightened Melvyn Douglas. She recalls Douglas, ultimately a double-Oscar winner like herself, as her favorite leading man. "He was intelligent, and he was interested also in other things than acting."
Her problems with the culture of Hollywood, or the lack thereof, were worsening. The lack of intellectual conversation or concern with ideas by the denizens of the movie colony she was forced to work with was depressing. Hollywood was an unsophisticated place where materialism, such as the stars' preoccupation with clothes, was paramount. As she tells it, "Soon after I was there in Hollywood, for some reason I was at a luncheon with Robert Taylor sitting next to me, and I asked him, 'Now, what are your ideas or what do you want to do', and his answer was that he wanted to have 10 good suits to wear, elegant suits of all kinds, that was his idea. I practically fell under the table."
MGM teamed her with fellow Oscar-winner Tracy in Big City (1937), a movie about conflict between rival taxi drivers. The memory of the movie disgusted her. "Supposedly it wasn't a bad film, but I thought it was a bad film!" She was also cast in The Emperor's Candlesticks (1937), reteaming her with "Ziegfeld" co-star Powell, a movie she didn't like, as she couldn't understand its story. A detective tale, the script thoroughly confused Rainer, who was expected to soldier on like a good employee. Instead, she resisted.
After appearing in The Great Waltz (1938) and Dramatic School (1938), her career was virtually over by 1938. She never made another film for MGM. "I just had to get away", she said about Hollywood. "I couldn't bear this total concentration and interviews on oneself, oneself, oneself. I wanted to learn, and to live, to go all over the world, to learn by seeing things and experiencing things, and Hollywood seemed very narrow." When World War II broke out in Europe, Rainer was joined by her family, as her German-born father was also an American citizen, allowing them all to escape Hitler and the Holocaust. Even before the outbreak of war, Rainer had been very worried about the state of affairs of the world, and she could not abide the escapist trifles that MGM wanted to cast her in. When she protested, Mayer told Rainer that if she defied him, he would blackball her in Hollywood.
Disturbed by Hollywood's apathy over fascism in Europe and Asia and by labor unrest and poverty in the U.S., she decided to walk out on her contract. She and Odets returned to New York. They were divorced in 1940. "Hollywood was a very strange place", she remembered. "To me, it was like a huge hotel with a huge door, one of those rotunda doors. On one side people went in, heads high, and very soon they came out on the other side, heads hanging." Her frustration with Hollywood was so complete, she abandoned movie acting in the early 1940s, after making the World War II drama Hostages (1943) for Paramount.
She made her Broadway debut in the play "A Kiss for Cinderella", which was staged by Lee Strasberg, which opened at the Music Box Theatre on March 10, 1942 and closed April 18th after 48 performances. Rainer then worked for the war effort during World War II, appearing at war bond rallies. She went on a tour of North Africa and Italy for the Army Special Service, socializing with soldiers to build their morale, and supplying them with books. The experience changed her life, allowing her to get over the shyness she'd had all her life. It also broadened her experience, forcing her to deal with the obvious fact that there were more important things than movie acting, which had proven unfulfilling to her.
Fortunately, Rainer found happiness in a long-lived marriage with the publisher Robert Knittel, a wealthy man whom she married in 1945. The couple had a daughter and made their home mostly in Switzerland and England as Rainer essentially left acting behind, although she did do some television in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Her retirement from the movies lasted for 53 years, until her brief comeback in The Gambler (1997), a movie based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's eponymous story. In the film, Rainer played the role of the matriarch of an aristocratic Russian family in the 1860s who is in hock due to the family members' obsession with gambling.
Toward the end of her life, Rainer lived in a luxurious flat in Eaton Square in London's Belgravia district, in a building where Vivien Leigh once lived. Blessed with a good memory, she claimed she could not remember the 1937 Academy Awards ceremony, when she won her first Oscar. She says the glamour of the event was out of sync with her life at the time, which was one of great sadness. "I married Clifford Odets. The marriage was for both of us a failure. He wanted me to be his little wife and a great actress at the same time. Somehow I could not live up to all of that."
She had intriguing offers during her long retirement. Federico Fellini had wanted Rainer for a role in La Dolce Vita (1960), but though she admired the director, she didn't like the script and turned it down. Rainer occasionally plied her craft as an actress on the stage. She made one more stab at Broadway, appearing in a 1950 production of Ibsen's "The Lady from the Sea", which was staged by Sam Wanamaker and Terese Hayden and co-starred Steven Hill, one of the founding members of Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio. The play was a flop, running just 16 performances. "I was living in America and was on the stage there - sporadically. I always lived more than I worked. Which doesn't mean that I do not love my profession, and every moment I was in it gave me great satisfaction and happiness."
Rainer had no regrets over not becoming the star she might have been. She outlived all of the legendary stars of her era, which likely is the best revenge for the loss of her career after bidding adieu to a company town she could not abide.- Actress
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Although British actress Kathleen Harrison was born in 1892 in the Lancashire town of Blackburn, she was fondly known for her cockney characters throughout her career. Trained for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art she first married and lived overseas in Argentina for nearly eight years. Upon her return she made her initial stage appearance in "The Constant Flirt" in 1926. In the 30s she found her way onto the screen, taking many of her delightful theatre roles to film, including Line Engaged (1935), Night Must Fall (1937) (probably her most noteworthy), and Who Is Guilty? (1939). She added immeasurable Dickensian flavor as various maids and mums to such classics as Oliver Twist (1948), A Christmas Carol (1951) and The Pickwick Papers (1952).
She was also openly received as Mrs. Huggett in the "Huggett Family" series that ran a few years in the late 40s. In her five decade career, Kathleen 'toiled' as various servile characters in nearly 80 films. As popular in England as similar 'working class' as character player Thelma Ritter was in America, Kathleen also enjoyed a slight shot of TV popularity late in her career, notably in the brief series Mrs Thursday (1966) as a cleaning lady who inherits her boss's vast fortune. Kathleen's last years were spent in a nursing home, living to the ripe old age of 103.- Director
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Manoel de Oliveira was born on 11 December 1908 in Oporto, Portugal. He was a director and writer, known for The Cannibals (1988), I'm Going Home (2001) and Christopher Columbus, the Enigma (2007). He was married to Maria Isabel Brandão de Meneses de Almeida Carvalhais. He died on 2 April 2015 in Oporto, Portugal.- Actress
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Dolores Hope was born on 27 May 1909 in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA. She was an actress, known for Soup for Nuts (1934), There Were Times, Dear (1985) and The Christophers (1952). She was married to Bob Hope. She died on 19 September 2011 in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
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Growing up as the youngest of four sons of the merchant Jacobus Heesters and his wife Gertruida, née van der Hoevel, he began a commercial apprenticeship after finishing school. He actually wanted to become a priest, but then began an apprenticeship in a bank. In 1920 he switched to acting. He initially completed singing and acting training in Amsterdam and had his first theater engagements there in 1921. He later also played on stages in The Hague, Brussels and Rotterdam. In 1924 he received a supporting role in his first silent film "Cirque Hollandais" directed by Theo Frenkel. In 1930 Heesters married Louisa H. Ghijs, with whom he had two daughters, Wiesje and Nicole. He was married to his wife for 53 years until her death in 1985. After appearances at theaters in the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, he received his first engagement as a tenor in operetta in 1934 in Millöcker's "The Begging Student" at the Vienna Volksoper. A year later, in 1936, he went to Berlin.
Here Heesters celebrated his breakthrough, first at the Komische Oper and then at the Metropoltheater and the Admiralspalast. He also owed his nickname "Jopie" to the audience in the German capital. He was immediately discovered for the film. Numerous UFA productions followed, such as his first leading role in "The Bettelstudent" (1936) and "The Court Concert" (1936). With "Gasparone" (1937) alongside Marika Rökk, Heesters became a film star. In 1938 he sang the role of Count Danilo for the first time in the Franz Léhar operetta "The Merry Widow", a role that he developed into one of his signature roles for 35 years. This was followed by "The Adventure Continues - Every Woman Has a Sweet Secret", "My Aunt - Your Aunt" (1939) and "Love School" (1940). The Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda soon included him on the so-called "God-Given List". His attitude towards Nazi Germany was contradictory. Although he owed his success primarily to the UFA, he also rejected German citizenship. He neither became a member of the NSDAP nor did he explicitly distance himself from National Socialism.
Despite a few encounters with Adolf Hitler, he performed in the Netherlands in 1938 with a Jewish theater group that had fled Germany. There was massive criticism from abroad, especially in Holland, where he was accused of being a collaborator who was in German service when his homeland was occupied by the Wehrmacht. He celebrated great successes during the war years with films such as "Hello Janine" with Marika Rökk, "It began so harmlessly" with Theo Lingen and "Roses in Tirol" with Hans Moser. Despite his success in film, Heesters returned to theater after the Second World War. His popularity remained unbroken. Count Danilo's entrance song "I'm going to Maxim" from the operetta "The Merry Widow" became an evergreen. He appeared on stage in this role over 1,600 times. In 1953, Otto Preminger hired him for the Hollywood film "The Virgin on the Roof". Meanwhile, Heesters had already been involved in around 50 film productions by 1961. In 1970, after a long break from filming, he appeared in "The Inspector: Parking Lot Hyenas". "The Beautiful Wilhelmine" followed in 1983.
In 1984 Johannes Heesters became an honorary member of the Vienna Volksoper. In 1985 the comedy film "Otto - The Film" followed. Heesters was also active in literature. He described his life in his 1993 autobiography entitled "Thank God I'm Not Young Anymore." In the 1990s he appeared in front of the camera for the television plays "Two Munichers in Hamburg", "Two Old Hands" and "Between Night and Day". In 1992 Heesters married the actress Simone Rethel, who was 46 years his junior. From 1996 to the summer of 2001 he played alongside his wife in the play "A Blessed Age" written for him by Curth Flatow. In 1999 he was awarded a "Bambi" for his life's work. In 1997, at the age of 94, Heesters celebrated his 75th stage anniversary and went on tour with the play "A Blessed Age". At the turn of the millennium, Heesters, who was fond of tobacco and whiskey until old age, became the oldest active entertainer in the world. In 2001 he was honored with the Platinum Romy for his life's work.
In 2002, the 99-year-old Heesters was able to look back on 80 years on the stage. Another autobiographical work by Heesters followed in 2002 with the title "Even a hundred years are not enough". In 2003, Johannes Heesters received an honorary award from the "Bambi" for his life's work. In 2004, Heesters appeared four times in the role of the gentleman in Hofmannsthal's "Everyman". At the Wittenberge Elbland Festival he was awarded the title of "chamber singer". In August 2006, the first exhibition about Heesters took place in the Berlin Academy of Arts, which he personally opened with a song recital. In the year 2006 he received the "Honorary Radio Rainbow Award". In 2008, Heesters took on a supporting role in the Til Schweiger comedy "1 1/2 Knights - In Search of the Adorable Herzelinde". From July 2010, Heesters plays the king in Rolf Hochhuth's "Inselkomödie" in the Berliner Ensemble.
Johannes Heesters died on December 24, 2011 in Starnberg, at the age of 108.- Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was born on 4 August 1900 in St. Paul's Waldenbury, Hertfordshire, England, UK. She was married to King George VI. She died on 30 March 2002 in Windsor, Berkshire, England, UK.
- Art Department
- Animation Department
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Tyrus Wong was born on 25 October 1910 in Taishan, Guangdong Province, China. He is known for Bambi (1942), How to Live Forever (2009) and When the World Breaks (2010). He was married to Ruth Ng Kim. He died on 30 December 2016 in Sunland, California, USA.- David Rockefeller is an American banker who served as chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan Corporation. He was the oldest living member of the third generation of the Rockefeller family, and family patriarch from August 2004 until his death in March 2017. Rockefeller was the youngest child of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and a grandson of John D. Rockefeller and Laura Spelman Rockefeller.
David Rockefeller was noted for his wide-ranging political connections and foreign travel, in which he met with many foreign leaders. His fortune was estimated at $3.3 billion at the time of his death in March 2017. - Actress
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Danielle Darrieux was born in 1917 in Bordeaux, France, to Marie-Louise (Witkowski) and Germain Jean Darrieux, a physician. She was raised in Paris. She was only fourteen when she auditioned for a secondary role in Le bal (1931): she got the part, and the producer offered her a five-year contract. She had her first romantic lead in La crise est finie (1934) and scored an international hit with the historical drama Mayerling (1936) in which she played Marie Vetsera opposite Charles Boyer. In 1938, she went to Hollywood to appear in the fine comedy The Rage of Paris (1938) but quickly returned to Paris.
Darrieux remained in France during the Occupation and was one of the leading actresses during this period, starring in major hits such as Premier Rendez-Vous (1941). In 1945, she appeared both on stage (in "Tristan et Isolde") and on screen (in Au petit bonheur (1946)). In the next three decades, she found several important roles, in films like La Ronde (1950), The Earrings of Madame De... (1953) -- in which she gave her best performance, as a society lady torn between her husband and her lover -- and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967).
In 1970, she replaced Katharine Hepburn on Broadway in "Coco." Afterwards, she made occasional screen and stage appearances. But she made a triumphant comeback in 2002, playing Catherine Deneuve's mother in the international hit 8 Women (2002).
She died on October 17, 2017 in Bois-le-Roi, Eure, France. She was 100.- Actress
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She was the standard prototype of the porcelain-pretty collegiate and starry-eyed romantic interest in a host of Depression-era films and although her name may not ring a bell to most, Mary Carlisle enjoyed a fairly solid decade in the cinematic limelight.
The petite Boston-born, blue-eyed blonde was born on February 3, 1914, and brought to Hollywood in 1918, at age 4, by her mother after her father passed away. The story goes that the 14-year-old and her mother were having lunch at the Universal commissary when she was noticed by producer Carl Laemmle Jr., who immediately gave her a screen test. Her age was a hindering factor, however, and Mary completed her high school studies before moving into the acting arena. An uncle connected to MGM helped give the young hopeful her break into the movies as a singer/dancer a few years later.
Mary started out typically as an extra and bit player in such films as Madam Satan (1930), The Great Lover (1931) and in Grand Hotel (1932) in which she played a honeymooner. The glamorous, vibrant beauty's career was given a build-up as a "Wampas Baby Star" in 1933 and soon she began finding work in films playing stylish, well-mannered young co-eds. Although she performed as a topline actress in a number of lightweight pictures such as Night Court (1932) with Anita Page, Murder in the Private Car (1934) starring Charles Ruggles, and It's in the Air (1935) alongside Jack Benny, she is perhaps best remembered as a breezy co-star to Bing Crosby in three of his earlier, lightweight '30s musicals: College Humor (1933), Double or Nothing (1937) and Doctor Rhythm (1938). In the last picture mentioned she is the lovely focus of his song "My Heart Is Taking Lessons". Her participation in weightier material such as Kind Lady (1935) was often overshadowed by her even weightier co-stars, in this case Basil Rathbone and Aline MacMahon.
Disappointed with the momentum of her career and her inability to extricate herself from the picture-pretty, paragon-of-virtue stereotype, Mary traveled and lived in London for a time in the late '30s. Following her damsel-in-distress role in the horror opus Dead Men Walk (1943) with George Zucco and Dwight Frye, Mary retired from the screen, prompted by her marriage to James Blakeley, a flying supervisor, the year before. The Beverly Hills couple had one son. Her husband, a former actor who also appeared in '30s musicals with Crosby as a dapper second lead (e.g., in Two for Tonight (1935)), later became an important executive (producer, editor, etc.) at Twentieth Century-Fox.
In later years Mary managed an Elizabeth Arden Salon in Beverly Hills and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her husband passed away in 2007. Mary herself lived to the ripe old age of 104 on August 1, 2018.- Actress
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Vera Lynn was born on 20 March 1917 in East Ham, London, England, UK. She was an actress, known for Hellboy (2004), Lolita (1997) and Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982). She was married to Harry Lewis. She died on 18 June 2020 in Ditchling, East Sussex, England, UK.- Director
- Animation Department
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Don Lusk was born on 28 October 1913 in Los Angeles County, California, USA. He was a director and assistant director, known for Lady and the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1959) and Alice in Wonderland (1951). He was married to Marjorie Gummerson. He died on 30 December 2018 in San Clemente, California, USA.- Beverly Cleary was born on 12 April 1916 in McMinnville, Oregon, USA. She was a writer, known for Ramona and Beezus (2010), Ramona (1988) and ABC Weekend Specials (1977). She was married to Clarence Thomas Cleary. She died on 25 March 2021 in Carmel, California, USA.
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- Actress
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Julie Gibson was born on 6 September 1913 in Grant County, Washington, USA. She was an actress, known for Bowery Buckaroos (1947), The Contender (1944) and Chick Carter, Detective (1946). She was married to Charles Barton, Dean Dillman Jr. and Jimmie Grier. She died on 2 October 2019 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Kevin O'Morrison was born on 25 May 1916 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Funny Farm (1988) and Dear Ruth (1947). He was married to Linda Soma. He died on 11 December 2016 in Lynnwood, Washington, USA.
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The Spanish born ventriloquist Senor Wences was one of the highest paid vaudeville acts in the world. Hugely popular with American TV audiences Wences was also a top nightclub favorite.
Born Wenceslao Moreno in Peñaranda de Bracamonte, Salamanca (Spain), Wences began performing ventriloquism as a child An early career in bullfighting proved unsuccessful so he took up ventriloquism and juggling professionally. Wences toured Europe in the 1920s before coming to America in 1935 where he made his New York debut at the Club Chico.
He became an overnight sensation on "The Milton Berle Show" and later made appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and TV specials with Jack Benny and Perry Como. In 1947 he had stand-out cameo in the film comedy Mother Wore Tights (1947), starring Dan Dailey and Betty Grable.
Among his famous vent characters were 'Johnny', ingeniously formed by one of Wences's hands and 'Pedro', a torso-less head in a box. In the middle of a routine Wences would lift the lid of the box and say "Are you alright?" to which Pedro would reply "S'alright". "S'alright" - which became a classic catchphrase.
In 1986 Wences toured America with Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller in the musical Sugar Babies. He also received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Comedy Hall of Fame which was inscribed "For his devotion to entertaining generations of audiences and bringing countless hours of joy and happiness to millions throughout the world."- Animation Department
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Al Jaffee was born on 13 March 1921 in Savannah, Georgia, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for The Mad Magazine TV Special (1974), Bum Future (2013) and When We Went MAD!. He was married to Joyce Revenson and Ruth Ahlquist. He died on 10 April 2023 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.- Actor
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Born in 1919 in Jerusalem, Nehemiah Persoff emigrated with his family to America in 1929.
Following schooling at the Hebrew Technical Institute of New York, he found a job as a subway electrician doing signal maintenance until an interest in the theater altered the direction of his life.
He joined amateur groups and subsequently won a scholarship to the Dramatic Workshop in New York. This led to what would have been his Broadway debut in a production of "Eve of St. Mark", but he was fired before the show opened. He made his official New York debut in a production of "The Emperor's New Clothes" in 1940.
WWII interrupted his young career in 1942, when he was inducted into the United Sates Army, returning to the stage after his hitch was over in 1945, three years later. He sought work in stock plays and became an intern of Stella Adler and, as a result, a strong exponent of the Actor's Studio. Discovered by Charles Laughton and cast in his production of "Galileo" in 1947, Persoff made his film debut a year later with an uncredited bit in The Naked City (1948).
Short, dark, chunky-framed and with a distinct talent for dialects, Persoff became known primarily for his ethnic villainy, usually playing authoritative Eastern Europeans.
In a formidable career which had him portraying everything from cab drivers to Joseph Stalin, standout film roles would include Leo in The Harder They Fall (1956) with Humphrey Bogart, Gene Conforti in Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956), Albert in This Angry Age (1958) and gangster Johnny Torrio in Al Capone (1959). That same year he played another gangster, the small role of Little Bonaparte, in Some Like It Hot (1959).
He was a durable performer during TV's "Golden Age" (Gunsmoke (1955), The Twilight Zone (1959)) and well beyond (Chicago Hope (1994), Law & Order (1990)), playing hundreds of intense, volatile and dominating characters.
In later years, his characters grew a bit softer as Barbra Streisand's Jewish father in Yentl (1983) and the voice of Papa Mousekewitz in the An American Tail (1986) will attest. Later stage work included well-received productions of "I'm Not Rappaport" and his biographical one-man show "Sholem Aleichem".
After declining health and high blood pressure forced him to slow down, Persoff took up painting in 1985, studying sketching in Los Angeles. Specializing in watercolor, he created more than 100 works of art, many of which have been exhibited up and down the coast of California. He celebrated his 100th birthday in 2019.- Actor
- Music Department
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Ray Anthony (real name Raymond Antonini) was born in Bentleyville, PA, on Jan. 20, 1922. His family moved to Cleveland, where he spent most of his early life. There he studied trumpet with his father. From 1940-1941 he played in Glenn Miller and His Orchestra. He enlisted in the US Navy in 1942 and was discharged in 1946. He also played in the Jimmy Dorsey and Al Donahue bands before forming his own band in the Midwest. He was a summer replacement for Perry Como on both CBS and NBC. Anthony recorded for Capitol Records for 19 years and later ran another record company, Wood Records, for nine years. He was once married to actress Mamie Van Doren. His biggest hits were the themes from Dragnet (1951) and Peter Gunn (1958), along with being one of the top big bands of the post-WW2 era.- Producer
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Norman Lear enjoyed a long career in television and film, political and social activism, and philanthropy.
Born in 1922 in New Haven, Connecticut, Lear flew 52 combat missions over Europe in World War II before beginning his television career. His classic shows of the 1970s and '80s - All in the Family, Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, among others - collectively reached as many as 120 million viewers per week and are said to have transformed the American cultural landscape, bringing the social and political issues of the day into American living rooms for the first time. With the rise of the radical religious right, Lear put his career on hold in 1980 to found People For the American Way, the nonprofit organization that remains a relevant and effective force defending all aspects of the First Amendment.
Lear was among the first seven television pioneers inducted in 1984 into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. In 1999, President Clinton presented him with the National Medal of Arts, noting that "Norman Lear has held up a mirror to American society and changed the way we look at it." His memoir, Even This I Get to Experience, was published in 2014, and the 2016 documentary Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You received an Emmy nomination as the representative program for the PBS American Masters series. In 2017, Lear received a Peabody Lifetime Achievement Award and was a Kennedy Center Honoree.
He was the father of six, the grandfather of four, and the husband of Lyn Davis Lear.- Director
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Bert I. Gordon, affectionately nicknamed "Mr. B.I.G." by Forrest J. Ackerman, produced, directed, and wrote more than twenty-five Sci/Fi and Horror features, such as The Magic Sword (1962), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), Village of the Giants (1965), The Cyclops (1957), in addition to comedies such as How to Succeed with Sex (1970). His film, The Food of the Gods (1976), was awarded the Grand Prix du Festival International Du Paris Fantastique 1977.- Actor
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Heinz Alfred grew up in his hometown, where he attended school. When the persecution of the Jewish population in Germany intensified as a result of Adolf Hitler's rise to power in January 1933, he emigrated to the USA with his parents Paula Stern and Ludwig Kissinger in 1938. Kissinger attended high school in New York City. A little later he had to help support the family by working in a factory, which is why he switched to night school. In 1943 Kissinger received US citizenship. He then served in the Army until 1946, for which he was deployed in Germany. After the end of the war, Kissinger initially stayed in Europe, where he worked as a lecturer at the European Command Intelligence School in Oberammergau. In 1947, Kissinger returned to the United States to enroll at Harvard University. In 1952 he completed his master's degree there. Two years later he received his doctorate. phil.
From 1952 to 1969, Kissinger headed the summer university at his university called the Harvard International Seminar. Here he got to know many foreign authorities with whom he would later have to deal as a foreign policy expert. In 1957 he was appointed lecturer and in 1962 professor at Harvard, where he held a full teaching position until 1965. Kissinger's entry into a decidedly political activity dates back to the early 1960s. Under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, he served as an advisor to the National Security Council until 1962 and as an advisor on disarmament issues until 1967. In 1965 he was appointed as an advisor to the State Department, which had to deal with the situation in Vietnam. In the following two years, Kissinger visited Vietnam several times. In 1969, President Richard Nixon elevated the veteran foreign policy expert to head the National Security Council. In this position, which he held until 1975, Kissinger opposed the policy of reconciliation and rapprochement that Kennedy and Johnson had previously initiated towards the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, as one of his first foreign policy successes, he contributed to the conclusion of the SALT negotiations with the USSR, which culminated in the signing of the treaty by Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow. Kissinger also played a role in bringing about the agreement on the four-power status of West Berlin, which was reached on September 3, 1971 and contributed significantly to facilitating exchange and travel between both parts of the city. Kissinger also had a great influence on the secret diplomatic preparations that led to a rapprochement between the USA and the People's Republic of China under Nixon's presidency. When faced with the Vietnam problem, Kissinger sought to protect US interests with a policy of military strength, which brought him the most criticism. Nevertheless, he reached a ceasefire with Le Duc Tho in 1973, which earned both the Nobel Peace Prize and initiated the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. In 1973, Kissinger was promoted to Secretary of State under Nixon. After his resignation as a result of the Watergate affair, he was confirmed in this position for the entire term of office of the successor Gerald Rudolph Ford from 1974 to 1977.
As Foreign Minister, Kissinger tried to mediate between the Arab and Israeli sides, especially in the Middle East conflict, through intensive travel known as "shuttle diplomacy". This enabled him, among other things, In 1974 the conclusion of the troop disengagement agreement. After Kissinger left the ministerial office as a result of Ford's election defeat in 1977, he founded the consulting firm "Kissinger Associates, Inc." in 1982, which produces analyzes for governments and commercial companies worldwide. In 1987 Kissinger was awarded the International Charlemagne Prize of the city of Aachen. After the upheavals of 1989/90 in the former Eastern Bloc states, Kissinger campaigned for the maintenance of the transatlantic alliance systems between the USA and Europe, for the rapid reunification of Germany and the continuation of European unification. He continued to speak out through numerous publications. In 2001 his treatise "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?" was published. In 2005 he received the Bavarian Order of Merit. In 2007, Kissinger was awarded the Baden-Württemberg Medal of Merit.
Henry Kissinger died on November 29, 2023 in Kent.- Actress
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Glynis Johns was the daughter of actor Mervyn Johns. Best known for her light comedy roles and often playful flirtation, Glynis was born in South Africa while her parents were on tour there (her mother was a concert pianist) but was always proud of her Welsh roots and took delight in playing the female lead (opposite Richard Burton) in the classic Under Milk Wood (1971). She was probably best known for her role as the suffragette mother in Mary Poppins (1964) although she is probably best loved for her fishy roles in Miranda (1948) and Mad About Men (1954). She had earlier showed she could take on the serious roles as well as in Frieda (1947). Most recently seen (at the time of writing) in Superstar (1999). Johns died in 2024, aged 100, having never received the damehood she had richly deserved for decades. Predeceased by her only son, she was survived by a grandson,Thomas Forwood, and three great-grandchildren.