It Happens Every Spring

Ray Milland (Actor) .. Prof. Vernon K. Simpson/King Kelly

Born: January 03, 1907
Died: March 10, 1986
Birthplace: Neath, Wales

Trivia: Welsh actor Ray Milland spent the 1930s and early 1940s playing light romantic leads in such films as Next Time We Love (1936); Three Smart Girls (1936); Easy Living (1937), in which he is especially charming opposite Jean Arthur in an early Preston Sturges script; Everything Happens at Night (1939); The Doctor Takes a Wife (1940); and the major in Billy Wilder's The Major and the Minor opposite Ginger Rogers. Others worth watching are Reap the Wild Wind (1942); Forever and a Day (1943), and Lady in the Dark (1944). He made The Uninvited in 1944 and won an Oscar for his intense and realistic portrait of an alcoholic in The Lost Weekend (1945). Unfortunately, it was one of his last good films or performances. With the exception of Dial M for Murder (1954), X, The Man With X-Ray Eyes (1953), Love Story (1970), and Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), his later career was made up of mediocre parts in mostly bad films. One of the worst and most laughable was the horror film The Thing with Two Heads (1972), which paired him with football player Rosie Grier as the two-headed monster. Milland was also an uninspired director in A Man Alone (1955), Lisbon (1956), The Safecracker (1958), and Panic in Year Zero (1962).

Jean Peters (Actor) .. Deborah Greenleaf

Born: October 15, 1926
Died: October 13, 2000
Birthplace: East Canton, Ohio, United States

Trivia: A onetime schoolteacher, Jean Peters was brought to Hollywood in 1946 upon winning a popularity contest in her home state of Ohio. She was signed to a 20th Century Fox contract and given star billing in her first film, Captain From Castile. With rare exceptions, Peters seldom played conventional ingénues; most of her characters were peppery, combative, and doggedly independent. After 1955's A Man Called Peter, Peters completely retired from films, having recently married billionaire Howard Hughes in a secret ceremony. The union was as bizarre as anything else in Hughes' life; he and Peters lived separately and rarely saw each other, conducting most of their tête-à-tête by telephone or through intermediaries. Only when Peters divorced Hughes in 1971 did she reemerge in the public eye. Two years later, Jean Peters briefly jump-started her acting career with her performance in the PBS TV drama Winesburg, Ohio.

Paul Douglas (Actor) .. Monk Lanigan

Born: November 04, 1907
Died: September 11, 1959

Trivia: Yale graduate Paul Douglas played professional football with the Philadelphia Yellow Jackets before turning to regional theatre. He parlayed his love of athletics into a prosperous career as a sports announcer in the 1930s; in the next decade he became a radio actor and master of ceremonies (he was the announcer for bandleader Glenn Miller's final program in 1944). A frequent visitor to the Broadway stages, Douglas became a star in the tailor-made role of vulgar junk tycoon Harry Brock in Garson Kanin's play Born Yesterday, in which he was co-starred with Judy Holliday. After 1,024 appearances as Harry Brock, Douglas made his first film, 1949's A Letter to Three Wives. An unlikely prospect for movie stardom with his burly build and longshoreman's voice, Douglas nonetheless remained popular throughout the 1950s. He is best remembered for his brace of baseball pictures, It Happens Every Spring (1949) and Angels in the Outfield (1951), and for his reteaming with Judy Holliday in 1956's The Solid Gold Cadillac. Among Douglas' five wives were actresses Virginia Field and Jan Sterling. Though the newspaper obituaries insisted that Paul Douglas had not been ill before his fatal heart attack in 1959, he looked so drawn and haggard in his last appearance on the TV series The Twilight Zone that the episode ("The Mighty Casey") had to be reshot with Jack Warden in Douglas' part.

Ed Begley (Actor) .. Edgar Stone

Born: March 25, 1901
Died: April 28, 1970

Trivia: Born in Connecticut to an immigrant Irish couple, Ed Begley ran away from home several times before making a complete break from both his family and his formal education at the age of 13. For the next two decades, Begley knocked around in a variety of activities, from Naval service to working as bowling alley pin boy, before obtaining an announcer's job at a Hartford radio station in 1931. Ten years later, Begley moved to New York, where he became a prolific radio actor; from 1944 through 1948, he played the title role in the radio version of Charlie Chan. His belated Broadway debut at age 43 came in a short-lived play titled Land of Fame. In 1947, Begley created the role of benighted war profiteer Joe Keller in Arthur Miller's All My Sons; that same year, he was assigned a solid supporting part in his first film, Boomerang (1947). He was a familiar figure in TV's "golden age" of the 1950s, co-starring in the original video productions of Twelve Angry Men and Patterns. In 1955, he made the first of 789 appearances as the William Jennings Bryan counterpart in the Broadway drama Inherit the Wind, co-starring first with Paul Muni and then with Melvyn Douglas. Despite his ever-increasing activity, Ed Begley was standing in the unemployment compensation line in 1961 when he was informed that he'd been Oscar-nominated for his performance in Sweet Bird of Youth. Justifiably proud of his Oscar statuette, Begley reportedly carried it with him everywhere he went, even on short airplane flights! Ed Begley died at 69 while attending a party at the home of Hollywood press agent Jay Bernstein; he was the father of popular movie and TV leading man Ed Begley Jr.

Ted De Corsia (Actor) .. Dolan

Born: September 25, 1905
Died: April 11, 1973

Trivia: Before his motion picture career DeCorsia was a radio actor ("March of Time," "That Hammer Guy," "The Shadow"). He made his film debut in 1948 with The Lady from Shanghai. DeCorsia generally played lead villain roles (Enforcer, Naked City, Slightly Scarlet) or he occasionally parodied those villainous types (Kettles in the Ozarks, Dance With Me Henry).

Ray Collins (Actor) .. Prof. Greenleaf

Born: December 10, 1889
Died: July 11, 1965

Trivia: A descendant of one of California's pioneer families, American actor Ray Collins' interest in the theatre came naturally. His father was drama critic of the Sacramento Bee. Taking to the stage at age 14, Collins moved to British Columbia, where he briefly headed his own stock company, then went on to Broadway. An established theatre and radio performer by the mid-1930s, Collins began a rewarding association with Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. He played the "world's last living radio announcer" in Welles' legendary War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938, then moved to Hollywood with the Mercury troupe in 1939. Collins made his film debut as Boss Jim Gettys in Welles' film classic Citizen Kane (1940). After the Mercury disbanded in the early 1940s, Collins kept busy as a film and stage character actor, usually playing gruff business executives. Collins is most fondly remembered by TV fans of the mid-1950s for his continuing role as the intrepid Lt. Tragg on the weekly series Perry Mason.

Jessie Royce Landis (Actor) .. Mrs. Greenleaf

Born: November 25, 1904
Died: February 02, 1972

Trivia: As elucidated by the title of her 1954 autobiography You Won't Be So Pretty, Jesse Royce Landis concluded early on that she was not the ingenue type. Landis became a character actress, thereby outlasting many of her more attractive contemporaries. A solitary film appearance in 1930's Derelict convinced Landis that the stage would remain her forte. She would not appear onscreen on a regular basis until 1949, and then only when her theatrical schedule permitted it. Most often playing outspoken society matrons, Landis was amusingly cast in maternal roles in two Hitchcock films, To Catch a Thief (1955) and North By Northwest (1959); in the latter, she portrayed the mother of Cary Grant, who was exactly the same age as she. Jesse Royce Landis' final appearance was in the made-for-television Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones (1971).

Alan Hale Jr. (Actor) .. Schmidt

Born: March 08, 1921
Died: January 02, 1990
Birthplace: Los Angeles, California, United States

Trivia: The son of a patent medicine manufacturer, American actor Alan Hale chose a theatrical career at a time when, according to his son Alan Hale Jr., boarding houses would post signs reading "No Dogs or Actors Allowed." Undaunted, Hale spent several years on stage after graduating from Philadelphia University, entering films as a slapstick comedian for Philly's Lubin Co. in 1911. Bolstering his acting income with odd jobs as a newspaperman and itinerant inventor (at one point he considered becoming an osteopath!), Hale finally enjoyed a measure of security as a much-in-demand character actor in the 1920s, usually as hard-hearted villains. One of his more benign roles was as Little John in Douglas Fairbanks' Robin Hood (1922), a role he would repeat opposite Errol Flynn in 1938 and John Derek in 1950. Talkies made Hale more popular than ever, especially in his many roles as Irishmen, blusterers and "best pals" for Warner Bros. Throughout his career, Hale never lost his love for inventing things, and reportedly patented or financed items as commonplace as auto brakes and as esoteric as greaseless potato chips. Alan Hale contracted pneumonia and died while working on the Warner Bros. western Montana (1950), which starred Hale's perennial screen cohort Errol Flynn.

William Murphy (Actor) .. Isbell

Born: January 09, 1921

William E. Green (Actor) .. Prof. Forsythe

Born: January 01, 1893
Died: January 01, 1962

Edward Keane (Actor) .. Bell

Born: May 24, 1884
Died: October 12, 1959

Trivia: American actor Edward Keane was eminently suitable for roles requiring tuxedos and military uniforms. From his first screen appearance in 1921 to his last in 1952, Keane exuded the dignity and assurance of a self-made man of wealth or a briskly authoritative Armed Services officer. Fortunately his acting fee was modest, enabling Keane to add class to even the cheapest of poverty-row "B"s. Generations of Marx Bros. fans will remember Edward Keane as the ship's captain (he's the one who heaps praise upon the three bearded Russian aviators) in A Night at the Opera (1935).

Gene Evans (Actor) .. Mueller

Born: July 11, 1922
Died: April 01, 1998
Birthplace: Holbrook, Arizona

Trivia: A professional actor since his teens, Gene Evans made his first film appearance in 1947's Under Colorado Skies. Evans' gritty, no-nonsense approach to his craft attracted the attention of like-minded director Sam Fuller, who cast the actor in several of his 1950s film projects. Many consider Evans' portrayal as the grim, born-survivor sergeant in Fuller's The Steel Helmet (1951) to be not only the actor's best performance, but also one of the best-ever characterizations in any war film. Active in films until 1984, Gene Evans also co-starred in the TV series My Friend Flicka (1956), Matt Helm (1975) and Spencer's Pilots (1976).

Al Eben (Actor) .. Parker

Born: March 11, 1918

Ruth Lee (Actor) .. Miss Collins

Born: January 01, 1895
Died: August 03, 1975

Trivia: In films from 1932, American actress Ruth Lee was an expert at portraying middle-America matriarchs. One of Lee's largest roles was as the "June Cleaver" mother in the classic 1939 promotional feature The Middleton Family at the World's Fair. From 1939 to 1943, Lee was a regular in the Robert Benchley one-reelers at both MGM and Paramount, superbly cast as the gently bellicose Mrs. Benchley. Ruth Lee remained active until 1962, when she essayed a minor role in Sergeants Three.

John Butler (Actor) .. Fan

Born: January 01, 1883
Died: January 01, 1967

Jane Van Duser (Actor) .. Miss Mengalstein

Ray Teal (Actor) .. Mac

Born: January 12, 1902
Died: April 02, 1976
Birthplace: Grand Rapids, Michigan

Trivia: Possessor of one of the meanest faces in the movies, American actor Ray Teal spent much of his film career heading lynch mobs, recruiting for hate organizations and decimating Indians. Naturally, anyone this nasty in films would have to conversely be a pleasant, affable fellow in real life, and so it was with Teal. Working his way through college as a saxophone player, Teal became a bandleader upon graduation, remaining in the musical world until 1936. In 1938, Teal was hired to act in the low-budget Western Jamboree, and though he played a variety of bit parts as cops, taxi drivers and mashers, he seemed more at home in Westerns. Teal found it hard to shake his bigoted badman image even in A-pictures; as one of the American jurists in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), he is the only member of Spencer Tracy's staff that feels that sympathy should be afforded Nazi war criminals -- and the only one on the staff who openly dislikes American liberals. A more benign role came Teal's way on the '60s TV series Bonanza, where he played the sometimes ineffectual but basically decent Sheriff Coffee. Ray Teal retired from films shortly after going through his standard redneck paces in The Liberation of LB Jones (1970).

Don Hicks (Actor) .. Assistant to Announcer

Born: January 01, 1890
Died: January 01, 1964

Mickey Simpson (Actor) .. Policeman

Born: January 01, 1912
Died: January 01, 1985

Trivia: Well-muscled former 1935 New York City heavyweight boxing champ Mickey Simpson was typically cast as a villain in numerous low-budget actioners, adventures, and Westerns of the '40s, '50s, and '60s. Before making his screen debut with a bit part in Stagecoach, Simpson had been Claudette Colbert's personal chauffeur. He served with the military during WWII and then returned to Hollywood to continue his busy onscreen career.

Johnny Calkins (Actor) .. Boy

Born: August 06, 1916
Died: January 01, 1963

Harry Cheshire (Actor) .. Doctor

Born: August 16, 1891

Ward Brant (Actor) .. Baseball Player

John Mckee (Actor) .. Baseball Player

Born: December 30, 1916

Debra Paget (Actor) .. Alice

Born: August 19, 1933

Trivia: She may have hailed from Denver, but actress Debra Paget had the sensual, exotic demeanor of an Arabian Nights princess -- which indeed she played on a few occasions. Signed by 20th Century Fox in 1949, the fresh-out-of-high-school Paget made her cinematic mark in the role of James Stewart's ill-fated Native American wife in Broken Arrow (1950). Most of her subsequent roles were merely decorative, though she was a more than adequate Cosette in the 1952 version of Les Miserables. In 1959, Paget was cast in Fritz Lang's sumptuous international production Journey to the Lost City, gaining extensive publicity coverage for her blood pressure-raising belly dance. After two failed marriages, one to director Budd Boetticher (for whom she had acted in 1955's Seven Men From Now), Debra Paget wed a wealthy Chinese-American oil executive in 1964, the same year that she retired from films.

Mae Marsh (Actor) .. Maid

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."

Tom Hanlon (Actor) .. St. Louis Broadcaster

Born: January 01, 1907
Died: January 01, 1970

Sam Hayes (Actor) .. New York Announcer

Born: January 01, 1904
Died: January 01, 1958

Douglas Spencer (Actor) .. Conductor

Born: January 01, 1890
Died: October 06, 1960

Trivia: From 1939 until his death in 1960, gangly, balding Douglas Spencer could be spotted in unbilled film roles as doctors and reporters. By the early '50s, Spencer had graduated to supporting parts, often in films with a science fiction or fantasy theme. One of his lengthier assignments was Simms, the seance-busting reporter in Houdini (1953). Douglas Spencer's best-ever film role was bespectacled reporter Ned "Scotty" Scott in the 1951 sci-fi classic The Thing, wherein he closed the film with the immortal cautionary words "Keep watching the skies!"

Pat Combs (Actor) .. Messenger Boy

Born: October 29, 1966

Robert Patten (Actor) .. Cab Driver

Born: October 11, 1925
Died: December 29, 2001

Alan Hale Jr. (Actor) .. Schmidt

Born: March 08, 1918
Died: January 02, 1990

Trivia: One look at Alan Hale Jr. and no one could ever assume he was adopted; Hale Jr. so closely resembled his father, veteran character actor Alan Hale Sr., that at times it appeared that the older fellow had returned to the land of the living. In films from 1933, Alan Jr. was originally cast in beefy, athletic good-guy roles (at 6'3", he could hardly play hen-pecked husbands). After the death of his father in 1950, Alan dropped the "Junior" from his professional name. He starred in a brace of TV action series, Biff Baker USA (1953) and Casey Jones (1957), before his he-man image melted into comedy parts. From 1964 through 1967, Hale played The Skipper (aka Jonas Grumby) on the low-brow but high-rated Gilligan's Island. Though he worked steadily after Gilligan's cancellation, he found that the blustery, slow-burning Skipper had typed him to the extent that he lost more roles than he won. In his last two decades, Alan Hale supplemented his acting income as the owner of a successful West Hollywood restaurant, the Lobster Barrel.

Grandon Rhodes (Actor) .. Professor

Born: January 01, 1904
Died: January 01, 1987

Trivia: Actor Grandon Rhodes worked steadily on stage, television, and in over 40 films during his four-decade career. On television, he had recurring roles on Bonanza (as a doctor) and Perry Mason.

Harry V. Cheshire (Actor) .. Doctor

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).

Harry Seymour (Actor) .. Clerk

Born: June 22, 1891
Died: November 11, 1967

Trivia: A veteran of vaudeville and Broadway, Harry Seymour came to films with extensive credits as a composer and musical-comedy star. Unfortunately, Seymour made his movie debut in 1925, at the height of the silent era. When talkies came in, he was frequently employed as a dialogue director with the Warner Bros. B-unit. From 1932 to 1958, Harry Seymour also essayed bit roles at Warners and 20th Century Fox, most often playing pianists (Irish Eyes Are Smiling, Rhapsody in Blue, A Ticket to Tomahawk, etc.).

Robert B. Williams (Actor) .. Reporter

Born: January 01, 1905
Died: January 01, 1978

Trivia: Character actor, onscreen from 1937.

Charles Flynn (Actor) .. Reporter

John R. McKee (Actor) .. Baseball Player

Trivia: American movie stunt man John McKee began accepting acting roles somewhere around 1945. Though his name is not listed in The Baseball Encyclopedia, we can safely assume that McKee had some pro baseball experience of some sort. He was seen as a ballplayer in such films as It Happens Every Spring (1949), Three Little Words (1950), Angels in the Outfield (1951), Pride of St. Louis (1952), The Big Leaguer (1953) and The Kid From Left Field (1953). As late as 1978 he was still in uniform, playing Ralph Houk in the made-for-TV One in a Million: The Ron LeFlore Story. John McKee was also on call for military-officer roles, notably in the war films The Gallant Hours (1960) and McArthur (1976).

04:00 am - 06:00 am, Tuesday, January 6 on WNYW Movies! (5.2)