Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire was Marlon Brando’s signature role. It made the then 23-year-old Brando an overnight Broadway sensation in 1947, and he electrified movie audiences and earned his first Oscar nomination for the classic 1951 film version. But he wasn’t the first choice to play Blanche’s earthy brother-in-law. Producer Irene Selznick had her eyes on Hollywood star John Garfield, who frequently took time out from movies to return to the Great White Way for limited runs.

In fact, writer John Lahr reported in 2014 that on July 19, 1947, Selznick drew up a contract for the 34-year-old actor, “one of the few sexy Hollywood stars with a proletarian pedigree. The Selznick office leaked the big news to the press. The contract was never signed. On August 18 the deal with Garfield collapsed.”

One of the reasons bandied about was that Garfield turned down the role because the contract would have kept him away from Hollywood for too long. Though Brando is considered the performer who ushered in the more naturalistic style of acting (known as “the Method”) both on stage and in film, truth be told it was Garfield who was the catalyst for Brando, as well as Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman, James Dean and Steve McQueen.

Just look at Garfield’s first feature film, FOUR DAUGHTERS (’38). Directed by Michael Curtiz, the cast includes Lane sisters Lola, Rosemary and Priscilla, in addition to Gale Page as the four musically inclined daughters of a widower music professor (Claude Rains). Enter handsome boy-next-door Jeffrey Lynn as a budding composer named Felix who endears himself with all the daughters, especially peppy Ann (Priscilla Lane).

The household is put in an uproar with the arrival of Garfield’s Mickey Borden, the original rebel anti-hero. Unkempt, slovenly and possessing a massive chip on his shoulder, Mickey is an orchestrator who has arrived at the house to work with Felix. You can’t keep your eyes off him especially in this early monologue where he explains his anger to Ann:

“They’ve been at me now nearly a quarter of a century. No let-up. First, they said, ‘Let him do without parents. He’ll get along.’ Then they decided, ‘He doesn’t need education. That’s for sissies.’ Then right at the beginning, they tossed a coin, ‘Heads he’s poor, tail’s he’s rich.’ So, they tossed a coin…with two heads. Then for the finale, they got together on talent. ‘Sure, they said, let him have talent. Not enough to let him do anything on this own, anything good or great Just enough to let him help people. It’s all he deserves.’”

There was a sexuality and eroticism to Garfield’s performance that was 180 degrees different from Lynn’s durable and safe leading man. He was so natural; it was almost like someone found Garfield walking down the street in the Bronx and asked him to star in the movie. “He was the prototypical Depression rebellion youth,” actor Norman Lloyd told me about Garfield for the L.A. Times in 2003. They first met in 1937 and worked together on Garfield’s final film HE RAN ALL THE WAY (’51).

“He combined all of these elements of darkness and rebelliousness with the charm and the poignancy and he became the prototypical actor of that time. He never changed as a person. He remained just as a wonderful guy. He was a man of great charm, a good fellow, very likable.”

There was a lot of Mickey in Garfield, who was born Jacob Julius Garfinkle in 1913 on the Lower East Side of New York to poor Russian immigrants. Julie, as he was called, had a rough and tumble upbringing. His mother died when he was seven. “He hated his father,” his daughter Julie Garfield noted in 2003. “His father was awful to him. He was torn away from his brother.” In fact, Garfield once said that if he hadn’t become an actor, he would have been “Public Enemy No. 1.”

Unlike Mickey, the fates and destiny were looking after him. First, it was educator Angelo Patri, who became a surrogate dad to Julie at P.S. 45, a high school for troubled students. With Patri’s encouragement, he joined the debate team where he discovered he had a gift for acting. That was further nurtured when he received a scholarship to Maria Ouspenskaya’s acting school. He was all of 18 when he made his Broadway debut in 1932 in Lost Boy and became the youngest member of the progressive and influential Group Theatre, appearing in Clifford Odets’ early masterpieces Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing. 

Odets wrote the play Golden Boy for Garfield in 1937, but director Harold Clurman decided to give the lead role of boxer Joe Bonaparte to Luther Adler and cast Garfield in a minor role. His unhappiness with Clurman’s decision pushed Garfield into signing a contract with Warner Bros. And FOUR DAUGHTERS made him an overnight sensation. He earned a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, but lost to Walter Brennan who picked up his second Academy Award in that category for Kentucky (‘38).

The following year, Garfield, Rains, the Lane siblings, Page and Curtiz reunited for DAUGHTERS COURAGEOUS, in which the actors played different characters from the prior film. It was probably the best film Garfield made that year. But Warner Brothers put him in a lot of movies that were unworthy of his talent including BLACKWELL’S ISLAND (’39) where he was typecast as a gangster. He made some good movies in 1941, including THE SEA WOLF, which also starred Edward G. Robinson and Ida Lupino and reunited him with Curtiz, and also Anatole Litvak’s atmospheric noir OUT OF THE FOG also with Lupino.

Because he suffered heart damage from scarlet fever, Garfield couldn’t serve during World War II. But he entertained the troops on USO tours and opened the famous Hollywood Canteen with Bette Davis so the troops could be entertained and be served by some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Both Davis and Garfield appeared as themselves in the hit 1944 film HOLLYWOOD CANTEEN. Garfield also fought the global conflict on screen, giving one of his strongest and grittiest performances in PRIDE OF THE MARINES (’45), a poignant drama based on the life Al Schmid who was blinded by a grenade during the Battle of Guadalcanal. He returns home to his wife (Eleanor Powell) a bitter, doubting man who has a difficult time trying to deal with his new life.

The year 1946 saw the release of two of Garfield’s most enjoyable films HUMORESQUE and THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. HUMORESQUE was his last film under his Warner Bros. contract. It’s a delicious melodramatic wallow with Garfield playing a poor New York kid who becomes a famous concert violinist. Joan Crawford, coming off her Oscar-winning triumph in Mildred Pierce (’45), plays a wealthy patroness who sets her sights on Garfield. Garfield went to MGM for POSTMAN, which was based on James M. Cain’s best-selling thriller. Garfield turns up the heat with Lana Turner as illicit lovers who brutally murder her husband only to turn on each other when they are caught.

The actor teamed up with Bob Roberts to form an independent production company, Enterprise Productions, and their first feature was the boxing classic BODY AND SOUL (’47), for which he earned his second Oscar nomination as Charley Davis, a boxer who loses his way when he gets involved with an unscrupulous promoter. Not only does he have a strong chemistry with leading lady Lilli Palmer, but also African American actor Canada Lee as Ben, a boxer with brain damage. And Garfield gets to utter one of his greatest lines in BODY AND SOUL: “What are you going to do? Kill me? Everybody dies.”

Though his next Enterprise production wasn’t a hit, FORCE OF EVIL (’48), co-written and directed by Abraham Polonsky, is a terrific film noir with a hard-hitting Garfield as a corrupt attorney trying to save his numbers-racket brother (Thomas Gomez) from his gangster boss. Garfield returned to Warner Bros. and Curtiz in 1950 for THE BREAKING POINT, which was based on Hemingway’s 1937 novel, To Have and Have Not. It’s an outstanding film noir with a superb performance from Garfield as well as from Black actor Juano Hernandez who plays his partner on the fishing boat.

THE BREAKING POINT was Garfield’s penultimate film and was not a hit because The Blacklist was engulfing Hollywood and the actor, despite the fact he wasn’t a Communist. His film career was over in 1951 when he refused to cooperate with HUAC at his hearing. Before his death of a heart attack in 1952 at the age of 39, Garfield did appear in a short-lived Broadway revival of Golden Boy, which also starred Lee J. Cobb, a young Jack Klugman and Joseph Wiseman.

Though she was only 6 ½ when he died, Julie Garfield recalls seeing her father on stage in Golden Boy where he introduced her during the curtain call. “When he smiled at you it was like being in the sun,” she noted. “He was funny and sometimes he would like to dance and kick up his legs. I remember him adoring me. He used to take me to the merry-go-round a lot in New York. He was so strong, so handsome and he loved to kid me. He would give me this mischievous smile. I wish I remembered more about him…”

Looking back on an accomplished life, Marsha Hunt’s most prized title was being named “Hollywood’s youngest character actress,” as she joyfully conveyed in the documentary MARSHA HUNT’S SWEET ADVERSITY (2015). Unlike most actors, Hunt actually started her career in lead roles at Paramount in 1935, but she really shined in the wide variety of character parts MGM offered her when she signed with the studio in 1939.

“Whenever there was something hard to cast, they’d say, ‘Give it to Marsha and see what she will do with it,’ which was such a compliment. Stardom was not the idea for me, nor was it my goal,” Hunt told me in 2014.

As MARSHA HUNT’S SWEET ADVERSITY illustrates, the word “character” isn’t only reserved for the 103-year-old actress’s movie roles. Hunt’s personal integrity was central to her life onscreen and off, as she fought back as a victim of the Hollywood Blacklist and later fueled her passion and energy into activism.

As a liberal-minded American, Hunt found her upstanding character attacked in the late 1940s. Horrified that 19 of her Hollywood colleagues were denied their constitutional rights in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), she traveled to Washington in 1947 with the Committee for the First Amendment to “defend as best we could the rights and freedoms” of her blacklisted associates. The events in Washington disturbed Hunt and her husband, Robert Presnell Jr. so much that they subsequently lent their talents to the radio program “Hollywood Fights Back,” co-written by Presnell, to denounce the hearings and show their support of free speech in Hollywood.

Hunt’s actions proved controversial at the height of the Red Scare. Upon returning home from a European vacation in the early 1950s, she found that work offers, including several for her own TV show, had disappeared as a result of her name landing in Red Channels, a 1950 pamphlet cataloging alleged Communists and sympathizers in the industry. Ever the fighter, Hunt pushed back against the mistreatment and intimidation; she even wrote to those television networks to salvage the offers, detailing her vast patriotic enterprises and her wartime volunteer service, to no avail.

“Apparently, I could resume working if I apologized, and there was nothing to apologize for,” Hunt said in 2015. “I had done what I felt was needed and was not in the least ashamed of it.”

While Hunt continued to appear sporadically on film, TV and the stage throughout the 1950s and beyond, she turned the harshly imposed career hiatus into an opportunity to focus on other activities. The strong character Hunt demonstrated through her blacklisted period also manifested in another way: activism. After performing in a play in Australia in the mid-1950s, Hunt and her husband hopped around the globe. The journey opened her eyes to the beauty and hardships around the world, leaving Hunt a self-proclaimed “planet patriot” and setting her off on a humanitarian path to help global citizens over the ensuing seven decades.

Hunt’s first stop: the United Nations. Though many stars used their celebrity to promote the war effort, few did so for philanthropic causes in times of peace – but Hunt was one of them. From 1956 to 1983, she remained active in the United Nations Association, utilizing her fame to educate the public about the UN’s global work and serving as president of the San Fernando Valley Chapter. The actress even produced a short documentary to raise awareness and funds for the UN’s World Refugee Year, A CALL FROM THE STARS (’60), featuring friends like Harry Belafonte, Paul Newman and Jean Simmons. She also wrote the song “We’re All One,” which UNICEF translated and distributed to member nations around the world.

For the past several decades, Hunt has focused her attention on hunger and poverty. In addition to bringing innovative fundraising approaches to her work with the American Freedom from Hunger organization, she crafted the concept for “Thankful Giving” in the early 1970s, a Thanksgiving program designed to create awareness and amass funds for world hunger. After seven years of lobbying, the House and Senate officially backed the congressional resolution Hunt wrote, and President Jimmy Carter made “Thankful Giving” the centerpiece of his 1978 Thanksgiving Proclamation. (Sadly, it didn’t catch on.)

Hunt even put her title of honorary Mayor of Sherman Oaks, California, her home since the 1940s, to use from 1983 to 2001, making a difference in her community by forming the Valley Mayor’s Fund for the Homeless, among many other initiatives. Hunt’s extraordinarily inspiring efforts inside and outside Hollywood showcase the actress’s benevolence, perseverance and integrity in the face of adversity.

“I may have disappeared from the limelight in the 1950s, but I didn’t disappear from life,” she told the Los Angeles Daily News in November 2020. “I think I made a difference.” Lucky for us, both her screen performances and altruistic efforts endure.

Who was the most romantic actor during the Golden Age of Hollywood? For me, it was Paul Henreid. He was tall-6’3”-handsome, with a gorgeous Austrian accent and a nobility and intelligence that could sweep women off their feet. Like that iconic scene in NOW, VOYAGER (‘42) where he lights two cigarettes at once giving one to Bette Davis; or when he utters the words “if I were free, there would be only one thing I’d want to do – prove you’re not immune to happiness. Would you want me to prove it, Charlotte? Tell me you would. Then I’ll go. Why, darling, you are crying.”

And this exchange with Rick (Humphrey Bogart) in his most famous role as the noble resistance leader Victor Laszlo in the Oscar-winning classic CASABLANCA (‘42):

Rick: “Don’t you sometimes wonder if it’s worth all this? I mean what you’re fighting for.”

Victor: “You might as well question why we breathe. If we stop breathing, we’ll die. If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.”

But Henreid was so much more than those two roles. He was dashing and sexy as a pirate in the 1945 Technicolor swashbuckling adventure THE SPANISH MAIN, he gave a complex and haunting performance as the mentally troubled composer Robert Schumann in SONG OF LOVE (‘47) and proved he could be a wonderfully vile film noir bad guy in HOLLOW TRIUMPH (‘48).

He also survived the blacklist, directed numerous episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, as well as the delicious thriller DEAD RINGER (‘64) with Davis. Even before he came to Hollywood, Henreid made his U.S film debut in the terrific romantic war drama JOAN OF PARIS (‘42); he had been a star on the Vienna stage as a member of the legendary Max Reinhardt’s theater company and also appeared in films. He was offered a movie contract with UFA in Berlin with the caveat that he join the National Socialist Actors Guild of Germany. Henreid turned down the offer.

Henreid went to England where he earned good reviews on the London stage as Prince Albert in 1937 in Victoria Regina. Though he played a sympathetic German in GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS (‘39), he was typecast generally in Nazi roles such as in Carol Reed’s classic NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH (‘40). He even played an odious German consul in his first Broadway show Elmer Rice’s Flight to the West in 1940. Then came Hollywood. And a name change from Von Hernreid to Henreid.

He was 84 when he died in 1992.

I recently chatted via e-mail with his daughter Monika Henreid, an actress/writer/director who is currently working on a documentary about her father.

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Anybody who has attended the TCM CLASSIC FILM FESTIVAL in Hollywood knows what a magical experience the event is for fans of vintage movies. There’s such good will, love and friendship there that it’s hard to choose what the favorite event is at the Festival, which would have celebrated its 11th edition this April until Covid-19 cancelled the four days of classic films.

One of the most popular presentations are the “Live From” events, which features some of the greatest actors and filmmakers from the Golden Age of Hollywood in conversation with the late, great TCM host Robert Osborne and now with Ben Mankiewicz, the channel’s primary host. These interviews have played on TCM over the years. And a select few, including interviews with Oscar-winners Luise Rainer, Eva Marie Saint, Faye Dunaway and such legends as Norman Lloyd and Peter O’Toole, will be featured during the TCM Classic Film Festival: Special Home Edition.

As a movie writer for 26 years at the L.A. Times. I’ve had the good fortune of interviewing many of these legends. Here are some memories of my conversations with two of my favorites, Eva Marie Saint and Norman Lloyd.

Eva Marie Saint

I have lost count of how many times I have interviewed Eva Marie Saint, now 95, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar as Edie, the girlfriend of Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), in Elia Kazan’s 1954 Academy Award-winning masterpiece ON THE WATERFRONT.

But I remember the first time.

I was at the now defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner when I was assigned to talk to her in 1986 about director Garry Marshall’s NOTHING IN COMMON, which stars Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason in his final film. Saint had long been a favorite of mine. I was a huge fan of ON THE WATERFRONT and admired her performances in 1957’s RAINTREE COUNTY opposite Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 romantic thriller NORTH BY NORTHWEST opposite Cary Grant and Otto Preminger’s 1960 epic EXODUS, where Saint was romanced by Paul Newman. I had also seen her on stage in 1979 in Los Angeles opposite Henry Fonda in the hit comedy First Monday in October.

From the moment she opened the door of the Westwood townhome she shared with her late director husband Jeffrey Hayden, I felt an immediate bond with her. Not only did we both hail from the same hometown, East Orange, N.J., Saint was down-to-earth, friendly and smart as a whip. And she’s always been frank and funny.

The last time I interviewed her in person in 2014, Saint talked about doing live TV in the late 1940s and 1950s. “My God, terrible things happened,” she said with a laugh, including exposing more than her talent on the soap opera One Man’s Family. Saint was doing a scene in a small pool opposite the actor who was playing her brother. At one point, she recalled, “someone was doing something offstage. You learn not to look away from what you are doing because you can be distracted.” But she finally looked, only to see a man off camera pulling his shirt up and down. “I looked down and saw my boobies were showing coast to coast,” Saint said, laughing. “I just kept in the scene and slid under the water. What could I do? It was live television. To this day, all of these years later, someone will say to me ‘Miss Saint, you were doing One Man’s Family…’ and I’ll say, ‘I remember.’”

Saint was married to Hayden for 65 years until his death at 90 in late 2016. And he was as exceptional a person as Saint, sweet and friendly. I asked her how the two met. Saint was a young actress and model in New York in the late 1940s, and Hayden was working in radio at NBC. “He saw me on the subway from the back, and he liked the way I walked,” Saint said with a smile. Hayden also noticed a big black book she was carrying that was her modeling portfolio. “The book I was carrying said ‘Eva Marie Saint’ in gold letters,” she noted. “He thought ‘I like the name.’”

They were fated to meet. Not long after seeing her on the subway, Hayden saw her again at Radio City talking with actor Arnold Stang, who also happened to be the only actor that Hayden knew. “So, he could go over to Arnold and Arnold would say ‘Hi Jeff, do you know Eva Marie?’”

The married in 1951, had two children and grandchildren.

My heart skipped a beat when she talked about how strong their marriage was after six decades. Saint noted she had been “thinking about life and I guess I was a little low. I said ‘Jeffrey, what in today’s world inspires you?’ He put his head up and said ‘You.’”

Norman Lloyd

Norman Lloyd, who is still going strong at 105, is one of the most accomplished actors/producers/directors. Beginning as child actor in the 1920s, he starred on Broadway as a member of Orson Welles’ legendary Mercury Theatre in the late 1930s.

He’s appeared in countless movies, including as the evil villain who falls from the Statue of Liberty in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 classic thriller SABOTEUR, as well as Jean Renoir’s 1945 THE SOUTHERNER and Charlie Chaplin’s 1952 LIMELIGHT. And TV audiences may know him as the kindly Dr. Auschlander on NBC’s acclaimed medical drama St. Elsewhere from 1982-88.

Lloyd also had one of the strongest marriages in Hollywood. He and his wife Peggy, who died in 2011, were married for 75 years. Having interviewed him several times, I can attest that he is a terrific storyteller and the sweetest of peas.

When I chatted with him at his cozy Brentwood home in 2014, he was still playing tennis twice a week and regaling me with stories about Hitchcock (Hitchcock, Renoir and Chaplin were among his best friends.) In fact, Hitchcock saved his career in the 1950s. Lloyd had discovered jobs hard to find because of the Hollywood Blacklist. Though he was not officially blacklisted, his liberal leanings and friendship with those who had been blacklisted hurt his career.

That didn’t stop Hitchcock from hiring him to be an associate producer on his classic anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1957. CBS told the Master of Suspense that there was a “problem” with Lloyd. Hitch persisted. “He said three words: ‘I want him,’” Lloyd recalled.

The Tiffany network, not wanting to upset one of the biggest directors in the world, immediately greenlit Lloyd, who initially worked with producer Joan Harrison, eventually became the executive producer of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour which ran until 1965. Lloyd also directed episodes of the series, including the devilishly fun 1960 installment “Man from the South,” starring Peter Lorre, Steve McQueen and the King of Cool’s then-wife Neile Adams.

Hitchcock and Lloyd reunited in the late 1970s for THE SHORT NIGHT, a thriller Hitch was hoping to make after 1976’s FAMILY PLOT. “Hitch, by the way, was not at his physical best,” Lloyd recalled. “He was really getting old and had difficulty walking. We were working on the script one day and he says to me, ‘You know, Norm. We are not going to make the picture.’”

Lloyd asked him what he meant by the statement. “He said to me a classic line: ‘Because it’s not necessary.’ When he died, the Directors Guild asked me to write a tribute to him, which I did. That’s what I ended it with.“