Maila “Vampira” Nurmi (1922 - 2008)

Born as Maila Elizabeth Syrjäniemi, she claimed to be the niece of the Finnish athlete Paavo Nurmi, who began setting long-distance running world records in 1921, the year before her birth. She moved to the United States with her family when she was two years old and grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio, home to the […]

Anthony Perkins (1932 - 1992)

Perkins made his film debut in The Actress (1953). He received the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actor and an Academy Award nomination for his second film, Friendly Persuasion (1956). The tall (6’2″, 188 cm) Perkins also portrayed the troubled former Boston Red Sox baseball player Jimmy Piersall in the […]

Ben Alexander (1911 - 1969)

Ben Alexander was born in Goldfield, Nevada and raised in California, Alexander made his screen debut at age of five in Every Pearl a Tear. He went on to portray Lillian Gish’s young brother in D.W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World. After a number of silent films, he retired from screen work but came back […]

Frank Aletter (1926 - 2009)

Frank Aletter (January 14, 1926 – May 13, 2009) was an American stage, film, and television actor.  During the 1950s, Aletter appeared on Broadway in Bells Are Ringing, Time Limit, and Wish You Were Here.  He soon moved on to a prolific television career, appearing as a guest on numerous shows between 1956 and 1988. […]

John Candy (1950 - 1994)

Candy was born in Newmarket, Ontario, in 1950. The son of Sidney James Candy and his wife Evangeline (Aker) Candy, he was raised in a working-class Roman Catholic family. His maternal grandparents, Jozefa (Stefaniuk) and Frank Michael Aker, were immigrants from Eastern Europe, of Polish and Ukrainian ancestry. Candy studied at Centennial College in Toronto and […]

Mary Alden (1883 - 1946)

Born in New York City, Alden began her career on the Broadway stage. She spent five years on Broadway before moving to Hollywood where she worked for the Biograph Company and Pathé Exchange in the first portion of her career. Her most popular role in movies came in Birth of a Nation directed by D.W. […]

Marlon Brando (1924 - 2004)

Marlon Brando Marlon Brando was born in 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska, to Marlon Brando, Sr., a pesticide and chemical feed manufacturer, and his wife, Dorothy Julia (née Pennebaker). Brando had two older sisters, Jocelyn (1919–2005) and Frances (1922–1994). Brando’s ancestry included German, Dutch, English and Irish. His patrilineal immigrant ancestor, Johann Wilhelm Brandau, arrived in […]

Robert Alda (1914 - 1986)

Alda, an American of Italian descent, was born Alphonso Giuseppe Giovanni Roberto D’Abruzzo in New York, New York, the son of Frances (née Tumillo) and Antonio D’Abruzzo, a barber born in Sant’Agata de’ Goti, Benevento, Campania, Italy. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York in 1930. He began as a singer and dancer […]

Jack Albertson (1907 - 1981)

Albertson was born in Malden, Massachusetts, the son of Russian-born Jewish immigrants Flora (née Craft) and Leopold Albertson. His sister was actress Mabel Albertson. Albertson’s mother, a stock actress, supported the family by working in a shoe factory. Albertson dropped out of high school and traveled to New York City in an attempt to make […]

Hans Albers (1891 - 1960)

Hans Albers was born in Hamburg, the son of a butcher, and grew up in the district of St. Georg. He was seriously interested in acting by his late teens and took acting classes without the knowledge of his parents. In 1915 Albers was drafted to serve in the German Army in World War I, […]

Iris Adrian (1912 - 1994)

Iris Adrian Hostetter was an only child, born to Adrian Earl Hostetter and Florence (née Van Every), who wed in 1909 in Los Angeles, California. She was raised by her single mother in Los Angeles. Iris won a beauty pageant and worked with the Ziegfeld Follies before she entered films at the end of the […]

Cecily Adams (1958 - 2004)

Adams was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York, the daughter of comic actor Don Adams and singer Adelaide Efantis. She attended Beverly Hills High School and the University of California at Irvine. She acted in high school and college and in 1983 joined the Hollywood theatre company Theatre West.  Adams is well known to fans […]

Paul Newman (1925 - 2008)

Newman was born in Shaker Heights (a suburb of Cleveland). He was the son of Theresa (née Fetzer or Fetsko; Slovak: Terézia Fecková) and Arthur Sigmund Newman, who ran a profitable sporting goods store. His father was Jewish (Paul’s paternal grandparents, Simon Newman and Hannah Cohn, were immigrants from Hungary and Poland). His mother, who […]

Dennis Hopper (1936 - 2010)

Hopper was born Dennis Lee Hopper in Dodge City, Kansas on May 17, 1936, the son of Marjorie Mae (née Davis, July 12, 1917 – January 12, 2007) and James Millard Hopper (June 23, 1916 – August 7, 1982). He had Scottish ancestors. Hopper had two brothers, Marvin and David. After World War II, the […]

Eddie Acuff (1903 - 1956)

Eddie Acuff is one of those wonderful supporting actors who peopled the fascinating world of Hollywood’s A, B or Z movies. In a career spanning eighteen years he appeared in the amazing number of 251 movies and 1 TV episode! His appearances could be invisible (when deleted), hardly visible (he portrayed an endless series of […]

Dorothy Abbott (1920 - 1968)

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Abbott appeared in many films between the 1940s and 1960s as an extra. In Las Vegas she was a showgirl at the Flamingo Hotel and was known as “the girl with the golden arm”. She also appeared in guest roles on The Ford Television Theatre, Leave It to Beaver, and […]

Angela Aames (1956 - 1988)

Angela Aames Angela Aames was born in Pierre, South Dakota. She acted in high school and attended the University of South Dakota before moving to Hollywood in 1978. She trained at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and Harvey Lembeck‘s Comedy Workshop. Angela Aames’s first film role was as Little Bo Peep in the adult film Fairy Tales (1979). The same year, she played Linda “Boom-Boom” […]

Annabella (1907 - 1996)

Born Suzanne Georgette Charpentier in La Varenne Saint Hilaire, Val-de-Marne, France. Annabella’s chance to enter films came when her father entertained a film producer who gave her a small part in Napoléon in 1927. It was not until she starred in Le Million that she was acclaimed and over the following decade established herself as one of France’s most popular cinema actresses. […]

Betty Ford (1918 - 2011)

Betty Ford She was born Elizabeth Ann Bloomer in 1918 in Chicago, Illinois, the third child and only daughter of Hortense (née Neahr; July 11, 1884 – November 20, 1948) and William Stephenson Bloomer, Sr. (July 19, 1874 – July 18, 1934), who was a traveling salesman for Royal Rubber Co. She was called Betty as a child. Hortense and William married […]

Jim Henson (1936 - 1990)

Henson was born in Greenville, Mississippi, the younger of two boys. His parents were Betty Marcella (née Brown) and Paul Ransom Henson, an agronomist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He was raised as a Christian Scientist and spent his early childhood in Leland, Mississippi, before moving with his family to Hyattsville, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., in the late 1940s. He later remembered […]

Jane Henson (1934 - 2013)

Jane Nebel Henson Jane Nebel Henson met Jim Henson in a puppetry class at the University of Maryland and soon after became an integral creative and business partner in what would become the world famous Muppets. As a fine arts education major studying at the University of Maryland in 1954, Jane Nebel shared with Jim […]

Joe Simon (1913 - 2011)

Joe Simon was born in 1913 as Hymie Simon and raised in Rochester, New York, the son of Harry Simon, who had emigrated from Leeds, England, in 1905, and Rose, whom Harry met in the United States. Harry Simon moved to Rochester, then a clothing-manufacturing center where his younger brother, Isaac, lived and the couple had a daughter, Beatrice, in 1912. A […]

Chris Farley (1964 - 1997)

Farley was born in Madison, Wisconsin. His father, Thomas “Tom” Farley, Sr., owned an oil company, and his mother was Mary Anne (née Crosby), a housewife. He had four siblings: Tom Jr., Kevin, John, and Barbara. His cousin, Jim, is a vice president at Ford Motor Company. Farley’s family is traditionally Roman Catholic, and Farley attended numerous Catholic schools in his hometown, […]

Aaliyah (1979 - 2001)

Aaliyah Dana Haughton was born on January 16, 1979, in Brooklyn, New York. Born of African American descent, with Oneida heritage from her grandmother, she was the second and youngest child of Diane and Michael Haughton. At a young age, Aaliyah was enrolled in voice lessons by her mother. She started performing at weddings, church […]

Michael Clarke Duncan (1957 - 2012)

Duncan was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in a single-parent household with his sister, Judy, and mother, Jean Duncan (a house cleaner), after his father left. He always wanted to act, but had to drop out of the Communications program at Alcorn State University to support his family when his mother became ill. Duncan’s large frame—6 feet […]

Brittany Murphy (1977 - 2009)

Brittany Anne Bertolotti was born in Atlanta, Georgia to Sharon Kathleen Murphy and Angelo Joseph Bertolotti, who divorced when she was two years old, and Murphy was raised by her mother in Edison, New Jersey. Bertolotti was so estranged from the family that he was not named as the father on the first death certificate. Prior to her enrolling at Edison High […]

Pauline Boty (1938 - 1966)

Boty was born in suburban south London in 1938 into a middle-class, Catholic family. The youngest of four children, she had three older brothers and a stern father who made her keenly aware of her position as a girl. In 1954 she won a scholarship to the Wimbledon School of Art which she attended despite her father’s disapproval (Boty’s mother, […]

Jack Kirby (1917 - 1994)

Jack Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg on August 28, 1917, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City, where he was raised. His parents, Rose and Benjamin Kurtzberg, were Austrian Jewish immigrants, and his father earned a living as a garment factory worker. In his youth, Kirby desired to escape his neighborhood. He liked to draw, and sought out places he could learn more about art. Essentially […]

Bill Melendez (1916 - 2008)

A native of the Mexican city of Hermosillo, Sonora, Melendez was educated in U.S. public schools in Douglas, Arizona. He was a very good student, and later attended the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (which would later become California Institute of the Arts). Following the 1941 Disney strike, Bill was hired by Leon Schlesinger to animate in Bob Clampett’s unit. After Clampett’s departure, […]

E. C. Segar (1894 - 1938)

E. C. Segar E.C. Segar was born on 8 December 1894, and raised in Chester, Illinois, a small town near the Mississippi River. The son of a handyman, his earliest work experiences included assisting his father in house painting and paper hanging. Skilled at playing drums, he also provided musical accompaniment to films and vaudeville acts in the local theater, where he was eventually given the job […]