Hollywood Actors
Martha Raye’s obituary in 1994 in “The Independent”:
THE WIDE-MOUTHED, clarion-voiced Martha Raye disliked being called a comedienne. ‘I’m a clown,’ she invariably maintained. Although she wasn’t born in a trunk, Raye was born backstage. Her parents were Reed and Hooper, well-known vaudevillians, and she joined the act at the age of three. At 15, she took a job as vocalist with Paul Ash’s orchestra, changing her name from Margie Reed to Martha Raye, a name she found by jabbing a pin into a telephone book. ‘Just think,’ she said. ‘I coulda wound up bein’ called ‘Mercy Hospital]’ ‘
After leaving the band, she developed a night-club act. In 1936 she was booked into the Trocadero in Hollywood, where the film director Norman Taurog saw her and offered a screen test. The songwriter Sam Coslow also caught her act and was so impressed he wrote her a song, ‘Mr Paganini’. She sang it in her successful test and in the first film of her Paramount contract, the Bing Crosby musical Rhythm on the Range. ‘For Miss Raye it was an exceptional break,’ Variety wrote. ‘She has an opportunity to show off all her tricks, particularly the mugging . . . She impresses as a very promising picture comedienne.’ The public agreed, and Raye adopted ‘Mr Paganini’ as her signature tune.
She made 15 films for Paramount, including Waikiki Wedding and Double or Nothing (both Crosby vehicles), two editions of the Big Broadcast series, and three films with Bob Hope: College Swing (1938), Give Me a Sailor (1938) and Never Say Die (1939). Her first film as a freelance was Universal’s screen version of Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys From Syracuse (1940).
Since 1936 Raye had been appearing on radio with Al Jolson, and in 1940 they co-starred in the Broadway musical Hold Onto Your Hats. The show was a hit, but Jolson’s health wasn’t up to a New York winter, and Hats closed after 158 performances. Back in Hollywood, Raye played twins in Abbott and Costello’s Keep ‘Em Flying (1941), prompting one critic to write ‘I’m not sure the world is ready for two Martha Rayes.’
In 1942 Raye, Carole Landis, Kay Francis and Mitzi Mayfair spent six months entertaining servicemen in Britain and North Africa. Long after her three co-stars had returned to Hollywood, Raye continued the tour, ending up with a severe case of malaria.
In 1944, she, Landis, Francis and Mayfair played themselves in 20th Century-Fox’s Four Jills in a Jeep, based on a book ‘written’ by Landis.
Raye stayed at 20th to play a night-club singer in the Betty Grable vehicle Pin-Up Girl (1944). She clowned with her Fellow BigMouth Joe E. Brown and sang two relentlessly patriotic songs, ‘Red Robins, Bob Whites and Blue Birds’ and ‘Yankee Doodle Hayride’ (‘There ain’t gonna be no hoedown / Till we knock the foe down]’). Also in the film were the two dancing Condos Brothers, one of whom (Nick) was the fourth of Raye’s seven husbands.
It was her uproarious performance in Four Jills in a Jeep that prompted Charles Chaplin to cast her as the dim-witted lottery winner Annabella Bonheur in Monsieur Verdoux (1947). At first overawed by Chaplin, Raye realised that hero-worship was repressing her performance, and started calling him ‘Chuck’. Amused by this, he countered by calling her ‘Maggie’.
Soon she felt so secure she would shout ‘Lunch]’ when she thought the morning’s filming had gone on too long. Chaplin still grinned and bore it, realising that the scenes in which Verdoux attempts to murder the indestructible Annabella were the funniest in the film. Ironically, Raye’s association with the politically unpopular Chaplin hindered, rather than helped her career, and she wasn’t offered another movie for 15 years. After more than a decade in television, she returned to the big screen as the fortune-teller Madame Lulu in MGM’s Jumbo (1962).
In 1967 she was one of the stars who followed Carol Channing in the Broadway production of Hello, Dolly. More television followed, including McMillan and Wife, for which she received an Emmy Award nomination. In 1979 she returned to Universal to play Boss Witch in Pufnstuf and a weak- bladdered passenger in Airport ’79 – the Concorde. Asked when she planned to retire, she replied ‘When I’m dead.’ In late 1993 a stroke which paralysed her left leg necessitated amputation. A week later she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for entertaining troops during the Second World War, the Korean war and in Vietnam – where she was wounded twice. In 1992 she sued the makers of For the Boys (1991), claiming her life was used as the basis of the Bette Midler film. In February the suit was dismissed.
In 1968, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented her with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her selfless entertaining in three wars. After the ceremony, a tearful Martha Raye was asked by photographers to kiss her Oscar. She refused, saying, ‘If I did, I’d swallow it.’
IMDB Entry:
This American film actor also multitasks as a producer, composer and production manager. He rose to fame in the 1970s, praised for his range and sensitivity. His blonde rugged looks helped viewers connect even more easily to his powerful performances.
Born John Youngs in Old Bethpage, New York, Savage attended the American Academy of Performing Arts. The Long Island boy debuted on Broadway in the chorus of “Fiddler On the Roof”. He ended up playing one of the sons, after another actor fell sick. During this production, managers Stewart Cohen and Rudy Altobelli discovered Savage. Between 1972 and 1975, Savage did a number of films, a TV show and spent three years doing theater in Chicago; “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Dance on a Country Grave”.
He subsequently moved to Los Angeles to star in “Eric” with Patricia Neal and Mark Hamill, and then was cast by director Ulu Grosbard to play “Bobby” in the original production of David Mamet‘s “American Buffalo”.
Savage first made a major splash with The Deer Hunter (1978), winner of the 1979 Best Picture Oscar. The film’s impact on Hollywood and America remains enormous. DirectorMichael Cimino cast him as “Steven”, who returns from Vietnam missing his legs.
The following year, this actor enjoyed leads in two more big pictures: the film adaptation of Joseph Wambaugh‘s The Onion Field (1979) and Milos Forman‘s musical Hair (1979). Savage played the corn-fed recruit “Claude Hooper Bukowski”, who turns on, tunes in and drops out. Critics and film historians celebrated his performance — both then and now. In fact, John Willis’ “Screen World” hailed him as one of the 12 promising new actors of 1979 (Vol. 31).
In another major role, Savage appeared as the suicide-survivor in Richard Donner‘sInside Moves (1980). Sensitive and moving, this feel-good film delivers a powerful message about overcoming adversity. He was nominated for Best Actor-Foreign for his work in The Amateur (1981). He went on to co-star in Maria’s Lovers (1984) withNastassja Kinski, backed by cinema legend Robert Mitchum.
Later films include Oliver Stone‘s Salvador (1986) and Francis Ford Coppola‘s The Godfather: Part III (1990) in place of Robert Duvall (who refused to appear due to a salary dispute). During the late 80s, Savage threw his star power behind the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. He continues to work despite his activism, including guest appearances in The X-Files (1993), Star Trek: Voyager (1995), Dark Angel (2000) and various “Law & Order” episodes.
He first collaborated with director Spike Lee as the bike-riding gentrifier in Do the Right Thing (1989), and then shifted to the camera’s other side for Malcolm X (1992) andSummer of Sam (1999). He also had a brief, but powerful, role in Terrence Malick‘s war epic, The Thin Red Line (1998).
Married twice — first to artist Susan Youngs and later to South African TV star Sandi Schultz — Savage is the father of ceramic artist Lachlan Youngs and actress/singer/songwriter Jennifer Youngs.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Amanda Castleman
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
TCM Overview:
Actor James Frain was a quintessential chameleon. Regardless of the role he portrayed – whether it was a sinister Spaniard in “Elizabeth” (1998), a classical pianist in “Hilary and Jackie” (1998), or a soft-spoken librarian in “Where the Heart Is” (2000) – Frain always extracted hidden layers of his characters’ emotions and brought them to the forefront. Frain also delivered strong performances on the action drama “24” (Fox, 2001-2010) as well as on the critically acclaimed Showtime miniseries “The Tudors” (2007-2010), as a commoner who rises to power as King Henry VIII’s ally. But it was Frain’s impressive turn as a psychotic vampire obsessed with a human on the award-winning HBO series “True Blood” (2008- ) that put him on the map and successfully showcased his range as a performer.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
“Wikipedia” entry:
Heather Thatcher (3 September 1896 – 15 February 1987) was an English actress in theatre and films. She was from London.
By 1922 Thatcher was a dancer. She was especially noted for her interpretation of an Egyptian harem dance. Her exotic clothes were designed in Russia. They featured stencil slits in the waist, trouserettes and sleeves. Her attire was billed as the boldest costume ever shown in England.
Thatcher played the feminine lead in London stage productions like Oh Daddy and Warm Corner. At the London Winter Garden she sang and danced in a revue in 1923. In August 1926, she appeared in Thy Name Is Woman at the Q Theatre. It marked her graduation from musical comedy to serious acting.
She continued her London stage work, performing with June Clyde in Lucky Break. Premiering at the Strand Theatre in September 1934, the theatrical presentation was a production of Leslie Henson. In 1937, Thatcher went to America in Full House. The previous season, she was paired with Ivor Novello in the English rendition. Jack Buchanan, Austin Trevor andCoral Browne teamed with Thatcher in Canaries Sometimes Sing (1947). Produced by Firth Shephard, the theatrical presentation opened in Blackpool and moved to London a month later. Thatcher participated in a Salute To Ivor Novello at the London Coliseum in September 1951. The production raised funds to run his old home, Redroofs. It had been purchased by the Actors’ Benevolent Fund.
The Plaything (1929), produced by Castleton Knight and Elstree Studios, begins as a silent film. It develops into an audible film which is recorded in good quality for its time. The theme concerns a Highland laird who falls in love with a hedonistic London heiress. Thatcher plays a prominent role as Martyn Bennett.
In 1931 she visited Hollywood while attending the wedding of James Gleason. As a star of English comedy, she was being compared to Marilyn Miller, Thatcher wore a monocle to the marriage ceremony. In the autumn of 1931 she was invited to a reception following the premiere of Strictly Dishonorable (1931), at the Carthay Circle Theatre. Among her friends in films were Anthony Bushell and Zelma O’Neal.
Thatcher was signed by MGM in February 1932. She was given a feature role in But The Flesh Is Weak (1932). The film stars Robert Montgomery and is directed by Jack Conway. The film was adapted from a British stage production which showcased Novello. Thatcher was praised for her performance. German actress, Nora Gregor was found disappointing. The English actress “gives a brilliant performance and creates the only human being in the piece.”
Thatcher sued Gloria Swanson British Productions for breach of contract in a suit which was settled in December 1933. During the filming of Perfect Understanding (1933) Thatcher’s contract was cancelled before the production was completed. No explanation was given. She was excluded from the film when a new author was hired. The replacement writer chose to eliminate her character.
The Private Life of Don Juan (1934) was also filmed at Elstree Studios. The film has Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. as its leading man. Owen Nares plays the title role and Thatcher is Anna Dora, one of the ladies.
Later in her career Thatcher returned to England to make films. Among these is Will Any Gentleman…? (1953), filmed at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood. Thatcher appears together with George Cole and Veronica Hurst. The film was a short adventure about a hypnotist who puts a man in a trance.
Thatcher made her last films in 1955. The Deep Blue Sea has a screenplay written by Terence Rattigan and features Vivien Leigh and Kenneth More. Thatcher depicts Aunt May Luton in Josephine and Men. The film is a comedy starring Glynis Johns and Peter Finch.
Thatcher died in Hillingdon, London in 1987.
The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.
“Wikipedia” entry:
Ronald Howard (7 April 1918 – 19 December 1996) was an English actor and writer best known in the U.S. for starring in a weekly Sherlock Holmes television series in 1954.[1] He was the son of actor Leslie Howard.
Howard was born in South Norwood, London, the son of Ruth Evelyn (Martin) and film actor Leslie Howard. He attended Tonbridge School. After graduating from Jesus College, Cambridge, Ronald Howard became a newspaper reporter for a while but decided to become an actor.
His first film role was an uncredited bit part in Pimpernel Smith (1941), a film directed by and starring his father in the title role, though young Howard’s part ended up on the cutting room floor. In the early 1940s, Howard gained acting experience in regional theatre, the London stage and eventually films, his official debut in While the Sun Shines in 1947. Howard received varying degrees of exposure in some well-known films, such as The Queen of Spades (1949) and The Browning Version (1951). Howard played Will Scarlet in the episode of the same name of the 1950s British television classic The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Richard Greene. The character of Scarlet was later portrayed by Paul Eddington.
The 1954 Sherlock Holmes television series, based on the Arthur Conan Doyle characters and produced by Sheldon Reynolds, ran for 39 episodes starring Howard as Holmes andHoward Marion-Crawford as Watson. In addition to 21st century DVD releases, in 2006 and 2014 this series was broadcast in the UK on the satellite channel Bonanza.
Howard continued mainly in British “B” films throughout the 1950s and ’60s, most notably The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964), along with a few plum television guest roles in British and American television in the 1960s, including as Wing Commander Hayes in the 1967 Cowboy in Africa TV show with Chuck Connors and Tom Nardini. In the mid-1970s, he reluctantly put aside his acting career to run an art gallery.
In the 1980s he wrote a biography covering the career and mysterious death of his father, whose plane was shot down over the Bay of Biscay on 1 June 1943. His conclusion (which remains in dispute) was that the Germans’ goal in shooting down the plane was to kill his father, who had been travelling through Spain and Portugal, ostensibly lecturing on film, but also meeting with local propagandists and shoring up support for the Allied cause.[2] The Germans suspected surreptitious activities since German agents were active throughout Spain and Portugal, which, like Switzerland, was a crossroads for persons from both sides of the conflict, but even more accessible to Allied citizens.[3] The book explores in detail written German orders to the Ju 88 Staffel based in France, assigned to intercept the aircraft, as well as communiqués on the British side that verify intelligence reports of the time indicating a deliberate attack on Howard.[2] Ronald Howard was convinced that the order to shoot down the airliner came directly from Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, who had been ridiculed in one of Howard’s films, and who believed Howard to be the most dangerous British propagandist.
The above “Wikiupedia” entry can also be accessed online here.
David Shipman’s obituary of Mai Zetterling in “The Independent”:
‘WOULD you take Frieda into your home?’ So went one of the most famous movie ad-lines of the post-war period. Frieda (1947) was the story of a German war bride and the prejudice she encountered when her husband, played by David Farrar, brought her home to the small town where he lived. It was directed by Basil Dearden for Ealing, a studio much admired for tackling topical issues.
Ealing might have argued that her notices for Hets (Frenzy, 1945) had proved that the critics adored her – she was certainly much admired for her performance as Bertha, the tobacconist’s assistant who seduces the schoolboy hero (Alf Kjellin) while pursuing his sadistic teacher (Stig Jarrel). It was written by Ingmar Bergman – his first work in movies – for the established Alf Sjoberg, who reunited his two young stars in Iris och Lojtnantishjarta (Iris).
Bergman, meanwhile, had become a director and cast Zetterling in Musik Morker (Night Is My Future/ Music Is My Future, 1948), in which she again played a maid who falls in love with the young master, Birger Malmsten. Though melodramatic, the film contains early echoes of Bergman’s richness.
Trained, like Ingrid Bergman, at the Royal Dramatic Theatre School in Stockholm, Zetterling might have sought a career like hers in the United States, but there were probably not sufficient roles for two leading Swedish actresses. Ealing, however, believed that Zetterling could be a big star for them. This was the heyday of period romances and the studio’s first Technicolor film was to be Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), based on a novel by Helen Simpson about the adulterous affair between a Swedish mercenary (Stewart Granger) and Sophie Dorothea, the consort of the Elector of Hanover who became George I. But when Zetterling became pregnant the role went to Joan Greenwood.
Zetterling looked like being a leading British star and in rapid succession played displaced persons in two movies set in contemporary Germany, Terence Fisher’s Portrait from Life (1948) and Bernard Knowles’s The Lost People (1949). These were produced by Gainsborough, smarting from the knowledge that critics disliked their escapist entertainment. Aiming again at respectability the studio came up with The Bad Lord Byron (1949), directed by David MacDonald with Dennis Price in the title-role, in which Zetterling played Byron’s Italian mistress Teresa Guiccioli. In what had been her second British picture Quartet (1948), a collection of four Somerset Maugham short stories, Zetterling had been unconvincing as a Riviera adventurist in the first of them, The Facts of Life. The Romantic Age (1949) was such sub-standard farce that it seriously damaged her film career.
However, the touching talent displayed in her Swedish films and Frieda found a congenial home on the West End stage. She had played supporting roles in classical plays in Stockholm; in London she scored such a critical success as Hedwig in The Wild Duck that the limited run of two months sold out the day after the first night. Later in 1948 Tennants cast her as Nina in The Seagull, with Paul Scofield as Constantin and Isabel Jeans as Arkadina, initially at the Lyric, Hammersmith, and then in the West End. Also at the Lyric for Tennants, she gave strong and subtle performances in Jean Anouilh’s Point of Departure (1950), as Eurydice to Dirk Bogarde’s Orpheus, and in A Doll’s House (1953), as Nora. She returned memorably to this theatre in 1959 to play Strindberg’s Tekla in Creditors.
In the meantime Hollywood had called and she starred opposite Danny Kaye in Knock on Wood (1954), playing a Swiss psychoanalyst who follows him to London to continue to treat him. She became romantically involved with Kaye, as she did with Tyrone Power when he came to Britain to make Seven Waves Away; she also persuaded him to play opposite her in the television Miss Julie.
There were several other British movies, some of them backed by Hollywood: and although most of them were undistinguished she remained a ‘name’ throughout the world. Her last leading role at this time was one of her successful seductresses, the provincial wife who makes a play for the librarian Peter Sellers in Sidney Gilliat’s Only Two Can Play (1961).
Zetterling, a woman of intelligence and fierce independence, decided not to sit around and wait for offers. She directed a short documentary, The War Game (1963), which won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. She returned to Sweden to direct Alskande Par (Loving Couples, 1964), a story of expectant mothers strongly influenced by Bergman and acted by some of his stock company, and Nattlek (Night Games, 1966), influenced this time by Strindberg as a disturbed man recalls his mother-dominated childhood. She also wrote the first of these, with her then husband, the novelist David Hughes, and the second she wrote alone from her own novel.
She continued to direct in Sweden and as her films became more feminist and more explicit they did not attract an undivided army of admirers. A British picture about two Borstal girls, Scrubbers (1982), created much controversy. Her last two films as an actress were Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches (1989) and Hidden Agenda (1990), Ken Loach’s brave film about Northern Ireland. That was only a small role, playing an anti-British activist, but one of which she was proud.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.
