Born October 3, 1896, (Thomas) Leo McCarey began in films as Assistant Director to horror legend Tod Browning in 1920, but soon found his niche as a comedy writer for Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedies. He later brought Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy together and guided their early joint career. By 1929 he was VP in charge of production for Hal Roach Studios.

He became a highly sought after director with the coming of sound and directed someof the biggest stars of the day, including Gloria Swanson, W. C. Fields and Harold Lloyd in some of their best reviewed films. One early highlight was the Marx Bros. classic, Duck Soup generally regarded as their best film.

In 1937 he directed two enduring masterpieces, Make Way for Tomorrow about the problems of old age in the pre-Social Security age, which he regarded as his finest film and the ultimate screenball comedy, The Awful Truth, which was the box-office smash Make Way for Tomorrow was not. When he won his Best Director Oscar for The Awful Truth he famously remarked “thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture”.

He was nominated for Best Original Story for 1939’s bittersweet Love Affair and 1940’s return to screwball comedy, My Favorite Wife, but he relegated the direction of the latter to Garson Kanin.

In 1944 he wrote, produced and directed the classic comedy,Going My Way with Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald as priests with different outlooks, which made him the first director whose film won all three Oscar categories in the same year, although he is not officially credited with having won for producing. But then, who needs another Oscar when your percentage of profits when the year’s most successful film made you the highest paid individual in the country that year?

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Born January 27, 1921 in Denison, Iowa as Donna Belle Mullenger, the future Donna Reed was discovered by a Hollywood talent scout while attending Los Angeles City College.

Signed by MGM, she was in three films in 1941, her first year in films, including a major supporting turn in Shadow of the Thin Man with William Powell and Myrna Loy. In 1942 she would appear in major roles in two other films from long-running MGM series in The Courtship of Andy Hardy with Mickey Rooney and Calling Dr. Gillepsie with Lionel Barrymore. She made a strong impression that same year as Edward Arnold’s daughter in Eyes in the Night. Important roles in major MGM films soon followed, including 1943’s The Human Comedy and 1945’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and They Were Expendable.

While returning from Mexico in 1945 where she went to obtain a quickie divorce from makeup artist William Tuttle, her husband of two years, she was bumped from her flight by an American serviceman. All on board the flight were killed. She then married producer Tony Owen with whom she had four children.

On loan to RKO, she starred opposite James Stewart in Frank Capra’s now classic 1947 film, It’s a Wonderful Life. From there it was back to MGM for one of that studio’s best films of 1947, Green Dolphin Street based on an enormously successful best-seller.

In fairly routine films until 1953, she was in two standout films that year, the domestic drama Trouble Along the Way in which she played her customary nice girl opposite John Wayne and From Here to Eternity in which she played against type as a hard-bitten prostitute, for which she won an Oscar.

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Born September 20, 1927 in Wales, Rachel Roberts had a strict Baptist upbringing against which she rebelled. Following her studies at the University of Wales and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she had a successful career on the London stage and entered films in 1953. Her screen career, however, did not take off until Karel Reisz’s 1960 film, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in which she played Albert Finney’s older, married lover. The performance won her a BAFTA for Best British Actress, an accomplishment she repeated three years later with a second win for Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life in which she played Richard Harris’ older lover.

Married to actor Alan Dobie, five years her junior, from 1955 to 1961, she became the fourth wife of actor Rex Harrison in 1962 three years after the death of his third wife, actress Kay Kendall.

On the British stage in the hit musical Maggie May in 1964, she was seen mostly on TV for the remainder of the decade with an occasional foray into film. It wasn’t, however, until
Lindsay Anderson’s 1973 film, O Lucky Man! opposite Malcolm McDowell that she had another screen role of major importance.

Her delightful portrayal of Wendy Hiller’s maid in Sidney Lumet’s 1974 film of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express brought her some of her best notices.

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Born June 13, 1892 in Johannesburg, South Africa to a mining engineer and his wife, young Basil Rathbone, along with his parents and two younger siblings were forced to flee the country at the end of the decade when his father was accused by the Boers of being a spy for the British. Young Rathbone himself later became an actual spy for the British during World War I. Awarded the Military Cross in 1918, his brother John was killed in action during the war.

On the British stage from 1911, he alternated between Great Britain and the U.S. in the 1920s and the early 1930s. He was Romeo to Katharine Cornell’s Juliet in the acclaimed 1934 Broadway production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. On screen from 1921, his film career took off with major supporting roles in four 1935 classics, David Copperfield; Anna Karenina; Captain Blood and A Tale of Two Cities as well as leads in A Feather in Her Hat and Kind Lady.

Rathbone’s portrayal of Tybalt in George Cukor’s 1936 screen version of Romeo and Juliet in support of Norman Shearer and Leslie Howard earned him his first Oscar nomination. The swordfight in which he kills John Barrymore ws the only one he ever won on screen in his long career

Two years later he was again among the Oscar nominees for his portrayal of Louis XI in If I Were King, though his most memorable role from that year was as Sir Guy of Gisbourne opposite Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood in which he once again exhibited the expert swordsmanship he previously displayed in Captain Blood and Romeo and Juliet and would again in 1940’s The Mark of Zorro. He was also splendid that year in the remake of the Word War I classic, The Dawn Patrol with Flynn and David Niven.

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The only wife of a future president of the U.S. to win an Oscar, and the only Oscar winning actress to be buried in a nun’s habit, the facts of Jane Wyman’s life are somewhat obscured and confusing.

Born Sarah Jane Mayfield on January 5, 1917 in St. Joseph, Missouri, young Sarah Jane’s parents were divorced when she was very young, her father dying when she was either 5 or 8, depending on whether you believe she born in 1917 or 1914. Some records show the earlier date of birth which she later claimed she used to get jobs she wouldn’t have been able to get if she used her real age were known.

Later adopted by her neighbors, the Foulks or Fulks, she became Sarah Jane Fulks. After a succession of clerical and retail jobs, she became a radio singer in 1932 and married her first husband, whose last name was Wyman, a year later. Mainly in un-credited film roles from 1932 forward, she first became noticed under the name of Jane Wyman in 1938’s Brother Rat which also featured future husband Ronald Reagan. By this time she had divorced both Wyman and second husband, Myron Futterman.

Married to Reagan in 1940, the two had a daughter, Maureen (1941-1990) and an adopted son (Michael, born 1943). While Reagan’s career took off fairly quickly, Wyman’s did not. A supporting player in A pictures, with occasional leads in B films, it was as the second female lead in 1943’s Princess O’Rourke that she was discovered by Billy Wilder and cast opposite Ray Milland in 1945’s The Lost Weekend. Legend has it that Wilder had screened Princess O’Rourke to catch Olivia de Havilland’s performance as he was considering her for the lead in his film. This sounds a bit odd because Wilder certainly knew who de Havilland was, having written much of her dialogue for 1941’s Hold Back the Dawn.

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Born Jane Alice Peters on October 6, 1908 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the young tomboy was discovered by director Allan Dwan at the age of 12 and cast as Monte Blue’s sister in 1921’s A Perfect Crime under her original name. She was Carol Lombard throughout the 1920s and Carole Lombard by 1930’s The Arizona Kid. She fell in love with William Powell, her co-star in 1931’s Man of the World and married him later that year. Starring opposite Clark Gable in 1932’s No Man of Her Own, the two did not hit it off. Divorced from Powell in 1933, the two remained friends. She was engaged to singer Russ Columbo who died tragically in 1934 at the age of 26.

That same year she became a major star opposite John Barrymore in the screwball comedy Twentieth Century. Meeting Gable again in 1935 the two fell madly in love but marriage seemed to be out of the question as Gable’s wife at the time was a wealthy oil heiress who refused to give him a divorce. Four years later Gable agreed to play Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind because the salary allowed him to pay for a divorce from his wife and he and Lombard were quietly married in Arizona.

In the meantime Lombard became a major star with three successful comedies from 1935 to 1937, Mitchell Leisen’s Hands Across the Table; Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey for which she won her only Oscar nomination and William A. Wellman’s Nothing Sacred. Now one of Hollywood’s highest paid actresses, she had her pick of roles and chose to move away from comedy and into drama.

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Born Gretchen Young in Salt Lake City, Utah on January 6, 1913 the third of three girls, her parents divorced when she was three and her mother moved them to Los Angeles where she ran a boarding house while grooming all three daughters for the movies. Little Gretchen made her screen debut at the age of four, appearing in several films that year. One was The Primrose Ring which starred Mae Murray. Murray was so taken by little Gretchen that she offered to adopt her. Her mother refused, but did allow her to live with Murray for two years where little Gretchen was a fast study in the art of acting under the expert tutelage of one of the silent screen’s biggest stars.

Answering a casting call intended for one of her sisters (either Polly Ann Young or Sally Blane) in 1927, Gretchen was given a major role in The Whip Woman with Estelle Taylor, the first film in which she appeared under her new name, Loretta Young.

Cast opposite Lon Chaney in 1928’s Laugh, Clown, Laugh, Loretta Young became a star at the age of 15. She had just turned 17 when she and Grant Withers, her 26 year-old co-star in 1930’s The Second Floor Mystery eloped. The marriage was annulled a year later.

By 1930, she was starring in films opposite the likes of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in Loose Ankles; John Barrymore in The Man from Blankley’s and Ronald Colman in The Devil to Pay! . Jean Harlow may have had the title role but Loretta had top billing in Frank Capra’s 1931 hit, Platinum Blonde.

She was just twenty when she starred opposite Spencer Tracy in Frank Borzage’s 1933 classic, Man’s Castle during which she had an affair with the 33 year-old actor. An affair with Clark Gable, her co-star in 1935’s Call of the Wild resulted in a secret pregnancy and the birth of a daughter she later adopted from an orphanage. Her daughter named Judith Young at the time of the adoption and later Judy Lewis when Young married businessman Tom Lewis in 1940, did not learn of her true parentage until she was a married woman herself.

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