25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Dr. Seuss

October 25, 2019

Theodor Seuss Geisel was an American writer and cartoonist most widely known for his children's books written under the pen names Dr. Seuss, Theo. LeSieg and, in one case, Rosetta Stone. He published over 60 children's books, which were often characterized by imaginative characters, rhyme, and frequent use of trisyllabic meter. His most celebrated books include the bestselling Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Horton Hears a Who!, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. Numerous adaptations of his work have been created, including eleven television specials, three feature films, and a Broadway musical

Geisel also worked as an illustrator for advertising campaigns, most notably for Flit and Standard Oil, and as a political cartoonist for PM, a New York City newspaper. During World War II, he worked in an animation department of the U.S Army, where he wrote Design for Death, a film that later won the 1947 Academy Award for Documentary Feature.

Read Across America is an initiative on reading created by the National Education Association. One part of the project is National Read Across America Day, an observance in the United States held on March 2, the birthday of Dr. Seuss.

Theodor Seuss Geisel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts to Henrietta and Theodor Robert Geisel. His father, the son of German immigrants, inherited the family brewery one month before the start of Prohibition and later supervised Springfield's public park system and zoo. Geisel was raised in the Lutheran faith and remained a member of the denomination his entire life.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording, Television Permalink

Doris Day

October 25, 2019

Doris Day is an American actress and singer, and has been an outspoken animal rights activist since her retirement from show business. Day’s entertainment career began in her late teens as a big band singer. In 1945 she had her first hit recording, “Sentimental Journey”, and, in 1948, appeared in her first film, Romance on the High Seas. During her entertainment career, she has appeared in thirty-nine films, recorded more than six-hundred-fifty songs, received an Academy Award nomination, won a Golden Globe and a Grammy Award, and, in 1989, received the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures.

As of 2009, Day was the top-ranking female box office star of all time and ranked sixth among the top ten box office performers. Doris Day was born in the Cincinnati, Ohio, neighborhood of Evanston to Alma Sophia Welz and Wilhelm Kappelhoff. All of her grandparents were German immigrants. Although the 1930 census lists her at age 7, she states to her biographer in “Doris Day: Her Own Story” that she was born in 1924. Specifically she states, ” named by my mother in honor of her favorite actress, Doris Kenyon, a silent screen star of that year 1924.” The youngest of three children, she had two brothers: Richard, who died before she was born, and Paul, a few years older.

Her parents’ marriage failed due to her father’s reported infidelity. Although the family was Roman Catholic, her parents divorced. After her second marriage, Day herself would become a Christian Scientist. Day was married four times.

25 Oct 2019
Live Performance Permalink

Doris Roberts

October 25, 2019

In memory of Walk Of Famer Doris Roberts, a memorial wreath was placed on her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Tuesday, April 19th, 2016 at 10 a.m. PDT. The star in the category of Live Performance is located at 7021 Hollywood Boulevard. “Everybody loves Doris Roberts! RIP ♡ ” Ana Martinez, Producer of the Hollywood Walk of Fame signed the card on behalf of the Hollywood Historic Trust and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

Doris May Roberts is an Emmy award-winning American character actress of film, stage and TV. With a seven-decade career, she is most widely known for playing Marie Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond from 1996–2005.

Roberts was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Larry and Ann Meltzer. Her father deserted the family when Roberts was a child, and her mother raised Doris with the help of her Russian Jewish parents in The Bronx, New York. Her stepfather was Chester H. Roberts.

Roberts's acting career began in 1952 with a role on the TV series Studio One. She also appeared on such programs as The Naked City, Way Out, Ben Casey, and The Defenders. In 1961, she made her film debut in Something Wild starring Carroll Baker. In 1968, she appeared in A Lovely Way to Die and No Way to Treat a Lady. She also appeared in the 1970 cult film The Honeymoon Killers starring Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco. In 1971, Roberts appeared in three films, Otto Preminger's Such Good Friends, Alan Arkin's Little Murders, and Elaine May's A New Leaf. In an interview with the Archive of American Television, Rue McClanahan confirmed that in 1972 she was approached by Norman Lear during the taping of an All In The Family episode to be a late replacement for Roberts, who was originally intended for the role of Vivian in Maude. She acted in a Walter Matthau vehicle again in 1974's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. In 1978, she appeared in a film about John F. Kennedy's assassination, Ruby and Oswald, in which she played Jack Ruby's sister. She also appeared very briefly in The Rose, as the mother of the title character. Since then, she has usually been cast as a mother or mother-in-law. An example of this was when she played newsstand owner, Theresa Falco, mother of Donna Pescow on Angie. After Angie was cancelled, she appeared as Mildred Krebs on Remington Steele, which starred Pierce Brosnan and Stephanie Zimbalist. After that show's cancellation, she starred in the TV movie remake of If It's Tuesday, It Still Must Be Belgium and the National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation with Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo. She also appeared on Alice, playing the mother of the title character, the wife of a man who secretly went to a sex surrogate on Barney Miller, as well as Danny Tanner's mother on Full House. She played mother Flo Flotsky on four episodes of Soap, and she was lonely Aunt Edna on the ABC sitcom Step by Step. She also showed up on an episode of Walker Texas Ranger.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Dorothy Arzner

October 25, 2019

Dorothy Arzner was an American film director. Her directorial career in feature films spanned from the late 1920s into the early 1940s, a time period in which there were very few?if any?other women working in the field.

Born in San Francisco, California, Arzner grew up in Los Angeles, where her father owned a restaurant frequented by many Hollywood celebrities. After finishing high school, she enrolled at the University of Southern California with hopes of becoming a doctor. During World War I, she left school to work overseas in the ambulance corps. By the time the war ended, she decided against returning to her medical studies and, after a visit to a movie studio, decided to pursue a career as a film director.

Through connections with director William C. DeMille, Dorothy got a job at Paramount Pictures. Starting out as a script writer, she was promoted to film editor within six months and quickly mastered the job. Her first assignment as an editor was in 1922 for the renowned classic Blood and Sand, starring Rudolph Valentino. She was soon receiving accolades for the high quality of her work.

Impressed by her technique, director James Cruze employed her as a writer and editor for several of his films. Arzner had achieved a great deal of clout through this, along with her work on over fifty other films at Paramount. She eventually threatened to move to rival Columbia Studios unless given a directorial position. Paramount conceded in 1927, putting her in charge of the film Fashions for Women, which became a financial success.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Dorothy Dalton

October 25, 2019

Dorothy Dalton was an American silent film actress and stage personality who worked her way from a stock company to a movie career. Beginning in 1910, Dalton was a player in stock companies in Chicago and Holyoke, Massachusetts. She joined the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corporation vaudeville circuits. By 1914 she was in Hollywood.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Dalton made her movie debut in 1914 in Pierre of the Plains, co-starring Edgar Selwyn, followed by the lead role in Across the Pacific that same year. In 1915, she appeared with William S. Hart in The Disciple. This production came before she left Triangle Film Corporation and was signed to Thomas Harper Ince Studios. Ince’s company was operative from 1919 until his death in 1924. With Ince, she played in The Price Mark and Love Letters, both co-starring William Conklin. Dalton also performed with Rudolph Valentino in Moran of the Lady Letty, and with H.B. Warner in The Flame of the Yukon and The Vagabond Prince. Dalton’s stage career included performances as Chrysis in Aphrodite by Morris Gest in 1920 and on Broadway in The Country Wife.

Dalton was first married to actor Lew Cody. The couple divorced in 1915. She then married theatrical producer Arthur Hammerstein in 1924. He was the uncle of Oscar Hammerstein II, the lyricist and the son of Oscar Hammerstein I. After her second marriage, Dalton acted infrequently. Arthur Hammerstein died in 1955.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording Permalink

Dorothy Dandridge

October 25, 2019

Dorothy Jean Dandridge was an American actress and popular singer, and was the first African American to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.

She performed as a vocalist in venues such as the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater. In 1954, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Carmen Jones, and, in 1959, was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for Porgy and Bess. In 1999, she was the subject of the HBO biopic Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. She has been recognized on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Dandridge was married and divorced twice, first to dancer and entertainer Harold Nicholas and then to Jack Denison. Dandridge died of an accidental drug overdose.

Dorothy Dandridge was born on November

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording Permalink

Dorothy Gish

October 25, 2019

Dorothy Elizabeth Gish was an American actress, and the younger sister of actress Lillian Gish.

The Gish sisters’ mother, Mary Robinson McConnell “Gish”, supported the family after her husband, James Leigh Gish, abandoned the family. When they were old enough, Dorothy and Lillian were brought into their mother’s act, and they also modeled. In 1912, their childhood friend, actress Mary Pickford, introduced them to director D.W. Griffith, and the sisters began acting at the Biograph Studios. Dorothy and Lillian Gish both debuted in Griffith’s An Unseen Enemy. Dorothy would go on to star in over 100 short films and features, many of them with Lillian.

Linda Arvidson, Griffith’s wife remembered in her autobiography, When The Movies Were Young

In Hearts of the World, a film about World War I and the devastation of France, Dorothy found her first foothold, striking a personal hit in a comedy role that captured the essence of her sense of humor. As the ?little disturber?, a street singer, her performance was the comic highlight of the film, and her characterization in this role catapulted her into a career as a star of comedy films.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Dorothy Kilgallen

October 25, 2019

Dorothy Mae Kilgallen was an American journalist and television game show panelist known nationally for her coverage of the Sam Sheppard trial, her syndicated newspaper column, The Voice of Broadway, and her role as panelist on the television game show What’s My Line?.

Born in Chicago, Kilgallen was the daughter of Hearst newspaperman James Lawrence Kilgallen and his wife Mae Ahern. The family moved from Chicago to Wyoming, Indiana and back to Chicago before finally settling in New York City. After two semesters at The College of New Rochelle, Kilgallen left for a job as a reporter for the New York Evening Journal, which was owned and operated by the Hearst Corporation.

In 1936, Kilgallen competed with two other New York newspaper reporters in a race around the world using means of transportation only available to the general public. She was the only female contestant and she came in second. She described the event in her book Girl Around The World and penned the screenplay for a 1937 movie, Fly Away Baby, starring Glenda Farrell, as the Kilgallen-inspired character. During a stint living in Hollywood in 1936 and 1937, Kilgallen wrote a daily column that could only be read in New York that nonetheless provoked a libel suit from Constance Bennett, “who in the early thirties had been the highest paid performer in motion pictures,” according to a Kilgallen biography, “but who was experiencing a temporary decline in popular appeal.”

Back in New York in 1938, Kilgallen began writing a daily column, the Voice of Broadway, for Hearst’s New York Journal American, which the corporation created by merging the Evening Journal with the American. The column, which she wrote until her death in 1965, featured mostly New York show business news and gossip, but also ventured into other topics like politics and organized crime. The column was eventually syndicated to 146 papers via King Features Syndicate.

25 Oct 2019
Recording, Television Permalink

Dorothy Kirsten

October 25, 2019

Dorothy Kirsten was an American operatic soprano.

Kirsten’s mother was an organist and music teacher, her grandfather was a conductor, and her great-aunt, Catherine Hayes, was also an opera singer. She left high school at age 16 and worked for the Singer Corporation sewing machine company and for New Jersey Bell, studying voice in her spare time. Her teacher, Louis Darnay, eventually employed her as a secretary and maid.

By the late 1930s she had an ongoing professional career as a radio singer on WINS, a member of the Kate Smith Chorus, and as a vocalist for pop orchestras. She mentored under Grace Moore from 1938, who had her study in Rome with Astolfo Pescia. Her time in Europe was cut short by the outbreak of World War II, and she returned in 1939, debuting at the New York World’s Fair. Roles followed at the Chicago Grand Opera Company, San Carlo Opera Company, New York City Opera, San Francisco Opera, and New York Philharmonic. Her radio program “Keepsakes” ran for a year in 1943-44.

Kirsten joined the roster of principle sopranos at the Philadelphia La Scala Opera Company in 1943 and spent much of her time performing there through 1947. She made her debut with the company in an out of town performance at the Syria Mosque in Pittsburg on May 18, 1943 as Mimì in Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme with Nino Martini as Rodolfo, Carlo Morelli as Marcello, and Armand Balendonck conducting. In the 1943-1944 PLSOC season at the Academy of Music she portrayed Mimì many times and sang Nedda in Pagliacci with Giovanni Martinelli as Canio. She also toured with the company to Detroit in October 1943, singing Mimì to Armand Tokatyan’s Rodolfo. Kirsten opened the PLSOC’s 1944-1945 season singing Micaëla in Georges Bizet’s Carmen with Bruna Castagna in the tile role. She also toured with company to Cleveland singing Mimì. In February 1946 she traveled with PLSOC to Washington D.C. to perform Marguerite in Charles Gounod’s Faust. In December 1949 she recorded Manon Lescaut with the world renowned tenor Jussi Björling. Her final year performing with the PLSOC was the 1946-1947 season, portraying Cio-cio-san in Madama Butterfly and Juliette in Roméo et Juliette.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Radio, Recording Permalink

Dorothy Lamour

October 25, 2019

Dorothy Lamour was an American film actress. She is probably best-remembered for appearing in the Road to. movies, a series of successful comedies co-starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.

Lamour was born Mary Leta Dorothy Slaton in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of Carmen Louise and John Watson Slaton, both of whom were waiters. Lamour had French Louisianan, Spanish and Irish descent. Her parents’ marriage lasted only a few years, with her mother re-marrying to Clarence Lambour, and Dorothy took his last name. The marriage also ended in divorce when Dorothy was a teenager. The family finances were so desperate that when she was 15, she forged her mother’s name to a document that authorized her to drop out of school. Later, however, she did go to a secretarial school that did not require her to have a high school diploma. She regarded herself as an excellent typist and usually typed her own letters, even after she became quite wealthy.

After she won the 1931 Miss New Orleans beauty contest, she and her mother moved to Chicago, where Lamour earned $17 a week as an elevator operator for the Marshall Field department store on State Street. She had no training as a singer but was persuaded by a friend to try out for a female vocalist’s spot with Herbie Kay, a band leader who had a national radio show called “The Yeast Foamers”, apparently because it was sponsored by Fleischmann’s Yeast.

She left Kay’s group and moved to Manhattan, where Rudy Vallee, then a popular singer, helped her get a singing job at a popular night club, El Morocco. She later worked at 1 Fifth Avenue, a cabaret where she met Louis B. Mayer, the Hollywood studio chief. It was Mayer who eventually arranged for her to have a screen test, which led to her Paramount contract in 1935.