Broadway producer Johnny Demming is only interested in big-name talent and scoffs that his sister, father and other small-time talent could be used in a successful show.
01-19-1944
1h 55m
THIS
HELLA
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Main Cast
Movie Details
Production Info
Director:
Roy Del Ruth
Production:
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Jack Cummings Productions
Key Crew
Author:
Oscar Hammerstein II
Screenplay:
Harry Clork
Screenplay:
Dorothy Kingsley
Producer:
Jack Cummings
Original Music Composer:
Johnny Green
Locations and Languages
Country:
US
Filming:
US
Languages:
en
Main Cast
George Murphy
George Murphy was an American dancer and stage, screen, and television actor, as well as a United States Senator. Murphy was a song-and-dance leading man in many big-budget Hollywood musicals from 1930 to 1952. He was the president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1944 to 1946, and was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1951. Murphy served from 1965 to 1971 as U.S. Senator from California, the first notable U.S. actor to be elected to statewide office in California, predating Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is the only United States Senator represented by a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
In movies, Murphy was known as a song-and-dance man and appeared in many big-budget musicals such as Broadway Melody of 1938, Broadway Melody of 1940 and For Me and My Gal. He made his movie debut shortly after talking pictures had replaced silent movies in 1930, and his career continued until he retired as an actor in 1952, at the age of 50. During World War II, he organized entertainment for American troops.
In 1951, he was awarded an honorary Academy Award. He was never nominated for an Oscar in any competitive category.
He was the president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1944 to 1946. He was also a vice president of Desilu Productions and of the Technicolor Corporation. He was director of entertainment for presidential inaugurations in 1953, 1957 and 1961.
Virginia Ellen Simms (May 25, 1913 – April 4, 1994) was an American popular singer and film actress. Simms sang with big bands and labeled with Dinah Shore, Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Jo Stafford, and others. She also worked as an MGM and Universal film actress and appeared in 11 movies from 1939 to 1951, when she retired.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
Gloria Mildred DeHaven (born July 23, 1925) is an American actress, singer and a former contract star for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
DeHaven was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of actor-director, Carter DeHaven, and actress, Flora Parker DeHaven, both former vaudeville performers.
She began her career as a child actor with a bit part in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). She was signed to a contract with MGM. Despite featured roles in such films as Best Foot Forward, The Thin Man Goes Home (1944) and Summer Stock (1950), and being voted by exhibitors as the third most likely to be a "star of tomorrow'" in 1944, she did not achieve film stardom. She portrayed her own mother, Flora Parker DeHaven, in the Fred Astaire film Three Little Words (1950).
DeHaven also appeared as a regular in the television series and soap operas As the World Turns, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Ryan's Hope. She was one of the numerous celebrities enticed to appear in the all-star box office flop, Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood (1976), and has guest starred in such television series as Robert Montgomery Presents, Appointment with Adventure (episode entitled "The Snow People"), The Guy Mitchell Show, Johnny Ringo (as Rosemary Blake in "Love Affair"), The Rifleman, Wagon Train, The Lloyd Bridges Show, Marcus Welby, M.D., Gunsmoke, Mannix, Fantasy Island, Hart to Hart, The Love Boat, Mama's Family, Highway to Heaven, Murder, She Wrote and Touched by an Angel. She was also on five episodes of Match Game 75 along with Patti Deutsch and Buck Owens as guest panelists.
Gloria DeHaven died July 30, 2016 (age 91), in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.
From Wikipedia.
Lena Horne (June 30, 1917 - May 9, 2010) was a singer, dancer, actress, and civil rights activist.
Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of sixteen and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood, where she had small parts in numerous movies, and more substantial parts in the films Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather.
Due to the Red Scare and her left-leaning political views, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to get work in Hollywood. Returning to her roots as a nightclub performer, Horne took part in the March on Washington in August 1963, and continued to work as a performer, both in nightclubs and on television, while releasing well-received record albums.
She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which ran for more than three hundred performances on Broadway and earned her numerous awards and accolades. She continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, disappearing from the public eye in 2000. Horne died on May 9, 2010 in New York City.
During her lifetime, Horne was awarded four Grammys, a Tony, and a NAACP Image Award . She also received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1984.
Eddie "Rochester" Anderson (September 18, 1905 – February 28, 1977) was an American comic actor who became famous playing Rochester, the valet to Jack Benny's eponymous title character on the long-running radio and television series The Jack Benny Program.
Sidney Alderman Blackmer (13 July 1895 – 6 October 1973) was an American actor.
Blackmer was born and raised in Salisbury, North Carolina. He started off in an insurance and financial business but gave up on it. While working as a builder's laborer on a new building, he saw a Pearl White serial being filmed and immediately decided to go into acting. Blackmer went to New York hoping to act on the stage. While in the city, he took jobs and extra work at various film studios at the then motion picture capital, Fort Lee, New Jersey, including a bit part in the highly popular serial, The Perils of Pauline (1914).
He made his Broadway debut in 1917, but his career was interrupted by service in the U.S. military in World War I. After the war, he returned to the theatre and in 1929 returned to motion pictures and went on to be a major character actor in more than 120 films. He won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Actor (Drama) for his role in the Broadway play, Come Back, Little Sheba.
In film, Blackmer is remembered for his more than a dozen portrayals of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and for his role in the Academy Award-winning 1968 Roman Polanski film about urban New York witches, Rosemary's Baby, in which he played an over-solicitous neighbor.
A humanitarian, Blackmer served as the national vice president of the United States Muscular Dystrophy Association. In 1972, he was honored with the North Carolina Award in the Fine Arts category. It is the state of North Carolina's highest civilian award. On his passing in 1973, Blackmer was interred in the Chestnut Hill Cemetery in his hometown of Salisbury, North Carolina.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Sidney Blackmer, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bess Flowers (November 23, 1898 – July 28, 1984) was an American actress. By some counts considered the most prolific actress in the history of Hollywood, she was known as "The Queen of the Hollywood Extras," appearing in over 700 movies in her 41 year career.
Born in Sherman, Texas, Flowers's film debut came in 1923, when she appeared in Hollywood. She made three films that year, and then began working extensively. Many of her appearances are uncredited, as she generally played non-speaking roles.
By the 1930s, Flowers was in constant demand. Her appearances ranged from Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford thrillers to comedic roles alongside of Charley Chase, the Three Stooges, Leon Errol, Edgar Kennedy, and Laurel and Hardy.
She appeared in the following five films which won the Academy Award for Best Picture: It Happened One Night, You Can't Take it with You, All About Eve, The Greatest Show on Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days. In each of these movies, Flowers was uncredited. Including these five movies, she had appeared in twenty-three Best Picture nominees in total, making her the record holder for most appearances in films nominated for the award. Her last movie was Good Neighbor Sam in 1964.
Flowers's acting career was not confined to feature films. She was also seen in many episodic American TV series, such as I Love Lucy, notably in episodes, "Lucy Is Enceinte" (1952), "Ethel's Birthday" (1955), and "Lucy's Night in Town" (1957), where she is usually seen as a theatre patron.
Outside her acting career, in 1945, Bess Flowers helped to found the Screen Extras Guild (active: 1946-1992, then merged with SAG), where she served as one of its first vice-presidents and recording secretaries.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sara Haden (born Catherine Haden, November 17, 1898 – September 15, 1981) was a character actress in Hollywood films of the 1930s through the 1950s and in television into the mid-1960s. She may be best remembered for appearing as Aunt Milly Forrest in thirteen entries in MGM's Andy Hardy film series.
Haden first appeared on the stage in the early 1920s. As early as October 1920, she was appearing with Walter Hampden's acting troupe. Her Broadway debut came in Trigger (1927).
She made her film debut in 1934 (one year after her mother's retirement) in the Katharine Hepburn vehicle Spitfire. Haden later became a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player in the late 1930s and had smallish roles in many of the studio's films, most notably in the Andy Hardy series starring Mickey Rooney, cast as the spinsterish Aunt Milly Forrest.
Haden made her last film, Andy Hardy Comes Home, in 1958, but was active on television until a 1965 guest spot on Dr. Kildare. She was most notable for her stern, humorless characterisations such as a truant officer in Shirley Temple's Captain January (1936), but she also played the much-loved teacher Miss Pipps, who is unjustly fired in the Our Gang comedy Come Back, Miss Pipps (1941). Other films in which she appeared include Poor Little Rich Girl (1936), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Woman of the Year (1942), and The Bishop's Wife (1947). Her television appearances include episodes of Climax!, Bourbon Street Beat, and Bonanza. She had a guest appearance on Perry Mason as Florence Harvey in the 1959 episode, "The Case of the Romantic Rogue".
Haden played Dora Darling in My Favorite Martian, season 2 episode 28, "Once Upon a Martian's Mother's Day" in 1965.
She was married to film actor Richard Abbott (born Seamon Vandenberg; 1899-1986) from 1921 until their divorce in 1948. Sara Haden died on September 15, 1981 at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, at age 82.
