Marian Nixon (1904 - 1983)

Born Marian Nissinen in Superior, Wisconsin, Nixon began her career as a teen working as a chorus dancer on the vaudeville circuit. She began appearing in bit part in films in 1922 and landed her first substantial role in the 1923 film Cupid’s Fireman, opposite Buck Jones. The following year, she was named a WAMPAS […]

Virginia Bruce (1910 - 1982)

Born Helen Virginia Briggs in Minneapolis, Minnesota. When she was one month old, she moved to Fargo, North Dakota, with her parents, Earil and Margaret Briggs. According to the Fargo City Directory, the Briggs family lived at 421 14th Street South, Fargo. After she graduated from Fargo Central High School in 1928, she moved with […]

Frank Tuttle (1892 - 1963)

Frank Wright Tuttle (6 August 1892 – 6 January 1963) was a Hollywood film director and writer who directed films from 1922 (The Cradle Buster) to 1959 (Island of Lost Women). Frank Tuttle wrote “The Kentuckians” (1921) and directed “Roman Scandals” (1933), and “Charlie McCarthy, Detective” (1939). He was educated at Yale University, where he edited […]

Charlie Ruggles (1886 - 1970)

Charlie Ruggles was born in Los Angeles, California in 1886. Despite training to be a doctor, Ruggles soon found himself on the stage, appearing in a stock production of Nathan Hale in 1905. At Los Angeles’s Majestic Theatre, he played the romantic lead Private Jo Files in L. Frank Baum and Louis F. Gottschalk’s musical, […]

Marshall Neilan (1891 - 1958)

Born in San Bernardino, California, Marshall Neilan was known by most as “Mickey.” Following the death of his father, the eleven-year-old Mickey Neilan had to give up on school to work at whatever he could find in order to help support his mother. As a teenager, he began acting in bit parts in live theatre, […]

Jesse Lasky (1880 - 1958)

Born in San Francisco, California, Jesse Lasky worked at a variety of jobs but began his entertainment career as a vaudeville performer that led to the motion picture business. In 1911 Lasky was the producer of two Broadway musicals, Hello, Paris and A La Broadway. Presumably this is how Cecil B. DeMille knew him before […]

Chester Conklin (1886 - 1971)

Chester Conklin was one of three children who grew up in a violent household. When he was eight, his mother was found burned to death in the family garden. Although first judged a suicide, his father, a devoutly religious man who hoped his son would be a minister, was eventually charged with murder, but found […]

Jean Negulesco (1900 - 1993)

Born in Craiova, he attended Carol I High School. In 1915 Jean Negulesco moved to Vienna, and then went to Bucharest in 1919, where he worked as a painter before becoming a stage decorator in Paris. In 1927 he went to New York City for an exhibition of his paintings and settled there. He then […]

George Seaton (1911 - 1979)

Born George Stenius in South Bend, Indiana, of Swedish descent, baptized as Roman Catholic, and grew up in a Detroit Jewish neighborhood and described himself as a “Shabas goy”. So he went on to learn Hebrew in an Orthodox Jewish Yeshiva and was even bar mitzvahed. George Seaton moved to Detroit after graduating from college […]

Eugenie Leontovich (1900 - 1993)

Born in Podolsk, she studied at Moscow’s Imperial School of Dramatic Art, and then under Meyerhold at the Moscow Art Theatre, which she subsequently joined. As the daughter of an officer in the Russian Imperial Army, Eugenie Leontovich suffered greatly during the Revolution. Her three brothers (who were Army officers like their father) were murdered […]

Gregory Ratoff (1897 - 1960)

Gregory Ratoff was born in Samara, Russia, near St. Petersburg, to Jewish parents, Sophie (nee Markison) and Benjamin Ratner. His mother claimed to have been born on September 1, 1878, but was married on June 14, 1894, when she would have been 15, to Benjamin Ratner (born 1864 – died 19??), with whom she had […]

Clarence Brown (1890 - 1987)

Born in Clinton, Massachusetts, to a cotton manufacturer, Clarence Brown moved to Tennessee when he was 11 years old. He attended Knoxville High School and the University of Tennessee, both in Knoxville, Tennessee, graduating from the university at the age of 19 with two degrees in engineering. An early fascination in automobiles led Brown to […]

William Beaudine (1892 - 1970)

Born in New York City, William Beaudine began his career as an actor in 1909 with American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. He married Marguerite Fleischer in 1914, to whom he stayed married until his death and who died in 1970 (Marguerite’s sister was the mother of actor Bobby Anderson). He was the brother of director […]

Nick Grinde (1893 - 1979)

Nick Grinde (January 12, 1893 – June 19, 1979) was an American film director and screenwriter. He directed 57 films between 1928 and 1945. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Grinde graduated from the University of Wisconsin. He later moved to New York and worked in Vaudeville. Grinde became a Hollywood film writer and director in the late […]

Edward Dmytryk (1908 - 1999)

Edward Dmytryk was born in Grand Forks, British Columbia, Canada, the son of Ukrainian immigrant parents, Frances (Berezowski) and Michael Dmytryk. His family moved to San Francisco, California. After his mother died, his father remarried. In San Francisco, the boy attended local schools and became interested in the developing film industry. He eventually reached Hollywood […]

William Wyler (1902 - 1981)

William Wyler was born to a Jewish family in Mulhouse, Alsace (then part of the German Empire). His Swiss father, Leopold, started as a traveling salesman which he later turned into a thriving haberdashery business in Mulhouse. His mother, Melanie (née Auerbach; died February 13, 1955, Los Angeles, aged 77), was German, and a cousin […]

Nella Walker (1886 - 1971)

Nella Walker (March 6, 1886 – March 22, 1971) was an American film actress and vaudeville performer of the 1920s through the 1950s. Walker was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, and in her teens became half of the husband and wife vaudeville team “Mack and Walker”, with her husband Wilbur Mack. By 1929 she had […]

Thomas Gomez (1905 - 1971)

Born Sabino Tomas Gomez in New York City, Thomas Gomez began his acting career in theater during the 1920s and was a student of the actor Walter Hampden. He made his first film Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror in 1942 and by the end of his career had appeared in sixty films. Thomas Gomez […]

Robert Lowery (1913 - 1971)

Born Robert Larkin Hanks in Kansas City, Missouri, Robert Lowery grew up on Wayne Avenue near the long-demolished Electric Park. Lowery’s father was a local attorney and oil investor who worked several years for the Pullman Corporation as a railroad agent; his mother, Leah Thompson Hanks, was a concert pianist. He graduated from Paseo High School […]

John Dall (1920 - 1971)

John Dall Thompson (he used his middle name for his acting career) was born in New York City on 26 May 1920, the younger son of Charles Jenner Thompson (1873-1929) and his wife Henry (née Worthington). (Sources which cite Dall’s birth name as John Jenner Thompson and his birth year as 1918 appear to be […]

Gladys Cooper (1888 - 1971)

Cooper was born at 23 Ennersdale Road, Hither Green, Lewisham, London, the eldest of the three daughters of Charles William Frederick Cooper (1844–1939) by his marriage to Mabel Barnett (1861–1944). Her two younger sisters were Doris Mabel (1891–1987) and Grace Muriel (1893–1982). Gladys Cooper spent most of her childhood in Chiswick, where her family moved […]

Spring Byington (1886 - 1971)

Spring Byington was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the daughter of Helene Maud (née Cleghorn 1862-1907) a doctor, and Edwin Lee Byington (1852–1891), an educator and Superintendent of schools in Colorado. Byington had one sibling, a younger sister, Helene Kimball Byington. After Edwin Lee died, their mother decided to send her younger daughter, Helene, to […]

Pier Angeli (1932 - 1971)

Born Anna Maria Pierangeli in Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy. Her twin sister is the actress Marisa Pavan. Pier Angeli made her film debut with Vittorio De Sica in Domani è troppo tardi (1950), after being spotted by director Léonide Moguy and De Sica. She was discovered by Hollywood, and MGM launched her in her first American […]

Dixie Evans (1926 - 2013)

Dixie Evans (August 28, 1926 – August 3, 2013), born as Mary Lee Evans, was an American burlesque dancer and stripper. Evans is probably best remembered for her burlesque parody as Marilyn Monroe. Evans entered show-business as a model and later chorus girl before becoming a star dancer. By the early 1950s she was a […]

Beverly Michaels (1928 - 2007)

Arriving in Hollywood in 1948, aged 19, and standing 5 feet 9 inches, she quickly found modeling work, in which she was mistakenly billed as “Beverley Michaels”. Later the same year, she had a brief role in the film East Side, West Side, and two years later had a minor role in the film version […]

Martha Sleeper (1910 - 1983)

Martha Sleeper reputedly spent her first years on a sheep ranch in Wyoming. Her father, William B. Sleeper, was an official of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum vaudeville circuit in New York City. Her mother was Minnie Akass. He retired to Los Angeles, California in 1923 because of ill health. She was under contract to Hal Roach studios […]

Dorothy Comingore (1913 - 1971)

Born Margaret Louise Comingore in Los Angeles, California, Dorothy Comingore was discovered by Charles Chaplin when she was acting in a small playhouse in Carmel. Comingore played bit parts in Hollywood movies until Orson Welles cast her as Susan Alexander Kane|Susan Alexander, the second wife of press tycoon Charles Foster Kane, in his debut feature film […]

Ivan Tors (1916 - 1983)

Ivan Tors wrote several plays in his natal country Hungary before moving to the United States just prior to World War II. He enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps then transferred to the Office of Strategic Services. Following the war he was contracted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a screenwriter. In 1952 he made Storm over […]

Constance Dowling (1920 - 1969)

Born in New York City, Constance Dowling was a model and chorus girl before moving to California in 1943. She was the elder sister of actress Doris Dowling. Prior to her move to Hollywood, Dowling appeared in several Broadway productions, including Panama Hattie (with sister Doris), Hold On To Your Hats, and The Strings, My […]

Barbara Lawrence (1930 - 2013)

Born to Morris Lawrence and Berniece (or Bernice) Eaton Lawrence in Carnegie, Oklahoma, Barbara Lawrence moved with her mother to Kansas City, Missouri as an adolescent. Lawrence’s career began as a child photographer’s model. She appeared in her first film, Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe (1945), as a night-club patron. A year later, she made a […]