25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording Permalink

Alice Calhoun

October 25, 2019

Alice Calhoun was an American silent film actress.

Born Alice Beatrice Calhoun in Cleveland, Ohio, she made her film debut in a role not credited in 1918 and went on to appear in another forty-seven films between then and 1929. As a star with Vitagraph in New York City, she moved with the company when it relocated to Hollywood. In the comedy, The Man Next Door, Calhoun plays Bonnie Bell. A critic complimented her on being pretty and playing her role successfully.The Man From Brodney’s is a movie which displays the fencing talent of actor J. Warren Kerrigan. Directed by David Smith for

Vitagraph, the film is based on a novel by George Barr McCutcheon. Calhoun plays Princess Genevra. Between Friends is a motion

picture adapted from a story by Robert W. Chambers. Anna Q. Nilsson and Norman Kerry are part of a cast in which Calhoun plays an artist’s Model. Among her other movies titles are

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording Permalink

Alice Cooper

October 25, 2019

Alice Cooper is an American rock singer, songwriter and musician whose career spans more than four decades. With a stage show that features guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood, boa constrictors and baby dolls, Cooper has drawn equally from horror movies, vaudeville, and garage rock to pioneer a grandly theatrical and violent brand of heavy metal that was designed to shock.

Alice Cooper was originally a band consisting of Furnier on vocals and harmonica, lead guitarist Glen Buxton, Michael Bruce on rhythm guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass guitar, and drummer Neal Smith. The original Alice Cooper band broke into the international music mainstream with the 1971 hit “I’m Eighteen” from the album Love it to Death, which was followed by the even bigger single “School’s Out” in 1972. The band reached their commercial peak with the 1973 album Billion Dollar Babies.

Furnier’s solo career as Alice Cooper, adopting the band’s name as his own name, began with the 1975 concept album Welcome to My Nightmare. In 2008 he released Along Came a Spider, his 18th solo album. Expanding from his original Detroit rock roots, over the years Cooper has experimented with many different musical styles, including conceptual rock, art rock, glam metal, hard rock, new wave, pop rock, soft rock, experimental rock, heavy metal, and industrial rock. In recent times he has returned more to his garage rock roots.

Alice Cooper is known for his social and witty persona offstage, The Rolling Stone Album Guide going so far as to refer to him as the world’s most “beloved heavy metal entertainer”. He helped to shape the sound and look of heavy metal, and has been credited as being the person who “first introduced horror imagery to rock’n’roll, and whose stagecraft and showmanship have permanently transformed the genre”. Away from music, Cooper is a film actor, a golfing celebrity, a restaurateur and, since 2004, a popular radio DJ with his classic rock show Nights with Alice Cooper.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Alice Faye

October 25, 2019

Alice Faye was an American actress and singer, called by the New York Times “one of the few movie stars to walk away from stardom at the peak of her career.” She is remembered first for her stardom at 20th Century Fox and, later, as the radio comedy partner of her husband, bandleader-comedian Phil Harris. She is also often associated with the Academy Award?winning standard, “You’ll Never Know”, which she introduced in the 1943 musical, Hello, Frisco, Hello.

Born Alice Jeanne Leppert in New York City, she was the daughter of a New York police officer of German descent and his Irish-American wife, Charles and Alice Leppert. Faye’s entertainment career began in vaudeville as a chorus girl, before she moved to Broadway and a featured role in the 1931 edition of George White’s Scandals. By this time, she had adopted her stage name and first reached a radio audience on Rudy Vallée’s The Fleischmann Hour, where she may have met her future husband and comedy partner Phil Harris for the first time.

Meanwhile, she gained her first major film break in 1934, when Lilian Harvey abandoned the lead role in a film version of George White’s 1935 Scandals, in which Vallee was also to appear. Hired first to perform a musical number with Vallee, Faye ended up as the female lead. And she became a hit with film audiences of the 1930s, particularly when Fox production head Darryl F. Zanuck made her his protege. He softened Faye from a wisecracking show girl to a youthful, yet somewhat motherly figure such as she played in a few Shirley Temple films.

Faye also received a physical makeover, from being something of a singing version of Jean Harlow to sporting a softer look with a more natural tone to her blonde hair and more mature makeup, including her notorious “pencil” eyebrows. This transition was practically a plot point of 1938’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band, in which Faye’s ascent is dramatized by her increasingly elegant grooming.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Alice Lake

October 25, 2019

Alice Lake was an American film actress. She began her career during the silent film era and often appeared in comedy shorts opposite Roscoe Arbuckle.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Lake began her career as a dancer. She made her screen debut was in 1912, and she appeared in a number of comedy shorts by Mack Sennett. Lake was often the leading lady of Roscoe Arbuckle in comedies like Oh Doctor! and The Cook. Arbuckle directed both films and was joined by Buster Keaton who had a leading role Oh Doctor.

Lake also played dramatic roles with Bert Lytell in Blackie’s Redemption and The Lion’s Den, both from 1919. During the 1920s she appeared in a number of Metro silent film features as the lead actress. At the height of her career she earned $1,200 per week as a motion picture actress. Lake had only limited success in dramatic roles. Following the introduction of talkies, her parts in films began to wane and she only performed in supporting roles. Her last appearance in film was in 1935 with a bit part in Frisco Kid. In all her screen credits numbered ninety-six.

In March 1925, Lake married fellow actor Robert Williams, but they were divorced in 1926. The couple separated and reunited three times before they made a permanent break. Williams was a vaudeville performer who had appeared in a number of stage plays. He was previously married to singer Marion Harris.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording Permalink

Alice Terry

October 25, 2019

Alice Terry was an American film actress who began her career during the silent film era, appearing in thirty-nine films between 1916 and 1933.

Born Alice Frances Taaffe in Vincennes, Indiana, she made her film debut in 1916 in Not My Sister, opposite Bessie Barriscale and William Desmond Taylor.

That same year, she played several different characters in the 1916 anti-war film Civilization, co-directed by Thomas H. Ince and Reginald Barker. One of her most acclaimed performances came as "Marguerite" in 1921's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, starring Rudolph Valentino.

In 1925 her husband co-directed Ben-Hur, filming parts of it in Italy. The two decided to move to the French Riviera, where they set up a small studio in Nice and made several films on location in North Africa, Spain, and Italy for MGM and others. In 1933, Terry made her last film appearance in Baroud, which she also co-directed with husband Rex Ingram.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Alice White

October 25, 2019

Alice White was an American film actress. She was born Alva White of French and Italian parents. Her mother, a former chorus girl died when Alice was only three years old. She attended Roanoke College in Virginia and then took a secretarial course at Hollywood High School also attended by future actors Joel McCrea and Mary Brian. After leaving school she became a secretary and “script girl” for director Josef Von Sternberg. After clashing with Von Sternberg, White left his employment to work for Charlie Chaplin, who decided before long to place her in front of the camera.

Her bubbly and vivacious persona led to comparisons with Clara Bow, but White’s career was slow to progress. After playing a succession of flappers and gold diggers, she attracted the attention of the director and producer Mervyn LeRoy who saw potential in her. Her first sound films included Show Girl made in the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, and Show Girl in Hollywood in the Western Electric sound-on-film process, both released by Warner Brothers and both based on novels by J. P. McEvoy. In these two films, White appeared as “Dixie Dugan”. In October 1929, McAvoy started the comic strip Dixie Dugan with the character Dixie having a “helmet” hairstyle and appearance similar to actress Louise Brooks. White also used the services of Hollywood ‘beauty sculptor’ Sylvia of Hollywood to stay in shape.

She left films in 1931 to improve her acting abilities, returning in 1933 only to have her career hurt by a scandal that erupted over her involvement with boyfriend actor Jack Warburton and future husband Sy Bartlett. Although she later married Bartlett, her reputation was tarnished and she appeared only in supporting roles after this. By 1937 and 1938, her name was at the bottom of the cast lists. She made her final film appearance in Flamingo Road. White died of complications from a stroke, aged 78, on February 19, 1983.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures Permalink

Alan Ladd

October 25, 2019

Alan Walbridge Ladd was an American film actor.

Ladd was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas to an American father and an English-American mother. His father died when he was four, and his mother relocated to Oklahoma City where she married Jim Beavers, a housepainter. The family then moved again to North Hollywood, California where Ladd became a high-school swimming and diving champion and participated in high school dramatics. He opened his own hamburger and malt shop, which he called Tiny’s Patio. He worked briefly as a studio carpenter and for a short time was part of the Universal Pictures studio school for actors. But Universal decided he was too blond and too short and dropped him. Intent on acting, he found work in radio.

Ladd began by appearing in dozens of films in small roles, including Citizen Kane in which he played one of the “faceless” reporters who are always shown in silhouette. He first gained some recognition with a featured role in the wartime thriller Joan of Paris, 1942. For his next role, his manager, Sue Carol, found a vehicle which made Ladd’s career, Graham Greene’s This Gun for Hire in which he played “Raven,” a hitman with a conscience. “Once Ladd had acquired an unsmiling hardness, he was transformed from an extra to a phenomenon. Ladd’s calm slender ferocity make it clear that he was the first American actor to show the killer as a cold angel.” – David Thomson Both the film and Ladd’s performance played an important role in the development of the “gangster” genre: “That the old fashioned motion picture gangster with his ugly face, gaudy cars, and flashy clothes was replaced by a smoother, better looking, and better dressed bad man was largely the work of Mr. Ladd.” – New York Times obituary. Ladd was teamed with actress Veronica Lake in this film, and despite the fact that it was Robert Preston who played the romantic lead, the Ladd-Lake pairing captured the public’s imagination, and would continue in another three films. Ladd went on to star in several Paramount Pictures’ films with a brief timeout for military service with the United States Army Air Force’s First Motion Picture Unit. He appeared in Dashiell Hammett’s story The Glass Key, his second pairing with Lake, and Lucky Jordan, with Helen Walker. His cool, unsmiling persona proved popular with wartime audiences, and he was quickly established as one of the top box office stars of the decade.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Recording Permalink

Alan Ladd, Jr.

October 25, 2019

See the Hollywood Walk of Fame Star Ceremony announcement
Oscar winner Alan Ladd Jr. was honored with the 2,348th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Johnny Grant, honorary Mayor of Hollywood, presided over the event. Guests included Mel Brooks, Ian LaFrenais, and John Goldwyn.
7018 Hollywood Boulevard on September 28, 2007.

BIOGRAPHY

Regarded as a consummate producer and studio executive, Alan Ladd’s films have grossed billions of dollars and have received countless awards including over 150 Academy Award nominations and 50 wins.

Alan Ladd Jr.’s career as an agent, independent producer, and studio head began in 1963 when he served as a motion picture talent agent at Creative Management Associates for the likes of Judy Garland, Warren Beatty, and Robert Redford. Within five years, his passion for the industry took a decidedly more independent route as Ladd began work as a producer on a wide range of films featuring some of the era’s most respected stars including Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Ben Kingsley, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, and Marlon Brando. With these remarkable collaborations under his belt, in 1973 he became Head of Creative Affairs at Twentieth Century Fox and within three years was President of the studio.

Soon after taking over the studio, Ladd had a fortuitous encounter with a relatively unknown filmmaker named George Lucas, who described for Ladd his dream of making an ambitious, character-driven science fiction story set in outer space. Though there was no precedent for this sort of big budget, risky filmmaking venture, Ladd took the largest gamble of his career and commissioned Lucas to write the screenplay Star Wars for Fox. Star Wars and the subsequent franchise that grew out of it has become one of the most profitable in motion picture history, generating billions of dollars in revenue and defining what would become known as the Hollywood blockbuster, a concept that forever changed the way movies were made.

After Star Wars, under Ladd’s leadership the studio produced some of the most successful films in its history, including Ridley Scott’s Alien; Julia starring Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jason Robards; The Towering Inferno with its all-star cast of Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, and Fred Astaire; The Omen directed by Richard Donner; as well as Young Frankenstein, Breaking Away, Norma Rae, All That Jazz, and The Rose, to name just a few.

In 1979, the producer launched The Ladd Company, and achieved huge success with the Oscar-winning Best Picture Chariots of Fire. Other films released by The Ladd Company include Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Once Upon a Time in America, and the top-grossing Police Academy series. He also helped launch the careers of future uber-producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer on the film Night Shift, evidence once again of his impeccable instincts for new talent. His other films include The Man in the Iron Mask, An Unfinished Life starring Robert Redford, Jennifer Lopez, and Morgan Freeman, and Mel Gibson’s masterwork Braveheart, for which Ladd received the Best Picture Oscar. Braveheart, one of the most acclaimed romantic epics in recent cinema, was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and the winner of 5 statuettes, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Ladd’s career has taken him down many roads, including a tenure as Chairman and CEO of MGM/UA where he oversaw such projects as A Fish Called Wanda, Moonstruck, and Thelma & Louise, and continued the franchise successes of the Rocky and Poltergeist series. Additionally, his work as a human rights advocate has gained him the admiration of working film professionals in Hollywood and around the world, particularly his efforts to expose gender and racial inequalities in his industry.

In addition to Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone due out later this year, Ladd’s upcoming production slate includes the English drama Tortoise and the Hare, and the historical Chinese epic A Dream of Red Mansions, starring Oscar nominee Ken Watanabe, which will begin production in October of this year. In addition to his producing efforts, Ladd is still an active member of the Producers Guild of America, the American Film Institute, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Radio Permalink

Alan Young

October 25, 2019

Alan Young is an English-Canadian character actor, best known for his television role in Mister Ed and as the voice of Scrooge McDuck. During the 1940s and 1950s he starred in his own shows on radio and television.

Young was born Angus Young in North Shields, Northumberland, to John Cathcart Young, a shipyard worker, and Florence Pinckney, whose ancestors included a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence. The family moved to Edinburgh when Young was a toddler, and later to West Vancouver, British Columbia, when Young was six years old. He came to love radio when bedridden as a child because of severe asthma. Near the start of his radio career, during World War II, Young attempted to enlist in the Royal Canadian Navy, then the Canadian Army, but was rejected due to his ill health.

Young was a broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1944, he moved to American radio with The Alan Young Show, NBC’s summer replacement for Eddie Cantor. He switched to ABC two years later, but then returned to NBC. Since 1994, he has played at least eight characters on the popular radio drama Adventures in Odyssey, most notably antique dealer Jack Allen.

Young was featured in the film Chicken Every Sunday in 1949, and the television version of The Alan Young Show began the following year. After its cancellation, Young appeared in films, including Androcles and the Lion and The Time Machine. In 1953, in the movie ‘Kiss Me Kate”, he had a featured, role, as a dancer with Ann Miller, in the major production number, “Tom, Dick or Harry”, in that film. He appeared in the episode “Thin Ice” of the NBC espionage drama Five Fingers, starring David Hedison. He is best known, however, for Mister Ed, a CBS television show which ran from 1961 to 1966. He played the owner of a talking horse that would talk to no one but him.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink
Albert Dekker, 1950s. (Photo by Film Favorites/Getty Images)
Albert Dekker, 1950s. (Photo by Film Favorites/Getty Images)

Albert Dekker

October 25, 2019

Albert Dekker was an American character actor and politician best known for his roles in Dr. Cyclops, The Killers, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Wild Bunch. He is sometimes credited as Albert Van Dekker or Albert van Dekker.

Born as Albert Van Ecke in Brooklyn, New York, he adopted his mother’s maiden name of Dekker as his stage name. Dekker attended Bowdoin College and made his professional acting debut with a Cincinnati stock company in 1927. Within a few months, Dekker was featured in the Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s play Marco Millions.

On April 4, 1929, Dekker married actress Esther Guernini. The couple had two sons and a daughter before divorcing.

After a decade of theatrical appearances, Dekker transferred to Hollywood in 1937, and made his first film, 1937’s The Great Garrick. He spent most of the rest of his acting career in the cinema, but also returned to the stage from time to time.