Yes, he is still alive — at age 90. (A prostate cancer survivor, no less.)

That may be one reason why it’s hard for younger generations fully appreciate today just how important Poitier was to mid-to-late 20th century Hollywood. He was the colony’s rare leading man, the first black star to win a best actor Oscar (for 1963′s Lillies of the Field.)

It is tempting to regard Poitier as a bypassed landmark, the world’s most handsome black man and Hollywood’s Uncle Tom, writes British critic David Thomson.  We strongly urge that you resist this temptation.

Poitier was at his peak one of Hollywood’s most potent STARS, who used his box office clout to expand his own work opportunities and extend them to others.  Often overlooked today is the fact that in the 1970′s he directed several titles featuring mostly black casts.

But there is no denying that Poitier’s acting career has never been able to disguise the fact that the man playing his parts is a regulation black:  good-looking, amiable, attractive and black, writes Thomson.  That his parts involved authority figures (doctors, teachers, etc.) invites the impression that Poitier was Hollywood’s “good Negro.”

Be that as it may, Poitier earned his stardom by performing onscreen invariably with precision, zest and passion. He was the tall (the actor stands over 6-feet-2), refined suitor of Spencer Tracy’s daughter in director Stanley  Kramer’s 1967 drama, Guess Whose Coming To Dinner. Nine years earlier he carried the banner of racial harmony (along with a bedraggled Tony Curtis) in Kramer’s The Defiant Ones.

Poitier stood out as the stalwart, amiable longshoreman in Martin Ritt’s drama Edge of the City. An outstanding turn as a righteous school teacher in Richard Brooks’ 1955 drama Blackboard Jungle still stands out.

Poitier’s career spans the second half of the last century; he hung it up in the 1990′s. He remains one of Hollywood very biggest stars of the period.  Not bad for an impoverished Bahamanian born in Miami 1924.

A few weeks ago we highlighted Lloyd Nolan, and mentioned his part in 1945′s The House on 92nd Street (above). It was a dark war drama about Nazi agents flooding American between 1939 and 1941.  Nolan played, typically for him, an FBI agent in pursuit.

But the actor who was supposed to become a star from his double agent role in that film was a fellow named William Eythe. You see him below.

Eythe was a contract player at 20th Century Fox in the mid 1940s. He got his big break after being discovered on Broadway by being cast in a small but pivotal role in The Ox Bow Incident (below). Then he was given a small but showy part in The Song of Bernadette.

He was a Tyrone Power “type,” and since the studio was losing Power to the Army, Fox initially tried to build up his career. But Eythe soon ran afoul of studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck, and was quicky sidelined.  

When Power refused to co-star with Tallulah Bankhead in Ernst Lubitsch’s A Royal Scandal, a tale about Catherine The Great, Eythe was cast in the role. Then came his most famous part, as the double agent in The House on 92nd St.

He starred in a few other ‘A’ films, such as Centennial Summer and  Colonel Effingham’s Raid, but then was relegated to ‘B’ films and eventually was pitched into that dark pit called Hollywood anonymity. His offscreen sexuality didn’t help at the time, something that a short marriage in the late Forties to actress Buff Cobb didn’t assuage. (Cobb’s next husband, by the way, was tv newsman Mike Wallace.)

Eythe went to pot physically fairly early — dying of hepatitis at age 38 in 1957.

Feel free to let us know if you honestly knew who this guy was, and if so, how and why.

Did you know those two youngsters MGM was promoting in 1940? Here’s a better look at him.

And here’s a publicity shot of her with fellow contract players June Allyson and Virginia O’Brien.

He was Douglas McPhail, a promising young tenor, Met Opera quality, who had a brief film career from 1935 to 1943. He was in some important films in the late 30s – San Francisco, Born to Dance, Maytime…. He even played Judy Garland’s love interest in Little Nellie Kelly.

Betty Jaynes (still with us at 96), was also an operatic vocalist, and had a career which started in 1937 and lasted a bit longer. They were married at the time they made Babes in Arms, with Rooney and Garland. They even had a child together.  But by 1941 they were divorced, and he committed suicide, by poison, in 1944.

Here are three of the most beautiful women to grace the silver screen. Who are they, and which countries do they call home?

Which was involved with Marcello Mastroianni?

Who won an Oscar?

Which were nominated for Oscars?

Who starred with Elvis Presley?

Which has parents as famous as she?

Who appeared nude in Playboy Magazine?

Who was up for the part of Honey Ryder?

Which have children?

Who was born in India?

Which one dated James Dean?

A leading man of the Thirties and Forties who is virtually forgotten today was the multi- talented Burgess Meredith. The shot above is from his most famous role, as Ernie Pyle in 1945′s The Story of G.I. Joe (costarring Robert Mitchum).

Actually, this may NOT be Meredith’s most recalled role, at least to younger readers. You’ll remember that the actor played Mickey Goldsmith, Rocky Balboa’s grizzled fight manager in 1976′s Rocky (and sequels).

Not to be overlooked is Meredith’s performance as George opposite Lon Chaney Jr.’s Lenny in Hollywood’s first — in 1939, two years after the source novel was published — adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1907, Meredith at first turned himself into an accomplished stage actor before making his Hollywood debut in the mid-Thirties.  His career was a long one — a total of nearly 180 movie and tv credits.  He died at age 80 in 1997.

He also made his mark offscreen in the romance department.  Most famously he was married to Paulette Goddard (who also at different times was married to Charlie Chaplin Meredith and novelist Erich Maria Remarque). The couple costarred in Jean Renoir’s 1946 romantic drama Diary of a Chambermaid, which Meredith co-scripted.

A notable screen venture for Meredith was not as an actor but as a narrator.

The movie is A Walk in the Sun, based on a book written by Harry Brown, originally published in 1944 by Alfred A Knopf Inc., and reprinted in 1998 by First Bison Books, Univ. of Nebraska Press. When it first came out — the book about a WWII G.I. platoon taking a bridge and Nazi infested farmhouse in Southern Italy — was highly praised as one of the best written about the war conflict from the enlisted man point of view. Meredith is the perfect narrator for this project.

Although he referred to himself as primarily a character actor, Meredith was a marquee name at his peak.  An actor of solid skills, he was for a time a leading man.

To his enormous credit, he kept a sense of perspective about his career.  He had, for example, no compunctions about playing smaller character parts as he did in 21 episodes from 1966-68 of the Batman tv series (starring Adam West). Meredith said he had fun playing The Penguin, and besides, the role paid the bills.