Irving Reis, born May 7, 1906, in New York City ? died July 3, 1953, in Woodland Hills, California, was a radio program producer & director, and a film director.
Irving Thalberg
Irving Grant Thalberg was an American film producer during the early years of motion pictures. He was called “The Boy Wonder” for his youth and his extraordinary ability to select the right scripts, choose the right actors, gather the best production staff, and make very profitable films.
Thalberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, to German Jewish immigrant parents. He had a bad heart due to childhood rheumatic fever and was plagued with other ailments all his life. Upon completing high school, he was employed by Universal Pictures’ New York office, where he worked as personal secretary to legendary studio founder Carl Laemmle, the boss of Universal Studios. Irving Thalberg was bright and persistent, and by age 21 was executive in charge of production at Universal City, the studio’s California production site.
He quickly established his tenacity as he battled with Erich von Stroheim over the length of Foolish Wives, and controlled every aspect of the production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In 1924, he left Universal for Louis B. Mayer Productions, which shortly thereafter linked up with Metro Pictures Corporation to become Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Thalberg became the merged studio’s head of production.
The Big Parade, directed by King Vidor, was Thalberg’s first major triumph at MGM. Until 1932, when he suffered a major heart attack, he supervised every important MGM studio production, and combined careful pre-production groundwork with prerelease sneak previews which measured audience response. He also had full authority to reedit any MGM film.
Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor. One of the most acclaimed musicians of the late 19th century and 20th century, he was renowned for his brilliant intensity, his restless perfectionism, his phenomenal ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his photographic memory. As music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra he became a household name through his radio and television broadcasts and many recordings of the operatic and symphonic repertoire. He is widely considered to have been one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century.
Toscanini was born in Parma, Emilia-Romagna, and won a scholarship to the local music conservatory, where he studied the cello. He joined the orchestra of an opera company, with which he toured South America in 1886. While presenting Aida in Rio de Janeiro, Leopoldo Miguez, the locally hired conductor, reached the summit of a two-month escalating conflict with the performers due to his rather poor command of the work, to the point that the singers went on strike and forced the company’s impresario to seek a substitute conductor. But on the evening of June 30, 1886 maestro Carlo Superti found himself booed by the audience, now prompted by the disgruntled Miguez. Yet another last-minute substitute conductor, Aristide Venturi, could not overcome a hostile, hollering public, and was forced to leave the podium. In desperation, the singers suggested the name of their assistant Chorus Master, who knew the whole opera by heart. Although he had no conducting experience, Toscanini was forcibly persuaded by the musicians to take up the baton at 9:15 P.M., discarded the score, and led a sensational performance of the two-and-a-half hour opera completely from memory. The public was taken by surprise, at first by the youth and sheer aplomb of this unknown conductor, then by his solid mastery. The result was astounding acclaim. For the rest of that season Toscanini conducted eighteen operas, all with absolute success. Thus began his career as a conductor, at age 19.
Upon returning to Italy, Toscanini set out on a dual path for some time. He continued to conduct, his first appearance in Italy being at the Teatro Carignano in Turin, on November 4, 1886, in the world premiere of the revised version of Alfredo Catalani’s Edmea. This was the beginning of Toscanini’s life-long friendship and championing of Catalani; he even named his first daughter Wally after the heroine of Catalani’s opera La Wally.
However, he also returned to his chair in the cello section, and participated as cellist in the world premiere of Verdi’s Otello under the composer’s supervision. Verdi, who habitually complained that conductors never seemed interested in directing his scores the way he had written them, was impressed by reports from Arrigo Boito about Toscanini’s ability to interpret his scores. The composer was also impressed when Toscanini consulted him personally about the Te Deum, suggesting an allargando where it was not set out in the score. Verdi said that he had left it out for fear that “certain interpreters would have exaggerated the marking”.
Irwin Winkler
Irwin Winkler is an American film producer and director. He is the producer or director of 50 major motion pictures, dating back to 1967’s Double Trouble, starring Elvis Presley. The fourth film he produced, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, starring Jane Fonda, was nominated for nine Academy Awards. In 1976, he won an Oscar for Best Picture for Rocky. As a producer, he has been nominated for Best Picture for three other films: Raging Bull, The Right Stuff, and Goodfellas.
Winkler was born in New York, New York, to father Sol Winkler and mother Anna Winkler. He received a BA from New York University in 1955, after serving in the U.S. Army.
In partnership with Robert Chartoff from the late 1960s, Irwin Winkler produced an impressive array of modern American gems, beginning with their first effort, John Boorman’s taut thriller Point Blank, largely ignored in its day but now regarded as a top film of the time. Adding Sydney Pollack to their production team for a one-shot-deal, they garnered critical acclaim for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. Their next film, The Strawberry Statement, won the Jury Prize at Cannes but Chartoff and Winkler roared to the top with Rocky, which earned the Academy Award as Best Picture. Subsequently, the producing duo picked up Best Picture Oscar nominations for Raging Bull and The Right Stuff, their last project together before Winkler launched his solo career with the disappointing Revolution. Winkler produced such noteworthy features as Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight and back-to-back Costa-Gavras films, Betrayed and Music Box, before receiving another Best Picture Oscar nomination for Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas. He also returned to the franchise to oversee Rocky IV and Rocky V, continuing the association forged with Sylvester Stallone on the first three Chartoff-Winkler productions.
Isaac Stern
Isaac Stern was a Ukrainian-born violinist. He was renowned for his recordings and for discovering new musical talent.
Isaac Stern was born into a Jewish family in Kremenetz, Ukraine. He was fourteen months old when his family moved to San Francisco. He received his first music lessons from his mother before enrolling at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1928 where he studied until 1931 before going on to study privately with Louis Persinger. He returned to the San Francisco Conservatory to study with Naoum Blinder for five years. He said he owed the most to Blinder. At his public début on February 18, 1936, aged 15, he played Saint-Saëns' Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor with the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of Pierre Monteux. Reflecting on his background Stern once memorably quipped that cultural exchanges between the US and Soviet Russia were simple affairs: "They send us their Jews from Odessa, and we send them our Jews from Odessa."
Within musical circles, Stern became renowned both for his recordings and for championing certain younger players. Among his discoveries were cellists Yo-Yo Ma and Jian Wang, and violinists Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman. He also played a major role in saving New York City's Carnegie Hall from demolition in 1960, which later had its main auditorium named in his honor.
Among his many recordings, Stern recorded concertos by Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, and Vivaldi and modern works by Barber, Bartók, Stravinsky, Bernstein and Dutilleux. The Dutilleux concerto, entitled L'arbre des songes was a 1985 commission by Stern himself. He also dubbed actors' violin-playing in several films, one of which was Fiddler on the Roof.
Imogene Coca
Imogene Fernandez de Coca was an American comic actress best known for her role opposite Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows. Starting out in vaudeville as a child acrobat, she studied ballet and wished to have a serious career in music and dance, graduating to decades of stage musical revues, cabaret and summer stock. Finally in her 40s she began a celebrated career as a comedienne in television, starring in six series and guesting on successful television programs from the 1940s to the 1990s.
She was nominated for five Emmy awards for Your Show of Shows, winning Best Actress in 1951 and singled out for a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting in 1953. Coca was also nominated for a Tony Award in 1978 for On the Twentieth Century and received a sixth Emmy nomination at the age of 80 for an episode of Moonlighting.
Though possessing a rubbery face capable of the broadest expressions?Life magazine compared her to Beatrice Lillie and Charlie Chaplin, and described her characterizations as taking “people or situations suspended in their own precarious balance between dignity and absurdity, and push them over the cliff with one single, pointed gesture”?the magazine noted a “particularly high-brow critic” as observing, “The trouble with most comedians who try to do satire is that they are essentially brash, noisy and indelicate people who have to use a sledge hammer to smash a butterfly. Miss Coca, on the other hand, is the timid woman who, when aroused, can beat a tiger to death with a feather.”
In addition to vaudeville, cabaret, theater and television, she appeared in film, voiced children’s cartoons and was even featured in an MTV video by a New Wave band. Though her fame began late, she worked well into her 80s. Twice a widow, Coca died in 2001.
Ina Claire
Ina Claire was an American stage and film actress.
Born Ina Fagan in Washington, D.C., Claire began her career appearing in vaudeville. She performed on Broadway in the musicals Jumping Jupiter and The Quaker Girl and Lady Luxury, and starred on Broadway in plays by some of the leading comic dramatists of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, including the roles of Jerry Lamarr in Avery Hopwood’s The Gold Diggers, Mrs. Cheyney in Frederick Lonsdale’s The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, Lady George Grayston in W. Somerset Maugham’s Our Betters, and Enid Fuller in George Kelly’s The Fatal Weakness.
Her last stage appearance was as Lady Elizabeth Mulhammer in T. S. Eliot’s The Confidential Clerk. She was particularly identified with the high comedies of S. N. Behrman, and created the female leads in three of his plays: Biography, End of Summer, and The Talley Method. of her, Behrman wrote, “Her readings were translucent, her stage presence encompassing. The flick of an intonation deflated pomposity. She never missed a nuance.” Critic J. Brooks Atkinson praised Claire for her “refulgent comic intelligence.”
Ingrid Bergman
Ingrid Bergman was a Swedish actress noted for her starring roles in American films. She won three Academy Awards, two Emmy Awards, and the Tony Award for Best Actress. She is ranked as the fourth greatest female star of American cinema of all time by the American Film Institute. She is best remembered for her role as Ilsa Lund in Casablanca, a World War II drama co-starring Humphrey Bogart.
Before becoming a star in American films, she had already been a leading actress in Swedish, French, German, Italian, and British films. Her first introduction to American audiences came with her starring role in the English remake of Intermezzo in 1939. In America, she brought to the screen a “Nordic freshness and vitality”, along with extreme beauty and intelligence, and according to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, she quickly became “the ideal of American womanhood” and one of Hollywood’s greatest leading actresses.
Her producer David O. Selznick, who called her “the most completely conscientious actress” he had ever worked with, gave her a seven-year acting contract, thereby assuring her continual stardom. A few of her other starring roles, besides Casablanca, included For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gaslight, The Bells of St. Mary’s, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, Notorious, and Under Capricorn, and the independent production, Joan of Arc. In 1950, after a decade of stardom in American films, she starred in the Italian film Stromboli, which led to a love affair with director Roberto Rossellini while they were both already married. The affair created a scandal that forced her to return to Europe until 1956, when she made a successful Hollywood comeback in Anastasia, for which she won her second Academy Award, as well as the forgiveness of her fans. Many of her personal and film documents can be seen in the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives.
Irene Dunne
Irene Dunne was an American film actress and singer of the 1930s and 1940s. Dunne was nominated five times for the Academy Award for Best Actress, for her performances in Cimarron, Theodora Goes Wild, The Awful Truth, Love Affair and I Remember Mama. Born Irene Marie Dunn in Louisville, Kentucky to Joseph Dunn, a steamboat inspector for the United States government, and Adelaide Henry, a concert pianist/music teacher from Newport, Kentucky, Irene Dunn would later write "No triumph of either my stage or screen career has ever rivalled the excitement of trips down the Mississippi on the river boats with my father." She was only eleven when her father died in 1909. She saved all of his letters and often remembered and lived by what he told her the night before he died: "Happiness is never an accident. It is the prize we get when we choose wisely from life's great stores."
After her father's death, she, her mother and younger brother Charles moved to her mother's hometown of Madison, Indiana. Dunn's mother taught her to play the piano as a very small girl. According to Dunn, "Music was as natural as breathing in our house." Dunne was raised as a devout Roman Catholic. Nicknamed "Dunnie," she took piano and voice lessons, sang in local churches and high school plays before her graduation in 1916.
She earned a diploma to teach art, but took a chance on a contest and won a prestigious scholarship to the Chicago Musical College. She had hopes of becoming an opera singer, but did not pass an audition with the Metropolitan Opera Company.
Irene Hervey
Irene Hervey was an American television and film actress.
Born Beulah Irene Herwick in Venice, California, she began her acting career after being introduced to a casting agent from MGM. After a successful screen test, she was signed by the studio and made her screen debut in the 1933 film The Stranger’s Return, opposite Lionel Barrymore. Though signed by MGM, Hervey was loaned out by the studio and appeared in several films including United Artists’ The Count of Monte Cristo and With Words and Music, released by Grand National Films Inc.
In 1936, Hervey left MGM and signed with Universal Pictures. While at Universal, Hervey appeared in The League of Frightened Men and Destry Rides Again with Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart.
In 1943, Hervey was seriously injured in a car accident and was forced to retire from acting for five years.