Walter Davis Pidgeon (September 23, 1897 – September 25, 1984) was a Canadian actor who lived most of his adult life in the United States. He starred in many motion pictures, including Mrs. Miniver, The Bad and the Beautiful, Forbidden Planet, Advise and Consent and Funny Girl.
Rita Ann Johnson (August 13, 1913 – October 31, 1965) was an American actress.
Early in her career, Johnson was busy in radio.
Johnson began acting on Broadway in 1935 and started her film career two years later. She played a murderer in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and a doomed wife in the RKO film noir They Won't Believe Me (1947).
In an incident that was never fully explained, Johnson suffered a head trauma on September 6, 1948 that required brain surgery. Unsubstantiated rumors promulgated by gossip columnists such as Walter Winchell suggested she might have been abused by a boyfriend, but the only explanation she offered was that a large, industrial-grade hair dryer at her apartment had fallen on her. She was in a coma for two weeks and it was reported it took her a year to recover. Her left side was paralyzed temporarily and for a while she couldn't walk. The injury put a virtual halt to her film career. Her screen time in movies after that was limited due to her reduced mobility and powers of concentration. Johnson suffered from alcoholism from the time of her injuries until her death of a brain hemorrhage at age 52.
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Thomas Donald Meek (14 July 1878 – 18 November 1946) was a Scottish-American actor. He first performed publicly at the age of eight and began appearing on Broadway in 1903. Meek is perhaps best known for his roles in the films You Can't Take It with You (1938) and Stagecoach (1939). He posthumously received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
Meek was born in Glasgow to Matthew and Annie Meek. In the 1890s, the Meek family emigrated to Canada and then to the United States. By 1900, they were living in Philadelphia where Meek was employed as a dry goods salesman, according to the United States census of that year with Meek later working on stage.
After years on the stage, Meek became a film actor, appearing memorably in several movies including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Little Miss Broadway, and State Fair. Before becoming an actor, he fought in the Spanish–American War in the United States Army and contracted yellow fever which caused him to lose his hair. He was cast as timid, worried characters in many of his films, and is perhaps best known for his roles as Mr. Poppins in Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You and as whiskey salesman Samuel Peacock in John Ford's Stagecoach.
From 1931 through 1932, Meek was featured as criminologist Dr. Crabtree in a series of 12 Warner Brothers two-reel short subjects written by S.S. Van Dine. Meek and Isabella "Belle" Walken married in Boston in a Methodist church on January 3, 1909. By this marriage, the American-born Belle Meek lost her United States citizenship by taking her husband's British nationality. Donald Meek died of leukaemia on 18 November 1946 in Los Angeles, while filming the role of Mr. Twiddle in Magic Town. A prolific film actor in over 100 Hollywood movies during its Golden Age, he received a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He was entombed in the Fairmount Mausoleum at Fairmount Cemetery in Denver, Colorado.
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Addison Whitaker Richards, Jr. (October 20, 1902 – March 22, 1964) was an American actor of film and television. He appeared in more than three hundred films and television series between 1933 and his death.
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Henry Victor (2 October 1892 – 15 March 1945) was an English-born character actor. Raised in Germany, Victor is probably best remembered for his portrayal of the strongman Hercules in Tod Browning's 1932 film Freaks. He originally was a leading figure in UK silent films. Later in his career, he mostly portrayed villains or Nazis in both American and British films with his trademark German accent. He died at 52 of a brain tumor. He is buried in Chatsworth, California's at the Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Henry Victor, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
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Martin Kosleck (born Nicolaie Yoshkin, March 24, 1904 – January 15, 1994) was a German film actor. Like many other German actors, he fled when the Nazis came to power. Inspired by his deep hatred of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, Kosleck made a career in Hollywood playing villainous Nazis in films. While in the United States, he appeared in more than 80 films and television shows in a 46-year span. His icy demeanor and piercing stare on screen made him a popular choice to play Nazi villains. He portrayed Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler's propaganda minister, five times, and also appeared as an SS trooper and a concentration camp officer.
Frank Faylen (born Francis Charles Ruf) was an American stage, screen, and television actor. He is best remembered for his movie performances as the cynical male nurse in The Lost Weekend (1945) and Ernie the taxi driver in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), as well as for his portrayal of long-suffering grocer Herbert T. Gillis on the 1950s television sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.
Sterling Price Holloway, Jr. was an American character actor who appeared in 150 films and television programs. He was also a voice actor for The Walt Disney Company. He was well-known for his distinctive tenor voice, and is perhaps best remembered as the voice of Walt Disney's Winnie the Pooh.
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Edgar Dearing (May 4, 1893 – August 17, 1974) was an American actor who became heavily type cast as a motorcycle cop in Hollywood films. Born in 1893, Dearing started in silent comedy shorts for Hal Roach, including several with Laurel and Hardy, notably in their classic Two Tars, probably his best ever screen role. He later had supporting roles in several of their features for 20th Century Fox in the 1940s.
Dearing continued in his familiar persona until the early 1950s, when he appeared in many film and television westerns, usually as a sheriff. One of his guest roles was on the syndicated television series, The Range Rider, starring Jock Mahoney and Dick Jones.
He was still active in films and television until he retired in the early 1960s; he died from lung cancer.
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Eddy Chandler (March 12, 1894 – March 23, 1948) was an American actor who appeared, mostly uncredited, in more than 300 films. Three of these films won the Academy Award for Best Picture: It Happened One Night (1934), You Can't Take It with You (1938), and Gone with the Wind (1939).
Chandler was born in the small Iowa city of Wilton Junction and died in Los Angeles, California.
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Guy Edward Hearn (September 6, 1888 – April 15, 1963) was an American actor who, in a forty-year film career, starting in 1915, played hundreds of roles, starting with juvenile leads, then, briefly, as leading man, all during the silent era.
With the arrival of sound, he became a character actor, appearing in scores of productions for virtually every studio, in which he was mostly unbilled, while those credits in which he was listed reflected at least nine stage names, most frequently Edward Hearn, but also Guy E. Hearn, Ed Hearn, Eddie Hearn, Eddie Hearne, and Edward Hearne.
Kemp was born on January 3, 1908 in Concho, Arizona. Kemp first started appearing in films in uncredited minor roles in the early 1930's and began popping up in numerous TV shows in the early 1950's. Moreover, Kenner not only also worked as both a stuntman and an occasional stand-in for.
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Wilfred Lucas (January 30, 1871 – December 13, 1940) was a Canadian-born American stage actor who found success in film as an actor, director, and screenwriter.
Wilfred Lucas made his Broadway debut in 1904, playing in both the The Blue Grass Handicap and The Superstition of Sue. Following his 1906 role in the highly successful play The Chorus Lady, he was recruited to the fledgling Biograph Studios by D. W. Griffith.
At the time, the film business was still looked down upon by many members of the theatrical community. In her 1925 book titled When the Movies Were Young, Griffith's wife, actress Linda Arvidson, told the story of the early days at Biograph Studios. In it, she referred to Lucas as the "first real grand actor, democratic enough to work in Biograph movies." In 1908 Lucas made his motion picture debut in Griffith's The Greaser's Gauntlet, appearing in more than 50 of these short (usually 17 minutes) films over the next two years.
In 1910 while still acting, he wrote the script for Griffith's film Sunshine Sue, which was followed by many more scripts by 1924. Lucas also began directing in 1912 with Griffith on An Outcast Among Outcasts, and directed another 44 films over the next 20 years.
In early 1916 he starred as John Carter in Acquitted, about which Photoplay wrote, "No single performance in the records of active photography has surpassed his visualization of the humble book-keeper in Acquitted." Later in 1916 he appeared in D.W. Griffith's film Intolerance.
Part of the group of Canadian pioneers in early Hollywood, Lucas became friends and sometimes starred with Mary Pickford, Sam De Grasse, and Marie Dressler. Canadian-born director Mack Sennett hired him to both direct and act in a large number of films at his Keystone Studios.
Lucas made the successful transition from silent film to sound. While working in Hollywood, in 1926 he returned to the stage, performing in several Broadway plays. He later appeared as a foil for Laurel and Hardy in their feature films Pardon Us and A Chump at Oxford.
During his long career, Wilfred Lucas appeared in more than 375 films. Although for a time he was cast in leading roles, he became very successful as secondary and minor characters, making a good living in the film industry for more than three decades.
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George Meeker (March 5, 1904 – August 19, 1984) was an American character movie and Broadway actor who became more of a legend off-camera than on. Meeker made several movies such as Crime, Inc. (1945) and Thief in the Dark (1928), and he played an uncredited part in All Through the Night (1941).
Meeker has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Gilbert Vincent Perkins (24 August 1907 – 28 March 1999) was an Australian film and television actor.
A champion athlete and trackman in his native northern Australia, Gil Perkins always wanted to get into films; as a teenager he virtually ran away from home, taking a job as a deck hand on a Norwegian freighter. He eventually landed in Hollywood in the late '20s, during the era of part-silent, part-talkie movies, and (because his accent was mistaken for English) he played young Englishmen in some of his first films. He soon drifted into stuntwork, regularly doubling cowboy star William Boyd and putting a red toupee over his own blond hair to double 'Red Skelton', among others. Some of his most notable stunt jobs were in the sci-fi/horror field. He doubled star Bruce Cabotthroughout King Kong (1933), stood in for Spencer Tracy as Mr. Hyde in Dr. Jekyll et Mr. Hyde (1941) and replaced Bela Lugosi as the Monster in the climactic battle sequence of Frankenstein rencontre le loup-garou (1943). In addition to his feature films, Perkins turned up regularly in serials and on TV. On many occasions he worked with special effects and rigging departments, setting up large action scenes. By the 1960s he was doing more acting than stunts; he "officially" retired in 1972, although he took a number of subsequent jobs. - IMDb Mini Biography
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Lee Phelps (May 15, 1893 – March 19, 1953) was an American film actor. He appeared in over 600 films between 1917 and 1953, mainly in uncredited roles. He also appeared in three films - Grand Hotel, You Can't Take It with You, and Gone with the Wind - that won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Phelps appeared in the 1952 episode "Outlaw's Paradise" as a judge in the syndicated western television series The Adventures of Kit Carson, starring Bill Williams in the title role. He also appeared in a 1952 TV episode (#90) of The Lone Ranger.
