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When Ruth Gordon convinced her father, a sea captain, to let her pursue acting she came to New York and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She acted in a few silents made at Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1915. She made her Broadway debut in "Peter Pan" as Nibs the same year. The next 20 years she spent on stage, even appearing at the Old Vic in London in the successful run of "The Country Wife" in 1936. Nearly 25 years after her film debut, she returned to movies briefly. Her most memorable role during this period in the early 1940s was as Mary Todd in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940).
She left Hollywood to return to theater. Back in New York, she married Garson Kanin in 1942 (her first husband Gregory Kelly, a stage actor, died in 1927). She began writing plays, and, later, her husband and she collaborated on screenplays for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, whose screen relationship was modeled on their own marriage. She returned to film acting during the 1960s. It is during this last period of her career that she became a movie star, with memorable roles in Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Harold and Maude (1971). She wrote several books during the mid-1970s and appeared on TV. She won an Emmy for her role on Taxi (1978) in 1979.- Director
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What do the classic films Scarface (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1939), Sergeant York (1941), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Rio Bravo (1959) have in common? Aside from their displays of great craftsmanship, the answer is director Howard Hawks, one of the most celebrated of American filmmakers, who ironically, was little celebrated by his peers in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences during his career.
Although John Ford--his friend, contemporary and the director arguably closest to him in terms of his talent and output--told him that it was he, and not Ford, who should have won the 1941 Best Director Academy Award (for Sergeant York (1941)), the great Hawks never won an Oscar in competition and was nominated for Best Director only that one time, despite making some of the best films in the Hollywood canon. The Academy eventually made up for the oversight in 1974 by voting him an honorary Academy Award, in the midst of a two-decade-long critical revival that has gone on for yet another two decades. To many cineastes, Hawks is one of the faces of American film and would be carved on any film pantheon's Mt. Rushmore honoring America's greatest directors, beside his friend Ford and Orson Welles (the other great director who Ford beat out for the 1941 Oscar). It took the French "Cahiers du Cinema" critics to teach America to appreciate one of its own masters, and it was to the Academy's credit that it recognized the great Hawks in his lifetime.
Hawks' career spanned the freewheeling days of the original independents in the 1910s, through the studio system in Hollywood from the silent era through the talkies, lasting into the early 1970s with the death of the studios and the emergence of the director as auteur, the latter a phenomenon that Hawks himself directly influenced. He was the most versatile of American directors, and before his late career critical revival he earned himself a reputation as a first-rate craftsman and consummate Hollywood professional who just happened, in a medium that is an industrial process, to have made some great movies. Recognition as an influential artist would come later, but it would come to him before his death.
He was born Howard Winchester Hawks in Goshen, Indiana, on Decoration Day, May 30, 1896, the first child of Franklin Winchester Hawks and his wife, the former Helen Brown Howard. The day of his birth the local sheriff killed a brawler at the town saloon; the young Hawks was not born on the wild side of town, though, but with the proverbial silver spoon firmly clenched in his young mouth. His wealthy father was a member of Goshen's most prominent family, owners of the Goshen Milling Co. and many other businesses, and his maternal grandfather was one of Wisconsin's leading industrialists. His father's family had arrived in America in 1630, while his mother's father, C.W. Howard, who was born in Maine in 1845 to parents who emigrated to the U.S. from the Isle of Man, made his fortune in the paper industry with his Howard Paper Co. Ironically, almost a half-year after Howard's birth, the first motion picture was shown in Goshen, just before Christmas on December 10, 1896. Billed as "the scientific wonder of the world," the movie played to a sold-out crowd at the Irwin Theater. However, it disappointed the audience, and attendance fell off at subsequent showings. The interest of the boy raised a Presbyterian would not be piqued again until his family moved to southern California.
Before that move came to pass, though, the Hawks family relocated from Goshen to Neenah, Wisconsin, when Howard's father was appointed secretary/treasurer of the Howard Paper Co. in 1898. Howard grew up a coddled and spoiled child in Goshen, but in Neenah he was treated like a young prince. His maternal grandfather C.W. lavished his grandson with expensive toys. C.W. had been an indulgent father, encouraging the independence and adventurousness of his two daughters, Helen and Bernice, who were the first girls in Neenah to drive automobiles. Bernice even went for an airplane ride (the two sisters, Hawks' mother and aunt, likely were the first models for what became known as "the Hawksian women" when he became a director). Brother Kenneth Hawks was born in 1898, and was looked after by young Howard. However, Howard resented the birth of the family's next son, William B. Hawks, in 1902, and offered to sell him to a family friend for ten cents. A sister, Grace, followed William. Childbirth took a heavy toll on Howard's mother, and she never quite recovered after delivering her fifth child, Helen, in 1906. In order to aid her recovery, the family moved to the more salubrious climate of Pasadena, California, northeast of Los Angeles, for the winter of 1906-07. The family returned to Wisconsin for the summers, but by 1910 they permanently resettled in California, as grandfather C.W. himself took to wintering in Pasadena. He eventually sold his paper company and retired. He continued to indulge his grandson Howard, though, buying him whatever he fancied, including a race car when the lad was barely old enough to drive legally. C.W. also arranged for Howard to take flying lessons so he could qualify for a pilot's license, an example followed by Kenneth.
The young Howard Hawks grew accustomed to getting what he wanted and believed his grandfather when C.W. told him he was the best and that he could do anything. Howard also likely inherited C.W.'s propensity for telling whopping lies with a straight face, a trait that has bedeviled many film historians ever since. C.W. also was involved in amateur theatrics and Howard's mother Helen was interested in music, though no one in the Hawks-Howard family ever was involved in the arts until Howard went to work in the film industry.
Hawks was sent to Philips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, for his education, and upon graduation attended Cornell University, where he majored in mechanical engineering. In both his personal and professional lives Hawks was a risk-taker and enjoyed racing airplanes and automobiles, two sports that he first indulged in his teens with his grandfather's blessing.
The Los Angeles area quickly evolved into the center of the American film industry when studios began relocating their production facilities from the New York City area to southern California in the middle of the 1910s. During one summer vacation while Howard was matriculating at Cornell, a friend got him a job as a prop man at Famous Players-Lasky (later to become Paramount Pictures), and he quickly rose trough the ranks. Hawks recalled, "It all started with Douglas Fairbanks, who was off on location for some picture and phoned in to say they wanted a modern set. There was only one art director . . . and he was away on another location. I said, 'Well, I can build a modern set.' I'd had a few years of architectural training at school. So I did, and Fairbanks was pleased with it. We became friends, and that was really the start."
During other summer vacations from Cornell, Hawks continued to work in the movies. One story Hawks tells is that the director of a Mary Pickford film Hawks was working on, A Little Princess (1917), became too inebriated to continue working, so Hawks volunteered to direct a few scenes himself. However, it's not known whether his offer was taken up, or whether this was just one more of his tall tales. During World War I Hawks served as a lieutenant in the Signal Corps and later joined the Army Air Corps, serving in France. After the Armistice he indulged in his love of risk, working as an aviator and a professional racing car driver. Drawing on his engineering experience, Hawks designed racing cars, and one of his cars won the Indianapolis 500. These early war and work experiences proved invaluable to the future filmmaker.
He eventually decided on a career in Hollywood and was employed in a variety of production jobs, including assistant director, casting director, script supervisor, editor and producer. He and his brother Kenneth shot aerial footage for motion pictures, but Kenneth tragically was killed during a crash while filming. Howard was hired as a screenwriter by Paramount in 1922 and was tasked with writing 40 story lines for new films in 60 days. He bought the rights for works by such established authors as Joseph Conrad and worked, mostly uncredited, on the scripts for approximately 60 films. Hawks wanted to direct, but Paramount refused to indulge his ambition. A Fox executive did, however, and Hawks directed his first film, The Road to Glory (1926) in 1926, also doubling as the screenwriter.
Hawks made a name for himself by directing eight silent films in the 1920s, His facility for language helped him to thrive with the dawn of talking pictures, and he really established himself with his first talkie in 1930, the classic World War I aviation drama The Dawn Patrol (1930). His arrival as a major director, however, was marked by 1932's controversial and highly popular gangster picture Scarface (1932), a thinly disguised bio of Chicago gangster Al Capone, which was made for producer Howard Hughes. His first great movie, it catapulted him into the front rank of directors and remained Hawks' favorite film. Unnder the aegis of the eccentric multi-millionaire Hughes, it was the only movie he ever made in which he did not have to deal with studio meddling. It leavened its ultra-violence with comedy in a potent brew that has often been imitated by other directors.
Though always involved in the development of the scripts of his films, Hawks was lucky to have worked with some of the best writers in the business, including his friend and fellow aviator William Faulkner. Screenwriters he collaborated with on his films included Leigh Brackett, Ben Hecht, John Huston and Billy Wilder. Hawks often recycled story lines from previous films, such as when he jettisoned the shooting script on El Dorado (1966) during production and reworked the film-in-progress into a remake of Rio Bravo (1959).
The success of his films was partly rooted in his using first-rate writers. Hawks viewed a good writer as a sort of insurance policy, saying, "I'm such a coward that unless I get a good writer, I don't want to make a picture." Though he won himself a reputation as one of Hollywood's supreme storytellers, he came to the conclusion that the story was not what made a good film. After making and then remaking the confusing The Big Sleep (1946) (1945 and 1946) from a Raymond Chandler detective novel, Hawks came to believe that a good film consisted of at least three good scenes and no bad ones--at least not a scene that could irritate and alienate the audience. He said, "As long as you make good scenes you have a good picture--it doesn't matter if it isn't much of a story."
It was Hawks' directorial skills, his ability to ensure that the audience was not aware of the twice-told nature of his films, through his engendering of a high-octane, heady energy that made his films move and made them classics at best and extremely enjoyable entertainments at their "worst." Hawks' genius as a director also manifested itself in his direction of his actors, his molding of their line-readings going a long way toward making his films outstanding. The dialog in his films often was delivered at a staccato pace, and characters' lines frequently overlapped, a Hawks trademark. The spontaneous feeling of his films and the naturalness of the interrelationships between characters were enhanced by his habit of encouraging his actors to improvise. Unlike Alfred Hitchcock, Hawks saw his lead actors as collaborators and encouraged them to be part of the creative process. He had an excellent eye for talent, and was responsible for giving the first major breaks to a roster of stars, including Paul Muni, Carole Lombard (his cousin), Lauren Bacall, Montgomery Clift and James Caan. It was Hawks, and not John Ford, who turned John Wayne into a superstar, with Red River (1948) (shot in 1946, but not released until 1948). He proceeded to give Wayne some of his best roles in the cavalry trilogy of Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950), in which Payne played a broad range of diverse characters.
During the 1930s Hawks moved from hit to hit, becoming one of the most respected directors in the business. As his fame waxed, Hawks' image replaced the older, jodhpurs-and-megaphone image of the Hollywood director epitomized by Cecil B. DeMille. The new paradigm of the Hollywood director in the public eye was, like Hawks himself, tall and silver-haired, a Hemingwayesque man of action who was a thorough professional and did not fail his muse or falter in his mastery of the medium while on the job. The image of Hawks as the ultimate Hollywood professional persists to this day in Hollywood, and he continues to be a major influence on many of today's filmmakers. Among the directors influenced by Hawks are Robert Altman, who used Hawksian overlapping dialog and improvisation in M*A*S*H (1970) and other films. Peter Bogdanovich, who wrote a book about Hawks, essentially remade Bringing Up Baby (1938) as What's Up, Doc? (1972). Brian De Palma remade "Scarface" (Scarface (1983)). Other directors directly indebted to Hawks are John Carpenter and Walter Hill.
Hawks was unique and uniquely modern in that, despite experiencing his career peak in an era dominated by studios and the producer system in which most directors were simply hired hands brought in to shoot a picture, he also served as a producer and developed the scripts for his films. He was determined to remain independent and refused to attach himself to a studio, or to a particular genre, for an extended period of time. His work ethic allowed him to fit in with the production paradigms of the studio system, and he eventually worked for all eight of the major studios. He proved himself to be, in effect, an independent filmmaker, and thus was a model for other director-writer-producers who would arise with the breakdown of the studio system in the 1950s and 1960s and the rise of the director as auteur in the early 1970s. Hawks did it first, though, in an environment that ruined or compromised many another filmmaker.
Hawks was not interested in creating a didactic cinema but simply wanted to tell, give the public, a good story in a well-crafted, entertaining picture. Like Ernest Hemingway, Hawks did have a philosophy of life, but the characters in his films were never intended to be role models. Hawks' protagonists are not necessarily moral people but tend to play fair, according to a personal or professional code. A Hawks film typically focuses on a tightly bound group of professionals, often isolated from society at large, who must work together as a team if they are to survive, let alone triumph. His movies emphasize such traits as loyalty and self-respect. Air Force (1943), one of the finest propaganda films to emerge from World War II, is such a picture, in which a unit bonds aboard a B-17 bomber and the group is more than the sum of the individuals.
Aside from his interest in elucidating human relationships, Hawks' main theme is Hemingwayesque: the execution of one's job or duty to the best of one's ability in the face of overwhelming odds that would make an average person balk. The main characters in a Hawks film typically are people who take their jobs with the utmost seriousness, as their self-respect is rooted in their work. Though often outsiders or loners, Hawksian characters work within a system, albeit a relatively closed system, in which they can ultimately triumph by being loyal to their personal and professional codes. That thematic paradigm has been seen by some critics and cinema historians as being a metaphor for the film industry itself, and of Hawks' place within it.
In a sense, Hawks' oeuvre can be boiled down to two categories: the action-adventure films and the comedies. In his action-adventure movies, such as Only Angels Have Wings (1939), the male protagonist, played by Cary Grant (a favorite actor of his who frequently starred in his films between 1947 and 1950), is both a hero and the top dog in his social group. In the comedies, such as Bringing Up Baby (1938), the male protagonist (again played by Grant) is no hero but rather a victim of women and society. Women have only a tangential role in Hawks' action films, whereas they are the dominant figures in his comedies. In the action-adventure films society at large often is far away and the male professionals exist in an almost hermetically sealed world, whereas in the comedies are rooted in society and its mores. Men are constantly humiliated in the comedies, or are subject to role reversals (the man as the romantically hunted prey in "Baby," or the even more dramatic role reversal, including Cary Grant in drag, in I Was a Male War Bride (1949)). In the action-adventure films in which women are marginalized, they are forced to undergo elaborate courting rituals to attract their man, who they cannot get until they prove themselves as tough as men. There is an undercurrent of homo-eroticism to the Hawks action films, and Hawks himself termed his A Girl in Every Port (1928) "a love story between two men." This homo-erotic leitmotif is most prominent in The Big Sky (1952).
By the time he made "Rio Bravo," over 30 years since he first directed a film, Hawks not only was consciously moving towards parody but was in the process of revising his "closed circle of professionals" credo toward the belief that, by the time of its loose remake, "El Dorado" in 1966, he was stressing the superiority of family loyalties to any professional ethic. In "Rio Bravo" the motley group inside the jailhouse eventually forms into a family in which the stoical code of conduct of previous Hawksian groups is replaced by something akin to a family bond. The new "family" celebrates its unity with the final shootout, which is a virtual fireworks display due to the use of dynamite to overcome the villains who threaten the family's survival. The affection of the group members for each other is best summed up in the scene where the great character actor Walter Brennan, playing Wayne's deputy Stumpy, facetiously tells Wayne that he'll have tears in his eyes until he gets back to the jailhouse. The ability to razz Wayne is indicative of the bond between the two men.
The sprawl of Hawks' oeuvre over multiple genres, and their existence as high-energy examples of film as its purest, emphasizing action rather than reflection, led serious critics before the 1970s to discount Hawks as a director. They generally ignored the themes that run through his body of work, such the dynamics of the group, male friendship, professionalism, and women as a threat to the independence of men. Granted, the cinematic world limned by Hawks was limited when compared to that of John Ford, the poet of the American screen, which was richer and more complex. However, Hawks' straightforward style that emphasized human relationships undoubtedly yielded one of the greatest crops of outstanding motion pictures that can be attributed to one director. Hawks' movies not only span a wide variety of genres, but frequently rank with the best in those genres, whether the war film ("The Dawn Patrol"), gangster film ("Scarface"), the screwball comedy (His Girl Friday (1939)), the action-adventure movie ("Only Angels Have Wings"), the noir (The Big Sleep (1946)), the Western ("Red River") and "Rio Bravo"), the musical-comedy (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)) and the historical epic (Land of the Pharaohs (1955)). He even had a hand in creating one of the classic science-fiction films, The Thing from Another World (1951), which was produced by Hawks but directed by Christian Nyby, who had edited multiple Hawks films and who, in his sole directorial effort, essentially created a Hawks film (though rumors have long circulated that Hawks actually directed the film rather than Nyby, that has been discounted by such cast members as Kenneth Tobey and James Arness, who have both stated unequivocally that it was Nyby alone who directed the picture).
Though Howard Hawks created some of the most memorable moments in the history of American film a half-century ago, serious critics generally eschewed his work, as they did not believe there was a controlling intelligence behind them. Seen as the consummate professional director in the industrial process that was the studio film, serious critics believed that the great moments of Hawks' films were simply accidents that accrued from working in Hollywood with other professionals. In his 1948 book "The Film Till Now," Richard Griffin summed this feeling up with "Hawks is a very good all rounder."
Serious critics at the time attributed the mantle of "artist" to a director only when they could discern artistic aspirations, a personal visual style, or serious thematic intent. Hawks seemed to them an unambitious director who, unlike D.W. Griffith or the early Cecil B. DeMille, had not made a major contribution to American film, and was not responsible for any major cinematic innovations. He lacked the personal touch of a Charles Chaplin, a Hitchcock or a Welles, did not have the painterly sensibility of a John Ford and had never matured into the master craftsman who tackled heavy themes like the failure of the American dream or racism, like George Stevens. Hawks was seen as a commercial Hollywood director who was good enough to turn out first-rate entertainments in a wide variety of genre films in a time in which genre films such as the melodrama, the war picture and the gangster picture were treated with a lack of respect.
One of the central ideas behind the modernist novel that dominated the first half of the 20th-century artistic consciousness (when the novel and the novelist were still considered the ultimate arbiters of culture in the Anglo-American world) was that the author should begin something new with each book, rather than repeating him-/herself as the 19th century novelists had done. This paradigm can be seen most spectacularly in the work of James Joyce. Of course, it is easy to see this thrust for "something new" in the works of D.W. Griffith and C.B. DeMille, the fathers of the narrative film, working as they were in a new medium. In the post-studio era, a Stanley Kubrick (through Barry Lyndon (1975), at least) and Lars von Trier can be seen as embarking on revolutionary breaks with their past. Howard Hawks was not like this, and, in fact, the latter Hawks constantly recycled not just themes but plots (so that his last great film, "Rio Bravo," essentially was remade as "El Dorado (1966)" and Rio Lobo (1970)). He did not fit the "modernist" paradigm of an artist.
The critical perception of Hawks began to change when the auteur theory--the idea that one intelligence was responsible for the creation of superior films regardless of their designation as "commercial" or "art house"--began to influence American movie criticism. Commenting on Hawks' facility to make films in a wide variety of genres, critic Andrew Sarris, who introduced the auteur theory to American movie criticism, said of Hawks, "For a major director, there are no minor genres." A Hawks genre picture is rooted in the conventions and audience expectations typical of the Hollywood genre. The Hawks genre picture does not radically challenge, undermine or overthrow either the conventions of the genre or the audience expectations of the genre film, but expands it the genre by revivifying it with new energy. As Robert Altman said about his own McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), he fully played on the conventions and audience expectations of the Western genre and, in fact, did nothing to challenge them as he was relying on the audience being lulled into a comfort zone by the genre. What Altman wanted to do was to indulge his own artistry by painting at and filling in the edges of his canvas. Thus, Altman needed the audience's complicity through the genre conventions to accomplish this.
As a genre director, Hawks used his audience's comfort with the genre to expound his philosophy on male bonding and male-female relationships. His movies have a great deal of energy, invested in them by the master craftsman, which made them into great popular entertainments. That Hawks was a commercial filmmaker who was also a first-rate craftsman was not the sum total of his achievement as a director, but was the means by which he communicated with his audience.
While many during his life-time would not have called Hawks an artist, Robin Wood compared Hawks to William Shakespeare and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, both of whom created popular entertainments that could also appeal to elites. According to Wood, "The originality of their works lay not in the evolution of a completely new language, but in the artist's use and development of an already existing one; hence, there was common ground from the outset between artist and audience, and 'entertainment' could happen spontaneously without the intervention of a lengthy period of assimilation."
The great French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who began his cinema career as a critic, wrote about Hawks, "The great filmmakers always tie themselves down by complying with the rules of the game . . . Take, for example, the films of Howard Hawks, and in particular 'Rio Bravo'. That is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception, but Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed without disturbing the audience that has come to see a Western like all the others. Hawks is the greater because he has succeeded in fitting all that he holds most dear into a well-worn subject."
A decade before Godard's insight on Hawks, in the early 1950s, the French-language critics who wrote for the cinema journal "Cahiers du Cinema" (many of whom would go on to become directors themselves) elevated Howard Hawks into the pantheon of great directors (the appreciation of Hawks in France, according to Cinématheque Francaise founder Henri Langlois, began with the French release of "Only Angels Have Wings." The Swiss Éric Rohmer, who would one day become a great director himself, in a 1952 review of Hawks' "The Big Sky" declared, "If one does not love the films of Howard Hawks, one cannot love cinema." Rohmer was joined in his enthusiasm for Hawks by such fellow French cineastes as Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. The Cahiers critics claimed that a handful of commercial Hollywood directors like Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock had created films as artful and fulfilling as the masterpieces of the art cinema. André Bazin gave these critics the moniker "Hitchcocko-Hawksians".
Rivette wrote in his 1953 essay, "The Genius of Howard Hawks," that "each shot has a functional beauty, like a neck or an ankle. The smooth, orderly succession of shots has a rhythm like the pulsing of blood, and the whole film is like a beautiful body, kept alive by deep, resilient breathing." Hawks, however, considered himself an entertainer, not an "artist." His definition of a good director was simply "someone who doesn't annoy you." He was never considered an artist until the French New Wave critics crowned him one, as serious critics had ignored his oeuvre. He found the adulation amusing, and once told his admirers, "You guys know my films better than I do."
Commenting on this phenomenon, Sarris' wife Molly Haskell said, "Critics will spend hours with divining rods over the obviously hermetic mindscape of [Ingmar Bergman], [Michelangelo Antonioni], etc., giving them the benefit of every passing doubt. But they will scorn similar excursions into the genuinely cryptic, richer, and more organic terrain of home-grown talents."
Hawks' visual aesthetic eschews formalism, trick photography or narrative gimmicks. There are no flashbacks or ellipses in his films, and his pictures are usually framed as eye-level medium shots. The films themselves are precisely structured, so much so that Langlois compared Hawks to the great modernist architect Walter Gropius. Hawks strikes one as an Intuitive, unselfconscious filmmaker.
Hawks' definition of a good director was "someone who doesn't annoy you." When Hawks was awarded his lifetime achievement Academy Award, the citation referred to the director as "a giant of the American cinema whose pictures, taken as a whole, represent one of the most consistent, vivid, and varied bodies of work in world cinema." It is a fitting epitaph for one of the greatest directors in the history of American, and world cinema.- Actor
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Educated at the University of Toronto & Balliol College, Oxford, he joined the Canadian Field Artillery in World War I, served in France & was wounded. His first appearance was in a stage production in Siberia, during the multi-nation intervention of 1918 - 1919. Raymond returned to Canada & his family farm implement business , Massey-Harris Tractor Company, after the war, although footlights proved a greater allure than plowshares. He appeared at the Everyman Theatre, London in "In the Zone" in 1922 and from then his acting career never looked back. As adept in front of arc lights as the footlights, he was signed up for a 5 year contract by Alexander Korda. Major Massey was invalided from the Canadian Army in 1943. Raymond was devoted to his American wife Dorothy, to whom he referred all queries and problems. He had an ardent radio following in the States and became an American citizen. This was natural as his mother and maternal grandmother were Americans. A bad traveler, Raymond hated the sea and airplanes. A good sportsman, he excelled at golf and fishing, A scholar, he loved good literature. A modest man, he regarded himself as supremely uninteresting.- Actor
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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.- Born on October 1, 1896, in Rangoon, Burma, to Burmese-Jewish parents, and the son of a well-to-do merchant, distinguished veteran character actor Abraham Isaac Sofaer was a one-time schoolteacher in both Rangoon and London. He switched gears to acting after a short time and made his stage debut in 1921 as a walk-on in William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice."
Sofaer scored his first prominent London appearance with "The Green Goddess" in 1925 and, from the 1930s on, alternated between the London and Broadway repertory stages playing an assortment of Shakespearean roles (Othello, Lear, Cassius, etc.) among other classical plays. He scored a personal triumph in New York as Benjamin Disraeli opposite Helen Hayes in "Victoria Regina" in 1936. The following year, he directed Ms. Hayes in "The Merchant of Venice", in which he played the title role of "Shylock". A theatre repertory player of note, he soon focused on the big screen and made his British film debut with The Dreyfus Case (1930). Subsequent noteworthy British film roles included his judge in A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and as Disraeli in The Ghosts of Berkeley Square (1947). Recognized for his bulgy, wide-eyed stare, resonant tones and imposing stance, he built up a solid reputation over the years playing odd and interesting Eastern ethnics -- sultans, swamis, high priests, witch doctors, foreign dictators and dignitaries, he was even convincing playing Indian chiefs on occasion. His characters ranged from wise and warm-hearted to cunning and wickedly evil.
In the mid-1950s, Sofaer settled in Hollywood wherein he became a main staple in exotic dramas and costumed adventure, appearing almost exclusively in movies and TV. Some of his better known U.S. films include Quo Vadis (1951), His Majesty O'Keefe (1954), Elephant Walk (1954), Taras Bulba (1962) and Chisum (1970). Throughout the 1960s, he could be counted on for guest appearances on all the popular shows of the day including Perry Mason (1957), Wagon Train (1957), Gunsmoke (1955), Daniel Boone (1964) and Star Trek (1966). On TV, he may be best remembered for his recurring role of Haji, the master of all genies, on I Dream of Jeannie (1965).
Married to wife Angela for nearly seven decades and affectionately called "Abe" to closer friends, Sofaer was the father of six children. Retiring from acting in 1974, Sofaer died of congestive heart failure at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California at the age of 91 in 1988. - Jessie Royce Landis was called "an international star" in her New York Times obituary. She was 20 when she made her stage debut at the Playhouse in Chicago as the young countess in "The Highwayman". Soon she was on Broadway. In 1950 she went to London for "Larger Than Life", a dramatization of W. Somerset Maugham's novel, "Theatre". There she received an award for the best performance of the year. The following year in London she had the prima donna role (a singing part) in "And So To Bed". In 1954, she published her autobiography, "You Won't Be So Pretty". Then in the mid-1950s her film career took off after she was Grace Kelly's mother in To Catch a Thief (1955) and Cary Grant's mother in North by Northwest (1959). Although she claimed to have been born the same year as Grant, she was actually more than seven years older.
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Respected character actor whose on-screen work included everything from Shakespeare to Dick Tracy (1990) (his last film). After a long apprenticeship in the theatre, the 38-year-old Wolfe finally debuted in films in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), recreating his Broadway role. He then toiled away steadily in Hollywood for the next several decades, working as a supporting player in literally hundreds of film and TV productions well into his 90s. Though capable of a wide range of parts, Wolfe's gentle, patrician manner found him most often cast as a butler, a minister or a kindly doctor. He finally gained his greatest fame at the age of 85, effortlessly stealing scenes as Mama Carlson's doddering yet feisty butler "Hirsch" in several episodes of the MTM sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati (1978).- Actor
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One of the most versatile character actors in the business, Joseph Patrick Carrol Naish (pronounced Nash) was born of Irish descent in New York City. His illustrious ancestors hailed from county Limerick and were listed in Burke's Peerage. He had a Catholic education at St. Cecilia's Academy, but absconded from school at the age of 14 to become a song plugger. He briefly joined a children's vaudeville company run by Gus Edwards. At 16, he enlisted in the Navy, was thrown out, re-enlisted to experience wartime action with the U.S. Army Signals Corps in France, then spent years sailing the world's seas with the Merchant Marine. Around this time, he acquired as many as eight languages and became adept at dialects. J. Carroll then spent some time in Paris singing and dancing with a stage troupe run by musical comedy star Gaby Deslys. Sometime around 1925, he returned to New York for further theatrical work, possibly with Molly Picon's Yiddish Theatre. The following year, he travelled by tramp steamer to California en route to China. The ship suffered mechanical breakdowns and departure was delayed. While ashore, J. Carroll was somehow spotted by a Fox studio talent scout and wound up in Hollywood. He played a few bit roles and then joined a road company production of 'The Shanghai Gesture'. In 1929, he married an Irish stage actress, Gladys Heaney, in what would become one the most enduring of show business unions.
Back in Hollywood from 1930, J. Carroll's gift for dialects were to land him plum character parts as Arabs, Italians, Pacific Islanders, Hindus, Mexicans, African-Americans and Orientals. Villains of the black-hearted variety were his stock-in-trade. Indeed, he was so damn good at his job that Time Magazine referred to him as a 'Hollywood's one-man United Nations'. Ironically, J. Carroll's black hair, moustache and swarthy complexion invariably denied him roles as an Irishman (the sole exception being General Phil Sheridan in Rio Grande (1950)).
On radio, J. Carroll enjoyed one of his most profound successes as the voice of Italian immigrant Luigi Basco. 'Life with Luigi' was broadcast from 1948 to 1954, entertained millions of listeners and helped shape American consciousness about Italian values and the Italian way of life. Of its time, it was also essentially stereotypical. In films, J. Carroll was the consummate scene-stealer who could make even a bad movie look good. There weren't many of those, to be sure. His very best work includes the Italian prisoner Giuseppe in Sahara (1943) (one of his two Oscar-nominated roles), Loretta Young's Chinese father Sun Yat Ming in The Hatchet Man (1932), a Mexican peasant in A Medal for Benny (1945) (his second Oscar nomination), the pirate Cahusac in Captain Blood (1935) and John Garfield's well-meaning father Rudy in Humoresque (1946). He played Lakota medicine man and warrior Sitting Bull twice: in Annie Get Your Gun (1950) and in the title role of Sitting Bull (1954). He was the archetypal evil genius Dr. Daka in the Batman (1943) serial and, in 1956, brought his talents to the small screen as Charlie Chan in The New Adventures of Charlie Chan (1957). Having amassed some 224 screen credits, J. Carroll Naish died of emphysema in January 1973 at the age of 77. Sadly, he never won an Oscar which would have been richly merited. However, A Medal for Benny garnered him a Golden Globe Award as Best Supporting Actor and he is remembered with a star on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard.- Actor
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An imposing Austrian import-turned-matinée idol on the silent screen, Hollywood actor Joseph Schildkraut went on to conquer talking films as well -- with Oscar-winning results. Inclined towards smooth, cunning villainy, his Oscar came instead for his sympathetic portrayal of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in The Life of Emile Zola (1937). His most touching role on both stage and screen would come as the Jewish father-in-hiding, Otto Frank, in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).
Born on March 22, 1895, in Vienna, Austria, Joseph was the son of famed European/Yiddish stage actor Rudolph Schildkraut and his wife, the former Erna Weinstein. Nicknamed "Pepi" as a boy, the affectionate tag remained with him throughout his life. The family moved to Hamburg, Germany, when Joseph was 4. Joseph studied the piano and violin and grew inspired with his father's profession. On stage (with his father) from age 6, the family again relocated to Berlin where his father built a strong association with famed theatrical director Max Reinhardt.
Following Joseph's graduation from Berlin's Royal Academy of Music in 1911, the family migrated to America and settled in New York in 1912. His father continued making his mark in America's Yiddish theater while Joseph was accepted into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Offered lucrative theatre work back in Germany, Rudolf and family returned to Europe where Joseph began to grow in stature on the stage with the help of mentor Albert Bassermann. Joseph, like his father, would become well known not only for his prodigious talents on stage, but his marriage-threatening, Lothario-like behavior off-stage.
World War I and a call to the Austrian Army could have interrupted his career but his theatrical connections helped exempt him from duty. A thriving member of the Deutsches Volkstheatre (1913-1920), work became difficult to find in the post-war years so once again the family returned to America in 1920. Now an established stage player, Joseph was handed the title role in the Guild Theatre production (and American premiere) of "Liliom" opposite his leading lady of choice Eva Le Gallienne. It made stars out of both actors and both revisited their parts together on stage many years later in 1932.
Having appeared in a few silent pictures in Germany and Austria, Joseph was handed a prime role in the silent screen classic Orphans of the Storm (1921) starring the Gish sisters. This alone established him as an exotic matinée figure along the lines of a Valentino and Navarro. Preferring the stage, he nevertheless continued making films while conquering (on screen) Hollywood's loveliest of actresses, including Norma Talmadge in The Song of Love (1923), Seena Owen in Shipwrecked (1926), Marguerite De La Motte in Meet the Prince (1926), Bessie Love in Young April (1926) (which also co-starred father Rudolf), Lya De Putti in The Heart Thief (1927), and Jetta Goudal in The Forbidden Woman (1927). Most notable was his participation in the Cecil B. DeMille epics The Road to Yesterday (1925) and The King of Kings (1927), the latter co-starring as Judas Iscariot, with father Rudolf playing the high priest Caiaphas.
Joseph met his first wife, aspiring actress Elise Bartlett, during a herald run as "Peer Gynt" (1923) on Broadway. The impulsive romantic swept her off her feet, proposed to her on the day he met her, and married her the following week. The couple separated a few years later and his first wife fell to drink, dying at a fairly young age of an alcohol-related illness. His second marriage to Marie McKay was much happier and lasted almost three decades.
The actor's sturdy voice and strong command of the stage led to an easy transition into talking films. Among others, Joseph won the role of Gaylord Ravenal in the Kern and Hammerstein musical Show Boat (1929) opposite Laura La Plante as Magnolia. Despite his preference for the theater, Depression-era finances forced him to relocate to Los Angeles for more job security. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Joseph evolved into one of Hollywood's most distinctive character actors.
He played Wallace Beery's nemesis, General Pascal in MGM's Viva Villa! (1934), King Herod opposite Claudette Colbert in DeMille's Cleopatra (1934), and stole scenes as the cunning and underhanded Conrad, Marquis of Montferratin, in DeMille's The Crusades (1935). Joseph received his Oscar for his portrayal of Captain Dreyfus, a proud and robust French Jew wrongly convicted of treason and subsequently exiled to Devil's Island, in the biopic The Life of Emile Zola (1937). He soon became a Hollywood fixture appearing in everything from sumptuous costumers (Marie Antoinette (1938), The Three Musketeers (1939), The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), Monsieur Beaucaire (1946)), to action adventure (Lancer Spy (1937), Suez (1938)) to potent drama (The Rains Came (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1940)). His film output slowed down considerably at the outbreak of WWII in 1941, however; nevertheless he continued to show vitality on the stage with notable successes in "Clash by Night" (1941) with Tallulah Bankhead, "Uncle Harry" (1942) and "The Cherry Orchard" (1944) (again with Eva Le Gallienne).
His Hollywood downfall happened when he signed his career away to the low budget Republic Pictures studio...for financial reasons. The films were unworthy of his participation and his roles secondary in nature to the storyline. His final Broadway appearance and greatest stage triumph would occur in 1955 as Otto Frank and he repeated his role on film but The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). In one of Hollywood's bigger missteps, he was not even nominated for an Academy Award. Sporadic appearances followed on stage and film -- his last movie role wasted on the trivial role of Nicodemus in the epic failure The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). The film was released posthumously. On TV, however, he played Claudius to Maurice Evans' Hamlet in 1953 and filmed a memorable "Twilight Zone" episode in 1961.
Following his beloved second wife's death in 1961, he married one more time, in 1963, to a much younger woman named Leonora Rogers. Joseph died of a heart attack only months later at his New York City home on January 21, 1964, He was 68, almost the exact same age his father Rudolf was when he too suffered a fatal heart attack. Joseph was interred in the Beth Olam Mausoleum of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.- Actor
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This dark, debonair, dashing and extremely distinguished Austrian actor was christened Adolf Wohlbrück in Vienna, the scion of a family of circus clowns. He broke away easily from generations of tradition as the circus life had no appeal whatsoever to Walbrook.
Trained by the legendary director Max Reinhardt, Walbrook's reputation grew on both the Austrian and German stages. In between he managed a couple of undistinguished roles in silent films. Billed as Adolf Wohlbrück, the youthfully handsome actor graced a number of romantic films come the advent of sound beginning in 1931. Among them Waltz War (1933) and the gender-bending comedy Victor and Victoria (1933), which later served as the inspiration and basis for Blake Edwards' own Victor/Victoria (1982) starring wife Julie Andrews. Hollywood beckoned in the late 30s for Walbrook to re-shoot dialog for an upcoming international picture The Soldier and the Lady (1937) again playing Michael Strogoff, a role he had played impeccably in both previous French and German adaptations. With the rise of oppression in Nazi Germany he moved to Great Britain and took his trademark mustache and dark, handsome features to English language films where he went on to appear to great effect.
Portraying a host of imperious kings, bon vivants and and foreign dignitaries over the course of his career, he played everything from composer Johann Strauss to the Bavarian King Ludwig I. With a tendency for grand, intense, over-the-top acting, he was nevertheless quite impressive in a number of portrayals. Such included the sympathetic German officer in the landmark Powell and Pressburger satire The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and gentle pacifist in another of their collaborations 49th Parallel (1941); as Prince Albert in the black-and-white glossy costumer Victoria the Great (1937) immediately followed by its color remake Queen of Destiny (1938) both opposite Anna Neagle's Queen Victoria; and, most notably, as the obsessively demanding impresario opposite ballerina Moira Shearer in the romantic melodrama The Red Shoes (1948). His stiff and stern military officers were just as notable which included sterling work in The Queen of Spades (1949) and last-speaking English film I Accuse! (1958).
He retired from films at the end of the 1950s, and in later years returned to the European stage and included television roles to his resume. He died in Germany in 1967 of a heart attack.- Actress
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Olive Carey was born Olive Fuller Golden on January 31, 1896. Olive was 18 when she appeared in her first motion picture, a silent entitled, Tess of the Storm Country (1914). After she made A Knight of the Range (1916), she retired from films. In 1916, she married actor Harry Carey who was eighteen years older. They had two children, one of whom was Harry Carey Jr. who was a very good actor in his own right. Olive briefly returned to the screen in 1931 in a film called Trader Horn (1931). After 1935's Naughty Marietta (1935) Olive again stepped away from the cameras. But in 1947, her husband passed away, and she, once more, stepped into films. This time her stay was a bit longer. Her first film following Harry's death was Air Hostess (1949). She continued to act in films off and on until age 70 when she appeared for the last time in 1966's Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (1966). On March 13, 1988, Olive died in Carpinteria, California, at the age of 92.- Actress
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Marjorie Bennett was an Australian actress, who spend most of her career working in the United Kingdom and the United States. She was born in York, Western Australia, a town that was an important stop for miners and travelers during the Australian gold rushes of the late 19th century. York is located 97 kilometers (60 miles) east of Perth, Western Australia's capital and largest city.
Bennett made her film debut in the film "The Girl, Glory" (1917). She had a few credited roles in silent films of the 1910s. such as "Naughty, Naughty!", "Hugon, the Mighty", and "The Midnight Patrol". None of them had a lasting impact
She resumed her film career in 1946, with the uncredited part of a shop assistant in the mystery film "Dressed to Kill". The film was another adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes series on film, and was the 14th and final entry in a film series which cast Basil Rathbone as Sherlock. Bennet started appearing regularly in minor film roles in the late 1940s, with films such as the black comedy "Monsieur Verdoux" (1947), the romantic comedy "June Bride" (1948), and the horror comedy "Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff" (1949).
By the 1950s, Bennett was quite established as a character actress in both film and television. She played the gruff landlady Mrs. Alsop in "Limelight" (1952), appeared in several more "Abbot and Costello" films, and had a recurring role in the television series "Lassie".
In the 1960s, Bennett had her first known role as a voice actress, as the character "Duchess" in the animated film "One Hundred and One Dalmatians" (1961). Duchess is one of the cows who offers shelter for the night and warm milk to the starving puppies, following their escape from villains Horace and Jasper.
Bennett continued regularly appearing in film throughout the 1960s. She had small roles in both "Mary Poppins" (1964) and "My Fair Lady" (1964). Her credits included psychological thriller "The Night Walker" (1964) and the horror film "Billy the Kid Versus Dracula" (1966), She also made several more television appearances.
In the 1970s, Bennett had a more substantial role in the mystery film "Stacey" (1973). She played aging heiress Florence Chambers, who hired private investigator Stacey Hanson to examine whether the surviving members of Florence's family were worthy to be included in her will. Chambers eventually learns that one of her would-be heirs is homosexual, a second one is having extramarital affairs, and a third one belongs to a Manson Family-style religious cult.
Bennett's other film roles in this decade included the crime thriller "Charley Varrick" (1973), the disaster film "Airport 1975" (1974), the black comedy "I Wonder Who's Killing Her Now?" (1975), and the crime comedy "The North Avenue Irregulars" (1979). In the television film "Sherlock Holmes in New York" (1976), Bennett played Mrs. Martha Hudson, Holmes' landlady. In the television film "Better Late Than Never" (1979), Bennett played Marjorie Crane, one of the residents of a nursing home who revolt against oppressive rules.
In 1980, Bennet finally retired, due to poor health. Her final television appearance was in an episode of the sitcom "Barney Miller" (1975-1982). Bennett died in 1982, and her ashes were interred in the Great Mausoleum's Columbarium of Dawn at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale.
According to a 1977 article by "The Los Angeles Times", Bennett was one of the busiest of Hollywood's veteran character actresses. Her face was familiar to many Americans due to Bennett's numerous starring roles in television commercials.- Director
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Leo McCarey was born on 3 October 1896 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was a director and writer, known for An Affair to Remember (1957), Going My Way (1944) and Love Affair (1939). He was married to Virginia Stella Martin. He died on 5 July 1969 in Santa Monica, California, USA.- Actor
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Alan Mowbray, the American film actor who was one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild, was born Ernest Allen on August 18, 1896, in London, England, to a non-theatrical family. He served in the British army during World War I and received the Military Medal and the French Croix De Guerre for bravery in action. He began as a stage actor in England, and in some accounts he gave of his life, claimed he was a provincial actor in England before his naval service. In other versions, he claimed he turned to acting after The Great War, as World War I was then known, as he was broke and had no other skills.
After acting in London's West End, Mowbray came to the United States, where he toured the country with the Theater Guild from 1923 to 1929. On the road with the Guild, he most enjoyed acting in the plays of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw. He made his Broadway debut in the play "Sport of Kings" at the Lyceum Theatre on May 4, 1926. He also appeared on Broadway in "These Modern Women" in February 1928 and in "The Amorous Antic" in December 1929.
On August 25, 1929, Mowbray's own play, "Dinner is Served," an original comedy he wrote, directed and starred in, made its debut at the Cort Theatre. The play was not a success, closing after just four performances. After "The Amorous Antic," Mowbray did not appear again on Broadway until 1963, when he was featured in "Enter Laughing," the hit stage adaptation of Carl Reiner's novel.
His relative lack of success on Broadway during the "Roaring Twenties" did not matter, as sound had come to Hollywood and the studios were looking for stage actors who could appear in the talkies. Blessed with excellent diction, and tall with a stiff posture and a patrician air, he was ideal for character parts in sound pictures. A member of the "stiff-upper lip" school of British acting, he was often cast as a British, European or upper-class American gentleman, or as an aristocrat or royalty. As he aged, roles as doctors or butlers were his forte.
Mowbray was praised by the critics for limning George Washington in the 1931 biopic Alexander Hamilton (1931) (he would once again play the Father of His Country, this time in a comic vein, in the 1945 musical Where Do We Go from Here? (1945)). He had a romantic lead role opposite Miriam Hopkins in Pioneer Films' Becky Sharp (1935), which was the first feature film made in three-strip Technicolor.
Mowbray had the distinction of appearing in movies with three screen Sherlock Holmeses: Clive Brook in Sherlock Holmes (1932), Reginald Owen in A Study in Scarlet (1933) and Basil Rathbone in Terror by Night (1946). He played the butler in the first two "Topper" films, and as a character actor had memorable turns in two John Ford pictures, My Darling Clementine (1946) and Wagon Master (1950). In the area of typecasting, Mowbray could be counted on as a "pompous blowhard" in such movies as My Man Godfrey (1936), or as "the surprise killer" in B-movie murder mysteries. One of his favorite roles was the con man in the television series Colonel Humphrey Flack (1953), which ran on the Dumont network in 1953.
Mowbray occasionally was a screenwriter, but mostly concentrated on acting. In his personal life he was a member of the Royal Geographic Society and was active in several acting fraternities. He also was one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild. The Guild was formed in 1933, in the wake of the formation of the Screen Writers Guild, in reaction to a proposed 50% across-the-board pay cut implemented by the studios.
Actors Equity, the theatrical actors union, had tried to organize Hollywood after winning a contract and a closed shop on Broadway after World War I, but it had failed. Screen actors angered over the lack of contracts and the grueling work hours at the Hollywood studios founded the Masquers club in 1925 in a move towards unionization. After studio technicians won a collective bargaining agreement from the studios in 1926, MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer had the idea of heading off collective bargaining by the "talent" branches--the actors, writers and directors--by creating a company union. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences was created to serve as an intermediary between the studios and the talent branches and technicians, negotiating contract disputes. Proto-unions, such as the original Screen Writers Guild, folded in 1927 after the creation of the Academy.
By the announcement of the across-the-board cut in 1933, two previous rounds of cutbacks and lay-offs caused by the Great Depression had alienated most of the talent in Hollywood and had led to a strike by the technicians which had closed down the studios for a day. Losing faith in the company union that was the Academy, the talent began organizing their own guilds. In addition to the lack of contracts for many actors and the concerns over wages and hours, one of the new Screen Actors Guild's grievances was that Academy membership was by invitation-only.
In March 1933, SAG was founded by six actors: Berton Churchill, Charles B. Miller, Grant Mitchell, Ralph Morgan, Alden Gay and Kenneth Thomson. Three months later Mowbray was named to SAG's board of directors. He personally funded SAG when it was first founded. While many high-profile actors, already signed to seven-year contracts, refused initially to join SAG, they began to flock to the new union once the studios initiated an anti-raiding provision in the new National Industrial Relations Act code the industry had implemented after Franklin D. Roosevelt became US President and oversaw the enactment of his New Deal legislation in the first 100 days of his administration.
The NRA code the movie industry adopted created a situation for the talent similar to baseball's reserve clause, in which another studio was prevented from offering a contract to an actor, writer or director whose contract had lapsed until their old studio had finished with them and not picked up their option. The NRA code contained a pay ceiling for the talent and technicians, but not for executives. The talent was further enraged when it found out that the Academy, the "company union," had created a committee to investigate the feasibility of long-term contracts. Long-term contracts were the only island of stability in an industry that enhanced its profitability by cutting the wages of its employees and by working them long hours.
At a pivotal meeting at the home of Frank Morgan (the future "Wizard of Oz" and the brother of first SAG president Ralph Morgan), Eddie Cantor insisted that SAG's response to the new code--a collective bargaining agreement--should be in the interests of all actors, not just the already established ones. In the three weeks after the critical meeting, SAG membership rose from approximately 80 members to more than 4,000. Actors resigned from the Academy en masse to join SAG.
Cantor, a friend of President Roosevelt, took the occasion of his being invited to spend the 1933 Thanksgiving holiday with the Roosevelt family to point out the inequities in the new code that SAG found particularly noxious. By executive order, F.D.R. struck them down.
Finally, in 1937, after a long period of resistance, the studios recognized SAG as a collective bargaining agent for actors. Recognition of the Screen Writers Guild and the Screen Directors Guild eventually followed. Mowbray's financial support, in the crucial early days of the guild, had helped make a collective bargaining agreement for actors a reality.
Alan Mowbray married Lorayne Carpenter in 1927, and they had two children. He died on March 25, 1969, of a heart attack.- Actor
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Born George Melville Cooper on October 15, 1896, in Birmingham England, he was the son of non-professionals W.C.J. and Frances (Brennan) Cooper, and attended various English public schools, including King Edward's School in Birmingham. Attracted to the stage as a teenager, he made his debut at Stratford-on-Avon at age 18, but his young career was interrupted by World War I. Serving in a Scottish regiment on the Western Front, he was captured and made prisoner of war for a time by the Germans.
Following the war Cooper returned to the theatre and earned good reviews in the play "The Farmer's Wife" in 1921. He made his official London debut with a production of "Back to Methuselah in 1924, and furthered his career on stage with roles in "The Third Finger" (1927) and "Journey's End" (1929). He turned to films in middle age with the English entry Black Coffee (1931) and, after supporting roles in the popular costumers The Private Life of Don Juan (1934) and The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), decided to cross the waters to seek work in America. Taking his first Broadway curtain call with "Laburnum Grove" (1935), he also appeared in "Jubilee" (1935) and "Tovarich" (1937) and subsequently became a sometime stage director, as in the case of the 1947 production of "We Love a Lassie."
In Hollywood Cooper was effectively cast as ineffectual types and played in a number of "A" pictures. Giving great snob appeal, he made a most reliable and disdainful butler, chauffeur or doorman in such films as The Bishop Misbehaves (1935), Four's a Crowd (1938), Too Many Husbands (1940), And Baby Makes Three (1949) and The Petty Girl (1950). More quality roles, however, wormed their way outside this stereotype with his blundering and cowardly Sheriff of Nottingham opposite dashing Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938); conman sidekick to Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve (1941); portentous Mr. Collins whom Greer Garson nearly married in Pride and Prejudice (1940); and Mr. Tringle, the wedding supervisor, in Father of the Bride (1950) being particular standouts.
Cooper made an active jaunt into TV roles in the 1950s but returned strongly to the stage after biding farewell to films in 1958. In the 1960s he enjoyed such scene-stealing theatrical roles as Colonel Pickering in "My Fair Lady," Pellinore in "Camelot" and Reverend Chasuble in "The Importance of Being Earnest". He made one last return to Broadway playing (what else?) a valet in a short-run revival of the farcical comedy "Charley's Aunt" in 1970, which co-starred Rex Thompson, Louis Nye and 'Maureen O'Sullivan'. Married three times, his first was to London-born actress Rita Page who had a bit part in one of his films This Above All (1942), and died in 1954. They had one daughter, Valerie. The 76-year-old Cooper died in Los Angeles of cancer in 1973, and was survived by third wife Elizabeth.- Actor
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Ted Healy was was born Ernest Lea Nash and grew up as a very good friend of Moses "Moe" and Samuel "Shemp" Horwitz (later Moe and Shemp Howard). In the '20s he changed his name to Ted Healy and got Moe, Shemp, and a violinist named Larry Feinberg (later Larry Fine) to do vaudeville acts with him as his stooges. As the 1930s started, Ted was becoming addicted to alcohol. Shemp left the act and Moe replaced him with Jerome "Curly" Howard. Those three also left the act because Ted Healy underpaid them and kept getting drunk. He spent the rest of his life doing feature films, most notably "Operator 13." Ted Healy died on December 21, 1937 while out celebrating the birth of his son. The cause of death was listed as nephritis on the autopsy.- Kathryn Givney was born on 27 October 1896 in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, USA. She was an actress, known for Daddy Long Legs (1955), My Friend Irma (1949) and A Place in the Sun (1951). She was married to J. George Stutzman and Francis Alton Connolly. She died on 16 March 1978 in Hollywood, California, USA.
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William Wellman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter-director of the original A Star Is Born (1937), was called "Wild Bill" during his World War I service as an aviator, a nickname that persisted in Hollywood due to his larger-than-life personality and lifestyle.
A leap-year baby born in 1896 on the 29th of February in Brookline, MA, Wellman was the great-great-great grandson of Francis Lewis, one of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence. Wellman's father was a stockbroker and his mother, the former Cecilia McCarthy, was born in Ireland. Despite an upper-middle-class upbringing, the young Wellman was a hell-raiser. He excelled as an athlete and particularly enjoyed playing ice hockey, but he also enjoyed joyriding in stolen cars at nights.
Cecilia Wellman served as a probation officer for "wayward boys" (juvenile delinquents) for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and was such a success in her field that she was asked to address Congress on the subject of delinquency. One of her charges was her own son, as the young Bill was kicked out of school at the age of 17 for hitting his high school principal on the head with a stink bomb. He tried making a living as a candy salesman and a cotton salesman, but failed. He worked for a lumber yard but was fired after losing control of a truck and driving it through the side of a barn. Eventually he wound up playing professional ice hockey in Massachusetts. While playing at the Colonial Theatre in Boston, an actor named Douglas Fairbanks took note of him. Impressed by Wellman's good looks and the figure he cut on ice, the soon-to-be silent-film superstar suggested to him that he had what it took to become a movie actor. Wellman's dream was to become an aviator, but since his father "didn't have enough money for me to become a flier in the regular way . . .I went into a war to become a flier."
When he was 19 years old, through the intercession of his uncle, Wellman joined the air wing of the French Foreign Legion, where he learned to fly. In France he served as a pilot with the famous Lafayette Flying Corps (better known as the Lafayette Escadrille), where he won his nickname "Wild Bill" due to his devil-may-care style in the air. He and fellow pilot Tom Hitchcock, the great polo player, were in the Black Cat group. Wellman was shot down by anti-aircraft fire and injured during the landing of his plane, which had lost its tail section. Out of 222 Escadrille pilots 87 were killed, but Wellman was fated to serve out the duration of the war. In the spring of 1918 he was recruited by the US Army Air Corps, joining "because I was broke, and they were trying to get us in." Commissioned an officer, he was sent back to the US and stationed at Rockwell Field, in San Diego, CA, to teach combat fighting tactics to the new AAC pilots.
Wellman would fly up to Hollywood and land on Fairbanks' polo fields to spend the weekend. Fairbanks told the returning hero that he would help him break into the movies when the war was over, and he was as good as his word. Fairbanks envisioned Wellman as an actor and cast him as the juvenile in The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (1919) and as a young officer in Evangeline (1919), but acting was something Wellman grew to hate, a hatred he later transferred to actors in his employ. He was fired by fellow macho director Raoul Walsh from "Evangeline" for slapping the lead actress, who Wellman didn't know was Walsh's wife. Disgusted with acting, Wellman told Fairbanks he wanted to be a director, and Fairbanks helped him into the production end of the business. It was a purely financial decision, he later recalled, as directors made more money than supporting actors at the time.
Goldwyn Pictures hired him as a messenger in 1920 and he soon worked his way up the ladder, first as an assistant cutter, then as an assistant property man, property man, assistant director and second-unit director before making his uncredited directorial debut later that year at Fox with Twins of Suffering Creek (1920) starring Dustin Farnum (the silent film B-Western star whom Dustin Hoffman's star-struck mother named the future double-Oscar winner after). Wellman later remembered the film as awful, along with such other B-Westerns as Cupid's Fireman (1923), starring Buck Jones, whose westerns he began directing in 1923 after serving his apprenticeship.
Fox Films gave Wellman his first directing credit in 1923 with the Buck Jones western Second Hand Love (1923) and, other than the Dustin Farnum picture The Man Who Won (1923), he turned out Jones pictures for the rest of his time at Fox. The studio fired him in 1924 after he asked for a raise after completing The Circus Cowboy (1924), another Buck Jones film. Moving to Columbia, he helmed When Husbands Flirt (1925), then went over to MGM for the slapstick comedy The Boob (1926) before landing at Famous Players-Lasky (now known as Paramount Pictures after its distribution unit), where he directed You Never Know Women (1926) and The Cat's Pajamas (1926). It was as a contract director at the now renamed Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky Corp. that he had his breakout hit, due to his flying background. Paramount entrusted its epic WW I flying epic Wings (1927) to Wellman, and the film went on to become the first Academy Award-winning best picture.
Paramount paid Wellman $250 a week to direct "Wings". He also gave himself a role as a German pilot, and flew one of the German planes that landed and rolled over. The massive production employed 3,500 soldiers, 65 pilots and 165 aircraft. It also went over budget and over schedule due to Wellman's perfectionism, and he came close to being fired more than once. The film took a year to complete, but when it was released it turned out to be one of the most financially successful silent pictures ever released and helped put Gary Cooper, whom Wellman personally cast in a small role, on the path to stardom. "Wings" and Wellman's next flying picture, The Legion of the Condemned (1928)--in which Cooper had a starring role--initiated the genre of the World War One aviation movie, which included such famous works as Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels (1930) and Howard Hawks' The Dawn Patrol (1930). Despite his success in bringing in the first Best Picture Oscar winner, Paramount did not keep Wellman under contract.
Wellman's disdain for actors already was in full bloom by the time he wrapped "Wings". Many actors appearing in his pictures intensely disliked his method of bullying them to elicit an performance. Wellman was a "man's man" who hated male actors due to their narcissism, yet he preferred to work with them because he despised the preparation that actresses had to go through with their make-up and hairdressing before each scene. Wellman shot his films fast. The hard-drinking director usually oversaw a riotous set, in line with his own lifestyle. He married five women, including a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, before settling down with Dorothy Coonan Wellman, a former Busby Berkeley dancer. Wellman believed that Dorothy saved him from becoming a caricature of himself. She appeared as a tomboy in Wild Boys of the Road (1933), a Depression-era social commentary picture made for the progressive Warner Bros. studio (and which is a favorite of Martin Scorsese). It came two years after Wellman's masterpiece, The Public Enemy (1931), one of the great early talkies, one of the great gangster pictures and the film that made James Cagney a superstar. Scorsese says that Wellman's use of music in the film influenced his own first gangster picture, Mean Streets (1973) .
Wellman was as adept at comedy as he was at macho material, helming the original A Star Is Born (1937) (for which he won his only Oscar, for best original story) and the biting satire Nothing Sacred (1937)--both of which starred Fredric March--for producer David O. Selznick. Both movies were dissections of the fame game, as was his satire Roxie Hart (1942), which reportedly was one of Stanley Kubrick's favorite films.
During World War Two Wellman continued to make outstanding films, including The Ox-Bow Incident (1942) and Story of G.I. Joe (1945), and after the war he turned out another war classic, Battleground (1949). In the 1950s Wellman's best later films starred John Wayne, including the influential aviation picture The High and the Mighty (1954), for which he received his third and last best director Oscar nomination. His final film hearkened back to his World War One service, Lafayette Escadrille (1958), which featured the unit in which Wellman had flown. He retired as a director after making the film, reportedly enraged at Warner Bros.' post-production tampering with a film that meant so much to him.
Other than David O. Selznick, not many people in Hollywood particularly liked the hell-raising iconoclast Wellman. Louis B. Mayer's daughter Irene Mayer Selznick, the first wife of David O. Selznick, said that Wellman was "a terror, a shoot-up-the-town fellow, trying to be a great big masculine I-don't-know-what". The Directors Guild of America in 1973 honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award.
William Wellman died (from leukemia) in 1975.- Actor
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Though not as well known as his nearly decade-older brother Barry Fitzgerald, Shields was a talented actor with well over twice the film roles in his career. Fitzgerald was already a well established player at the renowned Dublin Abbey Theater when Shields, also bitten by the acting bug, joined in 1914. He performed but was also out front directing plays. Already he had dabbled in the new medium of Irish film (1910) with two notable examples (1918). There was more to the seemingly mild-mannered Shields than met the eye. His family was Protestant Nationalist and he himself fought in the Easter Uprising of 1916. And he was in fact captured and imprisoned in a camp in North Wales. Late in 1918 he came to the United States and first helped bring Irish comedy and drama to Broadway. He would continue to appear on Broadway for some 24 plays until 1941, especially reviving two Abbey Theater favorites from the hand of Sean O'Casey, "The Plough and the Stars" and "Juno and the Paycock", the latter being produced and staged by him in 1940. Still not settled, Shields was back in Dublin through most of the 1920s but returned to Broadway almost full time in 1932 moving through the repertory of Irish plays. When John Ford finally convinced his brother - and some other Abbey players - to come to Hollywood to do the 1936 film version of "The Plough and the Stars", Broadway veteran Shields was asked to take the pivotal part of Padraic (Patrick) Pearse, perhaps the most important leader of the Easter Rising.
By early 1939 he was finished with his concentration on Broadway and found Ford eager to offer him a part in his Revolutionary period adventure Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) as the matter-of-fact pioneer minister with a good shooting eye Rev. Rosenkrantz. Ministers, reverends, priests, and other assorted clerics would be a Shields staple throughout his career - and he always managed to breath an individual humanity into each and every one. From then on through the 1940s he was in demand as character actor - and not just Irish roles as Fitzgerald with his gravelly, prominent brogue, found himself. Along with the aforementioned men of the cloth, Shields was provided a steady offering of the gamut of Hollywood's character storehouse-Irish and otherwise. And among them were parts for some of Ford's most memorable films: How Green Was My Valley (1941) and especially The Quiet Man (1952). Here again, he was a cleric but a uniquely sympathetic one - the lone Protestant Reverend Dr. Playfair - whom John Wayne affectionately calls "Padre" in the vastly Catholic village of the film. He alone knows the former identity of Wayne and convinces the latter of his final struggle to go on with his new life in Ireland. Enough said - with a wonderful cast of Ford stalwarts and native Irish (including Fizgerald), this was Ford's long awaited crowning achievement.
Though Shields was taking on the occasional film through the 1950s, most of his time was going to television. Along with TV playhouse roles he became a most familiar face of episodic TV with a variety of roles (even the old Mickey Mouse Club Hardy Boy Adventures), especially in the ever-popular TV Western genera. Aside from his numerous appearances in plays throughout his career, all told Arthur Shields screen appearances approached nearly 100 memorable acting endeavors.- Lilyan Tashman was born on October 23, 1896 in Brooklyn, New York to Rose (Cook) from Germany and Morris Tashman from Bialystock, Poland. After toying with stage work, Lilyan made her film debut with Experience (1921), followed the next year by Head Over Heels (1922) (this was at a time when some studios and their performers were turning out one film per week. She had no other offers for 1923, but her constant rounds of the casting offices finally did some good. In 1924 she appeared in no fewer than 6 films. For a while she averaged 7 films per year. She was one of relatively few performers who easily made the transition to the sound era, In 1934 she finished filming Frankie and Johnnie (1936) and went into a New York City hospital to have some tumors removed; she died there on March 21, 1934 at age 37. The film was released two years after her death.
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Young Arnold Ridley was forced to give up a budding acting career and turn to writing. He hit the jackpot with 'The Ghost Train' which was a great West End success, and has been filmed several times. This was followed by a number of other plays during the 1920s and 1930s. In later life he returned to acting, often as kindly and gentle old men such as his most famous role as Private Godfrey in the BBC comedy series Dad's Army (1968) from 1968 to 1977.
Ridley's acting career began before World War I while he was a student at Bristol University when he was paid a pound a week for, in his own words, "playing bits and pieces" at the Theatre Royal in Bristol (now the Bristol Old Vic). Having been "rather badly knocked about" in World War I (he fought at the Battle of the Somme and was injured three times, with one serious bayonet wound leaving him with no strength in his right arm) he returned to England but could find no acting work and went instead to work for his father's boot company in Bath. Still keen on pursuing a life in the theatre he turned to writing. He wrote a lot of what he called "serious plays," claiming that he didn't like thrillers very much, but after one of these was rejected by London producers, he went to the theatre to pass the evening before returning to the West Country the following morning.
He saw "an American thriller which I didn't like a bit, and I thought to myself, 'If that's the sort of tosh they'll put on, I'll write one of those only I'll try to make mine a bit better than that.'" The result was "The Ghost Train" which was a West End hit and whose popularity endures over 80 years on. He wrote several other plays in the 1920s and '30s, directing in the theatre and on film, and running both a theatre and film company (which went bust). When times were hard in the late-1920s he sold the amateur rights to "The Ghost Train" for 200 pounds, a decision he later regretted, believing that he had "lost a fortune" by selling the rights to such a popular play. He was wounded again in World War II and returned to acting, appearing in numerous television shows through the 1950s and '60s until he was cast as the kindly, retired shop assistant Mr Godfrey in Dad's Army (1968). Colleagues from the show commented that he had been "forced" to work long into his old age by financial circumstances, but he said himself that his great fear was being forced to retire.
He continued to work until the show ended in 1977, by which time he was 81. He was made an OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in the 1982 Queen's New Years Honours List, for services to drama, and died two years later.- Actress
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Doris Lloyd was an English actress with a lengthy film career. She appeared in over 150 films between 1920 and 1960. She spent most of her life abroad in the United States.
In 1891, Lloyd was born in Walton, Liverpool. Her parents were Edward Franklin Lloyd and Hessy Jane McCappin. One of her grandfathers was reportedly an amateur actor,.
Lloyd made her theatrical debut c. 1914, Liverpool Repertory Company. She made her film debut in the crime film The Shadow Between (1920), based on a novel by Silas Kitto Hocking (1850-1935).
In the early 1920s, Lloyd traveled to the United States to visit her sister who had settled there. She found work as an actress in the United States, and decided to permanently settle there. Besides film appearances, Lloyd appeared in Broadway theater, in the Ziegfeld Follies, and with touring theaters,
Though mostly playing minor and supporting roles, Lloyd had a few highlights in her film career. She played the sinister Russian spy Mrs. Travers in Disraeli (1929), Mrs. Cutten in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), sympathetic thief Nancy Sikes in Oliver Twist (1933), school superintendent Miss Wetherby in Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946), and the "meek housekeeper" Mrs. Watchett in The Time Machine (1960).
Lloyd voiced one of the talking roses in the animated film Alice in Wonderland (1951). Towards the end of her career she had bit parts as an unnamed depositor in Mary Poppins (1964), and as Baroness Ebberfeld in The Sound of Music (1965). Her last film appearance was in the comedy film Rosie! (1967).
Lloyd died in May 1968, at the age of 76. She died in Santa Barbara, California, and was buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery of Glendale.- Lilia Sofer was born on November 28, 1896, to Catholic Katharina Skala and Jewish Julius Sofer , in Vienna, Austria. Julius Sofer worked as a manufacturer's representative for the Waldes Kohinoor Company. Lilia had two sisters: Lisl (later known as renowned dance-therapy pioneer Elizabeth Polk); and Felicitas ("Lizi"--pronounced "Litzi"), an infant nurse. All three sisters adopted their mother's Gentile maiden name of "Skala" and emigrated to the United States.
Lilia Skala would become a star on two continents. In pre-World War II Austria she starred in famed Max Reinhardt's stage troupe, and in post-war America she would become a notable award-worthy matronly character star on Broadway and in films. Forced to flee her Nazi-occupied homeland with her Jewish husband, Louis Erich Pollak (who also adopted his mother-in-law's Gentile maiden name of "Skala") and two young sons in the late 1930s, Lilia and her family managed to escape (at different times) to England. In 1939, practically penniless, they emigrated to the USA, where she sought menial labor in New York's garment district. She quickly learned English and worked her way back to an acting career, this time as a sweet, delightful, thick-accented Academy Award, Golden Globe and Emmy nominee.
She broke through the Broadway barrier in 1941 with "Letters to Lucerne", followed by a featured role in the musical "Call Me Madam" with Ethel Merman. In the 1950s, she did an extensive tour in "The Diary of Anne Frank" as Mrs. Frank, and performed in a German-language production of Kurt Weill's "The Threepenny Opera". Lilia became a familiar benevolent face on TV in several early soap operas, including Claudia: The Story of a Marriage (1952).
She won her widest claim to fame, however, as the elderly chapel-building Mother Superior opposite Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field (1963), for which she won both Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations. That led to more character actress work in films, most notably as the dog-carrying Jewish lady in the star-studded Ship of Fools (1965) and as Jennifer Beals's elderly friend in Flashdance (1983). On TV she played Eva Gabor's Hungarian mother in Green Acres (1965) and earned an Emmy nomination for her work in the popular miniseries Eleanor and Franklin (1976)).
She continued filming into her 90th year. Her final film work, occurring in the 1980's, went on to include a touching role as Hanna Long in the hit musical Flashdance (1983), plus parts in Testament (1983), House of Games (1987) and Men of Respect (1990). A few years later, on December 18, 1994, Lilia died of natural causes in Bay Shore (Long Island), New York, a few weeks after her 98th birthday. - Initially drawn to an acting career to counterbalance an acute case of shyness, diminutive character actor Charles Wagenheim's career comprised hundreds upon hundreds of minor but atmospheric parts on stage, film and TV. Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1896, he was the son of immigrant parents. Enlisting in the military during World War I, he was compensated for an education by the government and chose to study dramatics at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, graduating in 1923.
After touring with a Shakespearean company, he appeared in a host of Broadway plays, several of them written, directed and/or produced by the prolific George Abbott, including "A Holy Terror" (1925), "Four Walls" (1927) and "Ringside" (1928). Following a stage part in "Schoolhouse on the Lot" (1938), the mustachioed Wagenheim turned to Hollywood for work. His dark, graveside manner, baggy-eyed scowl and lowlife countenance proved ideal for a number of genres, particularly crime thrillers and westerns.
In films from 1929, the character player scored well when Alfred Hitchcock chose him to play the assassin in Foreign Correspondent (1940). He went on to enact a number of seedy, unappetizing roles (tramps, drunks, thieves) over the years but never found the one juicy part that could have put him at the top of the character ranks. Usually billed tenth or lower, Wagenheim was more filler than anything else which his blue-collar gallery of cabbies, waiters, deputies, clerks, morgue attendants, junkmen, etc., will attest. Some of his better delineated roles came with Two Girls on Broadway (1940); Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum (1940); Halfway to Shanghai (1942); the cliffhangers Don Winslow of the Navy (1942) and Raiders of Ghost City (1944); The House on 92nd Street (1945); A Lady Without Passport (1950); Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953); and Canyon Crossroads (1955). One of his more promising roles came as "The Runt" in Meet Boston Blackie (1941), which started Chester Morris off in the popular 1940s "B" series as the thief-cum-crimefighter, but the sidekick role was subsequently taken over by George E. Stone.
Of his latter films it might be noted that Wagenheim was cast in the very small but pivotal role of the thief who breaks into the storefront in which the Frank family is hiding above in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). TV took up much of his time in later years and he kept fairly busy throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Wagenheim played the recurring role of Halligan on Gunsmoke (1955) (from 1967-1975) and performed until the very end on such shows as All in the Family (1971) and Baretta (1975). On March 6, 1979, the 83-year-old Wagenheim was bludgeoned to death in his Hollywood apartment following a grocery shopping trip when he surprised a thief in his home. By sheer horrific coincidence, elderly character actor Victor Kilian, of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976) fame, was found beaten to death by burglars in his Los Angeles-area apartment just a few days later (March 11th). - Actress
During the Golden Age of Hollywood there were an array of character actors who came out and perfected their craft alongside some of the era's most popular stars. Within that category is one Edith Evanson.
She was born on April 28, 1896 in Tacoma, Washington, the daughter of a Protestant minister. In the the 1910s she was educated at the historic Stadium High School in which she appeared in various drama productions. In the 1910s and 1930s she appeared in various stage productions through a stock company.
In 1939 she came to Hollywood to begin work as a supporting actress in motion pictures; she made her debut the following year in The Man Who Wouldn't Talk (1940). She soon made a name for herself in films often appearing as spinsters, landladies, wealthy widows, maids, town gossips, middle-aged secretaries, and snobs.
During her film career she appeared in such classics as Citizen Kane (1941), Woman of the Year (1942), Reunion in France (1942), The Strange Woman (1946), Rope (1948), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and Toby Tyler or Ten Weeks with a Circus (1960). With the advent of TV, she expanded in her career and made guest appearances on such programs as Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theatre (1955), The Loretta Young Show (1953), Lassie (1954), Bachelor Father (1957), and, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955).
In her later years work became harder to find due to old age and she retired from acting in 1974 following a guest role in the TV show Apple's Way (1974). Upon retirement she moved to Riverside Country, California, where she lived until her death from natural causes on November 29, 1980, aged 84. As she had no close family, she left money to her church, to the Democratic National Committee, and to the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital.