Judy Canova, with her plastic looks and hillbilly manners, was famous comedienne during the 1930s. Lil Abner look out
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Norma, growing younger by the site The old adage that a lady never tells her age, really struck home with 1930s Hollywood Actress Norma Shearer. Whether it was intentional or not, she has a few birth charts out there — four in fact. The popular one for astrologer is on Astro.com and says she was born 1900. I think that one can be discarded — it makes her too old for her debut in New York. The next two are strong contenders, and are just one year apart. The first is from Marc Jones 1000 Nativities with the entry of…
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Warner Baxter was the first American to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. He was the first actor to portray the character of Jay Gatsby on-screen in The Great Gatsby (1926). By 1936, Baxter was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, earning a record $284,000. His best role is that of the doctor who treated Abraham Lincoln‘s assassin, in The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936). Sorry, cannot find that one. But the one below was directed by the great Frank Capra. This one is rather amusing as Baxter had a fear of horses — Uranus (which rules the Equines btw) 20 Libra 25…
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Actor James Byron Dean was born on February 8, 1931, at the Seven Gables apartment on the corner of 4th Street and McClure Street in Marion, Indiana, southwest of Fort Wayne. Like the larger city, they named Marion for a Revolutionary War general, this time Brigadier General Francis Marion. His parents Mildred Marie (Wilson) and Winton Dean, a dental technician, were natives of the area. Their only child was Jimmy, and when the boy was about six years old, they moved to Los Angeles for presumably better business opportunities. Unfortunately, Mrs. Dean died a few years later, shortly before her…
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David Cope's Meridian System
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I happened to catch this porn-sci fi the other night and I was struck that only two people put in good performances: Rip Torn and Candy Clark. I’m not alone in my opinion — in John Willis’ 1974 Film Annual “Screen World” book thought she was one of the more “promising actors” on the horizon — he was basing that on her performance in George Lucas’s American Graffiti where she was terrific, and very pretty. I think that counts for a lot, especially these days, as most on t.v. and even on the runaway, aren’t.
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Ingrid Bergman a quiet shocker Ingrid Bergman, the Swedish beauty, and successor to Greta Garbo, had a tendency in Hollywood films of always playing soft, romantic women; delicate orchids too fragile to face the cold winds of reality and protected in a hothouse run by a domineering, cruel husband, until suddenly a bracing wind blows into her perfumed and warm rooms and makes her wake up with a tenacity and ferocity that would make Mary Shelley proud. It’s always the same, this time Casablanca (an Oscar nomination), another time Gaslight (an Oscar win), and still another in Notorious (her best…
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Monty Clift and James Dean were the young turks of the 1950s Hollywood Scene. but only Monty made it out of the decade, though only just. James was the more petulant and angry of the two; Monty was the sensitive “artistic” type that women wanted to mother. Only when Monty got out of the 1950s was he able to play something against type, in Trial in Nuremberg, Clift has several bios to his credit. One by Patricia Bosworth, and another by Robert LaGuardia , both who seem to to specialize in Hollywood bios. I read part of the LaGuardia the…
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I honestly thought the three Warleggan family members the best thing on Poldark. Their acting was quite good and I enjoyed the performances of the actors for George, Elizabeth and Uncle Cary, immensely. I could find little on Philip (Pip) Torrens even browsing through the British papers, though YouTube yielded a few interviews. He has a long and varied career — starting with Oxford Blues (a comedy c. 1986) to Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens ( 2015) and now the Poldark Series (2016-2019). Bloxham to Cambridge Torrens went to public Bloxham School, and then onto Trinity College where he…
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Meeting Barbra Despite her odd spelling name, she was born Barbara Joan Streisand and decided to drop an “A” as it would be quirky and noticeable. She was born on April 25 1942 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, then an Orthodox enclave. She gave an homage to that closed world in “Yentl”, where a young girl dresses as a man so she too can read the Torah and Talmud, the foundations of their faith. This article from My Jewish Learning gives a fuller understanding of their beliefs and identity.
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Raymond Burr is best known as Perry Mason, Erle Stanley Gardner’s, legal beagle and later Ironsides on television, always shedding light on lies and misdeeds and nary losing the fight. Perry existed before television, he was a radio favorite, but it was Burr’s intensity and drive for excellence that made the L.A. solicitor a household name, and running for a remarkable nine seasons before fading away into rerun history in 1966. That, though, was not the end of Burr, for he returned as the wheel-chaired crime fighter in Ironsides, which ran for another 8 seasons. Television crime-detective series owe a…
