Young Frank Freeman was an American film company executive for Paramount Pictures. Freeman graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1910. In addition to his work with Paramount, he also worked with banking, higher education, and athletics.
Zachary Scott
Zachary Scott was an American actor, most notable for his roles as villains and “mystery men”.
Born in Austin, Texas, he was a distant cousin of George Washington, and his grandfather had been a very successful cattle rancher.
Scott intended to be a doctor like his father, but after attending the University of Texas for a while, he decided to switch to acting. He signed on as a cabin boy on a freighter which took him to England, where he acted in repertory theatre for a while, before he returned to Austin, and began acting in local theater.
Alfred Lunt discovered Scott in Texas and convinced him to move to New York City, where he appeared on Broadway. Jack Warner saw him in a performance, and signed him to appear in a movie, The Mask of Dimitrios, in 1944.
Yakima Canutt
Yakima Canutt, also known as Yak Canutt, was an American rodeo rider, actor, stuntman and action director.
Born Enos Edward Canutt in the Snake River Hills, near Colfax, Washington; he was one of five children of John Lemuel Canutt, a rancher, and Nettie Ellen Stevens. He grew up in eastern Washington on a ranch near Penawawa Creek, founded by his grandfather and operated by his father, who also served a term in the state legislature. His formal education was limited to an elementary school in Green Lake, Washington, then a suburb of Seattle. He gained the education for his life’s work on the family ranch, where he learned to hunt, trap, shoot, and ride.
He broke a vicious wild broncho when only a boy of eleven. As a sixteen-year-old he started bronc riding at the Whitman County Fair held in Colfax in 1912 and age 17 he won the title of “The World’s Best Bronco Buster”. Canutt started rodeo riding professionally and gained a good reputation as a bronc rider, bulldogger and as an all-around cowboy. It was at the 1914 Pendleton Round-Up, Pendleton, Oregon where he got his nickname “Yakima” when a newspaper caption misidentified him. “Yakima Canutt may be the most famous person NOT from Yakima Washington” says Elizabeth Gibson, author of Yakima, Washington. Winning a second place at the 1915 Pendleton Round-Up brought attention from show promoters, who invited him to compete around the country.
During the 1916 rodeo season, he became interested in Kitty Wilks, who had won the Lady’s Bronc-Riding Championship a couple of times. They decided to get married at a show in Kalispell, Montana; he was twenty-one and she was twenty-eight. The marriage was short-lived, and the couple divorced in 1919. While bulldogging in Idaho, Canutt’s mouth and upper lip were torn up very badly by a bull’s horn; but after a dozen or so stitches, Canutt returned to the competition. It wasn’t until a year later that a plastic surgeon could correct the injury.
Xavier Cugat
Xavier Cugat was a Spanish American bandleader who spent his formative years in Havana, Cuba. A trained violinist and arranger, he was a key personality in the spread of Latin music in United States popular music. He was also a cartoonist and a successful businessman. In New York, his was the resident orchestra at the Waldorf-Astoria before and after World War II.
Cugat was born as Francesc d’Asís Xavier Cugat Mingall de Bru i Deulofeu in Girona, Spain. His family emigrated to Cuba when Xavier was five. He was trained as a classical violinist and played with the Orchestra of the Teatro Nacional in Havana. On 6 July 1915, Cugat and his family arrived in New York as immigrant passengers on board the S.S. Havana.
Cugat was married five times. His first marriage was to Rita Montaner ; his second was to Carmen Castillo ; his third to Lorraine Allen ; his fourth to singer Abbe Lane ; and his fifth to Spanish guitarist and comic actress Charo. His last marriage was the first in Caesars Palace on the Las Vegas Strip.
Entering the world of show business, he played with a band called The Gigolos during the tango craze. Later, he went to work for the Los Angeles Times as a cartoonist. Cugat’s caricatures were later nationally syndicated. His older brother, Francis, was an artist of some note, having painted the famous cover art for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby.
Yehudi Menuhin
Yehudi Menuhin, Baron Menuhin, OM, KBE was a Jewish American violinist and conductor who spent most of his performing career in the United Kingdom. He was born to Jewish parents in the United States, but became a citizen of Switzerland in 1970, and of the United Kingdom in 1985. He is commonly considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest violin virtuosi.
Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York City, New York, to Bielorussian Jewish parents from what is now Belarus. His sisters were the concert pianist and human rights worker Hephzibah Menuhin and the pianist, painter, and poet Yaltah Menuhin. Through his father Moshe Menuhin, a former rabbinical student and anti-Zionist writer, Menuhin was descended from a distinguished rabbinical dynasty.
Menuhin began violin instruction at age four under violinist Sigmund Anker; his parents had wanted Louis Persinger to be his teacher, but Persinger refused. He displayed extraordinary talents at an early age. His first solo violin performance was at the age of seven with the San Francisco Symphony in 1923. Persinger then agreed to take Menuhin as a student. When the Menuhins went to Paris, Persinger suggested Yehudi go to his own teacher, Eugène Ysaÿe. He did have one lesson with Ysaÿe, but did not like his method or the fact that he was very old. Instead, he went to the Romanian composer and violinist George Enescu, after which he made several recordings with his sister Hephzibah. He was also a student of Adolf Busch. In 1929 he played in Berlin, under Bruno Walter’s baton, three concerti by Bach, Brahms and Beethoven. In 1932, he recorded Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto in B minor for HMV in London, with the composer himself conducting, and between 1934 and 1936 he made the first integral recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin.
Yehudi Menuhin performed for allied soldiers during World War II, and went with the composer Benjamin Britten to perform for inmates of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, after its liberation in April 1945. He returned to Germany in 1947 to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler as an act of reconciliation, becoming the first Jewish musician to do so following the Holocaust. He said to critics within the Jewish community that he wanted to rehabilitate Germany’s music and spirit. After building early success on richly romantic and tonally opulent performances, he experienced considerable physical and artistic difficulties caused by overwork during the war as well as unfocused and unstructured early training. Careful practice and study combined with meditation and yoga helped him overcome many of these problems. His profound and considered musical interpretations are nearly universally acclaimed. When he finally resumed recording, he was known for practising by deconstructing music phrases one note at a time.
Yvonne De Carlo
Yvonne De Carlo was a Canadian-born American film and television actress, dancer and singer. She began her film career by starring in small film roles for Columbia Studios, Paramount Pictures, Universal International.
During her six-decade career, her most prolific appearances in film came in the 1940s and 1950s and included her best-known film roles, such as of Anna Marie in Salome Where She Danced, Anna in Criss Cross, Sephora the wife of Moses in The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston, and Amantha Starr in Band of Angels with Clark Gable. As her film career faded, De Carlo accepted an offer to play Lily Munster for CBS television series The Munsters, alongside with Fred Gwynne and Al Lewis.
The daughter of an aspiring actress, Marie De Carlo, and a salesman, William Middleton, De Carlo was born as Margaret Yvonne Middleton in Vancouver, British Columbia, and nicknamed ‘Peggy’. “I was named Margaret Yvonne – Margaret because my mother was very fond of one of the derivatives of the name. She was fascinated at the time by the movie star Baby Peggy, and I suppose she wanted a Baby Peggy of her own.” Her maternal grandfather, Michael de Carlo, was Sicilian-born, and her maternal grandmother, Margaret Purvis, was Scottish-born. Margaret’s mother ran away from home, when she was 16 to become a ballerina, after a couple of years working as a shop girl, she was finally married in 1924. Little Peggy was three years old when her father abandoned the family. She lived with her grandparents. By the time she entered grade school, she found that her strong singing voice brought her the attention she longed for. Although her mother recognized Peggy’s singing talent, she had already decided that her daughter would be a dancer. As a teenager Peggy was taken by her mother to Hollywood where she enrolled her in dancing school, also attending Le Conte Middle School in Hollywood. Margaret also lived in a downtown apartment, with her mother, where Marie took on odd jobs such as a waitress. Mother and daughter were uprooted when their visas expired, she would have to make three trips, the first from Los Angeles to Vancouver, within a few years, where they returned, unable to find work.
She attended and dropped out of Vancouver’s now-defunct King Edward High School, to focus more on her dance studies. She then attended the B.C. School of Dancing. It was there that Canadian dance instructor, June Roper, started her in a new direction, for which she was grateful and relieved. The following year at the Orpheum Theatre, Peggy appeared as a hula dancer in the famous revue Waikiki. A new nightclub, the Palomar, opened in Vancouver, and she acquired a week-long booking. Hoping to present more sophisticated image, she combined her middle name with her mother’s maiden name, which turned out to be “Yvonne De Carlo”.
Yma Sumac
Yma Sumac was a noted Peruvian soprano. In the 1950s, she was one of the most famous proponents of exotica music and became an international success, based on the merits of her extreme vocal range, which was said to be “well over four octaves” and was sometimes claimed to span even five octaves at her peak.
Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo was born on September 10, 1922, in Ichocán, Cajamarca, Peru. While one of her “official” websites says that the “official date” of her birth is September 10, the date on a different “official” website is given as September 13, 1922. Other dates mentioned in her various biographies range from 1921 to 1929. Some sources claim that she was not born in Ichocán, but in a nearby village, or possibly in Lima, and that her family owned a ranch in Ichocán where she spent most of her early life. Stories published in the 1950s claimed that she was an Incan princess, directly descended from Atahualpa. A story claiming that she was born Amy Camus?”Yma Sumac” backwards?in Brooklyn or Canada was fabricated while she was performing in New York City in the early 1950s.
Chávarri adopted the stage name of Imma Sumack before she left South America to go to the U.S. The stage name was based on her mother’s name, which was derived from Ima Shumaq, Quechua for “how beautiful!” although in interviews she claimed it meant “beautiful flower” or “beautiful girl”.
Imma Sumack first appeared on radio in 1942 and married composer and bandleader, on June 6 of the same year. She recorded at least eighteen tracks of Peruvian folk songs in Argentina in 1943. These early recordings for the Odeon label featured Moisés Vivanco’s group, Compañía Peruana de Arte, a group of forty-six Indian dancers, singers, and musicians.
Wink Martindale
Winston Conrad “Wink” Martindale is an American disc jockey and television game show host.
Martindale was born in Jackson, Tennessee and started his career as a disc jockey at age 17 at WPLI in Jackson, earning $25 a week. He was hired away by WTJS for double the salary by Jackson’s only other station, WDXI. He next hosted mornings at WHBQ in Memphis while a college student at Memphis State College, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1957. While there Martindale became a member of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity.
Martindale’s rendition of the spoken-word song, “The Deck Of Cards,” went to number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and sold over a million copies in 1959. It also peaked at #5 in the UK Singles Chart in April 1963, one of four visits to that chart. It was followed by “Black Land Farmer”. In 1959, he became morning man at KHJ in Los Angeles, California, moving a year later to the morning show at KRLA and finally to KFWB in 1962. He also had lengthy stays at KGIL, KKGO/KJQI and Gene Autry’s KMPC. In 1967, Martindale narrated a futuristic documentary which predicted Internet commerce.
Martindale’s first break into television was at WHBQ-TV in Memphis, as the host of Mars Patrol, a science-fiction themed children’s television program. It was at his tenure with WHBQ that Martindale became the host of the TV show Teenage Dance Party where his friend Elvis Presley made an appearance. Following Presley’s death in 1977, Martindale aired a nationwide tribute radio special in his honor.
William Wyler
William Wyler was a leading American motion picture director, producer, and screenwriter. He was regarded as second only to John Ford as a “master craftsman of cinema.”
Notable works included Ben-Hur, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Mrs. Miniver, all of which won Wyler Academy Awards for Best Director, and also won Best Picture. He earned his first Oscar nomination for directing Dodsworth in 1936, starring Walter Huston and Mary Astor, “sparking a 20-year run of almost unbroken greatness.”
Film historian Ian Freer calls Wyler a “bona fide perfectionist,” whose penchant for retakes and an attempt to hone every last nuance, “became the stuff of legend.” His ability to direct a string of classic literary adaptations into huge box-office and critical successes made him one of “Hollywood’s most bankable moviemakers” during the 1930s and 1940s.
Other popular films include Funny Girl, How to Steal a Million, The Big Country, Roman Holiday, The Heiress, The Letter, The Westerner, Wuthering Heights, Jezebel, Dodsworth, A House Divided, and Hell’s Heroes .
Woody Van Dyke
Woodbridge Strong “Woody” Van Dyke, Jr. was an American motion picture director.
Born in San Diego, California, Van Dyke was a child actor on the vaudeville circuit. His early adult years were unsettled, and he moved from career to career until arriving in Hollywood. His first movie assignment was as an assistant director on the D. W. Griffith feature motion picture Intolerance. During the silent era he learned his craft and by the advent of the talkies was one of MGM’s most reliable directors.
He came to be known as “One Take Woody” for the speed with which he would complete his assignments, and although not regarded as one of the screen’s most talented directors, MGM regarded him as one of the most versatile, equally at home directing costume dramas, westerns, comedies, crime melodramas and musicals. Many of his films were huge hits and top box office in any given year. He received Academy Award for Best Director nominations for The Thin Man and San Francisco. He also directed the Oscar winning classic “Eskimo/Mala the Magnificent”, in which he also has a featured acting role.
His other films include the island adventure White Shadows in the South Seas Trader Horn, Tarzan the Ape Man, Manhattan Melodrama, and Marie Antoinette. He is perhaps best remembered for directing Myrna Loy and William Powell in four Thin Man films: The Thin Man, After the Thin Man, Another Thin Man and Shadow of the Thin Man ; and Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in six of their greatest hits, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, Sweethearts, New Moon, Bitter Sweet and I Married an Angel .