25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Regis Toomey

October 25, 2019

John Regis Toomey was an American film and television actor.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, he was one of four children of Francis X. and Mary Ellen Toomey and attended Peabody High School. He initially pondered a law career, but acting won out and he established himself as a musical stage performer.

Educated in dramatics at the University of Pittsburgh, where he became a brother of Sigma Chi, Toomey began as a stock actor and eventually made it to Broadway. Toomey was a singer on stage until throat problems while touring in Europe stopped that aspect of his career. In 1929, Toomey first began appearing in films. He initially started out as a leading man, but found more success as a character actor. Toomey appeared in over 180 films, including classics such as The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart. In 1956, he appeared as a judge, with Chuck Connors as “Andy”, in the third episode, “The Nevada Nightingale”, of the NBC anthology series The Joseph Cotten Show. Toomey thereafter appeared in another anthology series too as the character “Harry” in the 1960 episode “The Doctor and the Redhead”, with Dick Powell and Felicia Farr, of CBS’s The DuPont Show with June Allyson. In the 1961?1962 television season, he appeared in a supporting role with George Nader in the syndicated crime drama Shannon about insurance investigators. From 1963?1966, Toomey was one of the stars of the ABC crime drama, Burke’s Law, starring Gene Barry. He played Sergeant Les Hart, one of the detectives assisting the murder investigations of the millionaire police captain Amos Burke. He also guest-starred on dozens of television programs, including the “Shady Deal at Sunny Acres” episode of Maverick.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Renée Zellweger

October 25, 2019

Renée Kathleen Zellweger is an American actress and producer. Zellweger first gained widespread attention for her role in the film Jerry Maguire, and subsequently received two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her roles as Bridget Jones in the comedy Bridget Jones's Diary, its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and as Roxie Hart in the musical Chicago, and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the drama Cold Mountain. She has won three Golden Globe Awards and three Screen Actors Guild Awards, was named Hasty Pudding's Woman of the Year in 2009, and has established herself as one of the highest-paid Hollywood actresses in recent years.

Zellweger was born in Katy, Texas, a western suburb of Houston. Her father, Emil Erich Zellweger, is from Au, St. Gallen in Switzerland, and is a mechanical and electrical engineer who worked in the oil refining business. Her mother, Kjellfried Irene, is Norwegian-born and of Sami origin, and is a nurse and midwife who moved to the United States in order to work as a governess for a Norwegian family in Texas. Zellweger has described herself as being raised in a family of "lazy Catholics and Episcopalians". She has an older brother, Andrew.

In junior high school, Zellweger actively took part in several sports, including soccer, basketball, baseball and football. She attended Katy High School, where she was a cheerleader, a gymnast, a member of speech team, and a drama club member. Zellweger acted in several school plays and was voted the "Best Looking" of her class before graduating from high school in 1987. After high school, she went to the University of Texas at Austin to major in English language.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording Permalink

Ray Charles

October 25, 2019

Ray Charles Robinson, better known by his shortened stage name Ray Charles, was an American musician. Ray was a pioneer in the genre of soul music during the 1950s by fusing rhythm & blues, gospel, and blues styles into his early recordings with Atlantic Records. He also helped racially integrate country and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records, most notably with his Modern Sounds albums. While with ABC, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to be given artistic control by a mainstream record company.

Rolling Stone ranked Charles number 10 on their list of "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" in 2004, and number two on their November 2008 list of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time". In honoring Charles, Billy Joel noted: "This may sound like sacrilege, but I think Ray Charles was more important than Elvis Presley. I don't know if Ray was the architect of rock & roll, but he was certainly the first guy to do a lot of things. . Who the hell ever put so many styles together and made it work?"

Ray Charles Robinson was the son of Aretha Williams, a sharecropper, and Bailey Robinson, a railroad repair man, mechanic and handyman. Aretha Williams was a devout Christian and the family attended the New Shiloh Baptist Church. When Ray was an infant, his family moved from Albany, Georgia, where he was born, to the poor black community of Jellyroll on the western side of Greenville, Florida.

In his early years, Charles showed a curiosity for mechanical things and he often watched the neighborhood men working on their cars and farm machinery. His musical curiosity was sparked at Mr. Wiley Pit's Red Wing Cafe when Pit played boogie woogie on an old upright piano. Pit would care for George, Ray's brother, so as to take the burden off Williams. However, George drowned in the Williams' wash tub when he was four years old.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording, Television Permalink

Ray Milland

October 25, 2019

Ray Milland was a Welsh actor and director. His screen career ran from 1929 to 1985, and he is best remembered for his Academy Award?winning portrayal of an alcoholic writer in The Lost Weekend and as Oliver Barrett III in the 1970 film, Love Story.

Milland was born Reginald Alfred John Truscott-Jones in Neath, Wales, the son of Elizabeth Annie, born Birmingham, Warwickshire, England, and Alfred Jones. Before becoming an actor, he served in the Household Cavalry. An expert shot, he became a member of his company’s rifle team, winning many prestigious competitions, including the Bisley Match in England. When his four-year duty service was completed, Milland tried his hand at acting. He was discovered by a Hollywood talent scout while performing on the stage in London, went to America, and signed with Paramount Pictures.

He took his stage name from the Millands area of his Welsh home town of Neath.

When the Second World War began, Milland tried to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Forces, but was rejected because of an impaired left hand. He worked as a civilian flight instructor for the Army, and toured with a United Service Organisation South Pacific troupe in 1944. He married Muriel Weber on September 30, 1932, and they remained together until his death. The couple had a son, Daniel, and a daughter, Victoria.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Ray Rennahan

October 25, 2019

Ray Rennahan, A.S.C. was a movie cinematographer.

For his work in movies, he became one of the only six cinematographers to have a “Star” on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The other five are: Haskell Wexler, Conrad L. Hall, J. Peverell Marley, Leon Shamroy and Hal Mohr.

25 Oct 2019
Live Performance Permalink

Ray Walston

October 25, 2019

Ray Walston was an American stage, television and film actor best known as the title character on the 1960s situation comedy My Favorite Martian. In addition, he was also known for his role as high school teacher Mr. Hand in the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Judge Henry Bone on the drama series Picket Fences.

Walston was born Herman Walston in New Orleans, Louisiana to working-class parents Mittie and Harry Norman Walston, a lumber man. He started acting at an early age, beginning his tenure as a “spear carrier” rounding out productions at many New Orleans theaters. He mostly played small roles with stock companies, where he not only starred in travelling shows but also worked at a movie theater, selling tickets and cleaning the stage floors. His family moved to Houston, Texas, where he joined the Houston Civic Theater’s repertory company under Margo Jones, debuting in 1938.

Walston was very popular with Margo Jones’s team of actors before he travelled to Cleveland, Ohio, where he spent three years with the Cleveland Playhouse. He then traveled to New York City, where he made his Broadway debut in a 1945 production of Hamlet. In 1949, he appeared in the short-lived play Mrs. Gibbons’ Boys directed by George Abbott, who later cast him as Satan in the musical Damn Yankees opposite Gwen Verdon as his sexy aide Lola. The chemistry between the two was such that they both garnered critical success and won awards for their roles. After a decade in New York theater, he won a Tony Award, and he and Verdon were invited to reprise their roles in the 1958 film version.

Additional Broadway credits included The Front Page, Summer and Smoke, King Richard III, Wish You Were Here, and House of Flowers. Walston had a prominent role in the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Me and Juliet, portraying the stage manager of the musical-within-the-musical, but his character did not participate in any of the musical numbers.

25 Oct 2019
Television Permalink

Raymond Burr

October 25, 2019

Raymond William Stacey Burr was a Canadian-born actor, primarily known for his title roles in the television dramas Perry Mason and Ironside. His early acting career included roles on Broadway, radio, television and in film, usually as the villain. He won two Emmy Awards for the role of Perry Mason, which he played for nine seasons between 1957 and 1966. His second hit series, Ironside, earned him six Emmy nominations, and two Golden Globe nominations.

In addition to acting, Burr owned an orchid business and had begun to grow a vineyard. He was a collector of wines and art, and was fond of cooking.

After his death from cancer in 1993, Burr’s personal life came into question as details of his known biography appeared to be unverifiable. Gradually, it was revealed that Burr had possibly contrived a life story that hid his homosexuality.

He was born Raymond William Stacey Burr in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada to William Johnston Burr, an Irish hardware salesman, and his wife Minerva, a concert pianist and music teacher. Burr spent part of his childhood in China, where his father worked as a trade agent. After his parents divorced, Burr moved to Vallejo, California with his mother and younger siblings, Geraldine and James Edmond. He a attended military junior high school, but dropped out. Burr said that he never attended high school, but did attend Long Beach Junior College and took courses from Stanford and The University of California.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Radio Permalink

Raymond Griffith

October 25, 2019

Raymond Griffith was one of the great silent movie comedians.

Griffith was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He lost his voice at an early age, causing him to speak for the rest of his life in a hoarse whisper. Griffith claimed that it was the result of his having to scream at the top of his lungs every night in a stage melodrama as a child actor?others have stated that a childhood disease was more likely the cause.

Although a few comedy films of his are considered classics he is almost totally forgotten today. Many of his starring feature films have long since been lost, but probably the best known of his films today is Hands Up!, a 1926 Civil War comedy feature directed by Clarence G. Badger, and co-starring Mack Swain, which was entered into the National Film Registry in 2005. Also considered a classic is Badger’s Paths to Paradise, a caper film that is in all circulating prints missing its final reel. Like many silent comedians, he had a traditional costume; his was a top hat, white tie and tails, often augmented by a cape and/or walking stick.

The coming of sound ended Griffith’s acting career, but he did have one memorable role in a motion picture before retiring from the screen, playing a French soldier killed by Lew Ayres in the 1930 Lewis Milestone film All Quiet on the Western Front. He then segued into a writing/producing career at Twentieth Century Fox.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Raymond Hatton

October 25, 2019

Raymond William Hatton was an American movie actor who appeared in almost five hundred movies, including a stint of being paired in 1920s comedies with Wallace Beery.

Although Hatton enjoyed a successful silent film career, sound helped to boost Hatton’s career and making him best remembered as the tobacco-chewing, rip snorting Rusty Joslin in The Three Mesquiteers series.

Fans of the TV series Adventures of Superman remember him for playing eccentric characters in the episodes “Dagger Island” and “The Prince Albert Coat”.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Raymond Massey

October 25, 2019

Raymond Hart Massey was a Canadian-born American actor.

Massey was born in Toronto, Ontario, the son of Anna and Chester Daniel Massey, the wealthy owner of the Massey-Ferguson Tractor Company. Massey’s family could trace their ancestry back to the American Revolutionary War. He attended secondary school briefly at Upper Canada College, before transferring to Appleby College in Oakville, Ontario, and graduated from university at University of Toronto where both he and his cousin were active members in The Kappa Alpha Society, and Balliol College, Oxford.

At the outbreak of World War I, he joined the Canadian Army, serving with the artillery on the Western Front. He returned to Canada suffering shell-shock and was engaged as an army instructor for American officers at Yale. In 1918, he was sent to serve at Siberia, where he made his first stage appearance, entertaining American troops on occupation duty. Severely wounded in action in France, he was sent home, where he eventually worked in the family business, selling farm implements.

Drawn to the theatre, in 1922, he appeared on the London stage. His first movie role was High Treason in 1927. In 1929 he directed the London premiere of The Silver Tassie. He played Sherlock Holmes in The Speckled Band in 1931, the first sound film version of the story. In 1934, he starred in The Scarlet Pimpernel and, in 1936, he starred in H. G. Wells’s Things to Come. Despite being Canadian, Massey became famous for his quintessential American roles such as abolitionist John Brown in 1940’s Santa Fe Trail and again as John Brown in the 1955 low-budget film Seven Angry Men. His second portrayal of Brown was much more sympathetic, presenting him as a well-intentioned, but misguided figure, while in Santa Fe Trail he was presented as a wild-eyed lunatic.