Category: Oscar Profile

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Many films have memorable Christmas scenes, but there are way too many to do justice to the subject so I am just going to concentrate on those that are set specifically at the holiday itself with two exceptions – both of which feature songs that have become holiday standards. Despite limiting myself to films specifically…

Born September 15, 1894 the second son of French impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he is the cherubic long-haired blonde boy in some of his father’s most famous paintings. His long hair was the cause of ridicule at the numerous boarding schools his parents sent him to, which he continually ran away from. Wounded in World…

Born August 24, 1906 in Byalistock, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, Boris Kaufman was the third son of librarians who would become world-renown filmmakers. His oldest brother, Denis, working under the pseudonym of Dziga Vertov, was the acclaimed documentary director whose most famous film was 1929’s The Man with the Movie Camera. Middle…

Born in New York, New York on April 4, 1932, Anthony Perkins was the son of stage and screen actor Osgood Perkins who died when the younger Perkins was just five years old. Raised by his widowed mother, he made his screen debut in 1953 as young Ruth Gordon’s (Jean Simmons) first boyfriend in The…

For my sixtieth profile I thought I’d do something a little different and take a look at the cinema history of an author whose books were adapted for the screen long after his passing. Who better, as we approach the holiday season than to recall the works of Charles Dickens whose bi-centennial we celebrate early…

Director Lindsay Anderson, who never had the opportunity to work with Mary Astor, wrote in Sight and Sound in 1990, “… when two or three who love the cinema are gathered together, the name of Mary Astor always comes up, and everybody agrees that she was an actress of special attraction, whose qualities of depth…

Born April 5, 1908, Ruth Elizabeth “Betty” Davis changed the spelling of her nickname to “Bette” after taking a liking to the title character in Balzac’s Cousin Bette. The aspiring actress was turned down by Eva Le Gallienne’s acting school because she was deemed to have been too frivolous, but she was accepted by John…

Born September 29, 1904 in London, England, the daughter of a Scottish father and Irish mother, Greer Garson was educated at King’s College, London and the University of Grenoble in France. Intent on becoming a teacher, she instead went to work in an advertising agency and did some acting on the side, eventually turning to…