Category: Oscar Profile

Technically, no Christmas movie has ever won a Best Picture Oscar, but one film in which the holiday is prominently featured did win the big prize. 1960’s The Apartment, which takes place primarily from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Eve, doesn’t so much celebrate the holiday as observe it. Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Jack…

Born June 23, 1957 in Chicago, Illinois, Frances McDormand was the adopted daughter of Canadian-born parents, Noreen Eloise (Nickleson), a nurse from Ontario, and The Rev. Vernon Weir McDormand, a Disciples of Christ minister from Nova Scotia, who raised her in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. She began her stage career after graduating from Yale in…

Born January 24, 1886 in Christiansburg, Virginia, Henry Edmonson King left school at 15 to go to work for the Norfolk and Western Railroad. He later became an actor with the touring Empire Stock Company. He married actress Gypsy Abbott, with whom he would have four children, in 1914. He made his first film as…

Born March 5, 1908 in Lancashire, England, Reginald Carey Harrison was the third child and only son of William Reginald Harrison, a cotton broker and his wife Edith Mary (née Carey). A precocious child, he dreamed of going on stage because he liked the applause and changed his name to Rex because it was the…

Born October 5, 1901 in Sopron, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) as Johann Jacob Altmann, the son of an American-born father, legendary cinematographer John Alton was raised on films steeped in German Expressionism during his European childhood, which informed his later use of low light, his motto being “it’s not what you light…it’s what you don’t light.”.…

Born August 11, 1965 in St. Matthews, South Carolina, the fifth of six children whose father was a horse trainer and whose mother was a maid. Two months after she was born, her parents moved her and three of her siblings to Cedar Falls, Rhode Island, leaving her two oldest siblings with her grandparents. She…

Born December 18, 1926 in Berlin, Germany to a German father and Polish mother, Walter Lassally’s father was an engineer and industrial filmmaker. Although Protestant by religion, both parents were Jewish by heritage and his father was forced to stop working when the Nazis came to power in 1932. With his father imprisoned in 1938,…

Born September 3, 1913 to Ina Rawley and Alan Ladd, an accountant, Alan Walbridge Ladd was four when his father died. He was five when he burned his apartment, playing with matches. His mother moved them to Oklahoma City. He was malnourished, undersize and nicknamed “Tiny” at eight, when his mother married a housepainter who…

Born May 9, 1895 in New York New York, Richard Barthelmess was the son of stage actress Caroline Harris (1866-1937) and her husband, Alfred Barthelmess who died when Richard was just a year old. He had walk-ons in his mother’s plays from an early age. Educated at Hudson River Military Academy and Trinity College, he…

Born August 18, 1920 in St. Louis, Missouri to Jonas Schrift, a designer of men’s clothing, and his wife Rose (née Winter), a singer, Shirley Schrift, would become the actress Shelley Winters. The family moved to Brooklyn, New York when Winters was 9. Her sister Blanche having married a Los Angeles theatre manager, Winters joined…

Born March 20, 1958 in Conyers, Georgia to Opal, a homemaker, and Charles Hunter, a part-time sporting goods company representative and farmer with a 250-acre farm, Holly Hunter was the youngest of seven siblings. Hunter’s parents encouraged her acting talent from an early age. Her first on-stage role was in a fifth-grade play in which…

Born August 23, 1912 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Eugene (Gene) Kelly was the third son of a phonograph salesman and his wife. His father had once been Al Jolson’s road manager. Although it was Gene’s dream to play shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, his mother enrolled Gene and his older brother James in dance classes when…

Born March 31, 1943 in Astoria, Queens, the son of a bakery owner and his wife, Ronald Walken, named by his mother after her favorite actor, Ronald Colman, and his brothers Kenneth and Glenn were child actors on television and in the theatre in the 1950s. Initially billed as Ronnie, the actor changed his first…

Born May 26, 1966 in London, England, Helena Bonham Carter was the youngest of three children of Elena, a psychotherapist, and Raymond Bonham Carter, a merchant banker. She is the great-granddaughter, on her father’s side of the family, of former Prime Minister Herbert H. Asquith, and the great-niece of director Anthony Asquith (Pygmalion, The Importance…