25 Oct 2019
Radio, Recording Permalink

Mary Margaret McBride

October 25, 2019

Mary Margaret McBride was an American radio interview host and writer. Her popular radio shows spanned more than forty years; she is also remembered for her few months of pioneering television, as an early sign of radio success not guaranteeing a transition to the new medium. She was sometimes known as “The First Lady of Radio.”

McBride was born on November 16, 1899 in Paris, Missouri, to a farming family. Their frequent relocations disorganized her early schooling, but at the age of six she became a student at a preparatory school called William Woods “College”, and at 16 the University of Missouri, receiving a degree in journalism there in 1919.

She worked a year as a reporter at the Cleveland Press, and then until 1924 at the New York Evening Mail. Following this, she wrote freelance for periodicals including the Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and starting in 1926 collaborated in writing travel-oriented books.

McBride first worked steadily in radio for WOR in New York City, starting in 1934. This daily women’s-advice show, with her persona as “Martha Deane”, a kind and witty grandmother figure with a Missouri-drawl, aired daily until 1940.

25 Oct 2019
Radio, Recording, Television Permalink

Mary Martin

October 25, 2019

Mary Virginia Martin was an American actress and singer. She originated many roles over her career including Nellie Forbush in South Pacific and Maria in The Sound of Music. She was named a Kennedy Center Honoree in 1989.

Mary Martin’s life as a child, as Martin describes it in her autobiography My Heart Belongs, was secure and happy. She had close relationships with both her mother and father, as well as her siblings. Her autobiography details how the young actress had an instinctive ear for recreating musical sounds.

Martin’s father, Preston Martin, was a lawyer and her mother, Juanita Presley, was a violin teacher. Although the doctors told Juanita that she would risk her life if she attempted to have another baby, she was determined to have a boy. Instead, she had Mary, who became quite a tomboy. Her birth was an event as all of the neighbors gathered around Juanita’s bedroom window, waiting for the raising of a curtain to signal the baby?s arrival.

Her family had a barn and orchard that kept her entertained. She played with her older sister Geraldine, climbing trees and riding ponies. Martin adored her father. ?He was a tall, good-looking, silver-haired, with the kindest brown eyes. Mother was the disciplinarian, but it was Daddy who could turn me into an angel with just one look?. Martin, who said ?I?d never understand the law?, began singing outside the courtroom where her father worked every Saturday night at a bandstand where the town band played. She sang in a trio of little girls dressed in bellhop uniforms. ?Even in those days without microphones, my high piping voice carried all over the square. I have always thought that I inherited my carrying voice from my father? .

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Mary Anderson

October 25, 2019

In memory of Hollywood actress and Walk of Famer Mary Anderson flowers were placed today on her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Tuesday, April 8, 2014 at 11 a.m. PDT. The star in the category of Motion Pictures is located at 1645 Vine Street.

“Rest in peace among the stars!” Ana Martinez, producer of the Walk of Fame signed the card on behalf of the Hollywood Historic Trust and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

Mary Anderson is an American former actress, who appeared in 31 films and 22 television productions between 1939 and 1965.

Born Bebe Anderson in Birmingham, Alabama, she was educated at Howard College in Texas.

After doing two uncredited roles, Anderson made her first important screen appearance as Maybelle Meriweather in Gone With the Wind. Ending her film career in the early 1950s, she occasionally acted on television, for example, as Catherine Harrington in the prime-time soap opera Peyton Place in 1964, episodes 2-20)

Many times confused with the stage actress of the same name or silent film actress of same name, Mary Anderson appeared in a number of films in the 1940s, and was credited under her birth name in a 1940 short film.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording Permalink

Mary Astor

October 25, 2019

Mary Astor was an American actress. Most remembered for her role as Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart, Astor began her long motion picture career as a teenager in the silent movies of the early 1920s.

She eventually made a successful transition to talkies, but almost saw her career destroyed due to public scandal in the mid-1930s. She was sued for support by her parents and was later branded an adulterous wife by her ex-husband during a custody fight over her daughter. Overcoming these stumbling blocks in her private life, Astor went on to even greater success on the screen, eventually winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Sandra Kovak in The Great Lie. She was an MGM contract player through most of the 1940s and continued to act in movies, on television and on stage until her retirement from the screen in 1964. Astor was the author of five novels. Her autobiography became a bestseller, as did her later book, A Life on Film, which was specifically about her career.

Director Lindsay Anderson wrote of her in 1990: “.that when two or three who love the cinema are gathered together, the name of Mary Astor always comes up, and everybody agrees that she was an actress of special attraction, whose qualities of depth and reality always seemed to illuminate the parts she played.”

She was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois. Astor was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos who were both teachers.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Mary Boland

October 25, 2019

Mary Boland was an American stage and film actress.

Born Marie Anne Boland in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she was the daughter of William Boland, an actor, and his wife Mary Cecilia Hatton. She had an older sister named Sara.

Boland originally was in a convent but left and was performing on stage by the age of fifteen. She debuted on Broadway in 1907 in the play The Ranger with Dustin Farnum and had appeared in eleven Broadway productions, notably with John Drew, before making her silent film debut for Triangle Studios in 1915. She entertained soldiers in France during World War One then returned to America. After appearing in nine movies, she left filmmaking in 1920, returning to the stage and appearing in a number of Broadway productions. She became famous as a comedienne.

Boland’s greatest success on the stage in the 1920s was the comedy The Cradle Snatchers, in which she, Edna May Oliver, and Margaret Dale, having been abandoned by their husbands, take on young lovers. Boland’s paramour was Humphrey Bogart in one of his first roles.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording Permalink

Marty Robbins

October 25, 2019

Martin David Robinson, known professionally as Marty Robbins, was an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. One of the most popular and successful country and Western singers of his era, for most of his nearly four-decade career, Robbins was rarely far from the country music charts, and several of his songs also became pop hits.

Robbins was born in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix, in Maricopa County, Arizona. He was reared in a difficult family situation. His father took odd jobs to support the family of ten children. His father’s drinking led to divorce in 1937. Among his warmer memories of his childhood, Robbins recalled having listened to stories of the American West told by his maternal grandfather, Texas Bob Heckle. Robbins left the troubled home at the age of 17 to serve in the United States Navy as an LCT coxswain during World War II. He was stationed in the Solomon Islands in the Pacific. To pass the time during the war, he learned to play the guitar, started writing songs, and came to love Hawaiian music.

After his discharge from the military in 1945, he began to play at local venues in Phoenix, then moved on to host his own show on KTYL. He thereafter had his own television show on KPHO-TV in Phoenix. After Little Jimmy Dickens made a guest appearance on Robbins’ TV show, Dickens got Robbins a record deal with Columbia Records. Robbins became known for his appearances at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.

In addition to his recordings and performances, Robbins was an avid race car driver, competing in 35 career NASCAR races with six top 10 finishes, including the 1973 Daytona 500. In 1967, Robbins played himself in the car racing film Hell on Wheels. Robbins was partial to Dodges, and owned and raced Chargers and then a 1978 Dodge Magnum. His last race was in a Junior Johnson-built 1982 Buick Regal in the Atlanta Journal 500 on November 7, 1982, the month before he died. In 1983, NASCAR honored Robbins by naming the annual race at Nashville the Marty Robbins 420. He was also the driver of the 60th Indianapolis 500 Buick Century pace car in 1976.

25 Oct 2019
Recording, Television Permalink

Marvin Gaye

October 25, 2019

Marvin Pentz Gaye, Jr., better known by his stage name Marvin Gaye, was an American singer-songwriter and instrumentalist with a three-octave vocal range. Starting as a member of the doo-wop group The Moonglows in the late fifties, he ventured into a solo career after the group disbanded in 1960 signing with the Tamla subsidiary of Motown Records. After starting off as a session drummer, Gaye ranked as the label’s top-selling solo artist during the sixties.

Because of solo hits such as “How Sweet It Is “, “Ain’t That Peculiar”, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and his duet singles with singers such as Mary Wells and Tammi Terrell, he was crowned “The Prince of Motown” and “The Prince of Soul”.

His mid-1970s work including the What’s Going On, Let’s Get It On and I Want You albums helped influence the quiet storm, urban adult contemporary and slow jam genres. After a self-imposed European exile in the early eighties, Gaye returned on the 1982 Grammy-winning hit, “Sexual Healing” and the Midnight Love album before his death. Gaye was shot dead by his father on April 1, 1984. He was posthumously inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

In 2008, the American music magazine Rolling Stone ranked Gaye #6 on its list of The Greatest Singers of All Time, and ranked #18 on 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

25 Oct 2019
Recording, Television Permalink

Marvin Miller

October 25, 2019

Marvin Miller was an American film and voice-over actor. Possessing a deep, baritone voice, he began his career in radio in St. Louis, Missouri before becoming a Hollywood actor. Miller is best remembered for two of his roles, as Michael Anthony, the man who passed out a weekly check on the TV series The Millionaire and as the voice of Robby the Robot in the film Forbidden Planet.

Born Marvin Mueller in St. Louis, Miller graduated from Washington University before he began his career in radio. He narrated a daily 15-minute radio show for Mutual Radio, The Story Behind the Story, which offered historical vignettes. He also served as announcer on several OTR shows of the 1940s and 50’s, including The Whistler.

He also won Grammy Awards in 1965 and 1966 for his recordings of Dr. Seuss stories: in 1967 for Dr Seuss Presents – If I Ran the Zoo and Sleep Book and 1966 for Dr Seuss Presents Fox in Socks and Green Eggs and Ham. He also read Horton Hatches the Egg and The Sneetches and Other Stories & Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories

In films, the heavyset Miller was often cast as a villain, many times playing Asian roles. He portrayed a sadistic henchman in the 1947 Humphrey Bogart film Dead Reckoning, and as Yamada in the 1945 James Cagney effort Blood on the Sun. In Deadline at Dawn he plays Sleepy Parsons, a blind pianist.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Martin Landau

October 25, 2019

Martin Landau is an American actor. Landau began his career in the 1950s; his early films include a supporting role in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. He played continuing roles in the television series ‘ for which he received Emmy Award nominations, and ‘. He received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture and his first nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work in , and was also Oscar nominated for his role in Crimes and Misdemeanors. His performance in the supporting role of Béla Lugosi in Ed Wood earned him the Academy Award, Screen Actors Guild Award and a Golden Globe. He continues to perform in film and television and heads the Hollywood branch of the Actors Studio.

Landau was born into a Jewish-American family in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Selma and Morris Landau, an Austrian-born machinist who scrambled to rescue relatives from the Nazis. At the age of 17, he began working as a cartoonist for the Daily News, assisting Gus Edson on The Gumps comic strip during the 1940s and 1950s.

Influenced by Charlie Chaplin and the escapism of the cinema, he pursued an acting career. He attended the Actors Studio in the same class with Steve McQueen and in 1957, Landau made his Broadway debut in Middle of the Night. Encouraged by his mentor Lee Strasberg, Landau also taught acting. Actors he has coached include Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston.

In 1959, Landau made his first major film appearance in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest at the age of 31. Landau took the role of master of disguise Rollin Hand in , becoming one of the show’s better-known stars. According to The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier, by Patrick J. White, Landau initially declined to be contracted to the show as he did not want it to interfere with his film career; instead, for the first season he was credited in “special guest appearances by” him. He became a “full-time” cast member with the second season, although the studio agreed to only contract him on a year-by-year basis rather than the then-standard five years. The role of Rollin Hand required Landau to perform a wide range of accents and characters from dictators to thugs, and several episodes saw Landau playing dual roles – not only Hand’s impersonation, but also the person Hand is impersonating. He co-starred in the series with his then wife, Barbara Bain.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Martin Scorsese

October 25, 2019

Martin Charles Scorsese is a U.S. film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. He is the founder of the World Cinema Foundation and a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema, and has won awards from the Oscars, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Directors Guild of America. Scorsese is president of The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation.

Scorsese’s body of work addresses such themes as Italian identity in the U.S., Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption, machismo, and violence. Scorsese is widely considered to be one of the most significant and influential U.S. film-makers of his era, directing landmark films such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas ? all of which he collaborated on with actor and close friend Robert De Niro. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed and earned an MFA in film directing from the New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

In 2007, Scorsese was honored by the National Italian American Foundation at the nonprofit’s thirty-second Anniversary Gala. During the ceremony, Scorsese helped launch N.I.A.F.’s Jack Valenti Institute, which provides support to Italian film students in the U.S., in memory of former Foundation Board Member and past president of the Motion Picture Association of America Jack Valenti. Scorsese received his award from Mary Margaret Valenti, Jack’s widow. Certain of Scorsese’s film related material and personal papers are contained in the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives to which scholars and media experts from around the world may have full access.

Martin Scorsese was born in New York City. His father, Luciano Charles Scorsese, and mother, Catherine Scorsese, both worked in New York’s Garment District. His father was a clothes presser and his mother was a seamstress. As a boy, his parents would often take him to movie theatres; it was at this stage in his life that he developed passion for cinema. Enamored of historical epics in his adolescence, at least two films of the genre, Land of the Pharaohs and El Cid, appear to have had a deep and lasting impact on his cinematic psyche. Scorsese also developed an admiration for neorealist cinema at this time. He recounted its influence in a documentary on Italian neorealism, and commented on how The Bicycle Thief alongside Paisà, Rome, Open City inspired him and how this influenced his view or portrayal of his Sicilian genes. In his documentary, Il Mio Viaggio in Italia, Scorsese noted that the Sicilian episode of Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà which he first saw on television alongside his relatives, who were themselves Sicilian immigrants, made a significant impact on his life. He has also cited filmmaker Satyajit Ray as a major influence on his career. His initial desire to become a priest while attending Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx was forsaken for cinema, and, consequently, Scorsese enrolled in NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where he received his M.F.A. in film directing in 1966.