Greta Nissen, born Grethe Rüzt-Nissen, was a Norwegian born American dancer, stage and screen actress. Greta made her Broadway debut as a ballerina in 1924. She was discovered by film producer Jesse L. Lasky of Paramount Pictures, and would appear in more than twenty feature films.
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Mary Forbes (1 January 1883 – 22 July 1974), born Ethel Louise Young, was a British-American film actress, based in the United States in her latter years, where she died. She appeared in more than 130 films between 1919 and 1958.
Forbes was born in Hornsey, England.
She made her first public appearance on the concert platform giving recitals. Her acting debut was in 1908 on the London stage at Aldwych Theatre. Her American stage debut came in Romance at Maxine Elliott's Theatre in 1913.
She took over management of the Ambassadors Theatre in 1913 and had several years experience on stage in Britain and America before her appearances in Hollywood films. Two of her three children by her first marriage in the first quarter of 1904 to Ernest J. Taylor, Ralph and Dorothy Brenda, known as Brenda, were also actors. The middle child of the three, Phyllis Mary Taylor, was not in the acting business. Her second husband was British actor Charles Quartermaine, who married in 1925; the union ended in divorce. She married her third husband, Wesley Wall, an American businessman, in 1935; the couple remained married until her death in 1974.
She became a naturalized United States citizen in 1943, with one of her character references being Lucile Webster Gleason, actress and wife of actor James Gleason.
Wyndham Standing (23 August 1880 – 1 February 1963) was an English film actor. Standing appeared in 131 films between 1915 and 1948. A popular and much beloved leading man in the silent film era, he starred and co-starred along many famous names of the day, both men and women. He and Ronald Colman were the stars of the now lost classic The Dark Angel (1925). Standing delivered a memorable performance in Hell's Angels (1930) as the commanding officer who gets fed up with the cowardly antics of Ben Lyon and James Hall just before sending them off on a deadly bombing mission.
He was born Charles Wyndham Standing in London, England and died in Los Angeles, California. He was the son of veteran actor Herbert Standing (1846–1923) and the brother of actors Jack Standing, Sir Guy Standing, Herbert Standing Jr. and Percy Standing. He was also the uncle of Joan Standing and Kay Hammond.
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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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Herbert Mundin (21 August 1898 – 5 March 1939) was an English-born Hollywood character actor. He was frequently typecast in films as an older cheeky eccentric, a type helped by his jowled features and cheerful disposition.
He was born Herbert Thomas Mundin in St Helens, then in Lancashire (now part of Merseyside). His father was a nomadic, Primitive Methodist home missionary. His family moved within a short time of his birth to St Albans in Hertfordshire (the 1901 census data reveal that the family lived at St Helens Villa, Paxton Road, St Albans; his parents William and Jane apparently naming their house after the town where they first met and where Herbert was born).
Mundin was educated at St Albans School, and joined the Royal Navy during World War I. He began his acting career on the London stage during the 1920s. Mundin first travelled to America on 18 December 1923 for a series of theatrical engagements in New York. He sailed from Southampton on the RMS Aquitania and described himself in ship’s passenger manifest as 5'7" tall with a fair complexion, brown hair, blue eyes and a scar over his left eye. His big break as an actor was arguably with Gertrude Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie in Charlot's Revue when it appeared on Broadway in 1925.
In 1931, after working in Australia and London, he permanently moved to the US, where he received a contract with Twentieth Century Fox Studios and enjoyed a successful career as a character actor in over 50 films.
Perhaps his most celebrated role was as Much in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), alongside Errol Flynn. Other film appearances included Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, and MGM's David Copperfield (1935).
He died in Van Nuys, California following a car crash. He was killed instantly when the car in which he was riding collided with another car at a street intersection. The force of the impact threw open the door and hurled Mundin to the street.He received a fractured skull and crushed chest.He was 40 years old. The other occupants of the car were not injured.
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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.)
Irish born Lumsden Hare (born Francis Lumsden Hare) was a stage and screen actor, as well as a theatre director and theatrical producer. His film career began in 1916, continuing to 1959. He also appeared in a number of television series from 1951 to 1961.