Akim Mikhailovich Tamiroff, Tiflis, Russian Empire was a Russian actor. He won the first Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor. He was born of Armenian ethnicity, trained at the Moscow Art Theatre drama school. He arrived in the US in 1923 on a tour with a troupe of actors and decided to stay. Tamiroff managed to develop a career in Hollywood despite his thick Russian accent.

Tamiroff’s film debut came in 1932 in an uncredited role in Okay, America!. He performed in several more uncredited roles until 1935, when he co-starred in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer. The following year, he was cast in the title role in The General Died at Dawn, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He appeared in the 1937 musical High, Wide, and Handsome and the 1938 proto-noir Dangerous to Know opposite Anna May Wong, frequently singled out as his best role.

In the following decade, he appeared in such films as The Buccaneer, The Great McGinty, The Corsican Brothers, Tortilla Flat, Five Graves to Cairo, His Butler’s Sister, For Whom the Bell Tolls, for which he received another Oscar nomination, and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. In later years, Tamiroff appeared in Ocean’s Eleven, Topkapi and had a long collaboration with Orson Welles including Touch of Evil, Mr Arkadin, The Trial and Welles unfinished version of Don Quixote where he played Sancho Panza.

While Tamiroff may not be a household name now, his malapropistic performance as the boss in The Great McGinty inspired the cartoon character Boris Badenov, the male half of the villainous husband-and-wife team Boris and Natasha on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. He was also spoofed in a 1969 episode of the TV show H.R. Pufnstuf entitled “The Stand-in” in which a frog named “Akim Toadanoff” directs a movie on Living Island.

Al Christie was a Canadian-born motion picture director, producer and screenwriter.

Born Alfred Ernest Christie, in London, Ontario, Canada, he was one of a number of Canadian pioneers in early Hollywood who made their way to Hollywood, California, attracted by the newly developing motion picture business. Al Christie began his career in 1909 working for David Horsley’s Nestor film company in Bayonne, New Jersey. In 1910, at Horsley’s Centaur Film Company, Christie began turning out one single reel of a Mutt and Jeff comedy picture every week. The following year, Al went to the West Coast to head up Nestor Studios for Horsley. This operation was the first ever movie studio to be built in Hollywood It opened October 27, 1911. Al Christie then formed a partnership with his brother Charles to form Christie Film Company which lasted until 1933 when the company went into receivership.

Andrew Craddock Lyles is an American movie producer for Paramount Pictures who produced westerns in the 1950s and 1960s, and has been a major player in Hollywood for the past 78 years.

Lyles was born in Jacksonville, Florida. He remembers seeing the film Wings on his 10th birthday at a theater owned by Paramount in his native Jacksonville, FL. “I just fell in love with the picture and the people who made it. I had a great admiration for Adolph Zukor .” Lyles quickly went to the theater manager, asked for a job, and began distributing bumper stickers and handbills, working his way up to usher in three months.

Working at the theater created an opportunity to meet Zukor himself four years later when the studio head came to visit the theater. Lyles says he was certain that his brief introduction to Zukor as an adolescent would ultimately lead to working at the studio in Hollywood. Zukor told Lyles to finish high school before pursuing his Hollywood dreams. Having already gotten a job at a Paramount theater, the young Lyles was determined to work at the actual Paramount Studios lot that he began writing letters to Zukor every week.

Fate also intervened when Lyles introduced himself to Gary Cooper when the star came to Jacksonville on his way to Miami. Lyles told him about his weekly letters, although he hadn’t yet received any response. The star gave the boy a note to include in his next letter: “I am looking forward to A.C. Lyles being with us at the studio.” That led to a response from Zukor’s secretary, and Lyles began writing letters to her as well.

Adela Rogers St. Johns was an American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. She wrote a number of screenplays for silent movies and, late in life, appeared with other early twentieth-century figures as one of the ‘witnesses’ in Warren Beatty’s Reds, but she is best remembered for her groundbreaking exploits as a “girl reporter” during the 1920s and 1930s.

St. Johns was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of a prominent Los Angeles criminal lawyer, Earl Rogers, who was a friend of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. She obtained her first job at age 19 working as a reporter for Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. She reported on crime, politics, society, and sports news before leaving the newspaper in the early 1920s. St. Johns then became noted for interviewing movie stars for Photoplay magazine. She also wrote short stories for Cosmopolitan, The Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines and finished nine of her 13 screenplays before returning to reporting for Hearst newspapers.

Writing in a distinctive, emotional style, St. Johns reported on, among other subjects, the controversial Jack Dempsey?Gene Tunney ?long-count? fight in 1927, the treatment of the poor during the Great Depression, and the 1935 trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for kidnapping and murdering the son of Charles Lindbergh. In the mid-1930s she moved to Washington, D.C., to report on national politics. Her coverage of the assassination of Senator Huey Long in 1935, the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936, the Democratic National Convention of 1940, and other major stories made her one of the best-known reporters of the day. St. Johns again left newspaper work in 1948 in order to write books, and to teach at a series of universities.

In 1962 she published Final Verdict, a biography of her father Earl Rogers. The book was adapted for a TNT television film in 1991; Olivia Burnette portrayed the young Nora Rogers.

Adolphe Jean Menjou was an American actor. His career spanned both silent films and talkies, appearing in such films as The Sheik, A Woman of Paris, Morocco, and A Star is Born. He was nominated for an Academy Award for The Front Page in 1931.

Menjou was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to a French father and an Irish mother from Galway. He was raised Catholic and attended the Culver Military Academy, graduating from Cornell University with a degree in engineering. Attracted to the vaudeville stage, he made his movie debut in 1916 in The Blue Envelope Mystery. During World War I, he served as a captain in the ambulance service.

Returning from the war, he became a star in such films as The Sheik and The Three Musketeers. When he starred in 1923’s A Woman of Paris, he solidified the image of a well-dressed man-about-town. Menjou was famous for wearing fine clothing in many of his films. His career stalled with the coming of talkies, but in 1930, he starred in Morocco, with Marlene Dietrich. He was nominated for an Academy Award for The Front Page. In 1947, Menjou cooperated with the House Committee on Un-American Activities in its hunt for Communists in Hollywood. Menjou was a leading member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a group formed to oppose Communist influence in Hollywood. Other members included John Wayne, Barbara Stanwyck and her husband, actor Robert Taylor.