1.
Clifford Odets
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Clifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, and director. Odets was widely seen as successor to Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene ONeill as ONeill began to retire from Broadways commercial pressures, from early 1935 on, Odets socially relevant dramas proved extremely influential, particularly for the remainder of the Great Depression. Odets works inspired the next generations of playwrights, including Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon, David Mamet. After the production of his play Clash by Night in the 1941-42 season, Odets focused his energies on film projects and he began to be eclipsed by such playwrights as Miller, Tennessee Williams and, in 1950, William Inge. At the time of his death in 1963, Odets was serving as script writer and script supervisor on The Richard Boone Show, born of a plan for televised repertory theater. Though many obituaries lamented his work in Hollywood and considered him someone who had not lived up to his promise, director Elia Kazan understood it differently. The tragedy of our times in the theatre is the tragedy of Clifford Odets, Kazan began and his plan, he said, was to. Come back to New York and get plays on, they’d be, he assured me, the best plays of his life. Cliff wasnt shot. The mind and talent were alive in the man, Odets was born in Philadelphia to Louis Odets and Pearl Geisinger, Russian- and Romanian-Jewish immigrants, and was raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York. He dropped out of school after two years to become an actor. In 1931, he became a member of the Group Theatre. This technique was based on the system devised by the Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavski and it was further developed by Group Theatre director Lee Strasberg and became known as The Method or Method Acting. Odets eventually became the Groups primary playwright, Odets pursued acting with great passion and ingenuity. At the age of 19 he struck out on his own, under this moniker he procured bookings as a radio elocutionist. He moved away from his parents, to Greenwich Village, where he acted with the Poets Theatre under the direction of Village legend Harry Kemp. Odets claimed to have become Americas first real disc jockey at about time, at radio station WBNY. In this capacity he saw the 1926 Broadway production of Seán OCaseys Juno, OCaseys work would prove to be a powerful influence on Odets as a playwright. The young Odets spent several summers as a counselor at camps in the Catskills
2.
Jack Palance
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Jack Palance was an American actor and singer. He was nominated for three Academy Awards, all for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, winning in 1992 for his role in City Slickers, Palance was born in Lattimer Mines, Pennsylvania, the son of Anna and Ivan Palahniuk, an anthracite coal miner. His parents were Ukrainian immigrants, his father a native of Ivane Zolote in southwestern Ukraine and his mother from the Lviv Oblast, one of six children, he worked in coal mines during his youth before becoming a professional boxer in the late 1930s. Years later he recounted, Then, I thought, you must be nuts to get your head beat in for $200, with the outbreak of World War II, Palances athletic career ended, and his military career began as a member of the United States Army Air Forces. Palances face, which took many beatings in the ring, was said to have become disfigured while bailing out of a burning B-24 Liberator bomber during a training flight over Southern Arizona. His distinctive cheekbones and deep-set eyes were said to have been the result of reconstructive surgery, one flack created the legend that I had been blown up in an air crash during the war, and my face had to be put back together by way of plastic surgery. If it is a face, why didnt they do a better job of it. Palance was honorably discharged from the Army Air Corps in 1944 and his last name was actually a derivative of his original name. In an episode of Whats My Line and he described how no one could pronounce his last name and it was suggested he be called Palanski. From that he decided to just use Palance instead, Palances acting break came as Marlon Brandos understudy in A Streetcar Named Desire, and he eventually replaced Brando on stage as Stanley Kowalski. In 1947, Palance made his Broadway debut and he debuted on television in 1949, and this was followed a year later by his screen debut in the movie Panic in the Streets. The same year he was featured in Halls of Montezuma about the United States Marines in World War II, Palance was quickly recognized for his skill as a character actor, receiving an Oscar nomination for his third film role as Lester Blaine in Sudden Fear. The following year, Palance was nominated for an Oscar for his role as the hired gunfighter Jack Wilson in Shane, several Western roles followed, but he also played varied roles such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula and Attila the Hun. I knew that Jack Palance would do the perfect Dracula, in 1957, Palance won an Emmy Award for best actor for his portrayal of Mountain McClintock in the Playhouse 90 production of Rod Serlings Requiem for a Heavyweight. Jean-Luc Godard persuaded Palance to take on the role of Hollywood producer Jeremy Prokosch in the nouvelle vague movie Le Mépris, although the main dialogue was in French, Palance spoke mostly English. Palance provided narration for the 1967 documentary, And Still Champion, later, in 1966, he appeared in the television movie Alice Through the Looking Glass, directed by Alan Handley, in which he played the Jabberwock. He had a role opposite Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster in the Western adventure The Professionals. In 1969, Palance recorded a music album in Nashville
3.
Ida Lupino
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Ida Lupino was an Anglo-American actress and singer, who became a pioneering director and producer—the only woman working within the 1950s Hollywood studio system to do so. With her independent production company, she co-wrote and co-produced several of her own social-message films, in her 48-year career, she made acting appearances in 59 films and directed eight others, mostly in the United States, where she became a citizen in 1948. She was the woman to direct episodes of the original The Twilight Zone series. Her father, a top name in musical comedy in the UK and he built a backyard theater for Lupino and her sister Rita, who also became an actress and dancer. Lupino wrote her first play at age seven and toured with a theater company as a child. She played leading roles in five British films in 1933 at Warner Bros, teddington studios and for Julius Hagen at Twickenham, including in The Ghost Camera with John Mills and I Lived with You with Ivor Novello. Dubbed the English Jean Harlow, she was discovered by Paramount in the 1933 film Money For Speed, playing a good girl/bad girl dual role. Lupino claimed the talent scouts only saw her play the girl in the film and not the part of the prostitute. When she arrived in Hollywood, the Paramount producers did not know what to make of their sultry potential leading lady, after this performance, she began to be taken seriously as a dramatic actress. As a result, her parts improved during the 1940s, and she referred to herself as the poor mans Bette Davis. Mark Hellinger, associate producer at Warner Bros, the film did well and the critical consensus was that Lupino stole the movie, particularly in her unhinged courtroom scene. Warner Bros. offered her a contract which she negotiated to include some freelance rights and she worked with Walsh and Bogart again in High Sierra, where she impressed critic Bosley Crowther in her role as adoring moll. Her performance in The Hard Way won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress and she starred in Pillow to Post, which was her only comedic leading role. After the drama Deep Valley finished shooting, neither Warner Bros. nor Lupino moved to renew her contract, although in demand throughout the 1940s, she never became a major star, but was critically lauded for her tough, direct acting style. As a result, she spent a deal of her time at Warner Bros. suspended. In 1942 she rejected an offer to star opposite Ronald Reagan in Kings Row, eventually, a tentative rapprochement was brokered, but her relationship with her studio remained strained. She moved to Columbia Pictures in 1948, where she appeared as a singer in the film noir Road House. She starred in On Dangerous Ground in 1951, and may have taken on some of the tasks of the film while director Nicholas Ray was ill
4.
Wendell Corey
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Wendell Reid Corey was an American actor and politician. Corey was born in Dracut, Massachusetts, the son of Milton Rothwell Corey and his father was a Congregationalist clergyman. His ancestors included U. S. Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, before becoming an actor, Corey was a washing-machine salesman in a department store. Corey began acting in 1938 with the depression-spawned Federal Theatre Project and his Broadway debut was in Comes the Revelation. After appearing in a number of supporting roles, he scored his first hit as a newspaperman in Elmer Rices comedy Dream Girl. While appearing in the play, Corey was seen by producer Hal Wallis and his movie debut came as a gangster in Desert Fury starring John Hodiak, Lizabeth Scott, and Mary Astor. Corey appeared in Sorry, Wrong Number starring Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster, and he co-starred with Stanwyck twice more in 1950 in The File on Thelma Jordon and The Furies, and also opposite Joan Crawford in Harriet Craig, which was released the same year. Coreys memorable roles include that of police Lt. Thomas Doyle in Hitchcocks Rear Window starring James Stewart and he starred with Casey Walters in the television series Harbor Command, co-starred on The Nanette Fabray Show, and had the lead role in the medical drama The Eleventh Hour. With Fabray, Corey played a widower who married Fabrays character, bobby Diamond also starred in the short-lived series. In The Eleventh Hour, Corey appeared as Dr. Theodore Bassett, in the second season of The Eleventh Hour, however, Corey was replaced by Ralph Bellamy, who assumed the role of psychiatrist Richard Starke. Corey made guest appearances on a number of programs, including Target, channing, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Untouchables, Burkes Law, The Road West, and The Wild Wild West. He made a guest appearance during the season of Perry Mason in 1966 as murder victim Jerome Klee in The Case of the Unwelcome Well. Corey served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts, a Republican campaigner in national politics since 1956, Corey was elected to the Santa Monica City Council in April 1965. The conservative politician ran for a California seat in the United States Congress in 1966 and he was still a councilman at the time of his death. Corey and Alice Wiley had one son and three daughters, Jonathan, Jennifer, Bonnie Alice, and Robin. Corey died November 8,1968, at age 54 at the Motion Picture & Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, funeral services were held at First Presbyterian Church in Santa Monica, California. He is interred in Washington Cemetery in Washington, Massachusetts, Wendell Corey has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in TV at 6328 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood. Wendell Corey at the Internet Movie Database Wendell Corey at the Internet Broadway Database Wendell Corey at Find a Grave
5.
Jean Hagen
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Jean Hagen was an American actress best known for her role as Lina Lamont in Singin in the Rain, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Hagen was also nominated three times for an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Margaret Williams on the television series Make Room For Daddy. Jean Shirley Verhagen was born on August 3,1923 in Chicago, to Christian Verhagen, a Dutch immigrant, the family moved to Elkhart, Indiana, when she was 12 and she subsequently graduated from Elkhart High School. She studied drama at Northwestern University, where she was a roommate of actress Patricia Neal and she graduated from Northwestern in 1945. She also worked as a theater usherette, Hagen began her show business career in radio in the 1940s, performing in Light of the World, Hollywood Story, and other programs. Using her maiden name, she played Betty Webster on Those Websters, Hagen first appeared on Broadway in Swan Song. She also acted in Another Part of the Forest, Ghosts, Born Yesterday and her film debut was as a comical femme fatale in the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn classic, Adams Rib, directed by the iconic George Cukor in 1949. The Asphalt Jungle provided Hagen with her first starring role alongside Sterling Hayden, Hagen received excellent reviews playing Doll Conover, a woman who sticks by criminal Dixs side until the bitter end. She appeared in the film noir Side Street playing a gangsters sincere, Hagen is best remembered for her comic performance in Singin in the Rain as the vain and talentless silent movie star Lina Lamont. She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for this memorable performance, by 1953, she had joined the cast of the television sitcom Make Room for Daddy. As the first wife of Danny Thomas, Hagen received three Emmy Award nominations, but after three seasons, she grew dissatisfied and left the series. Thomas, who produced the show, reportedly did not appreciate Hagens departing the successful series. This was the first TV character to be killed off in a family sitcom, marjorie Lord was cast a year later as Dannys second wife and played opposite Thomas successfully for the remainder of the series. Hagen starred in the 1957 Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 3, Episode 7, entitled Enough Rope for Two as a woman accompanied by two thieves trying to retrieve stolen money from a desert mine shaft. In 1960, she appeared as Elizabeth in the episode Once Upon a Knight on CBSs anthology series The DuPont Show with June Allyson,16,1961 Andy and the Woman Speeder Season 2 episode 3. Although she made frequent guest appearances in television series, Hagen was unable to successfully resume her film career in starring roles. In the 1960s, Hagens health began to decline and she spent many years hospitalized or under medical care, after a marriage fraught with domestic violence, she divorced Seidel on November 1,1965, in Los Angeles, California. Hagen died at age 54 of esophageal cancer on August 29,1977, at the Motion Picture & Television Country House, Hagen was nominated for a 1956 Emmy Award in the Best actress category
6.
Rod Steiger
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Rodney Stephen Rod Steiger was an American actor, noted for his portrayal of offbeat, often volatile and crazed characters. His performance in that film won him the Academy Award for Best Actor, Steiger was born in Westhampton, New York, the son of a vaudevillian. He had a childhood, with an alcoholic mother from whom he ran away at the age of 16. He made his debut in 1946, in a production of Curse you. At the Civic Repertory Theatre of Newark, and subsequently appeared in such as An Enemy of the People, Clifford Odetss Night Music, Seagulls Over Sorrento. Steiger made his debut in Fred Zinnemanns Teresa in 1951. Across the Bridge and Al Capone, the following year, he played a serial killer of many guises in No Way to Treat a Lady. During the 1970s, Steiger increasingly turned to European productions in his search for more demanding roles and he portrayed Napoleon Bonaparte in Waterloo, a Mexican bandit in Sergio Leones Duck, You Sucker. Benito Mussolini in Last Days of Mussolini, and ended the decade playing a disturbed priest in The Amityville Horror. By the 1980s, heart problems and depression took its toll on Steigers career, One of his final roles was as judge H. Lee Sarokin in the prison drama The Hurricane, which reunited him with In the Heat of the Night director Norman Jewison. Steiger was married five times, and had a daughter, opera singer Anna Steiger, and a son, Michael Steiger. He died of pneumonia and complications from surgery for a gall bladder tumor on July 9,2002, aged 77, in Los Angeles, and was survived by his fifth wife Joan Benedict Steiger. Steiger was born on April 14,1925 in Westhampton, New York, Rod was raised as a Lutheran. Biographer Tom Hutchinson describes him as a shadowy, fugitive figure, one who haunted Rod throughout his life and was an invisible presence, Hutchinson described Steigers mother as plump, energetic and small, with long auburn hair. She had a singing voice and nearly became a Hollywood actress. As a result, she quit show business and moved away from Westhampton to raise her son and they moved through several towns, including Irvington and Bloomfield, before settling in Newark, New Jersey. Her alcoholism caused Steiger much embarrassment, and the family was frequently mocked by other children, at the age of five he was sexually abused by a pedophile who lured him in with a butterfly collection. A loving, secure childhood in a New York minute, during the last 11 years of her life, Steigers mother stayed sober and regularly attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings
7.
Shelley Winters
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Shelley Winters was an American actress who appeared in dozens of films, as well as on stage and television, her career spanned over 50 years until her death in 2006. Winters won Academy Awards for The Diary of Anne Frank and A Patch of Blue and she also appeared in such films as The Big Knife, A Double Life, Lolita, The Night of the Hunter, Alfie, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, and Petes Dragon. Shelley Winters was born Shirley Schrift in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Rose, a singer with the Muny, and Jonas Schrift and her parents were Jewish, her father emigrated from Austria, and her mother was born in St. Louis to Austrian immigrants. Her family moved to Brooklyn, New York when she was three years old and her sister Blanche Schrift later married George Boroff, who ran the Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. Winters studied at the New School in New York City, as the New York Times obituary noted, A major movie presence for more than five decades, Shelley Winters turned herself into a widely respected actress who won two Oscars. Winters originally broke into Hollywood films as a Blonde Bombshell type, but quickly tired of the roles limitations. She claims to have washed off her makeup to audition for the role of Alice Tripp, the girl, in A Place in the Sun, directed by George Stevens. As the Associated Press reported, the public was unaware of how serious a craftswoman Winters was. Although she was in demand as an actress, Winters continued to study her craft. She attended Charles Laughtons Shakespeare classes and worked at the Actors Studio and she studied in the Hollywood Studio Club, and in the late 1940s, she shared an apartment with another newcomer, Marilyn Monroe. Her first movie was What a Woman, working in films through the 1940s, Winters first achieved stardom with her breakout performance as the victim of insane actor Ronald Colman in George Cukors A Double Life, in 1947. She quickly ascended in Hollywood with leading roles in The Great Gatsby with Alan Ladd and she also returned to the stage on various occasions during this time, including a Broadway run in A Hatful of Rain, in 1955–1956, opposite future husband Anthony Franciosa. She won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for The Diary of Anne Frank in 1960 and she donated her Oscar for The Diary of Anne Frank to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. In The Poseidon Adventure, she was the ill-fated Belle Rosen and she returned to the stage during the 1960s and 1970s, most notably in Tennessee Williams Night of the Iguana. She appeared in cult films as 1968s Wild in the Streets. She also starred in the 1970 Broadway musical Minnies Boys as Minnie Marx, the mother of Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, as the Associated Press reported, During her 50 years as a widely known personality, Winters was rarely out of the news. Her stormy marriages, her romances with famous stars, her forays into politics and she delighted in giving provocative interviews and seemed to have an opinion on everything. That led to a career as a writer
8.
Richard Boone
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Richard Allen Boone was an American actor who starred in over 50 films and was notable for his roles in Westerns and for the TV series Have Gun – Will Travel. Boone was born in Los Angeles, California, the child of Cecile and Kirk E. Boone. His father was a descendant of Squire Boone, brother to frontiersmen Daniel Boone and his mother was Jewish, the daughter of immigrants from Russia. Richard Boone graduated from Hoover High School in Glendale, California and he attended Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where he was a member of Theta Xi fraternity. He dropped out prior to graduation and went to work in oil-rigging, bartending, painting, in his youth, Boone had attended the San Diego Army and Navy Academy in Carlsbad, California, near Oceanside. There, Boone was introduced to theatre under the tutelage of Virginia Atkinson, robert Walker, another Academy graduate and member of the school’s theatre club, Masque & Wig, became a close acquaintance of Boones. After the war, Boone used the G. I, bill to study acting at the Actors Studio in New York. Serious and methodical, Boone debuted on the Broadway theatrical scene in 1947 with the play Medea and then appeared in Macbeth, elia Kazan used Boone to feed lines to an actress for a film screen-test done for director Lewis Milestone. Milestone was not impressed with the actress, but he was impressed enough with Boones voice to him to Hollywood. In 1950, Boone made his debut as a Marine officer in Milestones Halls of Montezuma. In 1953, he played Pontius Pilate in the first Cinemascope film released and he had only one scene in the film, in which he gives instructions to Richard Burton, who plays the centurion ordered to crucify Christ. When he was ordered to appear in film for Fox made at the same time as The Robe. During the filming of Halls of Montezuma he befriended Jack Webb, the writer of Dragnet was preparing a series about a doctor for NBC. From 1954 to 1956, Boone became a face in the lead role of that medical drama, titled Medic. While on Medic, he also guest-starred as the character Everett Brayer on NBCs Frontier anthology series, Boone also appeared in the 1954 Dragnet film based on Webbs series. The show had first been offered to actor Randolph Scott, who turned it down, the show ran from 1957 to 1963, with Boone receiving two more Emmy nominations, in 1959 and 1960. Boone starred in three movies with John Wayne, The Alamo as Sam Houston, Big Jake, and The Shootist, during the 1960s, Boone appeared regularly on other television programs. He was an occasional guest panelist and also a mystery guest on Whats My Line, the Sunday night CBS-TV quiz show
