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Purnell Pratt (October 20, 1885 – July 25, 1941) was an American film actor. He appeared in 114 films between 1914 and 1941. He was born in Bethel, Illinois and died in Hollywood, California.
Boris Karloff (November 23, 1887 – February 2, 1969), whose real name was William Henry Pratt, was an English-born actor who emigrated to Canada in 1909. Karloff is best remembered for his roles in horror films and his portrayal of Frankenstein's monster in Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Son of Frankenstein (1939). His popularity following Frankenstein was such that for a brief time he was billed simply as "Karloff" or "Karloff the Uncanny". His best-known non-horror role is as the Grinch in the television special of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas!.
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Edmund Breese (June 18, 1871 – April 6, 1936) was an American stage and film actor of the silent era. Long on the stage with a varied Broadway career before entering movies he appeared with James O'Neill in The Count of Monte Cristo (1893), The Lion and the Mouse (1906) with Richard Bennett, The Third Degree (1909) with Helen Ware, The Master Mind (1913) with Elliott Dexter, the popular World War I era play Why Marry? (1917) with Estelle Winwood & Nat C. Goodwin and So This Is London (1922) with Donald Gallaher. He appeared in 129 films between 1914 and 1935. He is best remembered as the advice-giving German businessman at the beginning of the war film All Quiet on the Western Front.
His final role was on stage in Night of January 16th from September 1935 to April 1936. Just before the play ended its run, Breese developed peritonitis, which he died from on April 6, 1936.
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Nella Walker (March 6, 1886 – March 22, 1971) was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, and in her teens became half of the husband and wife vaudeville team "Mack and Walker", with her husband Wilbur Mack. By 1929 she had launched a film acting career, her first film role being in Tanned Legs alongside Sally Blane, Dorothy Revier, June Clyde, and Arthur Lake. She appeared in three films in 1929, and easily transitioned to "talking films", appearing in another four films in 1930, possibly making the smooth transition because she was never an established silent film actress.
In 1931 her film career took off, with her appearing in ten films that year, five of which were uncredited. Her marriage ended not long after her film career was on the rise, and from 1932-33 she appeared in fifteen films, only five of which were uncredited. In 1935, her career improved, and between that year and 1938 she had 23 film appearances. Her biggest film appearance during that period was in Young Dr. Kildare alongside Lionel Barrymore and Lew Ayres. Throughout the 1930s her career was strong, and, despite her never being a premier "star", she repeatedly had solid acting roles. She finished that decade strong in 1939 with nine film roles, only three of which were uncredited.
The 1940s mirrored her success of the previous decade in many ways, with her appearing in 37 films from 1940 to 1947. Now later in her career, and over 60 years of age, she slowed her career for a time, not having another role until 1950 when she appeared in Nancy Goes to Rio alongside Ann Sothern and Carmen Miranda. She appeared in another two films in 1952, then had her last film acting role in 1954, in the film Sabrina alongside Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn.
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Robert Emmett O'Connor (March 18, 1885 – September 4, 1962) was an American film actor. He appeared in 204 films between 1919 and 1950. He is probably best known as the warmhearted bootlegger Paddy Ryan in The Public Enemy (1931) and as Detective Sergeant Henderson pursuing the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera (1935). He also appeared as Jonesy (the older Paramount gate guard) in Billy Wilder's 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, as well as made a cameo appearance at the very beginning and very end of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon short Who Killed Who? (1943).
Symona Ferner Boniface (March 5, 1894 – September 2, 1950) was an American film actress, most frequently seen in bit parts in comedy shorts, mostly at Columbia Pictures, particularly those of The Three Stooges. She appeared in 120 films between 1925 and 1950.
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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.
Rochelle Hudson (March 6, 1916 — January 17, 1972) was an American film actress from the 1930s through the 1960s. Hudson was a WAMPAS Baby Star in 1931.
The Oklahoma City-born actress began her career as a teenager. She had signed a contract with RKO Pictures on November 22, 1930, when she was 17 years old.
She may be best remembered today for costarring in Wild Boys of the Road (1933), playing Cosette in Les Misérables (1935), playing Mary Blair, the older sister of Shirley Temple's character in Curly Top, and for playing Natalie Wood's mother in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). During her peak years in the 1930s, notable roles for Hudson included: Richard Cromwell's love interest in the Will Rogers showcase Life Begins at 40 (1935), the daughter of carnival barker W. C. Fields in Poppy (1936) and Claudette Colbert's adult daughter in Imitation of Life (1934).
She played Sally Glynn, the fallen ingenue to whom Mae West imparts the immortal wisdom, "When a girl goes wrong, men go right after her!" in the 1933 Paramount film, She Done Him Wrong. In the 1954–1955 television season, Hudson co-starred with Gil Stratton and Eddie Mayehoff in the CBS situation comedy That's My Boy, based on a 1951 Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin film of the same name.