Category: Profiles

Born June 3, 1929 in London, England, William Desmond Williams, known professionally as Billy Williams, was the son of a cinematographer also known as Billy. Williams left school at 14 to go to work for his father as an apprentice cameraman, working with him for four years.  At 18, he joined the RAF as a…

In recognition of Father’s Day coming up on June 15, now is a great time to focus on actors who’ve either been nominated or won Oscars for playing fathers on screen. Actors who’ve won Best Actor Oscars for playing characters on screen whose role as a father is important to the plot, include George Arliss…

Born August 18, 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, Edward Harrison Norton is the son of an environmental attorney who was a prosecutor in the Carter administration and an English teacher whose father, James Rouse, was a famed real estate developer known as the father of the modern shopping mall. Norton was attracted to acting at an…

Born November 18, 1939 in Brooklyn, New York, Brenda Vaccaro is the daughter of Italian-Americans who raised her in Dallas, Texas where her parents founded Mario’s Restaurant. At 17, Vaccaro returned to New York to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse.  She made her Broadway debut in 1961’s Everybody Loves Opel for which received a…

Born September 23, 1897 in New Brunswick, Canada to a haberdasher and a housewife, Walter Pidgeon was educated at the University of New Brunswick where he studied law and drama.  He volunteered with the Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery in World War I.  Severely injured in an accident when he was crushed between two gun…

Born May 18, 1912 in Philadelphia, PA to Russian Jewish immigrants Hyman and Esther Sax, Reuben Sax grew up poor. He studied journalism at Temple University for two years from 1929-1931 before discovering that his parents were going into debt paying for his education at which time he quit school and rode the freight trains…

Born Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn, N.Y. on July 16, 1907, Barbara Stanwyc was the fifth and youngest child of a working-class couple. When she was four, Ruby’s mother was pushed off a moving streetcar by a drunken stranger and died. Two weeks later her father joined a crew digging the Panama Canal and was never…

Born in Philadelphia, Pa. in 1924, Sidney Lumet was one of the most prolific film directors of his time. His films received a total of forty-six Oscar nominations and won four. He directed seventeen actors to eighteen Oscar nominations and was nominated himself five times.  He won an honorary award at the 2005 Academy Awards.…

Born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko in San Francisco, California on July 20, 1938, the future Natalie Wood’s parents were Russian and Ukraine immigrants who barely spoke English. They changed the family name to Gurdin when they became U.S. citizens. At the age of four, while the family was living in Santa Rosa, the production company for…

Born April 25, 1905 in Chicago, Illinois, art director Harold (Hal) Pereira and his brother, architect William Pereira (born in 1909), began their highly successful careers after graduating college in the 1930s.  They designed, among other things, Chicago’s Esquire Theatre, one of the city’s best examples of Art Deco.  They later moved to Los Angeles…

Born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England on January 18, 1904, the future Cary Grant grew up in a working-class family. When he was nine, he was told his mother had gone off to a seaside resort. In truth, she had been placed in a mental institution. His father remarried when he was ten and young…

Born July 22, 1946 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Paul Joseph Schrader was raised as a strict Calvinist and did not see a film until he was 17. The first film he saw was Disney’s The Absent-Minded Professor with Fred MacMurray and Nancy Olson which failed to impress him.  His second film, however, was Philip Dunne’s…

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…