25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Joan Bennett

October 25, 2019

Joan Geraldine Bennett was an American stage, film and television actress. Besides acting on the stage, Bennett appeared in more than 70 motion pictures from the era of silent movies well into the sound era. She is possibly best-remembered for her film noir femme fatale roles in director Fritz Lang’s movies such as The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street. Bennett had three distinct phases to her long and successful career, first as a winsome blonde ingenue, then as a sensuous brunette femme fatale, and finally as a warmhearted wife/mother figure.

In 1951, Bennett’s screen career was marred by scandal after her third husband, film producer Walter Wanger, shot and injured her agent Jennings Lang. Wanger suspected that Lang and Bennett were having an affair, a charge which she adamantly denied.

In the 1960s, she achieved success for her portrayal of Elizabeth Collins Stoddard on TV’s Dark Shadows, for which she received an Emmy nomination. For her final movie role, as Madame Blanc in Suspiria, she received a Saturn Award nomination.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Joan Blondell

October 25, 2019

Rose Joan Blondell was an American actress. After winning a beauty pageant, Blondell embarked upon a film career. Establishing herself as a sexy wisecracking blonde, she was a Pre-code staple of Warner Brothers and appeared in more than 100 movies and television productions. She was most active in films during the 1930s, and during this time she co-starred with Glenda Farrell in nine films, in which the duo portrayed gold-diggers. Blondell continued acting for the rest of her life, often in small character roles or supporting television roles. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work in The Blue Veil. Blondell was seen in featured roles in two films released shortly before her death from leukemia, Grease and the remake of The Champ. Blondell was born to a vaudeville family in New York City. Her father, known as Eddie Joan Blondell, Jr., was born in Indiana in 1866 to French parents, and was a vaudeville comedian and one of the original Katzenjammer Kids. Blondell’s mother was Kathryn Cain, born April 13, 1884, in Brooklyn of Irish American parents. Her younger sister, Gloria, also an actress, was briefly married to film producer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli and bears a strong resemblance to her older sister, Joan. Blondell also had a brother, the namesake of her father and grandfather. Her cradle was a property trunk as her parents moved from place to place and she made her first appearance on stage at the age of four months when she was carried on in a cradle as the daughter of Peggy Astaire in The Greatest Love.

Joan had spent six years in Australia and seen much of the world by the time her family, who had been on tour, settled in Dallas, Texas when she was a teenager. Under the name Rosebud Blondell, she won the 1926 Miss Dallas pageant and placed fourth for Miss America in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in September of that same year. She attended what is now the University of North Texas, then a teacher’s college, in Denton, where her mother was a local stage actress, and she worked as a fashion model, a circus hand, and a clerk in a New York store. Around 1927, she returned to New York, joined a stock company to become an actress, and performed on Broadway. In 1930, she starred with James Cagney in Penny Arcade.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Joan Caulfield

October 25, 2019

Joan Caulfield was an American actress and former fashion model. After being discovered by Broadway producers, she began a stage career in 1943 that eventually lead to signing as an actress with Paramount Pictures.

Born while her family resided in East Orange, New Jersey, she moved to West Orange during childhood but continued attending Miss Beard’s School in Orange, New Jersey. During her teenage years, the family moved to New York City where Joan eventually attended Columbia University.

One of her most memorable roles was when she was lent out to Warner Bros. to appear in The Unsuspected alongside Claude Rains and Audrey Totter. Later in life she appeared mostly on television, appearing on programs such as Cheyenne, Baretta, and Murder, She Wrote, with Angela Lansbury. In the 1957-1958 season, Caulfield starred in her own short-lived NBC situation comedy, Sally in the role of a traveling companion to an elderly widow, played by Marion Lorne. At midseason, Gale Gordon and Arte Johnson joined the cast.

An urban legend states that Caulfield’s film Dear Ruth inspired author J.D. Salinger to name the protagonist of his novel The Catcher in the Rye “Holden Caulfield” after seeing a movie theater marquee with the film’s stars: Caulfield and William Holden. However, Holden Caulfield was mentioned in Salinger’s short story “Last Day of the Last Furlough” in the July 15, 1944 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, three years before Dear Ruth. The earliest known use of the Caulfield name, including a mention of Holden, is in the unpublished 1942 story “The Last and Best of the Peter Pans.” A more common version of the legend claims that Salinger was taken by Joan Caulfield upon first seeing her in a modeling photo or a publicity still or an acting performance. Since Joan was a leading model by 1941 and her acting career began in 1942 with an appearance in the short-lived Broadway musical “Beat the Band”, this version of the legend makes his using her surname for his character at least possible.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Joan Collins

October 25, 2019

Joan Henrietta Collins, OBE is an English actress, author, and columnist.

Collins was born in Paddington, London, the daughter of Elsa, a dance teacher and nightclub hostess, and Joseph William Collins, an agent whose clients would later include Shirley Bassey, the Beatles, and Tom Jones. Collins' South African?born father was Jewish and her British mother was Anglican. She has one sister, author Jackie Collins, and one brother, Bill Collins. Collins was educated at the Francis Holland School and then trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Collins's childhood was spent in and around Maida Vale and was, according to Collins, an idyllic one with plenty of love, comfort and security. Her father, however, was also a strict disciplinarian and exerted a strong hold over her gentle mother, an attitude which came to irritate her daughters who sought to rebel against it. Collins has said of her father that 'he was detached, cold, hard, critical, difficult, acerbic, and everyone had to please him'. He said himself in his 1986 autobiography A Touch of Collins: 'I love my daughters but I am not the kind of parent who deludes himself that his children are superior to everyone else's. I did not think of them as particularly outstanding in any way'.

At the age of 17 Collins was signed to the J. Arthur Rank Film Company, a highly profitable British studio.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Joan Crawford

October 25, 2019

Joan Crawford, born Lucille Fay LeSueur, was an American actress in film, television and theatre. Starting as a dancer in traveling theatrical companies before debuting on Broadway, Crawford was signed to a motion picture contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925. Initially frustrated by the size and quality of her parts, Crawford began a campaign of self-publicity and became nationally known as a flapper by the end of the 1920s. In the 1930s, Crawford’s fame rivaled MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. Crawford often played hardworking young women who find romance and financial success. These “rags-to-riches” stories were well-received by Depression-era audiences and were popular with women. Crawford became one of Hollywood’s most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States, but her films began losing money and by the end of the 1930s she was labeled “box office poison”.

After an absence of nearly two years from the screen, Crawford staged a comeback by starring in Mildred Pierce, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. In 1955, she became involved with the Pepsi-Cola Company through her marriage to company Chairman Alfred Steele. After his death in 1959, Crawford was elected to fill his vacancy on the board of directors but was forcibly retired in 1973. She continued acting in film and television regularly through the 1960s, when her performances became fewer; after the release of the British horror film Trog in 1970, Crawford retired from the screen. Following a public appearance in 1974, after which unflattering photographs were published, Crawford withdrew from public life and became more and more reclusive until her death in 1977.

Crawford married four times. Her first three marriages ended in divorce; the last ended with the death of husband Al Steele. She adopted five children, one of whom was reclaimed by his birth mother. Crawford’s relationships with her two older children, Christina and Christopher, were acrimonious. Crawford disinherited the two and, after Crawford’s death, Christina wrote a “tell-all” memoir, Mommie Dearest, in which she alleged a lifelong pattern of physical and emotional abuse perpetrated by Crawford.

Crawford was born Lucille Fay LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, the third child of Tennessee-born Thomas E. LeSueur and Anna Bell Johnson. Her older siblings were Daisy LeSueur, who died very young, and Hal LeSueur. Thomas LeSueur abandoned the family a few months before Crawford’s birth. He reappeared in Abilene, Texas, in 1930 as a 62-year-old construction laborer on the George R. Davis House, built in Prairie School architecture.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Radio, Television Permalink

Joan Davis

October 25, 2019

Joan Davis was an American comedic actress whose career spanned vaudeville, film, radio and television. Remembered best for the 1952–55 television comedy, I Married Joan, Davis had a successful earlier career as a B-movie actress and a leading star of 1940s radio comedy.

Born as Madonna Josephine Davis in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Davis was a performer since childhood. She appeared with her husband Si Wills in vaudeville.

Her first film was a short subject for Educational Pictures called Way Up Thar, featuring a then-unknown Roy Rogers. Educational’s distribution company, Twentieth Century-Fox, signed Davis for feature films. Tall and lanky, with a comically flat speaking voice, she became known as one of the few female physical clowns of her time. Perhaps best known for her co-starring turn with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in Hold That Ghost, she had a reputation for flawless physical comedy. Her pantomime sequence in Beautiful but Broke was a slapstick construction-site episode.

She co-starred with Eddie Cantor in two features, Show Business and If You Knew Susie. Cantor and Davis were very close offscreen as well.

25 Oct 2019
Radio, Recording Permalink

Jimmy Boyd

October 25, 2019

Jimmy Boyd was an American singer, musician, and actor.

Boyd was born in an old farmhouse near McComb, Mississippi to Winnie and Leslie Boyd.

In 1941 his father, Leslie, put his wife and their two sons, on a train bound for Riverside, California, for the second time. The family was sent back to Mississippi a year earlier by the California Welfare Department because Leslie lacked the skills to get a good job. Having sold everything they owned, and only having enough money to buy tickets for his wife and the two boys, Leslie rode the rails. He hitchhiked on freight trains to join his family in California. Hoboing from Mississippi, Louisiana and as far as West Texas, Leslie Boyd picked cotton to help support his own family of twenty-one brothers and sisters.

Leslie’s father was known locally as “Fiddler Bill”. He played fiddle at dances and family gatherings throughout the region. Most of Fiddler Bill’s children inherited his musical abilities, and all sang together and played musical instruments. Leslie Boyd played guitar and harmonica and started Jimmy playing the guitar at 9 years old. Leslie Boyd had been a farmer when a drought hit and there were no more crops, so he picked cotton. He could pick over 600 pounds of cotton a day himself, and was paid 25 cents. Although there was no cotton in California to pick, this time they were determined to stay. Leslie got a menial job cleaning up construction sites, quickly becoming an accomplished finish carpenter.

25 Oct 2019
Recording, Television Permalink

Jimmy Dorsey

October 25, 2019

James “Jimmy” Dorsey was a prominent American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, trumpeter, composer, and big band leader. He was known as “JD”. He composed the standards “I’m Glad There is You ” and “It’s the Dreamer in Me”.

Jimmy Dorsey was born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, the son of a music teacher and older brother of Tommy Dorsey who also became a prominent musician. He played trumpet in his youth, appearing on stage in a Vaudeville act as early as 1913. He switched to alto saxophone in 1915, and then learned to double on clarinet. Jimmy Dorsey played on a clarinet outfitted with the Albert system of fingering, as opposed to the more common Boehm system used by most of his contemporaries including Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw.

With his brother Tommy playing trombone, he formed Dorsey?s Novelty Six, one of the first jazz bands to broadcast. In 1924 he joined the California Ramblers. He did much free lance radio and recording work throughout the 1920s. The brothers also appeared as session musicians on many jazz recordings. He joined Ted Lewis’s band in 1930, with whom he toured Europe.

After returning to the United States, he worked briefly with Rudy Vallee and several other bandleaders, in addition to the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra with Tommy. He appeared on at least seventy-five radio broadcasts, as a member of Nathaniel Shilkret’s orchestra on programs such as the 1932 program, “The Music That Satisfies,” also known as the Chesterfield Quarter Hour. Tommy broke off to form his own band in 1935 after a musical dispute with Jimmy. The Dorsey Brothers Orchestra became the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, and included musicians such as Bobby Byrne, Ray McKinley, and Skeets Herfurt along with vocalists Bob Eberly and Kay Weber.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Radio Permalink

Jimmy Durante

October 25, 2019

James Francis “Jimmy” Durante was an American singer, pianist, comedian and actor. His distinctive clipped gravelly speech, comic language butchery, jazz-influenced songs, and large nose helped make him one of America’s most familiar and popular personalities of the 1920s through the 1970s. His jokes about his nose included referring to it as a “Schnozzola”, and the word became his nickname.

Durante was born in Brooklyn, New York, the third of four children born to Italian-Americans Bartolomeo Durante and Rosa Durante. He served as an altar boy at New York City’s Saint Malachy’s Roman Catholic Church also known as the Actor’s Chapel. Durante dropped out of school in the eighth grade to become a full-time ragtime pianist. He first played with his cousin, whose name was also “Jimmy Durante.” It was a family act, but he was too professional for his cousin. He continued working the city’s piano bar circuit and earned the nickname “Ragtime Jimmy,” before he joined one of the first recognizable jazz bands in New York, the Original New Orleans Jazz Band. Durante was the only member not from New Orleans. His routine of breaking into a song to deliver a joke, with band or orchestra chord punctuation after each line, became a Durante trademark. In 1920, the group was renamed Jimmy Durante’s Jazz Band.

Durante became a vaudeville star and radio personality by the mid-1920s, with a trio called Clayton, Jackson and Durante. Lou Clayton and Eddie Jackson, Durante’s closest friends, often reunited professionally. Jackson and Durante appeared in the Cole Porter musical The New Yorkers, which opened on Broadway on December 8, 1930.

By 1934, he had a major record hit with his own novelty composition, Inka Dinka Doo. It became his theme song for the rest of his life. A year later, Durante starred on Broadway in the Billy Rose stage musical Jumbo, in which a police officer stopped him while leading a live elephant and asked him, “What are you doing with that elephant?” Durante’s reply, “What elephant?”, was a regular show-stopper. Durante also appeared on Broadway in Show Girl, Strike Me Pink, and Red, Hot and Blue .

25 Oct 2019
Radio, Television Permalink

Jimmie Fidler

October 25, 2019

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce honored Jimmie Fidler a Star on the World Famous Hollywood Walk of Fame, in the Category of Radio, on February 8, 1960, in Los Angeles. The star has been dedicated in the category of Radio and is located at 6128 Hollywood Boulevard.

Jimmie Fidler was an American columnist, journalist and radio and television personality. He wrote a Hollywood gossip column and was sometimes billed as “Jimmy” Fidler.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Fidler was a former Hollywood publicist who became a syndicated columnist with his “Jimmie Fidler in Hollywood” column in 187 outlets, including the New York Post and the Los Angeles Times. In 1933-34 his 15-minute NBC radio show, Hollywood on the Air, sponsored by Tangee lipstick, was broadcast from the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. He was regarded in Hollywood as a genuine threat to gossip queen Louella Parsons, especially after he scooped her in November 1935 on a major story about Clark Gable, an incident so embarrassing to Parsons that she lied about it in her autobiography.

Fidler interviewed film personalities for the Hollywood segments of Fox Movietone News. Such was Fidler’s influence that a negative comment by him could affect the box office drawing power of a star. According to Time, in January 1938 he was sued for libel by Constance Bennett for $250,000 after he reported she snubbed Patsy Kelly on a Hal Roach movie set and that studio workmen bought flowers for Kelly but none for Bennett.

In 1938 Fidler made a short MGM documentary film, Personality Parade, about actors making the change from silent films to talkies. It featured clips of more than 60 performers whose careers began in silent films.