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Today’s photo (from our Donald Gordon collection; that’s Donald himself on the right) illustrates that off screen, while just as beautiful as they were on film, many female stars were not THAT recognizable. Without their makeup (and in the case of many male stars like Bing Crosby and Humphrey Bogart, their toupees) a lot of […]
Last week we discussed actors who left thriving careers to join the armed forces in World War II. Today we’re highlighting three men whose careers in Hollywood started after they’d left the service: character actors Neville Brand (above), George Kennedy (farther down below in living color) and Lee Marvin (directly below) — oh sure, Marvin became a […]
Margaret Lindsay, tell us more, about the “Crosby Shelvadoor” — Remember that one? Yes, like many vintage movie stars in the 1950s, Lindsay became a spokesman on TV — She promoted refrigerators. (Little did the sponsors at that time know; see below.) During her busy career, which spanned from 1932 to 1974, seven years before […]
Bette Davis said a terrible thing about Margaret Lindsay. She didn’t mention her by name but said that William Wyler, the director of 1938’s Jezebel, couldn’t get the actress to deliver her lines properly so he just took a shot of her hand wearing a wedding ring to denote that she, not Davis’ character, was married […]
Today winds up the week’s series covering some of the classic Hollywood screen personalities who actually saw combat — often heroically so — in World War II. We’ve written about just a few of the personalities who did, with apologies to Neville Brand, Audie Murphy and Lee Marvin, among others, for not giving all these […]
Other actors, perhaps not at the height of their careers, also answered the call when the U.S. was attacked and entered the War in 1941. Today we look at two men who served valiantly, Wayne Morris and Eddie Albert, two actors from the Warner Brothers’ stable. That’s Wayne on the far left, starring in […]
Many stars from the 1940’s served in the armed forces in World War II. Some were teenage actors who naturally were the right age to be drafted. Many used their studio connections, and served at Fort Roach (the Hal Roach studios in Hollywood) grinding out training films. But several big names and several minor stars […]
They were some of the top salesmen of war bonds in the 1940s. No wonder since they were HUGE box office attractions — not only Hollywood’s No. 1 in 1942, but Number 3 in 1941, 1943, 1948 and 1949. In 1951, the duo ranked No. 4. After logging successful appearances in vaudeville and radio, Universal […]
The 1940s had some big movie stars. The pin up girls: Lana Turner, Dorothy Lamour, Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth. The handsome and dashing leading men: Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, John Wayne. But no star was bigger at the box office than the two comics — Bud Abbott and Lou Costello — pictured above. By 1942, Abbott and Costello (on the right) at Universal […]
Time to dip into our trusty e-mail bag, and unearth recent pearls of wisdom (we mean that sincerely) from our ever-knowledgeable readers. There are few thing we like better than hearing back from readers about what we publish. Here’s what regular contributor Jeff Woodman wrote in response to our July 18th blog about Robert Taylor, […]