Impact

Brian Donlevy (Actor)

Born: February 09, 1889
Died: April 05, 1972

Trivia: The son of an Irish whiskey distiller, Brian Donlevy was 10 months old when his family moved to Wisconsin. At 15, Donlevy ran away from home, hoping to join General Pershing's purge against Mexico's Pancho Villa. His tenure below the border was brief, and within a few months he was enrolled in military school. While training to be a pilot at the U.S. Naval Academy, Donlevy developed an interest in amateur theatricals. He spent much of the early 1920s living by his wits in New York, scouting about for acting jobs and attempting to sell his poetry and other writings. He posed for at least one Arrow Collar ad and did bit and extra work in several New York-based films, then received his first break with a good supporting role in the 1924 Broadway hit What Price Glory?. Several more Broadway plays followed, then in 1935 Donlevy decided to try his luck in Hollywood. A frustrated Donlevy was prepared to head back to Manhattan when, at the last minute, he was cast as a villain in Sam Goldwyn's Barbary Coast. In 1936 he was signed to a 20th Century-Fox contract, alternating between "B"-picture heroes and "A"-picture heavies for the next few years. The most notable of his bad-guy roles from this period was the cruel but courageous Sgt. Markoff in Beau Geste (1939); reportedly, Donlevy deliberately behaved atrociously off-camera as well as on, so that his co-workers would come to genuinely despise his character. From 1940 through 1946, Donlevy was most closely associated with Paramount Pictures, delivering first-rate performances in such films as The Great McGinty (1940), Wake Island (1942), The Glass Key (1942) and The Virginian (1946). His own favorite role was that of the good-hearted, raffish con-artist in Universal's Nightmare (1942). In 1950, Donlevy took time off from films to star and co-produce the syndicated radio (and later TV) series Dangerous Assignment. He went on to introduce the character of Dr. Quatermass in two well-received British science fiction films, The Creeping Unknown (1955) and Enemy From Space (1957). Brian Donlevy left behind an impressive enough filmic legacy to put the lie to his own assessment of his talents: "I think I stink."

Ella Raines (Actor)

Born: August 06, 1920
Died: May 30, 1988

Trivia: The daughter of an engineer, Ella Raines completed her education at the University of Washington. After stage experience, Raines was signed for films by a production company headed by Charles Boyer and Howard Hawks. When this enterprise failed to yield fruit, Raines went with Universal Studios in 1943, where she received her best screen role: the inquisitive, extremely adaptable heroine in the 1943 film noir Phantom Lady. Impressed by this performance, Paramount producer/director Preston Sturges borrowed Raines from Universal to co-star with Eddie Bracken in Hail the Conquering Hero (1944). Her film career flagging in the late '40s, Raines married a military officer and retired to England. After divorcing her husband in the early '50s, she starred in the popular syndicated TV series Janet Dean, Registered Nurse, which she co-produced with Joan Harrison, who'd previously produced Phantom Lady. Ella Raines' final film appearance was in the 1956 British effort Man in the Road.

Helen Walker (Actor)

Born: July 17, 1920
Died: March 10, 1968

Trivia: "A beauty with brains" was the demeaning tag once attached to such actresses as Claudette Colbert, Madeline Carroll and Irene Dunne (it was assumed by some thick-eared publicists that individual qualities of beauty and brains normally cancelled each other out). In 1942, Helen Walker, fresh from her Broadway triumph in a play called Jason, was added to the intelligent-beauty categorization thanks to her impressive film debut in Lucky Jordan. Walker continued impressing fans and critics alike with her work in The Man in Half Moon Street (1944) and Murder He Says (1945). Just as her career was gaining momentum, Helen was seriously injured in a 1946 auto accident. She made a courageous comeback in roles calling for sophisticated shrewery -- 1947's Nightmare Alley was probably her best post-accident film -- but neither she nor her career ever completely recovered. In 1955, she retired from the screen; five years later, a group of her actress friends staged a benefit for her when her house burned to the ground. Helen Walker died of cancer at the age of 47.

Charles Coburn (Actor)

Born: June 19, 1877
Died: August 30, 1961

Trivia: American actor Charles Coburn had already put in nearly forty years as a stage actor, producer, and director (specializing in Shakespeare) before making his screen debut at age 61 in Of Human Hearts (1938). At home in any kind of film, Coburn was most popular in comedies, and in 1943 won an Academy Award for his role in The More the Merrier as the bombastic but likable business executive forced by the wartime housing shortage to share a Washington D.C. apartment with Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea. Coburn continued playing variations on his elderly scalawag character (he was the living image of the Monopoly-board millionaire) throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, most notably as Marilyn Monroe's erstwhile "sugar daddy" in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). The actor also kept busy on stage, touring with the Theatre Guild as Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor and supervising the annual Mohawk Drama Festival at Schenectady's Union College, which he'd founded in 1934. Moving into television work with the enthusiasm of a novice, the octogenarian Coburn continued acting right up to his death. Coburn's last appearance, one week before his passing, was as Grandpa Vanderhoff in an Indianapolis summer-stock production of You Can't Take It With You.

Anna May Wong (Actor) .. Su Lin

Born: January 03, 1905
Died: February 03, 1961

Trivia: At 12 she broke into films as an extra and soon went on to play a number of featured parts. She first attracted significant attention for her portrayal of a slave girl in Douglas Fairbanks's The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Oriental mysteries came into fashion in the late '20s, helping to elevate her to international stardom. In 1929 she went to Europe; besides starring in British and German films she also lectured widely. Meanwhile, she also costarred with Laurence Olivier in the stage production Circle of Chalk. Her films in the late '30s and early '40s were mostly cheap melodramas in which she played mysterious wicked women. In 1942 she retired from the screen, later appearing in three additional films. She died of a heart attack at 54.

Mae Marsh (Actor) .. Mrs. Peters

Born: November 09, 1895
Died: February 13, 1968

Trivia: American actress Mae Marsh was the daughter of an auditor for the Santa Fe railroad - and as such, she and her family moved around quite a bit during Marsh's childhood. After her father died and her stepfather was killed in the San Francisco earthquake, she was taken to Los Angeles by her great aunt, a one-time chorus girl who'd become a New York actress. Marsh followed her aunt's footsteps by securing film work with Mack Sennett and D.W. Griffith; it was Griffith, the foremost film director of the early silent period, who first spotted potential in young Miss Marsh. The actress got her first big break appearing as a stone-age maiden in Man's Genesis (1911), after Mary Pickford refused to play the part because it called for bare legs. Specializing in dramatic and tragic roles, Marsh appeared in innumerable Griffith-directed short films, reaching a career high point as the Little Sister in the director's Civil War epic, The Birth of A Nation (1915). She made such an impression in this demanding role that famed American poet Vachel Lindsay was moved to write a long, elaborate poem in the actress' honor. Marsh's career went on a downhill slide in the '20s due to poor management and second-rate films, but she managed to score a personal triumph as the long-suffering heroine of the 1931 talkie tear-jerker Over the Hill. She retired to married life, returning sporadically to films - out of boredom - as a bit actress, notably in the big-budget westerns of director John Ford (a longtime Marsh fan). When asked in the '60s why she didn't lobby for larger roles, Mae Marsh replied simply that "I didn't care to get up every morning at five o'clock to be at the studio by seven."

Tony Barrett (Actor) .. Jim Torrance

Born: January 01, 1915
Died: January 01, 1974

William Wright (Actor) .. District Attorney

Born: January 01, 1902
Died: January 19, 1949

Trivia: After accumulating experience at the Pasadena Playhouse, William Wright launched his film career in the late '30s. Signed to a Columbia contract in 1942, Wright showed up in roles of varying sizes in the studio's crime melodramas and Ann Miller musicals. Drafted into the army in 1945, Wright had trouble re-establishing himself upon his return to Hollywood a year later. He played detective Philo Vance in one PRC production of 1947, but was replaced by Alan Curtis in the studio's next two Vance mysteries. William Wright died of cancer at the age of 47.

Robert Warwick (Actor) .. Capt. Callahan

Born: October 09, 1878
Died: June 06, 1964

Trivia: As a boy growing up in Sacramento, Robert Warwick sang in his church choir. Encouraged to pursue music as a vocation, Warwick studied in Paris for an operatic career. He abandoned singing for straight acting when, in 1903, he was hired by Clyde Fitch as an understudy in the Broadway play Glad of It. Within a few year, Warwick was a major stage star in New York. He managed to retain his matinee-idol status when he switched from stage to screen, starring in such films as A Modern Othello and Alias Jimmy Valentine and at one point heading his own production company. He returned to the stage in 1920, then resumed his Hollywood career in authoritative supporting roles. His pear-shaped tones ideally suited for talkies, Warwick played such characters as Neptune in Night Life of the Gods (1933), Sir Francis Knolly in Mary of Scotland (1936) and Lord Montague in Romeo and Juliet (1936). He appeared in many of the Errol Flynn "historicals" at Warner Bros. (Prince and the Pauper, Adventures of Robin Hood, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex); in more contemporary fare, he could usually be found in a military uniform or wing-collared tuxedo. From The Great McGinty (1940) onward, Warwick was a particular favorite of producer/director Preston Sturges, who was fond of providing plum acting opportunities to veteran character actors. Warwick's best performance under Sturges' guidance was as the brusque Hollywood executive who insists upon injecting "a little sex" in all of his studio's product in Sullivan's Travels (1942). During the 1950s, Warwick played several variations on "Charles Waterman," the broken-down Shakespearean ham that he'd portrayed in In a Lonely Place (1950). He remained in harness until his eighties, playing key roles on such TV series as The Twilight Zone and The Law and Mr. Jones. Robert Warwick was married twice, to actresses Josephine Whittell and Stella Lattimore.

Philip Ahn (Actor) .. Ah Sing

Born: August 29, 1911
Died: February 28, 1978

Trivia: Though often cast as a Japanese or Chinese character, LA-born actor Philip Ahn was of Korean extraction. In films from 1936, Ahn spent the war years portraying dozens of heartless Japanese spies and military officers; ironically, the actor's father was a Korean diplomat who died in a Japanese concentration camp. After the war, Ahn was occasionally permitted to play a sympathetic role, minus stereotypical accent and mannerisms; cast as a lab technician in 1950's The Big Hangover, he has almost as much screen time as nominal star Van Johnson. One of his most substantial roles was as Chinese businessman Po Chang, foster father of young Caucasian tycoon Frank Garlund (Charles Quinlivan) on the brief 1960 TV weekly The Garlund Touch. At the time of his death from lung cancer at age 66, Philip Ahn was best known to American TV addicts as Master Kan on the TV series Kung Fu.

Art Baker (Actor) .. Eldredge

Born: January 07, 1898
Died: August 26, 1966

Trivia: Snowy-haired Art Baker played avuncular character roles on both stage and screen. Among his movie credits were Once Upon a Time (1944), Spellbound (1946), Daisy Kenyon (1947) and State of the Union (1948). Though never wanting for acting jobs, Baker is best remembered for his radio career (which began in 1936) and his subsequent TV work. Among his many other airwaves credits, Art Baker was the first emcee of the audience-participation program People are Funny and was the host of the long-running human-interest series You Asked for It.

Erskine Sanford (Actor) .. Dr. Bender

Born: November 19, 1880
Died: January 01, 1969

Trivia: Legend has it that Orson Welles saw his first theatrical production at age seven, when a touring company of Mr. Pim Passes By played in Welles' hometown of Kenosha, WI. Invited backstage, young Welles was effusively greeted by the play's leading man, Erskine Sanford, whose kind and encouraging words inspired Welles to pursue an acting career himself. Whether this story is true or not, the fact remains that, in 1936, Erskine Sanford left the Theatre Guild after a 15-year association to join Orson Welles' experimental Mercury Theatre. When Welles took the Mercury Players to Hollywood in 1940 to film Citizen Kane, Sanford was assigned the small but plum role of Herbert Carter, the sputtering, apoplectic former editor of the New York Inquirer. The actor went on to appear prominently in such Welles-directed films as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, as Mr. Bronson), Lady From Shanghai (1947, as the judge), and MacBeth (1948, as King Duncan). Outside of his Mercury Theatre activities, Erskine Sanford played featured roles in such mainstream Hollywood productions as Ministry of Fear (1943) and Angel on My Shoulder (1946) before his retirement in 1950.

William Ruhl (Actor)

Richard H. Gordon (Actor)

Born: January 01, 1892
Died: January 01, 1956

Raymond Bond (Actor)

Born: January 01, 1885
Died: January 01, 1972

Linda Johnson (Actor)

Trivia: Having played one of the students in the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland songfest Strike up the Band (1940), brunette starlet Melinda Leighton did her fair share of B-Westerns -- including Gene Autry's Cowboy Serenade (1942) -- before changing her name to Linda Johnson and earning a starring role opposite Kane Richmond in the Columbia serial Brick Bradford (1947). Those were the highlights in a screen career that came to a close with a 1953 episode of the popular television series The Cisco Kid.

Ruth Robinson (Actor)

Born: January 01, 1887
Died: March 17, 1966

Trivia: American actress Ruth Robinson made a solitary screen appearance in 1911 before returning to the stage. She resumed her film activities in 1936, playing a minor part in the Boris Karloff melodrama The Walking Dead. For the next two decades, she showed up in such stern-faced roles as missionaries, housekeepers, prison matrons, and society spouses. In 1956, Ruth Robinson appeared fleetingly as the title character in the speculative The Search for Bridey Murphy.

Mike Pat Donovan (Actor)

Richard Gordon (Actor)

William H. Ruhl (Actor)

Trivia: American actor William H. Ruhl made his first film in 1934, and his last in 1952. Seldom rising above bit parts, Ruhl showed up in one-scene assignments as detectives, lawyers, and the like. Someone over at Monogram must have liked Ruhl, else why would the actor have shown up in six of the studio's Bowery Boys features from 1946 to 1949? William H. Ruhl also appeared in various other Monogram series, including Charlie Chan and Joe Palooka.

Arthur Hecht (Actor)

W.J. O'Brien (Actor)

Martin Doric (Actor)

Sam Finn (Actor)

Will Wright (Actor) .. District Attorney

Born: March 26, 1891
Died: June 19, 1962

Trivia: San Franciscan Will Wright was a newspaper reporter before he hit the vaudeville, legitimate stage, and radio circuit. With his crabapple face and sour-lemon voice, Wright was almost instantly typecast as a grouch, busybody, or small-town Scrooge. Most of his film roles were minor, but Wright rose to the occasion whenever given such meaty parts as the taciturn apartment house manager in The Blue Dahlia (1946). In one of his best assignments, Wright remained unseen: He was the voice of the remonstrative Owl in the Disney cartoon feature Bambi (1942). Will Wright didn't really need the money from his long movie and TV career: His main source of income was his successful Los Angeles ice cream emporium, which was as popular with the movie people as with civilians, and which frequently provided temporary employment for many a young aspiring actor.

Tom Martin (Actor)

Thomas Browne Henry (Actor)

Born: November 07, 1907
Died: June 30, 1980

Sheila Graham (Actor) .. Herself

Trivia: During the '50s and early '60s Sheila Graham was one Hollywood's most powerful gossip columnists rivaled only by Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. Hers is truly a Cinderella tale. Graham spent her childhood in a London orphanage. She then married a wealthy captain of industry and worked in London as a fashion model and a chorine before becoming a journalist. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1933, Graham established her notorious column in 1935. During that time she became romantically involved with great American author F. Scott Fitzgerald and was the basis for the lead character in his unfinished last novel The Last Tycoon. Later Graham recounted Scott's final years, and their affair, in her autobiography Beloved Infidel. At the height of her popularity, Graham's syndicated gossip column was appearing in over 175 papers, and she was busy hosting television and radio programs. She also continued writing books about Fitzgerald, and insider views of Hollywood that include Confessions of a Gossip Columnist. In addition to all her writing, Graham also appeared in a few films, including College Confidential (1960).

Frank Pershing (Actor)

Lucius Cooke (Actor)

Mary Landa (Actor)

Tom Greenway (Actor)

Born: January 01, 1909
Died: January 01, 1985

Trivia: American actor Tom Greenway appeared in numerous films between the late '40s and early '60s. He got his start on Broadway where he appeared in a number of productions before serving in the U.S. Air Force during WW II. While flying a mission he was shot down, and he spent over a year in Italian and German POW camps. Following his release, Greenway launched his film career.

Ben Welden (Actor)

Born: June 12, 1901
Died: October 17, 1997

Trivia: As a youth, Ben Welden was trained to be a concert violinist. He chose instead a stage career, heading to London rather than New York to realize his goal. During the early '30s, the bald, barracuda-faced Welden was a valuable British movie commodity, playing American gangster types in such films as The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1937). He returned to the U.S. in 1937, where he appeared in picture after picture at Warner Bros., playing vicious thugs and "torpedoes" in several gritty urban efforts, among them Marked Woman (1937), City for Conquest (1940), and The Big Sleep (1946). Welden's work in such two-reelers as Columbia's The Awful Sleuth (1951) and Three Dark Horses (1952), and such sitcoms as The Abbott and Costello Show, revealed a flair for broad comedy that the actor would carry over into his many Runyon-esque bad-guy assignments on the Superman TV series. Gradually retiring from acting in the mid-'60s, Ben Welden (in real life a gentle, likeable man) maintained his comfortable living standard by operating a successful California candy popcorn business.

Hans Herbert (Actor)

Born: June 11, 1882
Died: June 21, 1957

Trivia: A gray-haired, mustachioed, bit-part player from Danzig, Prussia (today Gdansk, Poland), Hans Herbert popped up in several well-remembered Universal horror movies of the 1940s, including Phantom of the Opera (1943) as one of the stagehands, House of Frankenstein (1944) as a Visarian burgher, and The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946) as an angry German rancher. Herbert appeared mostly on television in the 1950s.

Glenn Vernon (Actor)

Born: January 01, 1923
Died: October 27, 1999

Trivia: Character actor Glenn Vernon had a long and varied career in television, film, and on the stage until his death in late 1999. Immediately after graduating from high school, the young Vernon left his hometown in Massachusetts for New York City, to try his hand at acting. He gained recognition in the early '40s for his efforts in a number of Broadway productions that led RKO Studios to offer him a film contract. He was a contract player with the studio only until the end of that decade, but his involvement in all things acting would continue for the rest of his life.

Joel Friedkin (Actor)

Born: January 01, 1884
Died: January 01, 1954

Joe Kirk (Actor)

Born: October 01, 1903
Died: April 16, 1975

Trivia: Joe Kirk was seldom more than a supporting actor -- and usually a bit player -- in feature films, but he left an indelible mark on 1950s television comedy, through his association with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. That association was partly professional and largely personal, as he was Costello's brother-in-law. Some sources credit Kirk with film appearances as far back as the mid-'30s in movies such as Circle of Death and The Taming of the West, but his main body of movie work began at around the same time that Abbott & Costello first arrived in Hollywood in 1940. His early appearances weren't in their comedies (though that would soon change) but, rather, in the movies of the East Side Kids at Monogram, specifically Spooks Run Wild, Mr. Wise Guy, Smart Alecks, and Dick Tracy vs. Crime Inc., usually as gangsters and thugs who had little more to do than stand there and look menacing in a group. He began appearing in his brother-in-law's movies with Pardon My Sarong (1942). Usually in small roles and often as gangsters and henchmen with occasional comic bits and once in a while advancing the plot, it wasn't until Abbott & Costello Go To Mars (1953) that Kirk got a featured scene; in a comic slapstick battle of wits (or half-wits) with Lou Costello. By that time, Abbott & Costello had already given Kirk the role by which he would become best known, as Mr. Bacciagalupe on The Abbott & Costello Show. With his phony moustache and broken English, Kirk was a masterpiece of politically incorrect characterization, but also extremely funny in his slapstick interactions with Costello, usually batting Costello around the set in one way or other. Most of the rest of Kirk's career was as a general purpose actor, playing a succession of clerks, police officers, workers, and character roles in films by directors as different as Jean Yarbrough's (Hot Shots) and Fritz Lang's (Beyond a Reasonable Doubt). He retired in 1956, around the same time that Abbott & Costello split up and their respective careers ended.

Harry Cheshire (Actor)

Born: August 16, 1891

Sheilah Graham (Actor)

Jason Robards Sr. (Actor)

Born: December 31, 1892
Died: April 04, 1963

Trivia: He studied theater at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. After establishing himself prominently on the American stage, he began appearing in silents beginning with The Gilded Lily (1921). He appeared in more than 100 films, the last of which was the Elvis Presley vehicle Wild in the Country (1961). He starred in a number of silents, often as a clean-living rural hero; in the sound era he began playing character roles, almost always as an arch villain. Due to a serious eye infection, he was absent from the big screen in the '50s. He was the father of actor Jason Robards, with whom he appeared on Broadway in 1958 in The Disenchanted.

Harry V. Cheshire (Actor) .. Irene's Attorney

Born: January 01, 1892
Died: June 16, 1968

Trivia: American character actor Harry Cheshire was usually billed as "Pappy," and, like S. Z. "Cuddles" Sakall, he certainly lived up to his nickname, both visually and temperamentally. After a long career on stage and in radio, Cheshire came to films in 1940, appearing in many of Republic's "hillbilly" musicals and westerns. In larger-budgeted films, he was usually seen in minor roles as businessmen, ministers, justice of the peaces and the like. He played Dr. Campbell in the Yuletide classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946), the stage manager of the ill-fated Iroquois theater in The Seven Little Foys (1955) and the Elvis-hating mayor in Loving You (1957). He also showed up in a few of the Ma and Pa Kettle entries, and was afforded a rare opportunity at all-out villainy in Dangerous Mission (1954). TV western fans will remember Harry Cheshire as Judge Ben Wiley on the Gene Autry-produced weekly Buffalo Bill Jr. (1954).

Thomas Brown Henry (Actor)

Clarence Kolb (Actor)

Born: July 31, 1874
Died: November 25, 1964
Birthplace: Cleveland, Ohio, United States

Trivia: American actor Clarence Kolb came to prominence in the very early 1900s, as one half of the stage comedy team of Kolb and Dill. Kolb and his partner Max Dill were Dutch-dialect comics, their act patterned after the more famous Weber and Fields. The team supplemented their stage appearances with a brief series of short film comedies, released between 1916 and 1917. It wasn't until Kolb struck out on his own that he developed his familiar screen persona of the bullying, excitable business tycoon with the requisite heart of gold. Playing virtually the same part in virtually the same clothes in film after film, Kolb continued his patented characterization in the role of Mr. Honeywell on the popular '50s TV sitcom My Little Margie. Clarence Kolb's final screen appearance was in Man of 1000 Faces (1957), the screen biography of Lon Chaney Sr. For this guest appearance, Kolb decked himself out in his old Dutch vaudeville costume and false beard and played "himself," while character actor Danny Beck portrayed Kolb's stage cohort Max Dill(who'd died in 1949).

Glen Vernon (Actor)

8:00 pm - 10:00 pm, Tuesday, January 27 on WDNV Family Channel (12.6)