- Ann Miller
Ann Miller was an American dancer, singer and actress, who was christened Johnnie Lucille Collier. Born in Chireno, Texas (some sources cite Houston, where she was raised), her father insisted on the name Johnnie because he had wanted a boy, but she was often called Annie. She took up dancing to exercise her legs to help her rickets. She was considered a child dance prodigy. - Marc Lawrence
Marc Lawrence (February 17, 1910 - November 28, 2005) was an American character actor who specialized in underworld types. Lawrence was born Max Goldsmith in the Bronx to a Russian Jewish father and a Polish Jewish mother. He participated in plays in school, then attended the City College of New York. In 1930, Lawrence befriended another young actor, John Garfield. - David Puttnam
David Terence Puttnam, Baron Puttnam, CBE, FRSA, (born 25 February 1941) is a film producer and politician. He sits on the Labour benches in the House of Lords. - Janet Blair
Janet Blair (April 23 1921 - February 19 2007) was an American film and television actress. Born as Martha Jane Lafferty (she took her acting surname from Blair County, Pennsylvania) in Altoona, Pennsylvania, she began her acting career on film in 1942. She left films for many years after she was dropped by her studio, Columbia Pictures, and disliked the roles she was offered. - Don Beddoe
Don Beddoe (July 1, 1903 - January 19, 1991) was an American character actor. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Beddoe made his Broadway acting debut in 1929. After a decade of stage work and bit parts in films, Beddoe began more prominent film roles in the late 1930s. He was usually cast as fast talking reporters and the like. His acting career was put on hold when he served in World War II in the Army Air Corps, but then returned to films playing small character roles. - Budd Boetticher
Budd Boetticher (July 29, 1916 - November 29, 2001) was a film director during the classical period in Hollywood most famous for the series of low-budget Westerns he made in the late 1950s starring Randolph Scott. Known for their sparse style, dramatic rocky locations near Lone Pine, California, and recurring stories of a lone man seeking vengeance amidst a brutal and abstract landscape, the films have, decades after their release, … - Del Lord
Del Lord (October 7, 1894 - March 23, 1970) was a film director and actor best known as a director of Three Stooges films. Lord was born in the small town of Grimsby, Ontario, Canada. Interested in the theatre, he traveled to New York City then when fellow Canadian, Mack Sennett offered him a job at his new Keystone Studios, Lord went on to work in Hollywood, California. There, he played the driver of the Keystone Kops police van, … - Charles Starrett
Charles Starrett (March 28 1903 - March 22 1986) was an American actor best known for his starring role in the "Durango Kid" Columbia Pictures western series. He was born in Athol, Massachusetts. A graduate of Worcester Academy in 1922, Starrett went on to study at Dartmouth College. While on the Darmouth football team, he was hired to play a football extra in the 1926 film "The Quarterback". In 1930 he played the romantic lead in "Fast and Loose", … - Smiley Burnette
Lester Alvin (Smiley) Burnette (born March 18, 1911, Summum, Illinois - February 16, 1967, Encino, California), an American singer-songwriter who could play as many as 100 different musical instruments, was a successful comedy actor in Western films over three decades. Burnette began singing in childhood and learned to play a variety of instruments while still a boy. In his teens, he worked in vaudeville and at a local radio station. - Jack Holt
Jack Holt (May 31, 1888 - January 18, 1951) was an American motion picture actor. - Jerome Cowan
Jerome Cowan (born October 6, 1897 in New York, New York; died January 24, 1972 in Encino, California) appeared in over 100 films but is probably best remembered for two roles in classic films: He played Miles Archer, the doomed private eye partner of Sam Spade, in "The Maltese Falcon"; he was also the hapless district attorney, Thomas Mara, who is forced to cross-examine his own son about the existence of Santa Claus, in "Miracle on 34th Street". - Dianne Foster
Dianne Foster is a Canadian actress. Of Ukrainian descent, Foster began her acting career at the age of 13 in a stage adaptation of James Barrie's "What Every Woman Knows". At 14 she began a radio career and subsequently moved to Toronto and became one of Canada's top radio stars. In 1951 she went to London, England for a holiday and after meeting and marrying Andrew Allen, drama supervisor for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, she decided to stay. - Larry Parks
Larry Parks (13 December 1914, Olathe, Kansas - 13 April 1975, Studio City, California), was an American stage and movie actor. His career was virtually ended when he admitted to having once been a member of a Communist party cell, an admission that led to his blacklisting by all Hollywood studios. Parks grew up in Joliet, Illinois, and graduated from Joliet Township High School in 1932. He attended the University of Illinois as a pre-med student, … - Warren William
Warren William (December 2 1894 - September 24 1948) was a Broadway and Hollywood actor, born Warren William Krech in Aitkin, Minnesota. He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. After moving from Broadway to Hollywood in the silent period, he reached his peak as a leading man in early 1930s pre-Production Code films. He was a contract player at the Warner Bros. studio and was known for portraying amoral businessmen, lawyers, … - William Campbell
William Campbell (b. October 30, 1926 in Newark, New Jersey) is an American actor. He has appeared in supporting roles in major film productions, but also starred in several low-budget b-movies, including two cult horror films. His movie career began in 1950, with a small part in the John Garfield film, "The Breaking Point". After several years of similar supporting performances in a variety of titles, … - Mario Kassar
Mario Kassar (born Beirut, Lebanon, 10 October 1951) is a movie-industry executive whose projects are frequently in association with Andrew Vajna. Working for Columbia Pictures and TriStar Pictures he was executive producer of several movies starting with "Escape to Victory" in 1981. In 1984, together with Vajna, he founded Carolco Pictures where he was executive producer of a large number of movies starting with "Rambo: First Blood Part II", … - Phil Silvers
Phil Silvers (May 11, 1911 - November 1, 1985) was an American entertainer and comedy actor. His best-known work is "The Phil Silvers Show", a 1950s sitcom set on a US Army post in which he played Sergeant Bilko; the show was also often referred to by this name. The show's chief writer, Nat Hiken, was TV's first writer-producer, and Hiken helped set a high comic tone for the show through his inventive plots and snappy comedic repartee for the characters. - Van Johnson
Van Johnson (born Charles Van Johnson on August 25, 1916, in Newport, Rhode Island) is an American film and television actor and dancer. Johnson was born to parents Charles E. Johnson (who was born in Sweden) and Loretta, who was of Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. His acting career began in earnest in 1936 in the Broadway revue "New Faces of 1936". - Billy Gilbert
Billy Gilbert (September 12, 1894 - September 23, 1971) was an American comedian and actor most known for his comic sneeze routines. Born William Gilbert Barron in Louisville, Kentucky, the child of singers with the Metropolitan Opera, he began working in vaudeville at the age of twelve and was 35 years old before he appeared in his first film for the Fox Film Corporation in 1929. Gilbert broke into comedy short subjects with producer Hal Roach, … - Andy Clyde
Andrew "Andy" Clyde (born March 25, 1892, in Blairgowrie, Perthshire, Scotland - died May 18, 1967, in Los Angeles, California) was a movie and TV actor whose career spanned more than four decades. He broke into silent films in 1925 as a Mack Sennett comic. Clyde's mastery of makeup allowed him tremendous versatility; he could play everything from grubby young guttersnipes to old crackpot scientists. Clyde hit upon an "old man" characterization in his short comedies, … - Stephen Norrington
Stephen Norrington (born 1964, London) is a film director whose credits include "Death Machine" and the comic book adaptations "Blade" and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen". Norrington was originally attached to the Dimension Films's "Ghost Rider" before the project was acquired by Columbia Pictures. - Rupert Wainwright
Rupert Wainwright (born November 30, 1961) is an English film and television director, writer, and actor. Wainwright was born in Cotswolds, UK and started his film career in the 1980s as an actor. While in his twenties, he wrote and directed a short film called "Open Window" which gained significant exposure through Columbia Pictures' nonprofit "Discovery Program" alongside 1987 Academy Award winner "Ray's Male Heterosexual Dance Hall". - Tom Tyler
Tom Tyler (nee Vincent Markowski) (August 9 1903 - May 1 1954) was an American actor. He was born into a Polish-American family. Tyler had a long career in film, stretching from the 1920s to the 1950s, and appeared in many films, most of them westerns such as John Ford's "Stagecoach" and "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon". He occasionally took "civilian" roles in feature films (he's the boxing referee in Abbott and Costello''s "Buck Privates"), … - Ismail Merchant
Ismail Merchant was an Indian-born film producer, best known for the results of his famously long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions which included director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Their films won six Academy Awards. Ivory was Merchant's long-term life partner - Arthur Lake
Arthur Lake (b. Arthur Silverlake, Corbin, Kentucky,April 17 1905; d. January 9 1987, Indian Wells, California) was an American actor known best for bringing Dagwood Bumstead, the stumbling husband of "Blondie" to life in film, radio, and television. Lake appeared in films starting in the late 1920's, beginning as an adolescent character actor. By the sound era he was playing light romantic roles, usually with a comic "Mama's Boy" tone to them. - Forrest Tucker
Forrest Tucker (February 12, 1919 - October 25, 1986) was an American actor in both movies and television from the 1940s to the 1980s. Tucker, who stood 6'4" and weighed 200 lbs. (91 kg), excelled as both hero and villain in nearly 100 action films throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Tucker was born in Plainfield, Indiana. He began his performing career at age 14 at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, pushing the big wicker tourist chairs by day and singing "Throw Money" at night. - Robert Allen
Robert (Tex) Allen (also credited as Bob Allen) was an actor B-movie westerns between 1935 and 1944. Born Irvine E. Theodore Beahr on March 28, 1906 in Mount Vernon, New York USA, Allen went on to graduate from the New York Military Academy in 1924, where he rode in the academy cavalry and from Dartmouth College in 1929 with a degree in English. He worked for a bank which soon failed in the Great Depression. - Ann Sothern
Ann Sothern (January 22, 1909 - March 15, 2001) was an American film actress with a career spanning six decades. Born Harriette Arlene Lake in Valley City, North Dakota, Sothern left home very young and began her film career as an extra in "Broadway Nights" (1927), aged 18. During 1929 and 1930, she appeared as a chorus girl in such films as "The Show of Shows" and "Whoopee!" (as one of the "Goldwyn Girls"). - Chester Morris
John Chester Brooks Morris (February 16, 1901 - September 11, 1970) was an American actor. Born in New York City, the son of actor William Morris, Morris is most famous for his role in the "Boston Blackie" detective series of the 1940s, but his film career began in 1917 in "An Amateur Orphan". Morris was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for "Alibi" (1929) directed by Roland West. - Adele Jergens
Film actress Adele Jergens (November 26, 1917 - November 22, 2002) was born in Brooklyn, New York. The beauty queen's birth date is sometimes listed as 1922. Jergens first rose to prominence in the late 1930s, when she was named "Miss World's Fairest" at New York's 1939 World's Fair and in the early 1940s, she worked as a Rockette, and was named the Number One Showgirl in New York City. After a few years of working as a model and chorus girl, … - Kerwin Mathews
Kerwin Mathews (January 8 1926 - July 5 2007) was an American actor. He is best known for playing Sinbad in the 1958 Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation feature "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad", where he engaged in a sword fight with an animated skeleton. Mathews was born in Seattle, Washington, USA. He attended Janesville High School in Janesville, Wisconsin, where he had moved with his mother after his parents divorced. - Michael Callan
Michael Callan (born November 22, 1935) is an American actor. Born Martin Calinieff in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Callan began his career as Mickey Calin, and it was with this name he appeared on Broadway in "The Boy Friend" (1954), "Catch a Star" (1955), and "West Side Story" (1957). Callan's film career began in 1959 with roles in two films, "They Came to Cordura" and "The Flying Fontaines". - Warren Hull
John Warren Hull (January 7 1903 - September 14 1974) was an actor and TV personality, active from the 1930s through the 1960s. He was one of the most popular serial actors in the action-adventure field. A native of Gasport, New York, Hull attended New York University. Later, he left college to study voice and pursue a career in operas and operettas. He also worked frequently as a radio announcer. The handsome Hull made his screen debut in 1934 for Educational Pictures, … - Jean Parker
Lois Mae Green, known by her screen name Jean Parker, (August 11, 1915 - November 30, 2005), was an American movie actress born in Deer Lodge, Montana. She was once married to actor Robert Lowery (who played Batman in 1949). She appeared in 70 movies from 1932 through 1966. She was discovered by Ida Koverman, secretary to MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, after she saw a poster featuring Parker portraying Father Time. - Bob Nolan
Bob Nolan (April 1, 1908 - June 16, 1980) was a Canadian-born singer, songwriter, and actor. - Gene Deitch
Gene Deitch (born August 8, 1924 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American Academy-Award winning illustrator, animator and film director, based out of Prague. From 1945 to 1951 Deitch was a frequent contributor to "The Record Changer", a jazz magazine. He has produced animated cartoons for studios such as UPA/Columbia Pictures, Terrytoons Fox ("Tom Terrific "), MGM ("Tom and Jerry") and Paramount Pictures ("Nudnik").He directed, … - Janis Carter
Janis Carter (October 10, 1913 - July 30, 1994) was a film and television actress working in the 1940s and 1950s. After attending Mather College in Cleveland, Ohio, Carter headed to New York in an attempt to start an opera career. Although her attempt was a failure, she did end up working on Broadway where she was spotted on stage by Darryl F. Zanuck who was impressed by the young actor/singer and signed her to a movie deal. - Constance Cummings
Constance Cummings, CBE (May 15, 1910 – November 23, 2005) was an American-born British actress, known for her work on both screen and stage. Born Constance Halverstadt in Seattle, Washington to Dallas Halverstadt and Kate Cummings, she began as a stage actress, landing her first Broadway show by the age of eighteen. While appearing on Broadway, she was discovered by Sam Goldwyn, who brought her to Hollywood in 1931. - Leon Errol
Leon Errol (July 3, 1881 - October 12, 1951). was an Australian-born comedian and actor in the United States, popular in the first half of the 20th century. Born Leonce Errol Simms in Sydney, he managed a traveling vaudeville troupe and gave a young comedian named Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle his first professional opportunity. in America Errol became a well-known vaudevillian who played skits with such notables as Bert Williams and who appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies. - George E. Stone
George E. Stone was a character actor in movies, radio, and television. Stone's slight build and very expressive face first attracted attention in 1927, in the popular silent-film romance "Seventh Heaven" (Stone played the local guttersnipe, The Sewer Rat). Originally billed as Georgie Stone, he made a successful transition to talking pictures in Warner Brothers' "Tenderloin", speaking in a pleasant, slightly nasal tenor.
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