Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film studio, production company and film distributor, a member of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, a division of Sony Entertainment's Sony Pictures subsidiary of the Japanese multinational conglomerate Sony Corporation. What would become Columbia Pictures, CBC Film Sales Corporation, was founded on June 19, 1918 by Harry Cohn, his brother Jack Cohn, Joe Brandt, it went public two years later. In its early years, it was a minor player in Hollywood, but began to grow in the late 1920s, spurred by a successful association with director Frank Capra. With Capra and others, Columbia became one of the primary homes of the screwball comedy. In the 1930s, Columbia's major contract stars were Cary Grant. In the 1940s, Rita Hayworth became the studio's premier star and propelled their fortunes into the late 1950s. Rosalind Russell, Glenn Ford, William Holden became major stars at the studio, it is one of the leading film studios in the world and is a member of the "Big Five" major American film studios.
It was one of the so-called "Little Three" among the eight major film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. Today, it has become the world's fifth largest major film studio; the studio was founded on June 19, 1918 as Cohn-Brandt-Cohn Film Sales by brothers Jack and Harry Cohn and Jack's best friend Joe Brandt, released its first feature film in August 1922. Brandt was president of CBC Film Sales, handling sales and distribution from New York along with Jack Cohn, while Harry Cohn ran production in Hollywood; the studio's early productions were low-budget short subjects: "Screen Snapshots", the "Hall Room Boys", the Chaplin imitator Billy West. The start-up CBC leased space in a Poverty Row studio on Hollywood's famously low-rent Gower Street. Among Hollywood's elite, the studio's small-time reputation led some to joke that "CBC" stood for "Corned Beef and Cabbage". Brandt tired of dealing with the Cohn brothers, in 1932 sold his one-third stake to Harry Cohn, who took over as president. In an effort to improve its image, the Cohn brothers renamed the company Columbia Pictures Corporation on January 10, 1924.
Cohn remained head of production as well. He would run one of the longest tenures of any studio chief. In an industry rife with nepotism, Columbia was notorious for having a number of Harry and Jack's relatives in high positions. Humorist Robert Benchley called it the Pine Tree Studio, "because it has so many Cohns". Columbia's product line consisted of moderately budgeted features and short subjects including comedies, sports films, various serials, cartoons. Columbia moved into the production of higher-budget fare joining the second tier of Hollywood studios along with United Artists and Universal. Like United Artists and Universal, Columbia was a horizontally integrated company, it controlled distribution. Helping Columbia's climb was the arrival of Frank Capra. Between 1927 and 1939, Capra pushed Cohn for better material and bigger budgets. A string of hits he directed in the early and mid 1930s solidified Columbia's status as a major studio. In particular, It Happened; until Columbia's existence had depended on theater owners willing to take its films, since as mentioned above it didn't have a theater network of its own.
Other Capra-directed hits followed, including the original version of Lost Horizon, with Ronald Colman, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which made James Stewart a major star. In 1933, Columbia hired Robert Kalloch to be women's costume designer, he was the first contract costume designer hired by the studio, he established the studio's wardrobe department. Kalloch's employment, in turn, convinced leading actresses that Columbia Pictures intended to invest in their careers. In 1938, the addition of B. B. Kahane as Vice President would produce Charles Vidor's Those High Gray Walls, The Lady in Question, the first joint film of Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. Kahane would become the President of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1959, until his death a year later. Columbia could not afford to keep a huge roster of contract stars, so Cohn borrowed them from other studios. At Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the industry's most prestigious studio, Columbia was nicknamed "Siberia", as Louis B. Mayer would use the loan out to Columbia as a way to punish his less-obedient signings.
In the 1930s, Columbia signed Jean Arthur to a long-term contract, after The Whole Town's Talking, Arthur became a major comedy star. Ann Sothern's career was launched when Columbia signed her to a contract in 1936. Cary Grant signed a contract in 1937 and soon after it was altered to a non-exclusive contract shared with RKO. Many theaters relied on westerns to attract big weekend audiences, Columbia always recognized this market, its first cowboy star was Buck Jones, who signed with Columbia in 1930 for a fraction of his former big-studio salary. Over the next two decades Columbia released scores of outdoor adventures with Jones, Tim McCoy, Ken Maynard, Jack Luden, Bob Allen, Russell Hayden, Tex Ritter, Ken Curtis, Gene Autry. Columbia's most popular cowboy was Charles Starrett, who signed with Columbia in 193
Robert Hardy
Timothy Sydney Robert Hardy was an English actor who had a long career in theatre and television. He began his career as a classical actor and earned widespread recognition for roles such as Siegfried Farnon in the BBC television series All Creatures Great and Small, Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter film series and Winston Churchill in several productions, beginning with the Southern Television series Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, he was nominated for the BAFTA for Best Actor for All Creatures Great and Small in 1980 and Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years in 1982. Aside from acting, Hardy was an acknowledged expert on the medieval English longbow and wrote two books on the subject. Hardy was born in Cheltenham in 1925 to Jocelyn and Henry Harrison Hardy, the headmaster of Cheltenham College and of Shrewsbury School, he was educated at Rugby School and Magdalen College, where his studies were interrupted by service in the Royal Air Force during World War II. He trained as a pilot, receiving part of his instruction in Terrell, Texas, in the British Flying Training School Program.
While he visited Los Angeles when on leave from flight training at Terrell, his acting career never gained a foothold in Hollywood. After service in the RAF, he returned to gain a BA in English. On BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs he described the degree he obtained as "shabby", although he treasured the time spent studying under C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Hardy began his career as a classical actor. In 1959 he appeared as Sicinius opposite Laurence Olivier in Coriolanus at Stratford-upon-Avon, directed by Peter Hall, he appeared in Shakespeare's Henry V on stage and in television's An Age of Kings, subsequently played Coriolanus in The Spread of the Eagle and Sir Toby Belch for the BBC Television Shakespeare production of Twelfth Night in 1980. Over the years, Hardy played a range of parts on film, his first continuing role in a TV series was as businessman Alec Stewart in the award-winning oil company drama The Troubleshooters for the BBC, which he played from 1966 to 1970. He won further acclaim for his portrayal of the mentally-unhinged Abwehr Sgt.
Gratz in LWT's 1969 war drama Manhunt. In 1975, Hardy portrayed Albert, Prince Consort in the award-winning 13-hour serial Edward the Seventh, which he regarded as one of his best performances. "I thought. There are always people who don't like what one does."He was seen as the irascible senior veterinarian Siegfried Farnon in the long-running All Creatures Great and Small, an adaptation of James Herriot's semi-autobiographical books. Hardy made an appearance in the 1986–88 ITV comedy series Hot Metal, in which he played the dual roles of newspaper proprietor Twiggy Rathbone and his editor, Russell Spam. In 1993 Hardy appeared in an episode of Inspector Morse, playing Andrew Baydon in "Twilight of the Gods". In 1994, he played Arthur Brooke in the BBC production of Middlemarch. In 2002, he played the role of pompous and eccentric Professor Neddy Welch in a WTTV/WGBH Boston co-production of Lucky Jim, adapted from the novel by Kingsley Amis, it aired as part of the Masterpiece series on PBS in the U.
S. and starred Stephen Tompkinson in the title role of Jim Dixon, a luckless lecturer at a provincial British university. Hardy played both Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, each on more than one occasion, he played Churchill most notably in Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, for which he was nominated for a BAFTA award, but in The Sittaford Mystery, Bomber Harris and War and Remembrance. On 20 August 2010, he read Churchill's famous wartime address "Never was so much owed by so many to so few" at a ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the speech, he played Roosevelt in the BBC serial and Elizabeth, in the French TV mini-series, Le Grand Charles, about the life of Charles de Gaulle. He played Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in Elizabeth R, took the role of Sir John Middleton in the 1995 film version of Sense and Sensibility, his big screen roles included Professor Krempe in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter films. His voice performance as Robin Hood in Tale Spinners For Children, an LP from the 1960s, is considered one of the best Robin Hood renditions.
His voice was the voice of D'Artagnan in The Three Musketeers, of Frédéric Chopin, in The Story of Chopin. Hardy was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1981 Birthday Honours, his first marriage, in 1952, was to the daughter of Sir Lionel Fox. This marriage ended in 1956. In 1961 he married Sally Pearson, the daughter of the baronet Sir Neville Pearson and Dame Gladys Cooper as well as a sister-in-law of Robert Morley. From this marriage, which ended in 1986, Hardy had two other children, one of whom is Justine Hardy, a journalist and psychotherapist who founded Healing Kashmir, his daughter, Emma, is a mother of a photographer. He was a close friend of actor Richard Burton, he shared some memories of their wartime friendship and read extracts from Burton's newly-published diaries at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2012. While playing Henry V, Hardy developed an interest in medieval warfare, in 1963 he wrote and presented an acclaimed television documentary on the subject of the Battle of Agincourt.
He wrote two books on the subject of the longbow, Longbow: A Social and Military History, The Great W
Peter Cellier
Peter Cellier is an English actor who has appeared in film and television. He is known for his role as Sir Frank Gordon in Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister in the 1980s. Cellier was born in Hendon, Middlesex into a family of actors including his father Frank and half-sister Antoinette, his grandfather was the Sullivan conductor François Cellier. Cellier started his career at the Leatherhead Theatre in 1953, his theatre work has included seasons at Stratford-on-Avon, The Old Vic and the Chichester Festival Theatre, he was a founder-member of the National Theatre. Shakespeare plays in which Cellier has appeared include Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Love's Labour's Lost, Measure for Measure, As You Like It, King John, Julius Caesar and Henry V, as the Dauphin. Other roles include Pinchard in Georges Feydeau's An Absolute Turkey, Tommy Devon in Aunt Edwina, The Dean of Archeo in Body and Soul, Eric Shelding in The Case in Question, Danforth in The Crucible, Duke Francis in The Dark Horse, Dr. Finache in Jacques Charon's National Theatre production of Feydeau's A Flea in her Ear, Charles Blutham in Juno and the Paycock, Dr. Herdal in The Master Builder, Sir John Tremaine in Me And My Girl, The Chaplain in Mother Courage, Christopher in A Private Matter, Captain Brazen in The Recruiting Officer, Polonius in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead Higgins in Ross, Miguel Estete in The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Desmond in The Winslow Boy.
On television, Cellier has appeared in a wide range of programmes since 1955, including detective series such as Softly and Bergerac, adventure series such as Doctor Who, historical dramas such as The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Upstairs and The Duchess of Duke Street, is best known for his work in two John Mortimer series, Rumpole of the Bailey, Paradise Postponed. He appeared in the sitcoms It Ain't Half Hot Mum, Yes Minister and its sequel Yes, Prime Minister and Keeping Up Appearances, as the Major, among others. In the two Minister series, he played Sir Frank Gordon, the Permanent Secretary to HM Treasury, urbanely contending with Nigel Hawthorne's Sir Humphrey Appleby for supremacy within the civil service, he played Roy Difford in the Casualty episode "The Silence of Friends". and the Judge in BBC Four's Canoe Man, which recounted the John Darwin disappearance case. Cellier's film work includes Morgan!, as Second Counsel. Cellier played W. S. Gilbert in the 1983 film The Best of Gilbert and Sullivan, in which Gilbert and Sullivan reunite to watch a performance of their greatest songs at the Royal Albert Hall.
Peter Cellier on IMDb Curriculum vitae
Patrick Magee (actor)
Patrick George McGee, known professionally as Patrick Magee, was a Northern Irish actor and director of stage and screen. He was known for his collaborations with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, as well as creating the role of the Marquis de Sade in the original stage and screen productions of Marat/Sade, he appeared in numerous horror films and in two Stanley Kubrick films, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon. He was born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Born into a middle-class family, McGee was the first born of five children and was educated at St. Patrick's Grammar School, Armagh, his first stage experience in Ireland was with Anew McMaster's touring company, performing the works of Shakespeare. It was here, he was brought to London by Tyrone Guthrie for a series of Irish plays. He met Beckett in 1957 and soon recorded passages from the novel and the short story, From an Abandoned Work, for BBC radio. Impressed by "the cracked quality of Magee's distinctly Irish voice," Beckett requested copies of the tapes and wrote Krapp's Last Tape for the actor.
First produced at the Royal Court Theatre in London on 28 October 1958, the play starred Magee directed by Donald McWhinnie. A televised version with Magee directed by McWhinnie was broadcast by BBC2 on 29 November 1972. Beckett's biographer Anthony Cronin wrote that "there was a sense in which, as an actor, he had been waiting for Beckett as Beckett had been waiting for him."In 1964, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, after Pinter, directing his own play The Birthday Party requested him for the role of McCann, stated he was the strongest in the cast. In 1965 he appeared in Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, when the play transferred to Broadway he won a Tony Award, he appeared in the 1966 RSC production of Staircase opposite Paul Scofield. Early film roles included Joseph Losey's The Criminal and The Servant, the latter an adaptation scripted by Pinter, he appeared as Surgeon-Major Reynolds in Zulu, Séance on a Wet Afternoon, in the film versions of Marat/Sade and The Birthday Party. He is best known for his role as the victimised writer Frank Alexander, who tortures Alex DeLarge with Beethoven's music, in Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange.
His other role for Kubrick was as Redmond Barry's mentor, the Chevalier de Balibari, in Barry Lyndon. Magee appeared in Young Winston, The Final Programme, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, The Monster Club and Chariots of Fire, but was most seen in horror films; these included Roger Corman's The Masque of Red Death, the Boris Karloff vehicle Die, Die! for AIP. Magee married Belle Sherry a native of County Armagh, in 1958. Patrick Magee died from a heart attack at his flat in Fulham, London on 14 August 1982 at the age of 60, according to obituaries in The Glasgow Herald and The New York Times. In July 2017 it was announced that a blue plaque would be unveiled in Edward Street, Armagh to mark Patrick Magee's birthplace. Another Flip for Dominick as Caleb Line Patrick Magee at the Internet Broadway Database Patrick Magee on IMDb Patrick Magee at the BFI's Screenonline Patrick Magee BFI Patrick Magee at Find a Grave
Ian Holm
Sir Ian Holm Cuthbert, known as Ian Holm, is an English actor known for his stage work and many film roles. He received the 1967 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor for his performance as Lenny in The Homecoming and the 1998 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor for his performance in the title role of King Lear, he won the 1981 BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his role as athletics trainer Sam Mussabini in Chariots of Fire, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. His other well-known film roles include Ash in Alien, Sir William Gull in From Hell, Father Vito Cornelius in The Fifth Element, the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film series. Holm was born Ian Holm Cuthbert on 12 September 1931 in Goodmayes, in Essex, to Scottish parents, Jean Wilson and James Harvey Cuthbert, his mother was a nurse, his father was a psychiatrist who worked as the superintendent of the West Ham Corporation Mental Hospital and was one of the pioneers of electric shock therapy.
He had an older brother, who died in 1943. Holm was educated at the independent Chigwell School in Essex, his parents retired to Mortehoe and Worthing where he joined an amateur dramatic society. A visit to the dentist led to an introduction to Henry Baynton, a well-known provincial Shakespearean actor who helped Holm train for admission to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he secured a place in 1949, his studies there were interrupted a year when he was called up for National Service in the British Army, during which he was posted to Klagenfurt and attained the rank of Lance Corporal. They were interrupted a second time when he volunteered to go on an acting tour of the United States in 1952, he graduated from RADA in 1953. Holm was an established star of the Royal Shakespeare Company before making an impact on television and film. In 1965, he played Richard III in the BBC serialisation of The Wars of The Roses, based on the RSC production of the plays, in 1969 he played the lead in Dennis Potter's Moonlight on the Highway and he made a name for himself with minor roles in films such as Oh!
What a Lovely War and Alexandra, Queen of Scots and Young Winston. In 1967, he won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play as Lenny in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter. In 1977, Holm appeared in the TV mini-series Jesus of Nazareth as the Sadducee Zerah, a villainous Moroccan in March or Die; the following year he played J. M. Barrie in the award-winning BBC TV series The Lost Boys, in which his son Barnaby played the young George Llewelyn Davies. In 1981, he played Frodo Baggins in BBC radio adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Holm's first film role to have a major impact was that of the treacherous android, Ash, in Ridley Scott's Alien, his portrayal of Sam Mussabini in Chariots of Fire, earned him a special award at the Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Back home in England, he won a BAFTA award, for Best Supporting Actor, for Chariots. In the 1980s, he had memorable roles in Time Bandits, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes and Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
He played Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland in the Dennis Potter-scripted fantasy Dreamchild. In 1989, Holm was nominated for a BAFTA award for the TV series Game and Match. Based on the novels by Len Deighton, this tells the story of an intelligence officer who discovers that his own wife is an enemy spy, he continued to perform Shakespeare, appeared with Kenneth Branagh in Henry V and as Polonius to Mel Gibson's Hamlet. Holm was reunited with Kenneth Branagh in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, playing the father of Branagh's Victor Frankenstein. Holm raised his profile in 1997 with two prominent roles, as the stressed but gentle priest Vito Cornelius in The Fifth Element and lawyer Mitchell Stephens in The Sweet Hereafter. In 2001 he starred in From Hell as the physician Sir William Withey Gull; the same year he appeared as Bilbo Baggins in the blockbuster film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, having played Bilbo's nephew Frodo Baggins in a 1981 BBC Radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.
He reappeared in the trilogy in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, for which he shared a SAG award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. He reprised his role as the elder Bilbo Baggins in the movie The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Martin Freeman portrayed the young Bilbo Baggins in those films. Holm has been nominated for an Emmy Award twice, for a PBS broadcast of a National Theatre production of King Lear, in 1999. Holm has provided voice-overs for many British TV commercials. Holm has appeared in two David Cronenberg films: Naked Lunch and eXistenZ, he was Harold Pinter's favourite actor, the playwright once stating: "He puts on my shoe, it fits!" Holm played Lenny in the first performance of Pinter's masterpiece The Homecoming. He has played Napoleon Bonaparte three times: first, in the 1972 television series Napoleon and Love. Holm has been married four times
Edward Elgar
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, two symphonies, he composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924. Although Elgar is regarded as a English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe, he socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer, he married the daughter of a senior British army officer. She inspired him both musically and but he struggled to achieve success until his forties, when after a series of moderately successful works his Enigma Variations became popular in Britain and overseas, he followed the Variations with a choral work, The Dream of Gerontius, based on a Roman Catholic text that caused some disquiet in the Anglican establishment in Britain, but it became, has remained, a core repertory work in Britain and elsewhere.
His full-length religious choral works were well received but have not entered the regular repertory. In his fifties, Elgar composed a violin concerto that were immensely successful, his second symphony and his cello concerto did not gain immediate public popularity and took many years to achieve a regular place in the concert repertory of British orchestras. Elgar's music came, in his years, to be seen as appealing chiefly to British audiences, his stock remained low for a generation after his death. It began to revive in the 1960s, helped by new recordings of his works; some of his works have, in recent years, been taken up again internationally, but the music continues to be played more in Britain than elsewhere. Elgar has been described as the first composer to take the gramophone seriously. Between 1914 and 1925, he conducted a series of acoustic recordings of his works; the introduction of the moving-coil microphone in 1923 made far more accurate sound reproduction possible, Elgar made new recordings of most of his major orchestral works and excerpts from The Dream of Gerontius.
Edward Elgar was born outside Worcester, England. His father, William Henry Elgar, was raised in Dover and had been apprenticed to a London music publisher. In 1841 William moved to Worcester, where he worked as a piano tuner and set up a shop selling sheet music and musical instruments. In 1848 he married daughter of a farm worker. Edward was the fourth of their seven children. Ann Elgar had converted to Roman Catholicism shortly before Edward's birth, he was baptised and brought up as a Roman Catholic, to the disapproval of his father. William Elgar was a violinist of professional standard and held the post of organist of St. George's Roman Catholic Church, from 1846 to 1885. At his instigation, masses by Cherubini and Hummel were first heard at the Three Choirs Festival by the orchestra in which he played the violin. All the Elgar children received a musical upbringing. By the age of eight, Elgar was taking piano and violin lessons, his father, who tuned the pianos at many grand houses in Worcestershire, would sometimes take him along, giving him the chance to display his skill to important local figures.
Elgar's mother encouraged his musical development. He inherited from a passionate love of the countryside, his friend and biographer W. H. "Billy" Reed wrote that Elgar's early surroundings had an influence that "permeated all his work and gave to his whole life that subtle but none the less true and sturdy English quality". He began composing at an early age; until he was fifteen, Elgar received a general education near Worcester. However, his only formal musical training beyond piano and violin lessons from local teachers consisted of more advanced violin studies with Adolf Pollitzer, during brief visits to London in 1877–78. Elgar said, "my first music was learnt in the Cathedral... from books borrowed from the music library, when I was eight, nine or ten." He worked through manuals of instruction on organ playing and read every book he could find on the theory of music. He said that he had been most helped by Hubert Parry's articles in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Elgar began to learn German, in the hope of going to the Leipzig Conservatory for further musical studies, but his father could not afford to send him.
Years a profile in The Musical Times considered that his failure to get to Leipzig was fortunate for Elgar's musical development: "Thus the budding composer escaped the dogmatism of the schools." However, it was a disappointment to Elgar that on leaving school in 1872 he went not to Leipzig but to the office of a local solicitor as a clerk. He did not find an office career congenial, for fulfilment he turned not only to music but to literature, becoming a voracious reader. Around this time, he made his first public appe
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