Category: Oscar Profile

Born June 10, 1922 in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, Judy Garland, née Frances Ethel Gumm, was the youngest of three sisters known professionally as The Gumm Sisters.  The sisters appeared in three short films between 1929 and 1930. Signed by MGM in 1935 when she was just 13 years old, Garland had a rapid climb to…

Born January 30, 1930 in San Bernadino, California, Eugene Allen Hackman was raised primarily in Danville, Illinois where his family settled after several moves.  He joined the U.S. Marines at 16. After being discharged from the Marines, he moved to New York where he worked in a number of menial jobs before studying journalism and…

Although there had been occasional tributes to recently deceased performers and other film greats through the years, the first In Memoriam segment at the Oscars where multiple actors and other film participants are honored did not occur until 1994. Each year, we look to this segment with lumps in our throats and tears in our…

Born November 11, 1962 in Roswell, New Mexico, Demi Gene Guynes’ father, Charles Harmon left her mother before her birth.  She was named Guynes after her mother’s second husband, Danny Guynes.  The future Demi Moore had an unstable childhood thanks to Guynes’ forcing them for move forty times as he went from job to job. …

Born December 16, 1963 in New York, New York, James Mangold is the son of artists Robert and Sylvia Plimack Mangold.  He was raised in Washingtonville in New York’s Hudson Valley.  After high school in New York, he attended the California Institute of the Arts film and video program under Alexander Mackendrick (Sweet Smell of…

MORE STARS TAKE THE STAGE TO PRESENT AT THE 97TH OSCARS®: HALLE BERRY, PENÉLOPE CRUZ, ELLE FANNING, WHOOPI GOLDBERG, SCARLETT JOHANSSON, JOHN LITHGOW, AMY POEHLER, JUNE SQUIBB AND BOWEN YANG THE OSCARS SET TO AIR LIVE MARCH 2, AT 7 P.M. ET/4 P.M. PT, ON ABC AND HULU LOS ANGELES, CA – Halle Berry, Penélope…

Born October 5, 1967 in Cambridgeshire, England, Guy Edward Pearce is the son of an Australia father and an English mother.  When he was just three years old, his family moved to Australia for two years when his father was offered the position of Chief Test Pilot for the Australian Government.  The position became permanent,…

Born December 22, 1962, Ralph Fiennes is the eldest of six children born to photographer Mark Fiennes and his wife, novelist Jennifer Lash. An eighth cousin of King Charles, with his mellifluous voice, Fiennes give the impression of a well-heeled British aristocrat when in fact he was brought up in near poverty. The family moved…

Born September 30, 1982 in New York, New York, Kieran Culkin is the son of former child actor Kit Culkin and Patricia Brentrup who never married despite having seven children: Shane (born 1976), Dakota (1978), Macauley (1980), Kieran, Quinn (1984), Christian (1987), and Rory (1989).  Dakota passed away in 2008.  The others are still alive.…

Born Born July 10, 1883 in Philadelphia, PA, Samuel Grosvenor Wood married Clara Louise Rousch in 1908. He began his Hollywood career as an actor and assistant to Cecil B. DeMille in 1915, becoming a full-time director in 1917. He would eventually direct 82 films between 1920 and his death in 1949. Wood’s silent films…

Born July 31, 1905, in Storm Lake, Iowa, Winton C. Hoch is the only cinematographer of note working in the black-and-white era of film that never lensed a black-and-white feature film. Moving to California in 1924 and graduating in 1931 as a chemist from the California Institute of Technology, Hoch was a research physicist who joined…

Born September 16, 1903 in Los Angeles, California, Russell Harlan was the son of a couple from the Midwest who raised him and his younger brother, Richard, in Los Angeles. Harlan started in the film industry as an actor and stuntman, and by the early 1930s was working behind the camera as an assistant.  Among…

Born August 22, 1892 in Denver, Colorado, Joseph Bailey Walker worked as a wireless telephone engineer, inventor and photographer of documentaries for the Red Cross during World War I before beginning his feature film career in 1919 with Back to God’s Country, a Canadian film that was filmed near the Artic Circle. He then freelanced as…

While no film with Christmas as its main theme has ever won a Best Picture Oscar, one film in which the holiday is prominently featured did win the big prize.  That was 1960’s bittersweet comedy, The Apartment, which takes place primarily from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Eve.  Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Jack Kruschen…

Born in San Antonio, Texas on March 23, 1904, Lucille LeSueur’s father abandoned her mother and older brother before she was born. By age 16 she had had three different stepfathers, one of them, although her mother’s marriage to Henry Cassin was a minor impresario in Oklahoma whose vaudeville shows gave LeSueur, then billed as…