Samuel Grosvenor Wood was an American film director, and producer, who was best known for directing such Hollywood hits as A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and The Pride of the Yankees. He was also involved in a few acting and writing projects.

Wood began his career as an actor, and worked for Cecil B. De Mille as an assistant in 1915. A solo director by 1919, Wood worked throughout the 1920s directing some of Paramount Pictures’s biggest stars, among them Gloria Swanson and Wallace Reid. He joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1927, working with Marion Davies, Clark Gable, Marie Dressler, and Jimmy Durante. In the 1940s, Wood directed Ginger Rogers through her Oscar-winning performance in Kitty Foyle. At one point, he served as president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.

Wood was married to Clara L. Roush from 1908 to his death in 1949. One of Wood’s daughters was film and television actress K. T. Stevens who started her career in one of her father’s films, Peck’s Bad Boy, credited as ‘Baby Gloria Wood’. His oldest daughter was also an actress, Jeane Wood.

Samuel Zachary Arkoff was  honored with Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

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View the Samuel Arkoff Walk of Fame press release

Samuel Zachary Arkoff  was an American producer of B movies. Born in Fort Dodge, Iowa to a Russian Jewish family, Arkoff first studied to be a lawyer. Along with business partner James H. Nicholson and producer-director Roger Corman, he produced eighteen films. In the 1950s, he and Nicholson founded the American Releasing Corporation, which later became known as American International Pictures and produced over 125 films before the company’s demise in the 1980s. These films were mostly low-budget, with production completed in a few days, though nearly all of them became profitable.

Arkoff is also credited with starting a few genres, such as the Beach Party and outlaw biker movies, and his company played a substantial part in bringing the horror film genre to a novel level with successes such as Blacula, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and The Thing with Two Heads. American International Pictures movies starred many established actors in principal or cameo roles, such as Boris Karloff, Elsa Lanchester and Vincent Price, as well as up-and-comers who later became household names, including Don Johnson, Nick Nolte, Diane Ladd, and most notably Jack Nicholson. A number of actors shunned or overlooked by most of Hollywood during the 1960s and 1970s, such as Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper, also found work in one or more of Arkoff’s productions. Arkoff’s most financially successful film was the 1979 adaptation of Jay Anson’s book The Amityville Horror.

Not long after American International Pictures went out of business, Arkoff founded Arkoff International Pictures.

Arkoff began his career in Hollywood as a producer of The Hank McCune Show, a seminal sitcom produced in 1951. He innovated the TV laugh track rather than go to the expense of a studio audience.

In 2000, Arkoff was featured alongside former collaborators including Roger Corman, Dick Miller and Peter Bogdanovich in the documentary SCHLOCK! The Secret History of American Movies, a film about the rise and fall of American exploitation cinema.

Arkoff died in 2001, within weeks of his wife’s own death.

Sabu Dastagir was a film actor of Indian origin?although he later took American citizenship. He was normally credited only by his first name, Sabu, and is primarily known for his work in film during the 1940s.

Born in 1924 in Karapur, Mysore, Kingdom of Mysore, then a Princely State of British India, Sabu was the son of an Indian mahout. While most reference books have his full name as “Sabu Dastagir”, research by journalist Philip Leibfried suggests that was his brother’s name, and that Sabu was in fact Selar Shaik Sabu or Sabu Francis. His brother managed his career.

Sabu was discovered by documentary film-maker Robert Flaherty who cast him in the role of an elephant driver in the 1937 British film Elephant Boy, based on Toomai of the Elephants, a story by Rudyard Kipling. Sabu is perhaps best known for his role as Abu in the 1940 British film The Thief of Bagdad. In 1942 he once again played a role based on a Kipling story, namely Mowgli in Jungle Book directed by Zoltán Korda.

After becoming an American citizen in 1944, Sabu joined the U.S Army Air Force as a tail gunner. He flew several dozen missions over the Pacific and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his valor and bravery.

Dame Ruth Elizabeth Warrick, DM, OSJ, Regent of Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Dame of Honour and Merit by the Imperial Russian Order of Saint John of Jerusalem Ecumenical Foundation, was an American singer, actress and activist, best known for her role as Phoebe Tyler on All My Children.

She celebrated her 80th birthday by attending a special screening of Citizen Kane to a packed, standing-room-only audience, to which she spoke afterward. Over the years, she collected several books about Orson Welles and Citizen Kane, in which she would write “Property of Ruth Warrick, Mrs. Citizen Kane”.

She served as a Licensed Unity Teacher.

She was born in Saint Joseph, Missouri. By writing an essay in high school called “Prevention and Cure of Tuberculosis”, Warrick won a contest to be Miss Jubilesta, Missouri’s paid ambassador to New York City. Popular legend says that she made her debut in New York City on the steps of city hall with an armful of turkeys for Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.

Ruth Carol Hussey was an American actress best known for her Academy Award-nominated role as photographer Elizabeth Imbrie in The Philadelphia Story.

Hussey was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1911. Her father died, aged 34, when Ruth was seven years old, from the 1918 flu. She later adopted her stepfather’s surname and was known as Ruth O’Rourke. went on to attend and graduate from Pembroke College in 1933. She never landed a role at Pembroke in any of the school plays she tried out for. She then studied drama in post graduate school at the University of Michigan School of Drama, and worked as an actress with a summer stock company in Michigan for two seasons.

After working as an actress in summer stock, she returned to Providence and worked as a radio fashion commentator on a local station. She wrote the ad copy for a Providence clothing store and read it on the radio each afternoon. One day she was encouraged by a friend to try out for acting roles at the Providence Playhouse. The theater director there turned her down, saying the roles were cast only out of New York City. Later that week she journeyed to New York City and on her first day there she signed-up with a talent agent who booked her for a role in a play starting the next day back at the Providence Playhouse.

In New York City she also worked for a time as a model with the world-famous Powers agency. She then landed a number of stage roles with touring companies. Dead End toured the country in 1937 and the last theater on the road trip was at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles where she was spotted on opening night by MGM talent scout Billy Grady. MGM signed her to a players contract and she made her film debut in 1937. She quickly became a leading lady in MGM’s “B” unit, usually playing sophisticated, worldly roles. For a 1940 “A” picture role she was nominated for an Academy Award for her turn as Elizabeth Imbrie, the cynical magazine photographer and girlfriend of Jimmy Stewart’s character Macaulay Connor in The Philadelphia Story.