My favourite Classic Movie Actors

Alan Mowbray, the American film actor who was one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild, was born Ernest Allen on August 18, 1896, in London, England, to a non-theatrical family. He served in the British army during World War I and received the Military Medal and the French Croix De Guerre for bravery in action. He began as a stage actor in England, and in some accounts he gave of his life, claimed he was a provincial actor in England before his naval service. In other versions, he claimed he turned to acting after The Great War, as World War I was then known, as he was broke and had no other skills.

After acting in London's West End, Mowbray came to the United States, where he toured the country with the Theater Guild from 1923 to 1929. On the road with the Guild, he most enjoyed acting in the plays of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw. He made his Broadway debut in the play "Sport of Kings" at the Lyceum Theatre on May 4, 1926. He also appeared on Broadway in "These Modern Women" in February 1928 and in "The Amorous Antic" in December 1929.

On August 25, 1929, Mowbray's own play, "Dinner is Served," an original comedy he wrote, directed and starred in, made its debut at the Cort Theatre. The play was not a success, closing after just four performances. After "The Amorous Antic," Mowbray did not appear again on Broadway until 1963, when he was featured in "Enter Laughing," the hit stage adaptation of Carl Reiner's novel.

His relative lack of success on Broadway during the "Roaring Twenties" did not matter, as sound had come to Hollywood and the studios were looking for stage actors who could appear in the talkies. Blessed with excellent diction, and tall with a stiff posture and a patrician air, he was ideal for character parts in sound pictures. A member of the "stiff-upper lip" school of British acting, he was often cast as a British, European or upper-class American gentleman, or as an aristocrat or royalty. As he aged, roles as doctors or butlers were his forte.

Mowbray was praised by the critics for limning George Washington in the 1931 biopic Alexander Hamilton (1931) (he would once again play the Father of His Country, this time in a comic vein, in the 1945 musical Where Do We Go from Here? (1945)). He had a romantic lead role opposite Miriam Hopkins in Pioneer Films' Becky Sharp (1935), which was the first feature film made in three-strip Technicolor.

Mowbray had the distinction of appearing in movies with three screen Sherlock Holmeses: Clive Brook in Sherlock Holmes (1932), Reginald Owen in A Study in Scarlet (1933) and Basil Rathbone in Terror by Night (1946). He played the butler in the first two "Topper" films, and as a character actor had memorable turns in two John Ford pictures, My Darling Clementine (1946) and Wagon Master (1950). In the area of typecasting, Mowbray could be counted on as a "pompous blowhard" in such movies as My Man Godfrey (1936), or as "the surprise killer" in B-movie murder mysteries. One of his favorite roles was the con man in the television series Colonel Humphrey Flack (1953), which ran on the Dumont network in 1953.

Mowbray occasionally was a screenwriter, but mostly concentrated on acting. In his personal life he was a member of the Royal Geographic Society and was active in several acting fraternities. He also was one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild. The Guild was formed in 1933, in the wake of the formation of the Screen Writers Guild, in reaction to a proposed 50% across-the-board pay cut implemented by the studios.

Actors Equity, the theatrical actors union, had tried to organize Hollywood after winning a contract and a closed shop on Broadway after World War I, but it had failed. Screen actors angered over the lack of contracts and the grueling work hours at the Hollywood studios founded the Masquers club in 1925 in a move towards unionization. After studio technicians won a collective bargaining agreement from the studios in 1926, MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer had the idea of heading off collective bargaining by the "talent" branches--the actors, writers and directors--by creating a company union. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences was created to serve as an intermediary between the studios and the talent branches and technicians, negotiating contract disputes. Proto-unions, such as the original Screen Writers Guild, folded in 1927 after the creation of the Academy.

By the announcement of the across-the-board cut in 1933, two previous rounds of cutbacks and lay-offs caused by the Great Depression had alienated most of the talent in Hollywood and had led to a strike by the technicians which had closed down the studios for a day. Losing faith in the company union that was the Academy, the talent began organizing their own guilds. In addition to the lack of contracts for many actors and the concerns over wages and hours, one of the new Screen Actors Guild's grievances was that Academy membership was by invitation-only.

In March 1933, SAG was founded by six actors: Berton Churchill, Charles B. Miller, Grant Mitchell, Ralph Morgan, Alden Gay and Kenneth Thomson. Three months later Mowbray was named to SAG's board of directors. He personally funded SAG when it was first founded. While many high-profile actors, already signed to seven-year contracts, refused initially to join SAG, they began to flock to the new union once the studios initiated an anti-raiding provision in the new National Industrial Relations Act code the industry had implemented after Franklin D. Roosevelt became US President and oversaw the enactment of his New Deal legislation in the first 100 days of his administration.

The NRA code the movie industry adopted created a situation for the talent similar to baseball's reserve clause, in which another studio was prevented from offering a contract to an actor, writer or director whose contract had lapsed until their old studio had finished with them and not picked up their option. The NRA code contained a pay ceiling for the talent and technicians, but not for executives. The talent was further enraged when it found out that the Academy, the "company union," had created a committee to investigate the feasibility of long-term contracts. Long-term contracts were the only island of stability in an industry that enhanced its profitability by cutting the wages of its employees and by working them long hours.

At a pivotal meeting at the home of Frank Morgan (the future "Wizard of Oz" and the brother of first SAG president Ralph Morgan), Eddie Cantor insisted that SAG's response to the new code--a collective bargaining agreement--should be in the interests of all actors, not just the already established ones. In the three weeks after the critical meeting, SAG membership rose from approximately 80 members to more than 4,000. Actors resigned from the Academy en masse to join SAG.

Cantor, a friend of President Roosevelt, took the occasion of his being invited to spend the 1933 Thanksgiving holiday with the Roosevelt family to point out the inequities in the new code that SAG found particularly noxious. By executive order, F.D.R. struck them down.

Finally, in 1937, after a long period of resistance, the studios recognized SAG as a collective bargaining agent for actors. Recognition of the Screen Writers Guild and the Screen Directors Guild eventually followed. Mowbray's financial support, in the crucial early days of the guild, had helped make a collective bargaining agreement for actors a reality.

Alan Mowbray married Lorayne Carpenter in 1927, and they had two children. He died on March 25, 1969, of a heart attack.

Basil Rathbone was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1892, but three years later his family was forced to flee the country because his father was accused by the Boers of being a British spy at a time when Dutch-British conflicts were leading to the Boer War. The Rathbones escaped to England, where Basil and his two younger siblings, Beatrice and John, were raised. Their mother, Anna Barbara (George), was a violinist, who was born in Grahamstown, South Africa, of British parents, and their father, Edgar Philip Rathbone, was a mining engineer born in Liverpool. From 1906 to 1910 Rathbone attended Repton School, where he was more interested in sports--especially fencing, at which he excelled--than studies, but where he also discovered his interest in the theater. After graduation he planned to pursue acting as a profession, but his father disapproved and suggested that his son try working in business for a year, hoping he would forget about acting. Rathbone accepted his father's suggestion and worked as a clerk for an insurance company--for exactly one year. Then he contacted his cousin Frank Benson, an actor managing a Shakespearean troupe in Stratford-on-Avon.

Rathbone was hired as an actor on the condition that he work his way through the ranks, which he did quite rapidly. Starting in bit parts in 1911, he was playing juvenile leads within two years. In 1915 his career was interrupted by the First World War. During his military service, as a second lieutenant in the Liverpool Scottish 2nd Battalion, he worked in intelligence and received the Military Cross for bravery. In 1919, released from military service, he returned to Stratford-on-Avon and continued with Shakespeare but after a year moved onto the London stage. The year after that he made his first appearance on Broadway and his film debut in the silent Innocent (1921).

For the remainder of the decade Rathbone alternated between the London and New York stages and occasional appearances in films. In 1929 he co-wrote and starred as the title character in a short-running Broadway play called "Judas". Soon afterwards he abandoned his first love, the theater, for a film career. During the 1920s his roles had evolved from the romantic lead to the suave lady-killer to the sinister villain (usually wielding a sword), and Hollywood put him to good use during the 1930s in numerous costume romps, including Captain Blood (1935), David Copperfield (1935), A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Anna Karenina (1935), The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Tower of London (1939), The Mark of Zorro (1940) and others. Rathbone earned two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet (1936) and as King Louis XI in If I Were King (1938).

However, it was in 1939 that Rathbone played his best-known and most popular character, Sherlock Holmes, with Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, first in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and then in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), which were followed by 12 more films and numerous radio broadcasts over the next seven years.

Feeling that his identification with the character was killing his film career, Rathbone went back to New York and the stage in 1946. The next year he won a Tony Award for his portrayal of Dr. Sloper in the Broadway play "The Heiress," but afterwards found little rewarding stage work. Nevertheless, during the last two decades of his life, Rathbone was a very busy actor, appearing on numerous television shows, primarily drama, variety and game shows; in occasional films, such as Casanova's Big Night (1954), The Court Jester (1955), Tales of Terror (1962) and The Comedy of Terrors (1963); and in his own one-man show, "An Evening with Basil Rathbone", with which he toured the U.S.

Bela Lugosi was born Béla Ferenc Dezsö Blaskó on October 20, 1882, Lugos, Hungary, Austria-Hungary (now Lugoj, Romania), to Paula de Vojnich and István Blaskó, a banker. He was the youngest of four children. During WWI, he volunteered and was commissioned as an infantry lieutenant, and was wounded three times.

A distinguished stage actor in his native Hungary, Austria-Hungary, he began his stage career in 1901 and started appearing in films during World War I, fleeing to Germany in 1919 as a result of his left-wing political activity (he organized an actors' union). In 1920 he emigrated to the US and made a living as a character actor, shooting to fame when he played Count Dracula in the legendary 1927 Broadway stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel. It ran for three years, and was subsequently, and memorably, filmed by Tod Browning in 1931, establishing Lugosi as one of the screen's greatest personifications of pure evil. Also in 1931, he became a U.S. citizen. Sadly, his reputation rapidly declined, mainly because he had been blacklisted by the main studios and had no choice but to accept any part (and script) handed to him, and ended up playing parodies of his greatest role, in low-grade poverty row films. Due to shady blacklisting among the top Hollywood studio executives, he refused to sell out or to compromise his integrity, and therefore ended his career working for the legendary Worst Director of All Time, Edward D. Wood Jr..

Lugosi was married to Ilona Szmik (1917 - 1920), Ilona von Montagh (? - ?), and Lillian Arch (1933 - 1951). He is the father of Bela Lugosi Jr. (1938). Lugosi helped organize the Screen Actors Guild in the mid-'30s, joining as member number 28.

Bela Lugosi died of a heart attack August 16, 1956. He was buried in a Dracula costume, including a cape, but not the ones used in the 1931 film, contrary to popular--but unfounded--rumors.

Bing Crosby was born Harry Lillis Crosby, Jr. in Tacoma, Washington, the fourth of seven children of Catherine (Harrigan) and Harry Lincoln Crosby, a brewery bookkeeper. He was of English and Irish descent. Crosby studied law at Gonzaga University in Spokane but was more interested in playing the drums and singing with a local band. Bing and the band's piano player, Al Rinker, left Spokane for Los Angeles in 1925. In the early 1930s Bing's brother Everett sent a record of Bing singing "I Surrender, Dear" to the president of CBS. His live performances from New York were carried over the national radio network for 20 consecutive weeks in 1932. His radio success led Paramount Pictures to include him in The Big Broadcast (1932), a film featuring radio favorites. His songs about not needing a bundle of money to make life happy was the right message for the decade of the Great Depression. His relaxed, low-key style carried over into the series of "Road" comedies he made with pal Bob Hope. He won the best actor Oscar for playing an easygoing priest in Going My Way (1944). He showed that he was indeed an actor as well as a performer when he played an alcoholic actor down on his luck opposite Grace Kelly in The Country Girl (1954). Playing golf was what he liked to do best. He died at age 74 playing golf at a course outside Madrid, Spain, after completing a tour of England that had included a sold-out engagement at the London Palladium.

Comedian Bob Hope was born Leslie Townes Hope in Eltham, London, England, the fifth of seven sons of Avis (Townes), light opera singer, and William Henry Hope, a stonemason from Weston-super-Mare, Somerset. His maternal grandmother was Welsh. Hope moved to Bristol before emigrating with his parents to the USA in 1908. After some years onstage as a dancer and comedian, he made his first film appearance in The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938) singing "Thanks for the Memory", which became his signature tune.

In partnership with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, he appeared in the highly successful "Road to ..." comedies (1940-52), and in many others until the early 1970s. During World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars he spent much time entertaining the troops in the field. For these activities and for his continued contributions to the industry he received five honorary Academy Awards.

Along with fellow actors Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price, Boris Karloff is recognized as one of the true icons of horror cinema, and the actor most closely identified with the general public's image of the Frankenstein Monster from the classic 1818 Mary Shelley novel "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus". William Henry Pratt was born on November 23, 1887, in Camberwell, London, England, UK, the son of Edward John Pratt Jr., the Deputy Commissioner of Customs Salt and Opium, Northern Division, Indian Salt Revenue Service, and his third wife, Eliza Sarah Millard.

He was educated at London University in anticipation that he would pursue a diplomatic career; however, he emigrated to Canada in 1909, joined a touring company based out of Ontario and adopted the stage name of "Boris Karloff." He toured back and forth across the U.S. for over 10 years in a variety of low budget theater shows and eventually ended up in Hollywood, reportedly with very little money to his name. Needing cash to support himself, Karloff secured occasional acting work in the fledgling silent film industry in such films as The Deadlier Sex (1920), Omar the Tentmaker (1922), Dynamite Dan (1924) and Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1927), in addition to a handful of film serials (the majority of these, sadly, are all lost films). Karloff supplemented his meager film income by working as a truck driver in Los Angeles, which allowed him enough time off to continue to pursue acting roles.

His big break finally came when he was cast as the Frankenstein Monster in the Universal production of Frankenstein (1931), which was directed by James Whale, one of the studio's few remaining auteur directors. The aura of mystery surrounding Karloff was highlighted in the opening credits, as he was listed as simply "?". The film was a commercial and critical success for Universal, and Karloff was instantly established as a hot property in Hollywood. He quickly appeared in several other sinister roles, including Scarface (1932) (filmed before Frankenstein (1931)), as the black-humored The Old Dark House (1932), as the titular Chinese villain of Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu novels in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), as the living mummy Im-ho-tep in The Mummy (1932) and as the misguided Prof. Morlant in The Ghoul (1933). He thoroughly enjoyed his role as a religious fanatic in John Ford's film The Lost Patrol (1934), although contemporary critics described it as a textbook example of overacting.

He donned the signature make-up, neck bolts and asphalt spreader's boots to play the Frankenstein Monster twice more, the first time in the sensational Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and the second time in the less thrilling Son of Frankenstein (1939). Karloff, on loan to Fox, appeared in one of the best of the Warner Oland Charlie Chan films, Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936), before beginning his own short-lived detective film series as Mr. Wong. He was a wrongly condemned doctor in Devil's Island (1938), the shaven-headed executioner Mord the Merciless in Tower of London (1939), another misguided scientist in The Ape (1940), a crazed scientist surrounded by monsters, vampires and werewolves in House of Frankenstein (1944), a murderous cab-man in The Body Snatcher (1945) and a Greek general fighting vampires in the Val Lewton thriller Isle of the Dead (1945).

While Karloff continued to appear in a plethora of films, many of them were not up to the standards of his previous efforts, including his appearances in two of the hokey Bud Abbott and Lou Costello monster films (he had appeared with both of them in an earlier, superior film, Bud Abbott Lou Costello Meet the Killer Boris Karloff (1949), of which theater owners often added his name to the marquee) at the low point of the Universal-International horror film cycle. During the 1950s he was a regular guest on many high-profile TV shows, including The Milton Berle Show (1948), Tales of Tomorrow (1951), The Veil (1958), The Donald O'Connor Show (1954), The Red Skelton Hour (1951) and The Dinah Shore Chevy Show (1956), just to name a few, and he appeared in a mixed bag of films, including Sabaka (1954) and Voodoo Island (1957). On Broadway, he appeared as the murderous Jonathan Brewster in the hit play "Arsenic and Old Lace" (his role, or rather the absence of him in it, was amusingly parodied in the play's 1944 film version) and 10 years later he enjoyed a long run in another hit play, "Peter Pan," perfectly cast as Captain Hook.

His career experienced something of a revival in the 1960s thanks to hosting the TV anthology series Thriller (1960) and independent film director Roger Corman, with Karloff contributing wonderful performances in The Raven (1963), The Terror (1963), the ultra-eerie Black Sabbath (1963) and the H.P. Lovecraft-inspired Die, Monster, Die! (1965). Karloff's last great film role before his death was as Byron Orlok, an aging and bitter horror film star on the brink of retirement who confronts a modern-day sniper in the Peter Bogdanovich-directed film Targets (1968). After this, he played Professor John Marsh in The Crimson Cult (1968), in which he co-starred with Sir Christopher Lee and Barbara Steele; it was the last film that he starred in that was released in his lifetime. Before these two films, he played the blind sculptor Franz Badulescu in Cauldron of Blood (1968) which was produced, directed and written by Edward Mann, who had also come to the art of film from the stage and the theater; it was released in the U.S. in 1971 after his death. His TV career was topped off by achieving Christmas immortality as both the voices of the titular character and the narrator of Chuck Jones' perennial animated favorite, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966). Four low budget horror films that were made in Mexico and starred an ailing Karloff, whose scenes for all four of them were shot on a soundstage in Hollywood, were released theatrically in Mexico in 1968 and then were released directly to television in the U.S. after his death between 1971 and 1972; however, they do no justice to this great actor. In retrospect, he never took himself too seriously as an actor and had a tendency to downplay his acting accomplishments. Renowned as a refined, kind and warm-hearted gentleman with a sincere affection for both children and their welfare, Karloff passed away on February 2, 1969 from pneumonia. Respectful of his Indian roots and in true Hindu fashion, he was cremated at Guildford Crematorium, Godalming, Surrey, England, UK, where he is commemorated by a plaque in Plot 2 of the Garden of Remembrance.

Brian Aherne was an Oscar-nominated Anglo-American stage and screen actor who was one of the top cinema character actors in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Born on May 2, 1902, in Kings Norton, Worcestershire, England, Aherne performed as an actor as a child. At age 18, he made his debut as an adult with the company that would evolve into the world-famous Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Three years later, he made his debut in London's West End, the English equivalent of Broadway. After his experience in Birmingham, Aherne studied architecture, but a life as an actor was too strong to resist, so he returned to the theater in 1923. For the next eight years, he toured the provinces and appeared in the West End in various productions. In 1931, he made his Broadway debut playing Robert Browning in "The Barretts of Wimpole Street." He alternated between the New York and London stage in the early 1930s. Aherne made his movie debut in 1924, and in the mid-1930s, he moved to Hollywood. In 1940, he was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for Juarez (1939) for playing the Emperor Maximilian. Brian Aherne published his autobiography in 1969, and 10 years later, he published a biography of his friend George Sanders, entitled "A Dreadful Man." He died at age 83 of heart failure on February 10, 1986, in Venice, Florida.

Once told by an interviewer, "Everybody would like to be Cary Grant", Grant is said to have replied, "So would I."

Cary Grant was born Archibald Alec Leach on January 18, 1904 in Horfield, Bristol, England, to Elsie Maria (Kingdon) and Elias James Leach, who worked in a factory. His early years in Bristol would have been an ordinary lower-middle-class childhood, except for one extraordinary event. At age nine, he came home from school one day and was told his mother had gone off to a seaside resort. However, the real truth was that she had been placed in a mental institution, where she would remain for years, and he was never told about it (he would not see his mother again until he was in his late 20s).

He left school at age 14, lying about his age and forging his father's signature on a letter to join Bob Pender's troupe of knockabout comedians. He learned pantomime as well as acrobatics as he toured with the Pender troupe in the English provinces, picked up a Cockney accent in the music halls in London, and then in July 1920, was one of the eight Pender boys selected to go to the United States. Their show on Broadway, "Good Times", ran for 456 performances, giving Grant time to acclimatize. He would stay in America. Mae West wanted Grant for She Done Him Wrong (1933) because she saw his combination of virility, sexuality and the aura and bearing of a gentleman. Grant was young enough to begin the new career of fatherhood when he stopped making movies at age 62.

One biographer said Grant was alienated by the new realism in the film industry. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he had invented a man-of-the-world persona and a style - "high comedy with polished words". In To Catch a Thief (1955), he and Grace Kelly were allowed to improvise some of the dialogue. They knew what the director, Alfred Hitchcock, wanted to do with a scene, they rehearsed it, put in some clever double entendres that got past the censors, and then the scene was filmed. His biggest box-office success was another Hitchcock 1950s film, North by Northwest (1959) made with Eva Marie Saint since Kelly was by that time Princess of Monaco.

Although Grant retired from the screen, he remained active. He accepted a position on the board of directors at Faberge. By all accounts this position was not honorary, as some had assumed. Grant regularly attended meetings and traveled internationally to support them. The position also permitted use of a private plane, which Grant could use to fly to see his daughter wherever her mother Dyan Cannon, was working. He later joined the boards of Hollywood Park, the Academy of Magical Arts (The Magic Castle - Hollywood, California), Western Airlines (acquired by Delta Airlines in 1987) and MGM.

Grant expressed no interest in making a career comeback. He was in good health until almost the end of his life, when he suffered a mild stroke in October 1984. In his last years, he undertook tours of the United States in a one-man-show, "A Conversation with Cary Grant", in which he would show clips from his films and answer audience questions. On November 29, 1986, Cary Grant died at age 82 of a cerebral hemorrhage in Davenport, Iowa.

In 1999, the American Film Institute named Grant the second male star of Golden Age of Hollywood cinema (after Humphrey Bogart). Grant was known for comedic and dramatic roles; his best-known films include Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Notorious (1946), An Affair to Remember (1957), North by Northwest (1959) and Charade (1963).

A cigar-smoking, monocled, swag-bellied character actor known for his Old South manners and charm. In 1918 he and his first wife formed the Coburn Players and appeared on Broadway in many plays. With her death in 1937, he accepted a Hollywood contract and began making films at the age of sixty.

Craig Reynolds was born on 15 July 1907 in Anaheim, California, USA. He was an actor, known for Perils of Pauline (1933), Back in Circulation (1937) and Love Birds (1934). He was married to Barbara Pepper. He died on 22 October 1949 in Los Angeles, California, USA.

His mother was the French Lady Comynyplatt Henrietta de Gacher, his father was the British Lieutenant William Graham Niven, who died in the war when David was six years old. Niven was considered a difficult child to educate and had to change schools often until he finally went to Sandhurst Military Academy. He came to Malta as a soldier, left the army here and went to Canada, where he worked as a lumberjack, bridge builder, journalist and whiskey salesman. After detours via New York and Cuba, Niven settled in California in 1934, where he had his first roles as an extra. He appeared in smaller films until the Second World War and then had to go to war for the British army.

In between, he also starred in propaganda films. Niven fought on the British front at Dunkirk and was promoted to colonel in 1944. General Eisenhower decorated him with the medals of the American Legion of Merit. From his first marriage to Primula Rollo, whom he married in 1940, Niven had two sons, David and Jamie. After his wife died in an accident in 1946, he married the Swede Hjordis Tersmeden in 1948, and his daughters Kristine and Fiona came from this marriage. In 1952, Niven founded the television production "Four Star TV" with Charles Boyer and other colleagues and starred in the self-produced series "The David Niven Show" and "Rogues Against Crooks". He had already been successful as an actor for a long time.

Niven starred in the 1946 English production of Error in the Afterlife and then returned to Hollywood. He celebrated successes with "The Virgin on the Roof", "Bonjour Tristesse", "The Guns of Navarone", "55 Days in Peking", "The Pink Panther", "Lady L." and with "Casino Royale". In 1959 he reached the peak of his success when he was honored with the Oscar for Best Actor for Separated from Table and Bed. His most beautiful film role was that of "Phileas Fogg" in the Jules Verne film adaptation "Around the World in 80 Days". Niven later demonstrated his enormous skills in many other films. In the 1970s and 1980s he starred in "Vampira", "A Corpse for Dessert", "Death on the Nile", "The Lion Shows its Claws" and in "Grandpa Seldom Comes Alone".

In 1982 and 1983 he had his last two roles in "The Pink Panther is Hunted" and "The Curse of the Pink Panther". Niven retired and lived on the Cote d'Azur and in Switzerland.

David Niven died on July 29, 1983 in Switzerland as a result of the nervous disease ALS. He made part of his inheritance available to medical research.

Don Ameche was a versatile and popular American film actor in the 1930s and '40s, usually as the dapper, mustached leading man. He was also popular as a radio master of ceremonies during this time. As his film popularity waned in the 1950s, he continued working in theater and some TV. His film career surged in a comeback in the 1980s with fine work as an aging millionaire in Trading Places (1983) and a rejuvenated oldster in Cocoon (1985).

Ameche was born Dominic Felix Amici in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to Barbara Edda (Hertel) and Felice Amici, a bartender.

Edward Arnold was born as Gunther Edward Arnold Schneider in 1890, on the Lower East Side of New York City, the son of German immigrants, Elizabeth (Ohse) and Carl Schneider. Arnold began his acting career on the New York stage and became a film actor in 1916. A burly man with a commanding style and superb baritone voice, he was a popular screen personality for decades, and was the star of such film classics as Diamond Jim (1935) (a role he reprised in Lillian Russell (1940)) Arnold appeared in over 150 films and was President of The Screen Actors Guild shortly before his death in 1956.

President of the Dramatic Club at Cornell University, Franchot Tone gave up the family business for acting, making his Broadway debut in "The Age of Innocence".

Tone then went into movies for MGM, making his film debut (at Paramount Pictures) in The Wiser Sex (1932). With his theatrical background, Tone became one of the most talented movie actors in Hollywood.

Fred MacMurray was likely the most underrated actor of his generation. True, his earliest work is mostly dismissed as pedestrian, but no other actor working in the 1940s and 50s was able to score so supremely whenever cast against type.

Frederick Martin MacMurray was born in Kankakee, Illinois, to Maleta Martin and Frederick MacMurray. His father had Scottish ancestry and his mother's family was German. His father's sister was vaudeville performer and actress Fay Holderness. When MacMurray was five years old, the family moved to Beaver Dam in Wisconsin, his parents' birth state. He graduated from Beaver Dam High School (later the site of Beaver Dam Middle School), where he was a three-sport star in football, baseball, and basketball. Fred retained a special place in his heart for his small-town Wisconsin upbringing, referring at any opportunity in magazine articles or interviews to the lifelong friends and cherished memories of Beaver Dam, even including mementos of his childhood in several of his films. In "Pardon my Past", Fred and fellow GI William Demarest are moving to Beaver Dam, WI to start a mink farm.

MacMurray earned a full scholarship to attend Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin and had ambitions to become a musician. In college, MacMurray participated in numerous local bands, playing the saxophone. In 1930, he played saxophone in the Gus Arnheim and his Coconut Grove Orchestra when Bing Crosby was the lead vocalist and Russ Columbo was in the violin section. MacMurray recorded a vocal with Arnheim's orchestra "All I Want Is Just One Girl" -- Victor 22384, 3/20/30. He appeared on Broadway in the 1930 hit production of "Three's a Crowd" starring Sydney Greenstreet, Clifton Webb and Libby Holman. He next worked alongside Bob Hope in the 1933 production of "Roberta" before he signed on with Paramount Pictures in 1934 for the then-standard 7-year contract (the hit show made Bob Hope a star and he was also signed by Paramount). MacMurray married Lillian Lamont (D: June 22, 1953) on June 20, 1936, and they adopted two children.

Although his early film work is largely overlooked by film historians and critics today, he rose steadily within the ranks of Paramount's contract stars, working with some of Hollywood's greatest talents, including wunderkind writer-director Preston Sturges (whom he intensely disliked) and actors Humphrey Bogart and Marlene Dietrich. Although the majority of his films of the 30's can largely be dismissed as standard fare there are exceptions: he played opposite Claudette Colbert in seven films, beginning with The Gilded Lily (1935). He also co-starred with Katharine Hepburn in the classic, Alice Adams (1935), and with Carole Lombard in Hands Across the Table (1935), The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936) -- an ambitious early outdoor 3-strip Technicolor hit, co-starring with Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney directed by Henry Hathaway -- The Princess Comes Across (1936), and True Confession (1937). MacMurray spent the decade learning his craft and developing a reputation as a solid actor. In an interesting sidebar, artist C.C. Beck used MacMurray as the initial model for a superhero character who would become Fawcett Comics' Captain Marvel in 1939.

The 1940s gave him his chance to shine. He proved himself in melodramas such as Above Suspicion (1943) and musicals (Where Do We Go from Here? (1945)), somewhat ironically becoming one of Hollywood's highest-paid actors by 1943, when his salary reached $420,000. He scored a huge hit with the thoroughly entertaining The Egg and I (1947), again teamed with Ms. Colbert and today largely remembered for launching the long-running Ma and Pa Kettle franchise. In 1941, MacMurray purchased a large parcel of land in Sonoma County, California and began a winery/cattle ranch. He raised his family on the ranch and it became the home to his second wife, June Haver after their marriage in 1954. The winery remains in operation today in the capable hands of their daughter, Kate MacMurray. Despite being habitually typecast as a "nice guy", MacMurray often said that his best roles were when he was cast against type by Billy Wilder. In 1944, he played the role of "Walter Neff", an insurance salesman (numerous other actors had turned the role down) who plots with a greedy wife Barbara Stanwyck to murder her husband in Double Indemnity (1944) -- inarguably the greatest role of his entire career. Indeed, anyone today having any doubts as to his potential depth as an actor should watch this film. He did another stellar turn in the "not so nice" category, playing the cynical, spineless "Lieutenant Thomas Keefer" in the 1954 production of The Caine Mutiny (1954), directed by Edward Dmytryk. He gave another superb dramatic performance cast against type as a hard-boiled crooked cop in Pushover (1954).

Despite these and other successes, his career waned considerably by the late 1950s and he finished out the decade working in a handful of non-descript westerns. MacMurray's career got its second wind beginning in 1959 when he was cast as the dog-hating father figure (well, he was a retired mailman) in the first Walt Disney live-action comedy, The Shaggy Dog (1959). The film was an enormous hit and Uncle Walt green lighted several projects around his middle-aged star. Billy Wilder came calling again and he did a masterful turn in the role of Jeff Sheldrake, a two-timing corporate executive in Wilder's Oscar-winning comedy-drama The Apartment (1960), with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon -- arguably his second greatest role and the last one to really challenge him as an actor. Although this role would ultimately be remembered as his last great performance, he continued with the lightweight Disney comedies while pulling double duty, thanks to an exceptionally generous contract, on TV.

MacMurray was cast in 1961 as Professor Ned Brainerd in Disney's The Absent Minded Professor (1961) and in its superior sequel, Son of Flubber (1962). These hit Disney comedies raised his late-career profile considerably and producer Don Fedderson beckoned with My Three Sons (1960) debuting in 1960 on ABC. The gentle sitcom staple remained on the air for 12 seasons (380 episodes). Concerned about his work load and time away from his ranch and family, Fred played hardball with his series contract. In addition to his generous salary, the "Sons" contract was written so that all the scenes requiring his presence to be shot first, requiring him to work only 65 days per season on the show (the contract was reportedly used as an example by Dean Martin when negotiating the wildly generous terms contained in his later variety show contract). This requirement meant the series actors had to work with stand-ins and posed wardrobe continuity issues. The series moved without a hitch to CBS in the fall of 1965 in color after ABC, then still an also-ran network with its eyes peeled on the bottom line, refused to increase the budget required for color production (color became a U.S. industry standard in the 1968 season). This freed him to pursue his film work, family, ranch, and his principal hobby, golf.

Politically very conservative, MacMurray was a staunch supporter of the Republican Party; he joined his old friend Bob Hope and James Stewart in campaigning for Richard Nixon in 1968. He was also widely known one of the most -- to be polite -- frugal actors in the business. Stories floated around the industry in the 60s regarding famous hard-boiled egg brown bag lunches and stingy tips. After the cancellation of My Three Sons in 1972, MacMurray made only a few more film appearances before retiring to his ranch in 1978. As a result of a long battle with leukemia, MacMurray died of pneumonia at the age of eighty-three in Santa Monica on November 5, 1991. He was buried in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City.

Fredric March began a career in banking but in 1920 found himself cast as an extra in films being produced in New York. He starred on the Broadway stage first in 1926 and would return there between screen appearances later on. He won plaudits (and an Academy Award nomination) for his send-up of John Barrymore in The Royal Family of Broadway (1930). Four more Academy Award nominations would come his way, and he would win the Oscar for Best Actor twice: for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). He could play roles varying from heavy drama to light comedy, and was often best portraying men in anguish, such as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (1951). As his career advanced he progressed from leading man to character actor.

At 22, George Zucco decided to begin his stage career in earnest in the Canadian provinces in 1908. In the course of the following decade, he also performed in an American vaudeville tour with his young wife, Frances, in a routine called "The Suffragette." As World War I grew in scale, Zucco returned to England to join the army. He saw action and was wounded in his right arm by gunfire. Subsequent surgery partially handicapped the use of two fingers and a thumb. However, having honed his theatrical talents, he proceeded to enter the London stage scene and was rewarded with a developing career that made him a leading man as the 1920s progressed. By 1931 he began working in British sound films, his first being The Dreyfus Case (1931) with Cedric Hardwicke. What followed were 13 B-grade movies through 1935, until The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936) with Roland Young and Ralph Richardson. Zucco was on his way to America and Broadway by late 1935. He had signed to play Disraeli opposite Helen Hayes in the original play "Victoria Regina," which ran from December 1935 to June 1936. After that came a Hollywood contract and his first American picture, Sinner Take All (1936). Zucco had a sharp hawk nose, magnetic dark eyes, and an arching brow that fit well with authoritative and intimidating characters. That same year, he was in the second installment of the "Thin Man" series, followed by a series of supporting roles in nine films in 1937, usually typed as an English doctor or lord character. They were good supporting roles in "A" films, but he was also taking on darker characters. This was evident in Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938) and more so with Arrest Bulldog Drummond (1938). Here, he was Rolf Alferson, alias the criminal mastermind "The Stinger," who could administer a poisonous sting from a needle at the tip of his cane. It was a typical pop movie in the pulp mystery/horror genre with the usual sort of ending, but it started him on the road as a Hollywood arch villain. That same year, he was cast as Professor Moriarty, the brilliant archenemy of the world's most famous detective in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939). Also that year, he and Hardwicke reunited to play the dark clerical heavies in the classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). Although into the early 1940s Zucco was still getting some variety in shady roles, he was increasingly accepting parts as mad doctors--ancient and otherwise--starting with The Mummy's Hand (1940), the sequel to the original The Mummy (1932). Although this was made by the relatively major Universal Pictures, Zucco began grinding out outlandish horror stuff for bottom-of-the-barrel Producers Releasing Corp. (PRC). It would be incorrect to say he sold out to the horror genre, though, even if horror buffs have made him their own. Into the later 1940s, he was still giving good accounts as nobles, judges and not-so-mad doctors in such "A" hits as Captain from Castile (1947), Joan of Arc (1948), and Madame Bovary (1949). Zucco was in real life an engaging personality and was also known as a very dependable actor. He suffered a stroke not long after his final film, David and Bathsheba (1951), once more in Egyptian garb but this time not even credited. He retired and lived on in fragile health. He evidently recovered his health enough to be offered the role of the mad scientist in Voodoo Woman (1957), but he declined. About that time, his health required a move to a nursing home, where he lived out his last years with dignity.

Guy Standing was born on 1 September 1873 in London, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Death Takes a Holiday (1934), Annapolis Farewell (1935) and I'd Give My Life (1936). He was married to Dorothy Hammond, Blanche Burton and Isabelle Urquhart. He died on 24 February 1937 in Hollywood Hills, California, USA.

Henry Kendall, born in London on 28 May 1897 was an English stage and film actor, theatre director and an immaculately stylish revue artiste.

Kendall was educated at the City of London School, and made his first appearance on the stage in September 1914 at the Lyceum Theatre, playing a 'super' in Tommy Atkins. He had a distinguished war career, serving as a Captain in the Royal Air Force from 1916 to 1919, and on demobilisation was awarded the Air Force Cross.

In addition to a busy career as an actor and entertainer, he was frequently engaged as a director, notably staging the first productions of See How They Run (Peterborough Rep, tour and Q Theatre 1944; Comedy Theatre 1945), and The Shop at Sly Corner (St Martin's Theatre 1945).

He also directed numerous plays at the Embassy Theatre and Q Theatre.

He was on his way back to Britain from America in 1939 with the intention of joining the armed forces when the ship on which he was traveling was captured by Nazis and he spent five years in a German P.O.W. camp. During this period he organized camp entertainment and produced 56 shows for the other prisoners. On his release he returned to Britain where he resumed his acting career. He never fully recovered from his wartime experiences and only made a limited number of post war appearances. He eventually died a broken man in a home for forgotten actors in Greenwich, London, England.

Jack Mulhall was born on 7 October 1887 in Wappingers Falls, New York, USA. He was an actor and producer, known for The Three Musketeers (1933), The Butter and Egg Man (1928) and Dark Streets (1929). He was married to Evelyn Mulhall, Laura Bunton and Bertha Vuillot. He died on 1 June 1979 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.

James Dunn worked on the stage, in vaudeville and as an extra in silent movies before he was signed by Fox in 1931. His first movie with Fox was 1931's Sob Sister (1931). While at Fox, he appeared with Shirley Temple in her first three features: Baby, Take a Bow (1934), Stand Up and Cheer! (1934) and Bright Eyes (1934). Dunn's screen character was usually the boy next door or the nice guy. In 1935 musicals at the new 20th Century-Fox were out and Dunn would move to the "B" list, from which he would never return. In The Payoff (1935) he plays the nice guy newspaper columnist whose wife ruins his career. By the late 1930s he was drinking heavily and became unemployable. He would appear in small roles in films during the early 1940s, but those parts were few and far between. In 1945 he was able to make a comeback and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), but his rejuvenated career would not continue. By 1951 he would again be unemployed and bankrupt. Television would later supply some work and he would be a regular on the series It's a Great Life (1954).

Joe E. Brown happily claimed that he was the only youngster in show business who ran away from home to join the circus with the blessings of his parents. In 1902, the ten-year-old Brown joined a circus tumbling act called the Five Marvellous Ashtons that toured various circuses and vaudeville theaters. Joe later began adding comedy bits into his vaudeville act and added more as it became popular. In 1920 he debuted on Broadway in an all-star review called "Jim Jam Jems". As he developed skits and comedy routines throughout the 1920s, he built up his confidence and his popularity soared. The same could not be said for his debut in movies. Hired for a non-comedy role in The Circus Kid (1928), he played a lion tamer whose fate is death. He didn't register with the public until he signed with Warner Brothers in 1929 to do comedy roles in the film adaptations of Broadway shows such as Sally (1929) and Top Speed (1930). Joe would be well known for his loud yell, his infectious grin and his cavernous mouth. Since many of his films revolved around sports, his natural athletic ability, combined with the physical comedy, made them hits. In Local Boy Makes Good (1931), Joe played a botanist who becomes a track star. As he had briefly played semi-pro baseball, he was a natural for films like Fireman, Save My Child! (1932), in which he played a pitcher who was also a fireman. Two of his biggest hits also involved the game of baseball, Elmer, the Great (1933) and Alibi Ike (1935). In his contract with Warners, he had it written that he would have his own baseball team at the studio to play when he was able. Joe was one of the top ten moneymaking stars for 1933 and 1936. In 1937, he left Warners to make films for David L. Loew, and it was a disaster. Most of the films were cheaply made with poor production values, and only a few were successful. Two of the better ones were Riding on Air (1937) and The Gladiator (1938). Brown always called signing with Loew his biggest professional mistake, and with Loew his popularity fell. By the end of the 1930s he was working in "B" material, which would have been unimaginable less than five years earlier. With the advent of World War II, Joe worked tirelessly to entertain the troops while his film career floundered. Their enthusiastic response enabled Joe to overcome the death of his son, Captain Donald Brown, on a training flight. In 1947 Joe was back in the biz and back on stage in a road company tour of the comedy "Harvey". His first movie role in three years was as a small-town minister in the drama The Tender Years (1948). Even though he gave a good performance, it would be another three years before he was again on the big screen, in the big-budget 1951 remake of Show Boat (1951), in which he played Cap'n Andy Hawks. When his film career became almost nonexistent, Joe worked on radio and in television. He starred as the clown in the drama The Buick Circus Hour (1952) from 1952 to 1953 and made guest appearances on a number of other shows in the 1950s and early 1960s. His peers regarded him as one of the few truly nice people in Hollywood. After a few small movie roles in the 1950s, he was discovered by a new generation as the millionaire Osgood Fielding III in Billy Wilder's classic Some Like It Hot (1959), uttering the immortal last line of the film, "Well, nobody's perfect."

John Carradine, the son of a reporter/artist and a surgeon, grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York. He attended Christ Church School and Graphic Art School, studying sculpture, and afterward roamed the South selling sketches. He made his acting debut in "Camille" in a New Orleans theatre in 1925. Arriving in Los Angeles in 1927, he worked in local theatre. He applied for a job as as scenic designer to Cecil B. DeMille, who rejected his designs but gave him voice work in several films. His on-screen debut was in Tol'able David (1930), billed as Peter Richmond. A protégé and close friend of John Barrymore, Carradine was an extremely prolific film character actor while simultaneously maintaining a stage career in classic leading roles such as Hamlet and Malvolio. In his later years he was typed as a horror star, putting in appearances in many low- and ultra-low-budget horror films. He was a member of the group of actors often used by director John Ford that became known as "The John Ford Stock Company". John Carradine died at age 82 of natural causes on November 27, 1988.

John Miljan was born on 9 November 1892 in Lead City, South Dakota, USA. He was an actor, known for The Ten Commandments (1956), Torchy Runs for Mayor (1939) and The Fallen Sparrow (1943). He was married to Victoria Lowe Creighton. He died on 24 January 1960 in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA.