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Yesterday’s blog noted the presence of Jean Peters playing a streetwalker in the Sam Fuller crime drama, Pickup on South Street. Today, we are concentrating on the fact that she was indeed at one point a major star. Then she married Howard Hughes — and virtually disappeared. (Let’s concentrate on Peters the actress, not the […]
Does it hold up? It’s gritty, it’s powerful. And even those not especially taken with the work of its creator — director Sam Fuller — admit that the movie’s unrelenting energy and mix of Marxian political overtones plays well even in today’s turbulent times. Under the watchful, but enthusiastic auspices of Darryl Zanuck and 20th […]
A contract player at Columbia, Larry Parks exploded into stardom by playing Al Jolson onscreen — twice. And, although he quickly made it to top-of-the-title billing status, we suspect that offhand, you’d have trouble immediately identifying any other Larry Parks feature. He logged nearly 50 movie and tv credits over two decades ending in the […]
Quite a career. Quite a marriage. By the Fifties, Sir Laurence and Lady Olivier felt the stage — and especially Shakespearean roles — were their destiny. Vivien no longer considered herself as a film star, nor did she believe she needed Hollywood to advance her career, wrote author Anne Edwards in her 1977 tome, Vivien […]
Let’s look at her career, pre and post Gone With the Wind. How much do you really know about the two time Oscar winner. After her sensational turn as Scarlett O’Hara in 1939’s Gone With The Wind, Vivien Leigh was perhaps the world’s most famous movie actress. After her 1940 marriage to Laurence Olivier, she […]
His long career in musicals, comedies and dramas, his success on stage, his Oscar win, and yet today few people under 30 have ever heard of Don Ameche. Who was this man? One of the leading actors of the 1930s and 1940s who never stopped working in films, on radio, television and on the Broadway […]
He was a big band singer, a movie star, a star on radio, a nightclub performer and a recording artist. He was one of the few crooners to have a sustained Hollywood screen career. He was in no way as imposing as Bing Crosby, but he was reasonably close during his Hollywood prime from the […]
There she is with best pal, Lana Turner. She had quite a career in B movies and as Clark Gable’s on again off again lover. In fact, Grey was a child actor but never a star. Her father Ray Grey was a director in the silent era. Legend has it that Gloria Swanson was one […]
There’s our man above with a familiar costar. Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn made four pictures together including one of the most infamous box office bombs of the 1930’s. Sylvia Scarlett is director George Cukor’s idea of a light comedy based on a novel about a girl disguised as a boy to help her errant […]
We suspect that you are reasonably confident that you pretty much know already everything important that there is to know Cary Grant. That’s why for today’s Cary Grant Quiz, we are tightening the screws a little bit. Our questions this time are inspired by a most pleasurable reading of author Scott Eyman’s recently published biography […]