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Julie Bishop (August 30, 1914 – August 30, 2001) was an American film and television actress. She appeared in over 80 films between 1923 and 1957.
Bishop was born Jacqueline Wells and used her birth name professionally through 1941. She also appeared on stage (and in one film) as Diane Duval. She was a child actress, beginning her career in 1923. Early on, she appeared in several Laurel and Hardy films (Any Old Port! and The Bohemian Girl), and she settled on the name by which she is best remembered when offered a contract by Warner Bros. on the condition that she change her name, which was associated with her almost exclusively B-movie appearances through 1941 (amounting to nearly 50 films over 17 years). She chose the name because it matched the monograms on her luggage (she had for a time been married to Walter Booth Brooks III, a writer).
She made 16 films at Warners, including a supporting role in 1943's Princess O'Rourke, supporting Olivia de Havilland and Robert Cummings. While filming, she met her second husband, Clarence Shoop, a pilot. She was Humphrey Bogart's leading lady in Action in the North Atlantic (1943), played Ira Gershwin's wife in the biopic Rhapsody in Blue (1945), and closed out her Warners years in 1946's Cinderella Jones.
In 1949, Bishop played a down-on-her-luck wife and mother in the Sands of Iwo Jima, opposite John Wayne. She was among several former Wayne co-stars (including Laraine Day, Ann Doran, Jan Sterling, and Claire Trevor) who joined the actor in 1954's aviation drama, The High and the Mighty.
Thrice married, Bishop had a son, Steve, a physician and pilot, and a daughter, actress Pamela Susan Shoop, both by her second marriage, Gen. Clarence A. Shoop, a test pilot who flew for Howard Hughes and later became vice president of Hughes Aircraft; they were married from 1944 until his death in 1968. Her first marriage ended in divorce and her third with her death.
Julie Bishop died of pneumonia on her 87th birthday, August 30, 2001, in Mendocino, California.
Charles Drake (October 2, 1917 – September 10, 1994) was an American actor.Drake was born as Charles Ruppert in New York City. He graduated from Nichols College and became a salesman. In 1939, he turned to acting and signed a contract with Warner Brothers. He wasn't immediately successful. World War II interrupted his career; soon after his military service was complete, Drake returned to Hollywood in 1945, his contract with Warner Brothers ended. In the 1940s, he did some freelance work, like A Night in Casablanca. In 1949 he moved to Universal Studios. In 1955, Drake turned to television as one of the stock-company players on Robert Montgomery Presents and three years later he became the host of the British TV espionage weekly Rendezvous. In 1959, he starred in the Western film, No Name on the Bullet, where he played a doctor dedicated to saving a small town from a dangerous assassin. In 1967 he played the part of Oliver Greer in The Fugitive episode The One That Got Away. He played in 83 films between 1939 and 1975, including Scream, Pretty Peggy. More than 50 were dramas, but he also acted in comedies, science fiction, horror and film noir. He died on September 10, 1994 in East Lyme, Connecticut, aged 76.
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Eleanor Jean Parker (June 26, 1922 – December 9, 2013) was an American actress. She was nominated for three Academy Awards for her roles in the films Caged (1950), Detective Story (1951), and Interrupted Melody (1955), the first of which won her the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. She was also known for her roles in the films Of Human Bondage (1946), Scaramouche (1952), The Naked Jungle (1954), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), A Hole in the Head (1959), The Sound of Music (1965), and The Oscar (1966).
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William “Willie” Best (May 27, 1916 - February 27, 1962), sometimes known as “Sleep n' Eat,” was an American television and film actor. Best was one of the first African-American film actors and comedians to become well known. In the 21st century, his work, like that of Stepin Fetchit, is sometimes reviled because he was often called upon to play stereotypically lazy, illiterate, and/or simple-minded characters in films. Of the 124 films he appeared in, he received screen credit in at least 77, an unusual feat for an African-American bit player. Willie Best appeared in more than one hundred films of the 1930s and 1940s. Although several sources state that for years he was billed only as “Sleep n' Eat,” Best received credit under this moniker instead of his real name in only six movies: his first film as a bit player (Harold Lloyd's Feet First) and in Up Pops the Devil (1931), The Monster Walks (1932), Kentucky Kernels and West of the Pecos (both 1934), and Murder on a Honeymoon (1935). Best was first loved as a great clown, then later in the 20th century reviled and pitied, before being forgotten in the history of film. Hal Roach called him one of the greatest talents he had ever met. Comedian Bob Hope similarly acclaimed him as “the best actor I know,” while the two were working together in 1940 on The Ghost Breakers. As a supporting actor, Best, like many black actors of his era, was regularly cast in domestic worker or service-oriented roles (though a few times he played the role echoing his previous occupation as a private chauffeur). He was often seen making a brief comic turn as a hotel, airline or train porter, as well as an elevator operator, custodian, butler, valet, waiter, deliveryman, and at least once as a launch pilot (in the 1939 movie Mr. Moto in Danger Island). Willie Best received screen credit most of the time, which was unusual for “bit players,” most in the 1930s and '40s were not accorded due credit. This also happened to white actors in small roles, but black actors were not credited even when their roles were larger. In more than 80 of his movies, he was given a proper character name (as opposed to simple descriptions such as “room service waiter” or “shoe-shine boy”), beginning with his second film. Best played “Chattanooga Brown” in two Charlie Chan films —The Red Dragon in 1945 and Dangerous Money in 1946. He also played the character of “Hipp” in three of RKO’s six Scattergood Baines films with Guy Kibbee: Scattergood Baines (1941), Scattergood Survives a Murder (1942), and Cinderella Swings It in 1943. (Actor Paul White, who played a young version of Best’s “Hipp” in the first film, went on to play “Hipp” in the next three films. Best returned to the role in the last two.) After a drug arrest ended his film career, he worked in television for a while and became known to early TV audiences as “Charlie the Elevator Operator” on CBS's My Little Margie, from 1953 to 1955. He also played Willie, the house servant, handyman and close friend of the title character of ABC’s The Trouble with Father, for its entire run from 1950 to 1955.
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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.
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Vera Lewis (June 10, 1873 – February 8, 1956) was an American film and stage actress, beginning in the silent film era. She appeared in 183 films between 1915 and 1947. She was married to actor Ralph Lewis.
She was born in Manhattan, where she began acting in stage productions. Her film career started in 1915 with the film Hypocrites, which starred Myrtle Stedman and Courtenay Foote. From 1915 to 1929 she appeared in 63 silent films, including the film classic Intolerance (1916) where she played the "old maid" Miss Jenkins.
Unlike many silent film stars, she made a smooth transition to "talking films", starting with her 1930 appearance in Wide Open, starring Patsy Ruth Miller and Edward Everett Horton. Though never what is referred to as a "premier star", she appeared in 58 films during the 1930s, and another 60 during the 1940s. She retired after 1947, and resided at the Motion Picture Country House in Woodland Hills, California at the time of her death on February 8, 1956.