25 Oct 2019
Recording, Television Permalink
BB king
BB king

B. B. King

October 25, 2019

In memory of Walk Of Famer and Blues Icon B.B. King, memorial wreath was placed on his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Friday, May 15, 2015 at 2 p.m. PDT. The star in the category of Recording is located at 6771 Hollywood Boulevard. “Keep on playing BB. We will miss you. RIP.” Ana Martinez, Producer of the Hollywood Walk of Fame signed the card on behalf of the Hollywood Historic Trust and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.
The Hollywood Walk of Fame and the Hollywood Sign are registered trademarks of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. 

Riley B. King, known by the stage name B.B. King, is an American blues guitarist and singer-songwriter acclaimed for his expressive singing and guitar playing.

Rolling Stone magazine ranked him at #3 on its list of the “100 greatest guitarists of all time”. According to Edward M. Komara, King “introduced a sophisticated style of soloing based on fluid string bending and shimmering vibrato that would influence virtually every electric blues guitarist that followed.” King has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

King was born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, a small town near Indianola, Mississippi. His parents were Alfred King and Nora Ella King. King grew up singing in a gospel choir. At age 12 he bought his first guitar for $15.00. In 1943 King left Indianola to work as a tractor driver.

In 1946 King followed his cousin Bukka White to Memphis, Tennessee. White took him in for the next ten months. However, King shortly returned to Mississippi, where he decided to prepare himself better for the next visit, and returned to Memphis two years later. Initially he worked at the local R&B radio station WDIA as a singer and disc jockey, where he gained the nickname “Beale Street Blues Boy”, later shortened to “B.B.” It was there that he first met T-Bone Walker. “Once I’d heard him for the first time, I knew I’d have to have myself. ‘Had’ to have one, short of stealing!”, he said.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

B. P. Schulberg

October 25, 2019

B.P. Schulberg was a pioneer film producer and movie studio executive.

Born Percival Schulberg in Bridgeport, Connecticut, he took the name Benjamin from the boy in front of him when registering for school to avoid mockery for his British name. He worked in the fledgling film industry in New York City until 1919 when he moved to Hollywood, California where he operated “Preferred Pictures” and was responsible for making Clara Bow a star. He joined Louis B. Mayer to form “Mayer-Schulberg Studio” but after Mayer became part of MGM, Schulberg would join with Adolph Zukor and became the head of Paramount Pictures.

In an era when the film industry was filled with conservative studio executives, B.P. Schulberg was a “New Deal” liberal, described by Moving Pictures magazine as “a political liberal in the reactionary world of Mayer and Hearst.” His wife Adeline Jaffe-Schulberg founded a talent agency taken over by her brother, producer/talent agent Sam Jaffe. She spent little time with Hollywood society women, instead working for charities that aided the poor and promoting socialism. She subsequently had a literary agency in New York. They were the parents of renowned novelist and screenwriter, Budd Schulberg, producer Stuart Schulberg, and writer Sonya Schulberg O’Sullivan.

In a power struggle at Paramount, Schulberg left the studio in 1937 and remained out of the business until 1940 when he began producing for Columbia Pictures. He produced six films for Columbia in three years until he retired in 1943.

25 Oct 2019
Television Permalink

Barbara Britton

October 25, 2019

Barbara Britton was an American film and television actress.

She was the first actress to play Laura Petrie on television on the pilot program, Head of the Family, which was retooled and became The Dick Van Dyke Show with the role taken over by Mary Tyler Moore. The California native signed a film contract with Paramount Pictures in 1941. Her first two films were that same year, first in the William Boyd western Secret of the Wasteland, followed by Louisiana Purchase starring Bob Hope. Her first big film appearance was a small role in the 1942 John Wayne film Reap the Wild Wind.

During the 1940s she starred in three films that, today, are her most recognizable film roles, two of which placed her starring opposite Randolph Scott. The first was with Scott in the 1945 film Captain Kidd, followed by The Virginian in 1946, opposite Joel McCrea. The third was in the 1947 Randolph Scott film Gunfighters. She would team with Randolph Scott again in the 1948 western Albuquerque, and that same year she starred opposite Gene Autry in Loaded Pistols. In total she starred or appeared in twenty-six films during that decade.

Reportedly, due to lasting trauma which she suffered making the 1943 war picture So Proudly We Hail!, she sought the help of physician and psychoanalyst, Dr. Eugene J. Czukor, in 1944. The memorable film was about a group of nurses returning from the war in the Philippines recall their experiences in combat and in love. Britton and Dr. Czukor married soon after, lasting until Britton’s death 35 years later.

25 Oct 2019
Radio, Television Permalink
Barbara Eden - Life Ball 2013
Barbara Eden - Life Ball 2013

Barbara Eden

October 25, 2019

Barbara Eden is an American film and television actress and singer who is best known for her starring role in the sitcom I Dream of Jeannie.

Eden was born Barbara Jean Morehead in Tucson, Arizona, the daughter of Alice Mary and Hubert Henry Morehead. Her parents divorced when she was 3, she and her mother Alice moved to San Francisco where later her mother married Harrison Connor Huffman, a telephone lineman. The Great Depression deeply affected the Huffman family, and as they were unable to afford many luxuries, Barbara’s mother entertained the children by singing songs. This musical background left a lasting impression on the actress, who began taking acting classes because she felt it might help her improve her singing.

She graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco in 1951, and was elected Miss San Francisco in 1951. Barbara also entered the Miss California pageant, but did not win.

Eden made featured appearances on television shows such as The Johnny Carson Show, The West Point Story, Highway Patrol, Private Secretary, I Love Lucy, The Millionaire, , Crossroads,

25 Oct 2019
Recording, Television Permalink

Barbara Hale

October 25, 2019

Barbara Hale is an American actress best known for her role as Della Street on the long running Perry Mason show.

Hale was born in DeKalb, Illinois, to Luther Ezra Hale, a landscape gardener, and his wife Wilma Colvin. She is of mainly Scottish and Irish ancestry. Hale graduated from high school in Rockford, Illinois, and then attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, planning to become an artist. Her performing career began in Chicago when she started modeling to pay for her education. She moved to Hollywood in 1943, and made her first screen appearances playing small parts. Hale was under contract to RKO Radio Pictures through the late 1940s. She appeared in Higher and Higher with Frank Sinatra, Lady Luck opposite Robert Young and Frank Morgan, the The Window, and Jolson Sings Again, with Larry Parks playing Al Jolson and Hale as Jolson’s wife, Ellen Clark. She played the title role in Lorna Doone and was Julia Hancock in The Far Horizons with Charlton Heston.

Hale had a featured role in the movie Airport, playing the wife of the pilot. In 1967, she guest starred on the ABC series Custer.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Barbara La Marr

October 25, 2019

Barbara La Marr was an American stage and film actress, cabaret artist and screenwriter.

She was born Reatha Dale Watson to William Wallace and Rosana “Rose” Watson in Yakima, Washington. Her father was an editor for a newspaper, and her mother had a son, Henry, born in 1878, and a daughter, Violet, born in February 1881, from a previous marriage. The couple wed some time during 1884, and they had William Watson, Jr., born in June 1886 in Washington. He would later, in the 1920s, become a vaudeville comedian under the stage name of “Billy Devore”. The Watsons lived in various locations during La Marr’s formative years. By 1900, she was living with her parents in Portland, Oregon, with her brother William, her half-sister Violet Ross, and Violet’s husband Arvel Ross. As a child, La Marr also performed in a few stage productions in Tacoma, Washington.

By 1910, La Marr was living in Fresno, California, with her parents. Some time after 1911, the family moved to Los Angeles, and later settled at 220 San Jose Street in Burbank, California. In January 1913, La Marr’s half-sister, now going by the name of Violet Ake, took her then 16-year-old sister on a three-day automobile excursion with a man named C.C. Boxley. They drove up to Santa Barbara, but after a few days La Marr felt that they were not going to let her return home. Ake and Boxley finally let La Marr return to Los Angeles after they realized that there were warrants issued for their arrests accusing them of kidnapping. This episode was published in several newspapers, and La Marr even testified against her sister, but the case was eventually dropped.

La Marr’s name appeared frequently in newspaper headlines during the next few years. In November 1913, she came back from Arizona and announced that she was the newly-widowed wife of a rancher named Jack Lytell, and that they were supposedly married in Mexico. As legend goes, Lytell became enamored of La Marr as he saw her one day riding in an automobile while he was out on horseback. He rode up to her car and swept her on his horse and rode off with her. They were married the next day. She also stated that she loathed the name Reatha and preferred to be called by the childhood nickname “Beth”.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Barbara Lawrence

October 25, 2019

Barbara Jo Lawrence is an American film actress.

Lawrence was born in Carnegie, Oklahoma. She began her career as a photographer’s model at a very young age, and appeared in her first film, Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, in 1945. She was featured in the 1947 swashbuckler, “Captain from Castile” with Tyrone Power. While finishing her studies at UCLA, she attracted the attention of talent scouts, and Lawrence was soon co-starring in a handful of 20th Century Fox movies, including A Letter to Three Wives, The Street with No Name, Thieves’ Highway and Here Come the Nelsons. In January 1947, aged 18, she married The marriage was kept secret until June 28, 1947, when her mother gave Barbara a church wedding in Beverly Hills, but the marriage ended a year and a half later, in 1948.

Upon moving to MGM, Lawrence starred with Gig Young in the 3D movie, Arena. She then starred in Her Twelve Men with Greer Garson. Lawrence also played the major role of Gertie Cummings in the film version of Oklahoma!, in which she gets into a knockdown fight with Gloria Grahame. In 1957, she starred in Kronos with Jeff Morrow. Although the film was not praised by critics at the time, it eventually attracted a cult following for its imaginative storyline and special effects. After doing a number of television shows in the late 1950s and early 1960s she spent several years in South America.

In 1951 the actress married Johnny Murphy, and the couple had two children together before divorcing in 1957. After marrying Lester R. Nelson in 1961, she had two more children. She made several more television appearances in 1962, then retired from acting altogether. She and Nelson divorced in 1976.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording Permalink

Barbara Stanwyck

October 25, 2019

Barbara Stanwyck was an American actress, a film and television star, known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional with a strong screen presence, and a favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang and Frank Capra. After a short stint as a stage actress, she made 85 films in 38 years in Hollywood, before turning to television.

Stanwyck was nominated for the Academy Award four times, and won three Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe. She was the recipient of honorary lifetime awards from the Motion Picture Academy, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Golden Globes, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the Screen Actors Guild, has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and is ranked as the eleventh greatest female star of all time by the American Film Institute.

Barbara Stanwyck was born Ruby Catherine Stevens in Brooklyn, New York on July 16, 1907. She was the fifth and last child of Byron and Catherine McGee Stevens; the couple were working-class natives of Chelsea, Massachusetts and were of English and Irish extraction, respectively. When Ruby was four, her mother was killed when a drunken stranger pushed her off a moving streetcar. Two weeks after the funeral, Byron Stevens joined a work crew digging the Panama canal; and was never seen again. Ruby and her brother Byron were raised by their sister Mildred, who was five years older than Ruby. When Mildred got a job as a John Cort showgirl, Ruby and Byron were placed in a series of foster homes, from which Ruby often ran away. Ruby attended various public schools in Brooklyn, where she received uniformly poor grades and routinely picked fights with the other students.

During the summers of 1916 and 1917, when Ruby was nine and ten years old, she toured with her sister Mildred, and practiced Mildred’s routines backstage. Another influence toward performing was watching the movies of Pearl White, whom Ruby idolized. At age 14, she dropped out of school to take a job wrapping packages at a Brooklyn department store. Soon after she took a job filing cards at the Brooklyn telephone office for a salary of $14 a week, a salary that allowed her to become financially independent. Ruby disliked both jobs; she was interested in show business, but her sister Mildred discouraged the idea, so Ruby next took a job cutting dress patterns for Vogue; customers complained of her poor work and Ruby was fired. Ruby’s next job was as a typist for the Jerome H. Remick Music Company, a job she enjoyed; her true interest, however, was still show business, and her sister gave up dissuading her. In 1923, a few months short of her 16th birthday, Ruby auditioned for a place in the chorus at the Strand Roof, a night club over the Strand Theatre in Times Square. A few months thereafter she obtained a job as a Ziegfeld girl in the 1922 and 1923 editions of the Ziegfeld Follies. For the next several years, Ruby worked as a chorus girl, performing from midnight to seven a.m. at nightclubs owned by Texas Guinan; she also occasionally served as a dance instructor at a speakeasy for gays and lesbians owned by Guinan.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Barbara Walters

October 25, 2019

See the Hollywood Walk of Fame Star Ceremony announcement
 

Barbara Jill Walters is an American broadcast journalist and author, who has hosted morning television shows, the television newsmagazine, and co-anchor of the ABC Evening News and correspondent on ABC World News. Walters was first known as a popular TV morning news anchor for over 10 years on NBC's Today, where she worked with Hugh Downs and later hosts Frank McGee and Jim Hartz. Walters later spent 25 years as co-host of ABC's newsmagazine 20/20. She was the first female co-anchor of network evening news, working with Harry Reasoner on the ABC Evening News and was later a correspondent for ABC World News Tonight with Charles Gibson.

Walters was born in Boston, MA to Louis "Lou" Walters and his wife, Dena Seletsky, both of whom were Jewish and descendants of refugees from the former Russian Empire, now Eastern Europe. Walters' paternal grandfather, Isaac Abrahams, was from what is now ?ód?, Poland, and first immigrated to England, changing his name to Abraham Walters. Walters' father was born there c. 1896, and moved to the United States with his family in 1900. In 1937, her father opened the New York version of the Latin Quarter; he also was a Broadway producer. Walters' brother, Burton, died in 1932 of pneumonia. Walters' elder sister, Jacqueline, was born developmentally disabled and died of ovarian cancer in 1985.

According to Walters, being surrounded by celebrities when she was young kept her from being "in awe" of them. When he was a young man, Walters' father lost his nightclubs and the family's penthouse on Central Park West. As Walters recalled, "He had a breakdown. He went down to live in our house in Florida, and then the Government took the house, and they took the car, and they took the furniture." Of her mother, she said, "My mother should have married the way her friends did, to a man who was a doctor or who was in the dress business."

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Barbara Whiting Smith

October 25, 2019

Barbara Whiting Smith was an actress in movies and on radio and television, primarily in the 1940s and 1950s before she gave up her career to be a wife and mother.

Ms. Whiting was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Born in Los Angeles, she was the daughter of Richard A. Whiting, the composer who wrote classics such as “Hooray for Hollywood” and “Till We Meet Again”.

Her movie career began with the 1945 film, Junior Miss, a movie based on her popular radio show by the same name. This was followed by nine other starring roles until she married and retired. On television, she hosted the show Those Whiting Girls on CBS, along with her sister, Margaret Whiting.