Virginia Christine Ricketts was an American stage and screen film actress. She began training for a theatrical career with actor/ director Fritz Feld whom she married in 1940. In 1942, she made her stage debut in the Los Angeles production of "Hedda Gabler". While performing in the play, she was spotted by an agent from Warner Bros. who signed her to a film contract with the studio. Virginia Christie appeared in more than 170 feature films and TV-productions.
Gary Gray was a child and juvenile actor from the 1940s to the 1960s. Some of his movies include: Rachel & the Stranger, The Painted Hills, and Return of the Bad Men. He passed away in 2006 at the age of 69.
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John Ridgely (born John Huntington Rea, September 6, 1909 – January 18, 1968) was an American film character actor with over 175 film credits.
He appeared in the 1946 Humphrey Bogart film The Big Sleep as blackmailing gangster Eddie Mars and had a memorable role as a suffering heart patient in the film noir Nora Prentiss (1947). He appeared in a large number of other Warner Bros. films in the 1930s and 1940s.
Freelancing after 1948, John Ridgely continued to essay general-purpose parts until he left films in 1953. Thereafter, he worked in summer-theater productions and television until his death from a heart attack at the age of 58 in 1968.
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James Burke (September 24, 1886 – May 23, 1968) was an American film and television actor born in New York City. He made his stage debut in New York around 1912 and went to Hollywood in 1933. He made over 200 film appearances during his career, which ranged from 1932 to 1964; he was more often than not cast as a cop, usually a none-too-bright one, most notably as Sgt. Velie in Columbia's Ellery Queen mysteries in the early 1940s. He appeared in The Maltese Falcon, At the Circus, Lone Star, and many others. One of his best roles was as Charles Ruggles' rowdy rancher pal in Ruggles of Red Gap.
In the early 1950s, Burke appeared with Tom Conway in the ABC detective drama series then called Inspector Mark Saber -- Homicide Detective, later renamed, reformatted, and switched to NBC under the title Saber of London. From 1960-1961, Burke appeared in the role of Zeke Bonner in seven episodes of the ABC western television series Stagecoach West, starring Wayne Rogers, Robert Bray, and Richard Eyer.
Burke suffered from a heart condition, which took his life at the age of eighty-one.
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Konstantin Shayne (November 29, 1888 – November 15, 1974) was an actor from the Russian Empire who emigrated to the United States.
Born in Kharkov, Russian Empire, to the family of a Jewish actor Veniamin Olkenitsky-Nikulin, he was the brother of actress Tamara Shayne and Russian writers Lev Nikulin and Yuriy Nikulin.[1] The First World War intervened before he could join the Moscow Arts Theatre, and during the conflict he fought with General Wrangel and the White Armies. Shayne was married two times and he also had children.
As an actor, Konstantin Shayne performed in movies such as None but the Lonely Heart (1944) and The Stranger (1946), starring (and directed by) Orson Welles. He performed in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) which featured Danny Kaye in the lead role. His performance in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) was cut from the final release. In his last film appearance Shayne dominates two minutes of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo, playing the old bookseller Pop Leibel.
William Bakewell (May 2, 1908 – April 15, 1993), also known as Billy Bakewell, was an American actor, who achieved his greatest fame as one of the premiere juvenile performers of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Bakewell, educated at Los Angeles Harvard Military School, began his film career as an extra in the silent movie Fighting Blood (1924), and went on to appear in some 170 films and television shows. He had supporting roles at the end of the silent era and reached the peak of his career around 1930. He is perhaps best remembered for playing German soldier Albert Kropp in the film classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), and Rodney Jordan, Joan Crawford's brother, in Dance, Fools, Dance (1931). He also co-starred in Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929) with Winnie Lightner and Lilyan Tashman. In 1933, he contributed to the founding of the Screen Actors Guild, and was member 44 of the original 50. He never achieved stardom after the Depression years, although he became familiar in dozens of films, including his short appearance as a mounted soldier in Gone with the Wind (1939) whom Scarlett O'Hara asks when the Yankee soldiers are coming to Atlanta.
During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army with the rank of second lieutenant. He was stationed at the 73rd Evacuation Hospital and at the Radio Section of the Special Service Division as the Post Intelligence Officer. He also worked under the department that handled distribution of recorded programs to overseas station circuits.
He starred in the Columbia Pictures serial Hop Harrigan (1946), where he played a top Air Corps pilot. He also portrayed Major Tobias Norton and a Keelboat Race Master of Ceremonies in the phenomenally popular Disney series Davy Crockett (1954-1955).
In the 1960s, he guest starred in numerous situation comedy television series, including Guestward, Ho!, Pete and Gladys, Bringing Up Buddy, The Tab Hunter Show, Mister Ed, Leave It to Beaver, The Jack Benny Program, Petticoat Junction , and Hazel. He also was cast in episodes of Peter Gunn, Sea Hunt, Wagon Train, The Roaring 20s, The Virginian, Arrest and Trial, and 87th Precinct He played the Virginia statesman George Wythe in the episode "George Mason" in the 1965 NBC documentary series, Profiles in Courage. He made his last film in 1975.
For four decades, Bakewell served on the board of Motion Picture and Television Fund. He died on April 15, 1993 of leukemia at the age of 84.
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William Benedict (April 16, 1917 – November 25, 1999) was an American actor, perhaps best known for playing "Whitey" in Monogram Pictures' The Bowery Boys series.
Born in Haskell, Oklahoma, he took part in school theatricals, and on leaving school he made his way to Hollywood. His first film was $10 Raise (1935) starring Edward Everett Horton, which launched Benedict on a busy career. The blond-haired Benedict almost always played juvenile roles, such as newsboys, messengers, office boys, and farmhands.
In 1939, when Universal Pictures began its Little Tough Guys series to compete with the popular Dead End Kids features, Billy Benedict was recruited into the cast. These films led him into the similar East Side Kids movies (usually playing a member of the East Side gang, but occasionally in villainous roles). The East Side Kids became The Bowery Boys in 1946, and Benedict stayed with the series (as "Whitey") through the end of 1951.
Other films included My Little Chickadee (1940) starring W. C. Fields and Mae West, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster (1955), The Sting (1973) and Farewell, My Lovely (1975). Benedict never shook his juvenile image completely, and continued to play messengers and news vendors well into his sixties. He also worked often in television commercials.
