Gregory Ratoff (1897 - 1960)

Gregory Ratoff was born in Samara, Russia, near St. Petersburg, to Jewish parents, Sophie (nee Markison) and Benjamin Ratner. His mother claimed to have been born on September 1, 1878, but was married on June 14, 1894, when she would have been 15, to Benjamin Ratner (born 1864 – died 19??), with whom she had […]

Clarence Brown (1890 - 1987)

Born in Clinton, Massachusetts, to a cotton manufacturer, Clarence Brown moved to Tennessee when he was 11 years old. He attended Knoxville High School and the University of Tennessee, both in Knoxville, Tennessee, graduating from the university at the age of 19 with two degrees in engineering. An early fascination in automobiles led Brown to […]

William Beaudine (1892 - 1970)

Born in New York City, William Beaudine began his career as an actor in 1909 with American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. He married Marguerite Fleischer in 1914, to whom he stayed married until his death and who died in 1970 (Marguerite’s sister was the mother of actor Bobby Anderson). He was the brother of director […]

Nick Grinde (1893 - 1979)

Nick Grinde (January 12, 1893 – June 19, 1979) was an American film director and screenwriter. He directed 57 films between 1928 and 1945. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Grinde graduated from the University of Wisconsin. He later moved to New York and worked in Vaudeville. Grinde became a Hollywood film writer and director in the late […]

Edward Dmytryk (1908 - 1999)

Edward Dmytryk was born in Grand Forks, British Columbia, Canada, the son of Ukrainian immigrant parents, Frances (Berezowski) and Michael Dmytryk. His family moved to San Francisco, California. After his mother died, his father remarried. In San Francisco, the boy attended local schools and became interested in the developing film industry. He eventually reached Hollywood […]

William Wyler (1902 - 1981)

William Wyler was born to a Jewish family in Mulhouse, Alsace (then part of the German Empire). His Swiss father, Leopold, started as a traveling salesman which he later turned into a thriving haberdashery business in Mulhouse. His mother, Melanie (née Auerbach; died February 13, 1955, Los Angeles, aged 77), was German, and a cousin […]

Nella Walker (1886 - 1971)

Nella Walker (March 6, 1886 – March 22, 1971) was an American film actress and vaudeville performer of the 1920s through the 1950s. Walker was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, and in her teens became half of the husband and wife vaudeville team “Mack and Walker”, with her husband Wilbur Mack. By 1929 she had […]

Thomas Gomez (1905 - 1971)

Born Sabino Tomas Gomez in New York City, Thomas Gomez began his acting career in theater during the 1920s and was a student of the actor Walter Hampden. He made his first film Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror in 1942 and by the end of his career had appeared in sixty films. Thomas Gomez […]

Robert Lowery (1913 - 1971)

Born Robert Larkin Hanks in Kansas City, Missouri, Robert Lowery grew up on Wayne Avenue near the long-demolished Electric Park. Lowery’s father was a local attorney and oil investor who worked several years for the Pullman Corporation as a railroad agent; his mother, Leah Thompson Hanks, was a concert pianist. He graduated from Paseo High School […]

John Dall (1920 - 1971)

John Dall Thompson (he used his middle name for his acting career) was born in New York City on 26 May 1920, the younger son of Charles Jenner Thompson (1873-1929) and his wife Henry (née Worthington). (Sources which cite Dall’s birth name as John Jenner Thompson and his birth year as 1918 appear to be […]

Gladys Cooper (1888 - 1971)

Cooper was born at 23 Ennersdale Road, Hither Green, Lewisham, London, the eldest of the three daughters of Charles William Frederick Cooper (1844–1939) by his marriage to Mabel Barnett (1861–1944). Her two younger sisters were Doris Mabel (1891–1987) and Grace Muriel (1893–1982). Gladys Cooper spent most of her childhood in Chiswick, where her family moved […]

Spring Byington (1886 - 1971)

Spring Byington was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the daughter of Helene Maud (née Cleghorn 1862-1907) a doctor, and Edwin Lee Byington (1852–1891), an educator and Superintendent of schools in Colorado. Byington had one sibling, a younger sister, Helene Kimball Byington. After Edwin Lee died, their mother decided to send her younger daughter, Helene, to […]

Pier Angeli (1932 - 1971)

Born Anna Maria Pierangeli in Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy. Her twin sister is the actress Marisa Pavan. Pier Angeli made her film debut with Vittorio De Sica in Domani è troppo tardi (1950), after being spotted by director Léonide Moguy and De Sica. She was discovered by Hollywood, and MGM launched her in her first American […]

Dixie Evans (1926 - 2013)

Dixie Evans (August 28, 1926 – August 3, 2013), born as Mary Lee Evans, was an American burlesque dancer and stripper. Evans is probably best remembered for her burlesque parody as Marilyn Monroe. Evans entered show-business as a model and later chorus girl before becoming a star dancer. By the early 1950s she was a […]

Beverly Michaels (1928 - 2007)

Arriving in Hollywood in 1948, aged 19, and standing 5 feet 9 inches, she quickly found modeling work, in which she was mistakenly billed as “Beverley Michaels”. Later the same year, she had a brief role in the film East Side, West Side, and two years later had a minor role in the film version […]

Martha Sleeper (1910 - 1983)

Martha Sleeper reputedly spent her first years on a sheep ranch in Wyoming. Her father, William B. Sleeper, was an official of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum vaudeville circuit in New York City. Her mother was Minnie Akass. He retired to Los Angeles, California in 1923 because of ill health. She was under contract to Hal Roach studios […]

Dorothy Comingore (1913 - 1971)

Born Margaret Louise Comingore in Los Angeles, California, Dorothy Comingore was discovered by Charles Chaplin when she was acting in a small playhouse in Carmel. Comingore played bit parts in Hollywood movies until Orson Welles cast her as Susan Alexander Kane|Susan Alexander, the second wife of press tycoon Charles Foster Kane, in his debut feature film […]

Ivan Tors (1916 - 1983)

Ivan Tors wrote several plays in his natal country Hungary before moving to the United States just prior to World War II. He enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps then transferred to the Office of Strategic Services. Following the war he was contracted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a screenwriter. In 1952 he made Storm over […]

Constance Dowling (1920 - 1969)

Born in New York City, Constance Dowling was a model and chorus girl before moving to California in 1943. She was the elder sister of actress Doris Dowling. Prior to her move to Hollywood, Dowling appeared in several Broadway productions, including Panama Hattie (with sister Doris), Hold On To Your Hats, and The Strings, My […]

Barbara Lawrence (1930 - 2013)

Born to Morris Lawrence and Berniece (or Bernice) Eaton Lawrence in Carnegie, Oklahoma, Barbara Lawrence moved with her mother to Kansas City, Missouri as an adolescent. Lawrence’s career began as a child photographer’s model. She appeared in her first film, Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe (1945), as a night-club patron. A year later, she made a […]

Silvana Mangano (1930 - 1989)

Born in Rome to an Italian father and an English mother (Ivy Webb from Croydon), Silvana Mangano lived in poverty caused by the Second World War. Trained for seven years as a dancer, she was supporting herself as a model. In 1946, at age 16, Mangano won the “Miss Rome” beauty pageant and through this, she […]

June Vincent (1920 - 2008)

June Vincent (July 17, 1920 – November 20, 2008) was an American actress. June Vincent was born Dorothy June Smith in Harrod, Ohio, the daughter of Sybil Irwin and the Rev. Willis E. Smith. She began her career in film in the early 1940s. She later became a successful television actress appearing in many programs throughout […]

Josephine Hutchinson (1903 - 1998)

She was born in Seattle, Washington. Her mother, Leona Roberts, was an actress best known for her role as “Mrs. Meade” in Gone with the Wind. Through her mother’s connections, Hutchinson made her film debut at the age of thirteen in The Little Princess, starring Mary Pickford. She later attended the Cornish School of Music […]

Lilyan Tashman (1896 - 1934)

Lilyan Tashman was born the tenth and youngest child of a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Rose (née Cook), who was born in Germany, and Maurice Tashman, a clothing manufacturer from Bialystok, Poland. She freelanced as a fashion and artist’s model while attending Girl’s High School in Brooklyn and eventually entered […]

Edmund Lowe (1890 - 1971)

Edmund Lowe’s career included over 100 films in which he starred as the leading man. Edmund Lowe is best remembered for his role as Sergeant Quirt in the 1926 movie, What Price Glory. (Lowe reprised his role from the movie in the radio program Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt, broadcast on the Blue Network September […]

Asta Nielsen (1881 - 1972)

Asta Sofie Amalie Nielsen was born in the Vesterbro section of Copenhagen, Denmark, the daughter of an often unemployed blacksmith and a washerwoman. Nielsen’s family moved several times during her childhood while her father sought employment. They lived for several years in Malmö, Sweden where her father worked in a corn millery and then a […]

Kenne Duncan (1903 - 1972)

Kenne Duncan (February 17, 1903 – February 5, 1972) was a Canadian-born B-movie character actor. Hyped professionally as “The Meanest Man in the Movies,” the vast majority of his over 250 appearances on camera were Westerns, but he also did occasional forays into horror, crime drama, and science fiction. He also appeared in over a […]

William Boyd (1895 - 1972)

Boyd was born in Hendrysburg in Belmont County, located 26 miles east of Cambridge, Ohio. He was reared in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of day laborer Charles William Boyd and his wife, the former Lida Wilkens. Following his father’s death, he moved to California and worked as an orange picker, surveyor, tool dresser and auto […]

Nigel Green (1924 - 1972)

The son of a professor, Nigel Green attended King’s College School, Wimbledon and the University of London followed by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. During the Second World War, he trained as an Observer in the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. He appeared on stage at the Old Vic before making his first forays into […]

Brian Donlevy (1901 - 1972)

Brian Donlevy was born in 1901 in Portadown, County Armagh, Ireland, to Rebecca (née Parks) and Thomas Donlevy. Sometime between 1910 and 1912 the family moved to Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, where Donlevy’s father worked as a supervisor at the Brickner Woolen Mills. When the local Army National Guard company was called into service for the Pancho […]