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.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Donald Meek

October 25, 2019

Donald Meek was a Scottish-born American character actor. He first worked as a stage actor in Scotland and, when coming to the United States, he appeared in several films, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Little Miss Broadway. At eighteen, before becoming an actor, he fought in the Spanish-American War and contracted yellow fever which caused him to lose his hair. As a consequence, he became a successful character actor.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Donald O’Connor

October 25, 2019

Donald David Dixon Ronald O?Connor was an American dancer, singer, and actor who came to fame in a series of movies in which he co-starred alternately with Gloria Jean, Peggy Ryan, and Francis the Talking Mule. Perhaps his most famous performance was as Gene Kelly's friend and colleague in Singin' in the Rain. Though he considered Danville, Illinois to be his home town, O?Connor was born in St. Elizabeth Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. His parents were Irish American vaudeville entertainers. When O'Connor was only a few years old, he and his sister Arlene were in a car crash outside a theater in Hartford, Connecticut; O'Connor survived, but his sister was killed. Several weeks later, his father died of a heart attack while dancing on stage in Brockton, Massachusetts. O'Connor at the time was being held in the arms of the theater manager Mr. Maurice Sims.

O'Connor began performing in movies in 1937. He appeared opposite Bing Crosby in Sing, You Sinners, and at age 12 showed excellent comedic timing. Paramount Pictures used him in both A and B films, including Tom Sawyer, Detective and Beau Geste. In 1940, when he had outgrown child roles, he returned to vaudeville.

In 1942 O'Connor joined Universal Pictures. He played roles in four of the Gloria Jean musicals, and achieved stardom with Mister Big .

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Donald Trump

October 25, 2019

Donald John Trump is the 45th President of USA, an American business magnate, socialite, author and television personality. He is the Chairman and CEO of the Trump Organization, a US-based real-estate developer. Trump is also the founder of Trump Entertainment Resorts, which operates numerous casinos and hotels across the world. Trump's extravagant lifestyle and outspoken manner have made him a celebrity for years, a status amplified by the success of the shows he produced,  the Miss Universe Pageants and the NBC show The Apprentice. Donald was the fourth of five children of Fred Trump, a wealthy real estate developer based in New York City. Donald was strongly influenced by his father in his eventual goals to make a career in real estate development, and upon his graduation from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1968, Donald Trump joined his father's company, The Trump Organization.

Starting with the renovation of the Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt with the Pritzker family, he continued with Trump Tower in New York City and several other residential projects. Trump would later expand into the airline industry, and Atlantic City casino business, including buying the Taj Mahal Casino from the Crosby family, then taking it into bankruptcy. This expansion, both personal and business, led to mounting debt. Much of the news about him in the early 1990s involved his much publicized financial problems, creditor-led bailout, extramarital affair with Marla Maples, and the resulting divorce from his first wife, Ivana Trump.

The late 1990s saw a resurgence in his financial situation and fame. In 2001, he completed Trump World Tower, a 72-story residential tower across from the United Nations Headquarters. Also, he began construction on Trump Place, a multi-building development along the Hudson River. Trump owns commercial space in Trump International Hotel and Tower, a 44-story mixed-use tower on Columbus Circle. Trump currently owns several million square feet of prime Manhattan real estate, and remains a major figure in the field of real estate in the United States and a celebrity for his prominent media exposures.

25 Oct 2019
Television Permalink

Donald Woods

October 25, 2019

Donald Woods was a Canadian-born American film and television actor whose career spanned six decades.

Born Ralph L. Zink in Brandon, Manitoba, Woods moved with his family to California and was raised in Burbank. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and made his film debut in 1928. His screen career was spent mostly in B movies, although he occasionally scored a role in a prestige feature film like Anthony Adverse, Watch on the Rhine, and The Bridge of San Luis Rey. In the early days of television, Woods appeared in Craig Kennedy, Criminologist, and such anthology series as The Philco Television Playhouse, Armstrong Circle Theatre, Robert Montgomery Presents, The United States Steel Hour, and General Electric Theater. He later was a regular on the short-lived series Tammy and made guest appearances on Bat Masterson, Wagon Train, Ben Casey, 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye, Stoney Burke, Bonanza, Coronet Blue, Ironside, Alias Smith and Jones, and Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law, among many others.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Donna Reed

October 25, 2019

Donna Reed was an American film and television actress.

She received the 1953 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Lorene, a prostitute, in From Here to Eternity, and received the 1963 Golden Globe Award for Best TV Star – Female for her performance as Donna Stone, an American middle class wife and mother, in The Donna Reed Show. In 1984, she replaced Barbara Bel Geddes as Miss Ellie in the television melodrama, Dallas, and sued the production company for breach of contract when she was abruptly fired upon Bel Geddes’s decision to return to the show.

Reed was married three times and the mother of four children. She died of pancreatic cancer.

Reed was born Donna Belle Mullenger on a farm near Denison, Iowa, the daughter of Hazel Jane Shives and William Richard Mullenger. The eldest of five children, she was raised as a Methodist. After graduating from Denison High School, Reed planned to become a teacher, but was unable to pay for college. She decided to move to California to attend Los Angeles City College on the advice of her aunt. While attending college, she performed in various stage productions but had no plans to become an actress. After receiving several offers to screen test for studios, Reed eventually signed with MGM, but insisted on finishing her education first.