Rose Joan Blondell (August 30, 1906 – December 25, 1979) was an American actress.
After winning a beauty pageant, Blondell embarked upon a film career. Establishing herself as a sexy wisecracking blonde, she was a pre-Code staple of Warner Brothers and appeared in more than 100 movies and television productions. She was most active in films during the 1930s, and during this time she co-starred with Glenda Farrell in nine films, in which the duo portrayed gold-diggers. Blondell continued acting for the rest of her life, often in small character roles or supporting television roles. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work in The Blue Veil (1951).
Blondell was seen in featured roles in two films, Grease (1978) and the remake of The Champ (1979), released shortly before her death from leukemia.
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Charles Winninger (May 26, 1884 – January 27, 1969) was an American stage and film actor, most often cast in comedies or musicals, but equally at home in dramas.
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Alan Mowbray MM, (18 August 1896 - 25 March 1969), was an English stage and film actor who found success in Hollywood. Born Alfred Ernest Allen in London, England, he served with distinction the British Army in World War I, being awarded the Military Medal for bravery. He began as a stage actor, making his way to the United States where he appeared in Broadway plays and toured the country as part of a theater troupe. As Alan Mowbray, he made his motion picture debut in 1931, going on to a career primarily as a character actor in more than 140 films including the sterling butler role in the comedy Merrily We Live, and playing the title role in the TV series The Adventures of Colonel Flack. During World War II, he made a memorable appearance as the Devil in the Hal Roach propaganda comedy The Devil with Hitler. He appeared in some two dozen guest roles on various television series. Mowbray was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild, with outside interests that led to membership in Britain's Royal Geographic Society. He played the title role in the television series Colonel Humphrey Flack, which first appeared in 1953-1954 and then was revived in 1958-1959. In the 1954-1955 television season Mowbray played Mr. Swift, the drama coach of the character Mickey Mulligan, in NBC's short-lived situation comedy The Mickey Rooney Show: Hey, Mulligan. Mowbray died of a heart attack in 1969 in Hollywood and was interred in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
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Billy House (May 7, 1889 – September 23, 1961) was an US vaudevillian, Broadway performer and feature film actor. After devoting most of his career to live performance, he moved to Hollywood where he became a supporting actor during the 1940s and 1950s. According to Orson Welles, the name "Billy House" was likely an invention for use in burlesque theatres.
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Yola d'Avril grew up in Paris. In 1923 she moved to Canada and became a dancer. She then went to Hollywood and, from 1925, started being cast in small roles, ultimately appearing in more than seventy films.
Mary Louise Brooks (November 14, 1906 – August 8, 1985) was an American film actress and dancer during the 1920s and 1930s. She is regarded today as an icon of the Jazz Age and flapper culture, in part due to the bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career.
Brooks began her career as a dancer. While dancing in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York City, she came to the attention of Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount Pictures, and was signed to a five-year contract with the studio. She appeared in supporting roles in various Paramount films before taking the heroine's role in Beggars of Life (1928).
Dissatisfied with her mediocre roles in Hollywood films, Brooks went to Germany in 1929 and starred in three feature films that launched her to international stardom: Pandora's Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Miss Europe (1930); the first two were directed by G. W. Pabst. By 1938, she had starred in seventeen silent films and eight sound films.
After retiring from acting, she fell upon financial hardship and became a paid escort. For the next two decades, she struggled with alcoholism and suicidal tendencies.
Following the rediscovery of her films by cinephiles in the 1950s, a reclusive Brooks began writing articles about her film career; her insightful essays drew considerable acclaim. She published her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, in 1982. Three years later, she died of a heart attack at age 78.
[preceding biography, edited, from Wikipedia]
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Armand Kali(s)z (October 23, 1882 or 1883 - February 1, 1941) was a French born American film actor of the silent film and early sound period of the 1930s. Born in Paris, or in Warsaw, Poland Kaliz was a headliner in vaudeville.
He arrived in the USA in 1907. His Broadway debut came in The Hoyden (1907). His other plays on Broadway included The Kiss Burglar (1918) and Spice of 1922 (1922).
He appeared in films such as The Temptress (1926) with actresses such as Greta Garbo, making some 82 film appearances between 1917 and 1941. After 1933, the majority of his small roles in films went uncredited.
Charles Judels was born in Amsterdam on 17 August 1882. He starred on vaudeville in the early 1900s. His Broadway stage debut was in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1912. Judels appeared in more than 130 American comedy and drama movies and was an expert with dialects. That talent served him well throughout his career. His first film was a comedy, Old Dutch, in 1915.
Judels is perhaps best remembered as the cheese store proprietor in Laurel & Hardy's 1938 film Swiss Miss. He also did extensive work as a voice actor in animated films, most notably as the voice of "Stromboli" in Disney's Pinocchio (1940). His final appearance on screen was as a Danite merchant in Samson and Delilah in 1949.
Judels died in San Francisco, California on 14 February 1969.
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Wild Bill Elliott (October 16, 1904 – November 26, 1965) was an American film actor. He specialized in playing the rugged heroes of B Westerns, particularly the Red Ryder series of films. By 1925, he was getting occasional extra work in films. He took classes at the Pasadena Playhouse and appeared in a few stage roles there. By 1927, he had made his first Western, The Arizona Wildcat, playing his first featured role. Several co-starring roles followed, and he renamed himself Gordon Elliott. But as the studios made the transition to sound films, he slipped back into roles as an extra and bit parts, as in Broadway Scandals, in 1929. For the next eight years, he appeared in over a hundred films for various studios, but almost always in unbilled parts as an extra.
Elliott began to be noticed in some minor B Westerns, enough so that Columbia Pictures offered him the title role in a serial, The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (1938). The serial was so successful, and Elliott so personable, that Columbia promoted him to starring in his own series of Western features, replacing Columbia's number-two cowboy star Robert "Tex" Allen. Henceforth Gordon Elliott would be known as Bill Elliott. Within two years, he was among the Motion Picture Herald's Top Ten Western Stars, where he would remain for the next 15 years.
In 1943, Elliott signed with Republic Pictures, which cast him in a series of Westerns alongside George "Gabby" Hayes. The first of these, Calling Wild Bill Elliott, gave Elliott the name by which he would be best known and by which he would be billed almost exclusively for the rest of his career.
Following several films in which both actor and character shared the name Wild Bill Elliott, he took the role for which he would be best remembered, that of Red Ryder in a series of sixteen movies about the famous comic strip cowboy and his young Indian companion, Little Beaver (played in Elliott's films by Bobby Blake). Elliott played the role for only two years but would forever be associated with it. Elliott's trademark was a pair of six guns worn butt-forward in their holsters.
Elliott's career thrived during and after the Red Ryder films, and he continued making B Westerns into the early 1950s. He also had his own radio show during the late 1940s. His final contract as a Western star was with Monogram Pictures, where budgets declined as the B Western lost its audience to television. When Monogram became Allied Artists Pictures Corporation in 1953, it phased out its Western productions, and Elliott finished out his contract playing a homicide detective in a series of five modern police dramas, his first non-Westerns since 1938.
Elliott retired from films (except for a couple of TV Western pilots which were not picked up). He worked for a time as a spokesman for Viceroy cigarettes and hosted a local TV program in Las Vegas, Nevada, which featured many of his Western films.
Alphonse Martell (born March 27, 1890 in Strasbourg, German Empire, died March 18, 1976 in San Diego, California, United States) was a screen and television actor.
Martell performed many French roles in American cinema and directed a film, Gigolettes of Paris.
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