From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jeanette MacDonald (June 18, 1903 – January 14, 1965) was an American singer and actress best remembered for her musical films of the 1930s with Maurice Chevalier (Love Me Tonight, The Merry Widow) and Nelson Eddy (Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, and Maytime). During the 1930s and 1940s she starred in 29 feature films, four nominated for Best Picture Oscars (The Love Parade, One Hour with You, Naughty Marietta and San Francisco), and recorded extensively, earning three gold records. She later appeared in grand opera, concerts, radio, and television. MacDonald was one of the most influential sopranos of the 20th century, introducing grand opera to movie-going audiences and inspiring a generation of singers.
Claud Allister (3 October 1888 – 26 July 1970) was an English actor. After his education at Felsted, in Essex, he appeared in 74 films between 1929 and 1955.
He was born William Claud Michael Palmer in London, England and died in Santa Barbara, California. His interment was located in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery.
He began his career as a stockbroker's clerk but gave it up and made his stage debut in 1910. He toured England playing minor parts till the war started. He served in WWI and in 1924 went to America to act on the stage. In 1929 he made his film debut where he featured in The Trial of Mary Dugan.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Claud Allister, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Zasu Pitts was an American actress who starred in many silent dramas and comedies, transitioning successfully to mostly comedy films with the advent of sound films. She may be best known for her performance in Erich von Stroheim's epic silent film Greed.
Based on her performance, von Stroheim labeled Pitts "the greatest dramatic actress". He also featured her in his films The Honeymoon (1928), The Wedding March (1928), War Nurse (1930) and Walking Down Broadway, released as Hello, Sister! (1933). However, for the most part, with the advent of sound Pitts was mostly relegated to comedy parts. A bitter disappointment was when she was replaced in the classic war drama All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) by Beryl Mercer after her initial appearance in previews drew unintentional laughs, despite her intense performance. She had viewers rolling in the aisles in Finn and Hattie (1931), The Guardsman (1931), Blondie of the Follies (1932), Sing and Like It (1934) and Ruggles of Red Gap (1935). In 1936 and 1937 she portrayed Hildegarde Withers in two movies, succeeding Edna May Oliver as the spinster sleuth, but they were not well received.
In the 1950s she started focusing on television. This culminated in her best known series role, playing second banana to Gale Storm on CBS's The Gale Storm Show (1956) (also known as Oh, Susannah) in the role of Elvira Nugent ("Nugie"), the shipboard beautician. In 1961, Pitts was cast opposite Earle Hodgins in the episode "Lonesome's Gal" on the ABC sitcom, Guestward, Ho!, set on a dude ranch in New Mexico. In 1962, Pitts appeared in an episode of CBS's Perry Mason, "The Case of the Absent Artist". Her final role was as Gertie, the switchboard operator in the Stanley Kramer comedy epic It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963).
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Lionel Belmore (12 May 1867, Wimbledon, Surrey, England - 30 January 1953, Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California) was an English character actor and director on stage for more than a quarter of a century.
Onstage, Belmore appeared with Wilson Barrett, Sir Henry Irving, William Faversham, Lily Langtry, and other famous actors. He entered in films from 1911. In total, he had some 200 titles to his film credit. He was notable as the huffy-puffy Herr Vogel the Burgomaster in Frankenstein (1931). Belmore played bit parts in several 1930s film classics. Unusually, he was a director before he became a prolific actor. He directed from 1914 to 1920, only acting in a limited number of films, until concentrating as an actor from then on.
He was the brother of the actress Daisy Belmore (Mrs. Samuel Waxman) (1874-1954) and the actor Paul Belmore. He was married to stage actress Emmeline Florence Carder and they had two daughters. Their daughter Violet had decided to follow in her father's footsteps and go into acting.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Lionel Belmore, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Albert De Conti Cadassamare (29 January 1887 – 18 January 1967), professionally billed as Albert Conti, was an Austrian-Hungarian-born Italian-American film actor.
Born in the village Gorizia (now part of Italy), Conti achieved moderate fame as an actor in American films, but first he specialized in law (high school and law college in Graz) and natural science, and married Patricia Cross. When World War I began, he became an officer. His father was Albert, Ritter Conti v. Cedassamare and his mother was Marie Bernhardine Anna (Countess Caboga) a member of an old Ragusan/Dubrovnik noble family. After his discharge from the Austrian army at the close of World War I, he came to America like many other now-impoverished postwar Europeans from both sides of the conflict.
Conti emigrated to the United States via the Port of Philadelphia in 1919. After settling in the new country, Conti was obliged to take a series of manual labor jobs, his patrician background notwithstanding. While working in the California oil fields, he answered an open call placed by director Erich von Stroheim, who was in search of an Austrian military officer to act as technical advisor for his upcoming film Merry-Go-Round (1923).
A better actor than most of his fellow Habsburg Empire expatriates, Conti was able to secure dignified character roles in several silent and sound films; his credits ranged from Josef von Sternberg's Morocco (1930) to the early Laurel and Hardy knockabout Slipping Wives (1927). He appeared in the 1928 silent film Dry Martini as a roué artist. Though he made his last film in 1942, Albert Conti remained in the industry as an employee of the MGM wardrobe department, where he worked until his retirement in 1962.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Billy Bevan (born William Bevan Harris, 29 September 1887 – 26 November 1957) was an Australian-born vaudevillian, who became an American film actor. He appeared in 254 American films between 1916 and 1950.
Bevan was born in the country town of Orange, New South Wales, Australia. He went on the stage at an early age, traveled to Sydney and spent eight years in Australian light opera, performing as Willie Bevan. He sailed to America with the Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company in 1912 and later toured Canada. Bevan broke into films with the Sigmund Lubin studio in 1916. When the company disbanded, Bevan became a supporting actor in Mack Sennett movie comedies. An expressive pantomimist, Bevan's quiet scene-stealing attracted attention, and by 1922 Bevan was a Sennett star. He supplemented his income, however, by establishing a citrus and avocado farm at Escondido, California.
Usually filmed wearing a derby hat and a drooping mustache, Bevan may not have possessed an indelible screen character like Charlie Chaplin but he had a friendly, funny presence in the frantic Sennett comedies. Much of the comedy depended on Bevan's skilled timing and reactions; the famous "oyster" routine performed on film by Curly Howard, Lou Costello, and Huntz Hall—in which a bowl of "fresh oyster stew" shows alarming signs of life and battles the guy trying to eat it—was originated on film decades earlier by Bevan in the short film Wandering Willies.
By the mid-1920s Bevan was often teamed with Andy Clyde; Clyde soon graduated to his own starring series. The late 1920s found Bevan playing in wild marital farces for Sennett.
The advent of talking pictures took their toll on the careers of many silent stars, including Billy Bevan. Bevan began a second career in "talkies" as a character actor and bit player in roles such as that of a bus driver in the 1929 film High Voltage, a hotel employee in the Mae Murray film Peacock Alley, and the supporting role of Second Lieutenant Trotter in Journey's End in 1930. His starring roles had come to an end, however, and for the next 20 years he often would play rowdy Cockneys (as in Pack Up Your Troubles with The Ritz Brothers), and affable Englishmen (as in Tin Pan Alley and Terror by Night). He played a friendly bus conductor opposite Greer Garson in one of the opening scenes of Mrs. Miniver.
Bevan died in 1957 in Escondido, California, just before new audiences discovered him in Robert Youngson's silent-comedy compilations. (The Youngson films mispronounce his name as "Be-VAN"; Bevan himself offered the proper pronunciation in a Voice of Hollywood reel in 1930.)
John Carroll (July 17, 1906 – April 24, 1979) was an American actor and singer. He was born Julian Lafaye in New Orleans, Louisiana. Carroll performed in several small roles in films under his original name until 1935, when he first used the name John Carroll in Hi, Gaucho! He appeared in several Western films in the 1930s, including the role of Zorro in Zorro Rides Again in 1937. He was the male lead in the Marx Brothers' Western comedy Go West in 1940. Probably his best known role was as Woody Jason in the 1942 movie Flying Tigers with John Wayne. He was also notable as a Cajun soldier, aptly nicknamed "Wolf", in the 1945 comedy A Letter for Evie.
He interrupted his movie career during World War II and served as a U.S. Army Air Corps pilot in North Africa. He broke his back in a crash. He recovered and resumed his acting career.
John Carroll was a well-established actor and his wife Lucille was a casting director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). In 1948, the famous movie actress Marilyn Monroe moved into their house. They helped support her emotionally and financially during her difficult transition period. Their support was essential in her success as an actress.
Carroll worked steadily through the mid-1950s, but his career began to fade in the latter half of the decade. He did play a memorable role in the 1957 Budd Boetticher western Decision at Sundown as Tate Kimbrough, the evil nemesis of Randolph Scott's character. His last role was in Ride in a Pink Car in 1974.
Frances Marion Dee (November 26, 1909 – March 6, 2004) was an American screen and television actress. She starred opposite Maurice Chevalier in the early talkie musical Playboy of Paris (1930). She starred in the film An American Tragedy (1931) in a role later recreated by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1951 re-titled remake A Place in the Sun. She also had a prominent role in the classic 1943 Val Lewton psychological horror film I Walked With a Zombie. Dee was the wife of Hollywood star Joel McCrea.