Aline MacMahon was an American stage, screen, and television actress. She worked extensively from 1921, when she began appearing on Broadway, until her full retirement from acting in 1975. MacMahon was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the 1944 film Dragon Seed.
Arthur Franz (February 29, 1920 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey – June 17, 2006) was a B-movie actor whose most notable role was as Lieutenant, Junior Grade H. Paynter, Jr. in The Caine Mutiny. He also appeared in Roseanna McCoy (1949), Invaders from Mars (1953), Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951) and The Unholy Wife (1957), among others. In The Sniper (1952), he played a rare movie lead in the film's title role as a tormented killer.
In addition to films, Franz was a familiar face on American television, appearing on dozen of television programs including Crossroads, Perry Mason, The F.B.I., The Mod Squad, Custer, The Virginian and Rawhide.
Franz portrayed Congressman Charles A. Halleck in the 1974, made for TV film, The Missiles of October.
Franz's last film role was in That Championship Season in 1982.
Franz's interest in acting developed when he was a high school student.
During World War II, Franz served as a B-24 Liberator navigator in the United States Army Air Forces. He was shot down over Romania and incarcerated in a POW camp, from which he escaped.
Franz died in Oxnard, California at the age of 86 from emphysema and heart disease.
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Gerald Mohr was an American radio, film and television character actor who appeared in more than 500 radio plays, 73 films and over 100 television shows. Born in New York City, he was educated in Dwight Preparatory School in New York City, where he learned to speak fluent French and German. At Columbia University, where he was on a course to become a doctor, before being discovered as promising voice talent by a radio producer. Mohr was hired by the radio station and became a junior reporter. In the mid-1930s, Orson Welles invited him to join his formative Mercury Theatre and appeared on Broadway. Mohr began appearing in films in the late 1930s, playing his first villain role in the 15-part cliffhanger serial Jungle Girl (1941). After three years' service in the US Army Air Forces during World War II, he returned to Hollywood, starring and appearing in numerous movies until 1949 when he joined Fred Foy has co-announcer for the first series of The Lone Ranger. From the 1950s on, he appeared as a guest star in more than one hundred television series, mostly westerns, though several comedy, variety, crime, and early science fiction serials. Mohr is remembered for his performance as "Ricky's friend" psychiatrist 'Dr. Henry Molin' (real life name of the assistant film editor on the show) in the classic February 1953 I Love Lucy episode, "The Inferiority Complex". Mohr's repeated line was, "Treatment, Ricky. Treatment".
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William Forrest (October 10, 1902 – January 26, 1989) was an American theatre, film, and television actor. He appeared in more than 250 films between 1939 and 1977. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and died in Santa Monica, California.
Ann Lee Doran (July 28, 1911 – September 19, 2000) was an American character actress, possibly best known as the mother of Jim Stark (James Dean) in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). She was an early member of the Screen Actors Guild and served on the board of the Motion Picture & Television Fund for 30 years.
American character actor whose career lasted nearly half a century. James Wilson Flavin Jr. was the son of a hotel waiter of Canadian-English extraction and a mother, Katherine, whose father was an Irish immigrant. (Thus Flavin, well-known in Hollywood as an "Irish" type, was only one-quarter Irish.) Flavin was born and raised in Portland, Maine (a fact that may have enrichened his later working relationship with director John Ford, also a Portland native). He attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, but (contrary to some sources) did not graduate. Instead he dropped out and returned to Portland where he drove a taxi. Then as now, summer stock companies flocked to Maine each year, and in 1929 he was asked to fill in for an actor. He did well with the part and the company manager offered him $150 per week to go with the troupe back to New York. Flavin accepted and by the spring of 1930 was living in a rooming house at 108 W. 87th Street in Manhattan. Flavin didn't manage to crack Broadway at this time (his Broadway debut would not occur for another thirty-nine years, in the 1971 revival of "The Front Page," in which Flavin played Murphy and briefly took over the lead role of Walter Burns from star Robert Ryan). He worked his way across the country in stock productions and tours, arriving in Los Angeles around 1932. He quickly made the transition to movies, landing the lead in his very first film, a Universal serial, The Airmail Mystery (1932). He also landed his leading lady, marrying the serial's female star Lucile Browne that same year. However, the serial marked virtually the last time that Flavin would play the lead in a film. Thereafter, he was restricted almost exclusively to supporting characters, many of them without so much as a name. He specialized in uniformed cops and hard-bitten detectives, but played chauffeurs, cabbies, and even a 16th-century palace guard with aplomb. Flavin appeared in nearly four hundred films between 1932 and 1971, and in almost a hundred television episodes before his final appearance, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Francis Gary Powers: The True Story of the U-2 Spy Incident (1976). Flavin died of a heart ailment at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on April 23, 1976. His widow Lucile died seventeen days later. They were survived by their son, William James Flavin, subsequently a professor at the United States Army War College. James and Lucile Brown Flavin were buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
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Barbara Pepper (born Marion B. Pepper; May 31, 1915 – July 18, 1969) was an American stage, television, radio, and film actress. She is best known as the first "Doris Ziffel" on the sitcom Green Acres. Pepper was born in New York City, the daughter of actor David Mitchell "Dave" Pepper, and his wife, Harrietta S. Pepper. At age 16 she started life in show business with Goldwyn Girls, a musical stock company where she met lifelong friend Lucille Ball.
Pepper began making movies. Among her later film parts were small roles in My Fair Lady and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. She also performed radio parts. In 1943, she married actor Craig Reynolds (né Harold Hugh Enfield), and the couple later had two sons. After Reynolds died in 1949 in a California motorcycle accident, Pepper was left to raise their children alone. She never remarried.
After gaining weight, her roles were mostly confined to small character parts on television, including several appearances on I Love Lucy, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, Petticoat Junction, and The Jack Benny Program. She made four appearances on Perry Mason, including the role of Martha Dale, mother of the title character, in the 1957 episode "The Case of the Vagabond Vixen".
A long-time friend of Lucille Ball, Barbara was considered for the role of Ethel Mertz on "I Love Lucy," but was passed over due to the fact that she was reportedly a drinker. William Frawley ("Fred Mertz") was, likewise, reportedly, a drinker and was already cast. It was felt that having two drinkers in the cast might eventually cause difficulties so they auditioned and found Vivian Vance to play Ethel instead.
She may be best remembered as the first Doris Ziffel on Petticoat Junction in 1964, although her character's name on the "Genghis Keane" episode of Petticoat Junction was Ruth Ziffel. Her role as Doris Ziffel continued on Green Acres from 1965 to 1968, until heart ailments finally forced her to leave that weekly series. Veteran actress Fran Ryan replaced her on Green Acres, which would continue to run for another three years. Her final performance was in the 1969 film Hook, Line & Sinker, in which she played Jerry Lewis's secretary.
Eddie Cantor (born Isidore Itzkowitz; January 31, 1892 – October 10, 1964) was an American comedian, actor, dancer, singer, songwriter, film producer, screenwriter and author. Cantor was one of the prominent entertainers of his era.
Though he was the youngest, Jordan was the first of the boys who made up the Dead End Kids to work in films with a role in a 1933 Universal short. In 1935, he became one of the original Dead End Kids by winning the role of Angel in Sydney Kingsley's Broadway drama Dead End about life in the slums of the east side of New York City. The play was performed at the Belasco Theatre and ran for three years with over 600 performances. He appeared for the first season and the beginning of the second but left in mid-November 1936. He returned in time to join the others in 1937 in Hollywood, California to make the movie version of the play, starring big names such as Humphrey Bogart, Joel McCrea, Sylvia Sidney, and Claire Trevor.
Following the making of Dead End, Jordan found himself "released" from his contract at Goldwyn, and, subsequently, he appeared at Warner Brothers with the rest of the Dead End Kids. After one year, Warners released most of them, but kept Leo Gorcey and Jordan as solo performers. Jordan appeared (as "Douglas Fairbanks Rosenbloom") in Warner's Damon Runyon comedy A Slight Case of Murder (1938) and at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Young Tom Edison (1940).
In 1940, Jordan appeared in the film Military Academy and accepted an offer from producer Sam Katzman to star in a new tough-kid series called "The East Side Kids." Leo Gorcey soon joined him, then Huntz Hall, and the trio continued to lead the series through 1943, when Jordan entered the United States Army during World War II as a foot soldier in the 97th Infantry Division. He was subsequently involved in an elevator accident, when the elevator fell five floors, that forced him to have surgery to remove his right kneecap.