Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 60 of 111

Ann Miller

Ann Miller was one of key figures in the great MGM musicals of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. She was born in 1923 in Texas. She began her film career with the RKO studio but when she began working in MGM she starred in such favourites as “Easter Parade” in 1948 with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, “On the Town”, “Kiss Me Kate” and “Hit the Deck”. In 1979 she starred with Mickey Rooney on the stage in several venues throughout the US and UK. Her last film was the cult classic of David Lynch, “Mulholland Drive” in 2001. She died in 2004.

“Telegraph” obituary:

Ann Miller, who died on Thursday aged 80, was the leading female tap dancer in Hollywood musicals of the 1940s and 1950s, with a reputed speed of 500 taps a minute.

At the height of her popularity her legs were insured for $1 million; and on her passport, in the space reserved for “occupation”, she wrote simply “star lady”. Yet she generally played second fiddle to such singers and dancers as Kathryn Grayson and Cyd Charisse. At the final fade-out, it was always they who got the man, never Ann Miller. But her contributions to musicals such as On the Town (1949) and Kiss Me Kate(1953), in which she sang Too Darn Hot and Always True to You, Darling, in My Fashion, were often more memorable than those of the nominal stars.

Vivacity was her strongest suit – never more so than in On the Town, in which she played an anthropology student with a special attraction to cave men. Her Prehistoric Man routine, danced in a natural history museum with dinosaur bones and a chorus line of neanderthal hunks, is one of the highlights of the film.

Her speciality numbers often outlived the films in which they featured. Few now remember The Kissing Bandit (1948), one of Frank Sinatra’s weakest musicals; but the Spanish Dance of Fury, in which Ann Miller was partnered by Cyd Charisse and Ricardo Montalban, is fondly recalled, as is Shakin’ the Blues Away – the solo number in the Fred Astaire musical Easter Parade (1948) which won her a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. Later, in Deep in My Heart (1954), a biopic of Sigmund Romberg, she stole the show with a red-hot Charleston, It.

Because her numbers were often self-contained and did not depend on a knowledge of the plot, they formed ideal extracts for the compilation movies MGM packaged together as That’s Dancing! and That’s Entertainment! For That’s Entertainment! III (1994), Ann Miller acted as one of the guides to the studio’s product.

She was born to dance at MGM, the studio whose initials were waggishly said to stand for Mighty-Good-Musicals. Unlike some of her contemporaries at Culver City, she never had a bad word to say about MGM or its studio boss, Louis B Mayer. “Why, Mr Mayer treated us better than his own horses,” she would insist.

Mayer was captivated by her and, despite giving her 39 years, regularly took her wining, dining and dancing – always with her mother as chaperon. Not that he misbehaved. “Mr Mayer was the Kissinger of his day”, she reported, “very much the gentleman, and he liked me because I was a nice girl.” Unfortunately, he was possessive. One of the more bizarre stories from that era concerned Ann Miller’s nose: she broke it, and disliked the contour after it mended, so she had an artificial extension made. When she and Mayer quarrelled, he would steal the nose and lock it away in his safe so that she could not go out without him.

Then came the fateful day when she fell for an oil millionaire (the first of three in her life) and had to break the news to Mayer. He sobbed, he groaned, he hung up the telephone – and within minutes sent his chauffeur to summon her to his death bed, where he was expiring having swallowed a bottle of sleeping tablets. The ambulance, however, got there first; Mayer recovered, and Ann Miller’s relations with him were never as cordial again.

She lacked the dramatic training to survive on screen when the tide turned against MGM musicals in the late 1950s. “As an actress, I’m terrible”, she admitted, “but if Ava Gardner and Lana Turner can act under a good director, I think I still have a chance.” But it was not enough. Her film career petered out after Hit the Deck in 1955, and she was absent from the screen for 20 years until she made a guest appearance in Won Ton Ton – the Dog Who Saved Hollywood in 1976. She never quit show business, however, switching to television and live theatre instead.

Faux pas were her stock in trade, and Ann Millerisms became almost as legendary as Goldwynisms. Attending a memorial tribute to Oscar Hammerstein, she asked her escort: “Why isn’t Oscar here tonight?” When she was informed that this was what the concert was about, the lyricist having been dead for 10 years, she replied: “Well, how should I know? I’ve been touring in Mame.”

“I do a lot of nutty things, and people think I’m for real,” she acknowledged. “But all my life I’ve tried to be an eight-by-10 glossy. I try to give the impression that everything’s perfect and that star ladies don’t go to the bathroom. It was worse than doing 24 shows a day for those smarty-pants husbands of mine because I was never off-stage. I tried to make them believe I was always gorgeous.”

She was especially renowned for her lacquered coiffure, never a hair of which was out of place. It was a bouffant wig, and gave rise to long-running quips that she was terrified of falling lest she break her hair.

Part Cherokee Indian, Ann Miller shared the tribe’s belief in the psychic, and firmly believed in reincarnation. She considered herself the re-embodiment of Queen Hatshepsut of ancient Egypt, for whose crimes and cruelties she was paying to this day. Under hypnosis she spent many a happy hour regressing to her former life, and was able categorically to reveal that she and her sister had been murdered by her half-brother. Egyptologists, however, were reluctant to pursue the matter.

Her real name was Lucille Ann Collier, and she was of Irish, French and Cherokee descent (on her grandmother’s side). She was born at Cherino, Texas, to a prominent criminal lawyer, John Collier, but brought up in Houston, where she attended the Albert Sidney Johnson High School. Her date of birth was April 12 1923, but later it came to be misquoted and accepted as 1919. This was due to early career pressures when, at the age of 14, she misrepresented herself as 18 in order to secure a contract for full-time work with RKO.

Her early life, according to Hollywood folklore, included dancing lessons from the age of five, as therapy after an attack of rickets, and a first lesson in tap dancing from Bill (“Bojangles”) Robinson, whom she visited with her mother when he was playing at a local theatre. Her parents divorced when she was 10 and she moved with her mother to California.

Being deaf and without alimony, her mother was unable to hold down a job and feed the family; so the young Ann was forced to dance for her supper at sleazy establishments such as the Black Cat Club. Having worked her way up to a four-month stint at the Bal Tabarin in San Francisco, she was spotted by the RKO talent scout Benny Rubin and, in 1937, made her screen debut in New Faces of 1937.

Few of her early screen roles were of any great merit. They included bit parts in Stage Door (1937); Room Service (1938), with the Marx Brothers; and Radio City Revels (1938). There was also a more substantial part as the dance-mad daughter in Frank Capra’s Oscar-winning comedy You Can’t Take It with You (1938).

She asked RKO for a release from her contract because a conflict of interest was arising involving her agent. At that time, the dancer Eleanor Powell was represented by the same agency. She was a big star at MGM (a much more powerful studio than RKO), which was unhappy to see Ann Miller developing as a rival. It became clear that Miller would be the loser if pressure were brought to bear to ensure Powell’s supremacy – so she temporarily quit Hollywood and headed for Broadway. She appeared in the last (1939) edition of the George White Scandals, and, although the show was not successful, everybody admired her big number, the Mexiconga.

Ann Miller returned to Hollywood with a series of short-term contracts, but they were not especially good years. In Melody Ranch (1940), she played opposite the singing cowboy Gene Autry (“I was the first girl he ever kissed, apart from his horse”) and became known as “the Queen of the Bs” in a run of second features such as True to the Army (1942),Priorities on Parade (1942) and Reveille with Beverly (1943), all aimed at encouraging the war effort.

The breakthrough in her career came in 1948, when MGM hired her to replace an injured Cyd Charisse in Easter Parade. It was a small part, and fairly unsympathetic; but her partner in several dances was Fred Astaire, and Ann Miller made a big enough impression to secure a standard seven-year contract. It led directly to On the Town and steady employment in some of MGM’s best-known musicals. Among them wereLovely to Look At (1952), a remake of the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie Roberta; Kiss Me Kate; Small Town Girl (1953), in which she danced a scorching version of I’ve Got to Hear That Beat; Deep in My Heart (1954); and Hit the Deck (1955).

Her last musical was The Opposite Sex (1956), an ill-advised remake of The Women. In the same year, she played her last film role for 20 years – as the mother of Dean Jones in The Great American Pastime, a non-musical film about baseball. Sensing the end of an era, she devoted herself in future to theatre and television.

On television she made regular appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, Hollywood Palace and Laugh In, and played acting roles in Dames at Sea (1971), a spoof of Hollywood musicals, and in one episode of the long-running soap Love American Style (1972).

Ann Miller also featured in a spectacular television commercial for Great American Soups, dancing on top of an eight-foot soup can, surrounded by 20-foot fountains, a 24-piece orchestra and a long line of high-kicking chorus girls. It ended with her toe-tapping her way into the kitchen, where her husband protested: “Why must you make such a big production out of everything?”

In the theatre she acted and danced in touring productions of Can Can, Hello, Dolly!, Panama Hattie and Blithe Spirit, and made her Broadway comeback (after a 30-year gap) in Mame, assuming the role originally played by Angela Lansbury.

Her most successful stage appearance was in Sugar Babies (1979), a $1.3 million extravaganza based on the rise of burlesque; her co-star was Mickey Rooney, who had once been her teenage classmate at an acting school in Hollywood. The show was brought to London in 1988, where she received some of the most favourable notices of her career.

In 1998 she appeared in a successful revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. In 2001 she played Coco, an ageing Hollywood matron, in David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive.

Ann Miller published her autobiography, Miller’s High Life, in 1972, and a book about psychic phenomena, Tapping Into the Force (1990).

She was married three times: to Reese Milner in 1946; to William Moss in 1958; and to Arthur Cameron in 1961. All three were oil millionaires. The first two marriages ended in divorce, the third was annulled. There were no children.

The above “Telegraph” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne

Alfred Lunt was one of the great figures on Broadway in the early part of the 2oth century. He formed a legendary acting legacy with his wife Lynn Fontanne. He was born in 1892 in Wisconsin. Among his Broadway shows are “The Guardsman” in 1924, “Design for Living” and “Idiot’s Delight”. His few films include “Backbone” in 1923 and film of his stage hit “The Guardsman” in 1931. He died in 1977.

Alfred Lunt was an American actor, particularly known for his professional partnership with his wife Lynn Fontanne (1887-1983). Lunt was one of Broadway’s leading male stars.

Lunt was born in 1892 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father Alfred D. Lunt was active in the lumber business, while his mother Harriet Washburn Briggs was a housewife. Lunt’s ancestry in both Maine and Massachusetts dated back to the colonial era. He was a distant descendant of Henry Lunt, an early settler of Newbury, Massachusetts. Lunt’s paternal grandmother was Scottish American. Lunt’s maternal ancestors lived in New England since colonial times, and including a number of Mayflower arrivals.

Alfred D. Lunt died in 1893. The widowed Harriet married a Finnish-American physician, Dr. Karl Sederholm. The Sederholms eventually settled in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin, a small unincorporated community in Waukesha County, Wisconsin. Lunt was raised in Genesse Depot, along with three younger half-siblings, He attended Carroll College in nearby Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Lunt fist gained publicity in 1919, for his starring role in the comedy play “Clarence” by Booth Tarkington (1869-1946). He distinguished himself in a variety of theatrical roles, including in Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” and Chekhov’s “The Seagull “. On May 26, 1926, Lunt married actress Lynn Fontane. The two became the preeminent Broadway acting couple. Their successes included a play written specifically for them, the menage a trois-themed “Design for Living” (1932) by Noël Coward.

Lunt started acting in films in the 1920s. His film debut was the silent drama “Backbone” (1923) for Goldwyn Pictures. Subsequent films included the South Sea romance “The Ragged Edge” (1923), the romantic comedy “Second Youth” (1924), the circus-themed comedy “Sally of the Sawdust” (1925), and the comedy film “Lovers in Quarantine” (1925).

Lunt’s most successful film effort was the comedy film “The Guardsman” (1931). In the film, A jealous husband creates a second identity in order to woo his wife, and she plays along. Lunt played the role of the husband, and Lynn Fontane the role of the wife. It was a critical success, but not particularly successful at the box office. Lunt was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for this role, but the Award was instead won (in a tie) by Wallace Beery and Fredric March.

Lunt returned to being mostly a theatrical actor. He had a cameo in the World War II film “Stage Door Canteen” (1943), and appeared as himself in the documentary film “Show Business at War” (1943). During the 1940s, Lunt and and Fontane starred in several radio dramas. In the 1950s and the 1960s, they appeared frequently on television.

Lunt officially retired from the stage in 1958, at the age of 66. His last film appearance was the television film “The Magnificent Yankee” (1965), where he played the United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935).

Ron O’Neal was a very charismatic actor who starred in some successful movies in the 1970’s. He was born in New York City in 1937. He achieved fame on the stage and made his film debut in 1971 in “The Organisation”. He gained stardom with his performance as Youngblood Priest in “Superfly” in 1972. His other movies include “A Force of One” in 1979, “When A Stranger Calls” and “The Final Countdown” in 1980. He died in 2004.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Forever tagged as the super baaaaaaad “Super Fly,” actor Ron O’Neal has spent his entire post 70s career trying to break the chains of a stereotype that made him his fortune. Of tough, humble beginnings, Ron was the son of a wannabe jazz musician who became a factory worker in order to support the family, growing up in Cleveland’s black ghetto. He managed to attend Ohio State University for a single semester before developing an interest in theater and joining Cleveland’s Karamu House, an interracial acting troupe, training there for nine years (1957-1966). He arrived in New York in 1967 and taught acting in Harlem to support himself, jointly appearing in summer stock and off-Broadway shows at the same time. He received critical notice in 1970 in Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre production of “No Place to Be Somebody,” in which he won the Obie, Drama Desk, Clarence Derwent and Theatre World awards for his dynamite performance. The timing couldn’t have been more ‘right on’ for this dude with the tough, streetwise style and attitude to spare — perfect for Hollywood what with the arrival of the “blaxploitation” films that were taking over at the time. Ron became an overnight star as the hip, funky anti-hero in the action-driven flick Super Fly (1972), playing one cool drug dealer who wants out of the business, taking out the entire syndicate one by one (or two by two as need be). He made his debut as a director the following year with the equally violent sequel, Super Fly T.N.T. (1973), which again starred himself. But the genre soon turned to uncool parody and within a couple of years, O’Neal was struggling badly, playing support roles and even less by the end of the decade. Although he managed to co-star in the TV series “Bring ‘Em Back Alive” and “The Equalizer” in the 80s, it’s been an uphill battle all the way for him to obliterate this stubborn image of the supercool Priest with his fu-manchu like beard and dazzling white suit. He has appeared as both hero and villain in a number of action low budgets since, including Mercenary Fighters (1987), Trained to Kill (1988) and Up Against the Wall (1991), which he also directed. In 1996, he joined other former 70s black action stars, including Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, Richard Roundtree and Pam Grier, in a revival of the violent genre entitled Original Gangstas (1996). He passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2004.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

Ron O’Neal, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 66, spent most of his professional life trying to live down his role of the bad-ass Youngblood Priest in Superfly (1972), one of the key blaxploitation movies of the decade. His interpretation of the long-haired, ultra-hip, ultra-violent cocaine dealer, who wore tight white suits and drove a customised Cadillac, made him into an instant star, mainly among the vast urban black movie-going public.

They delighted in seeing their people no longer treated on the screen as servants or saints, or as a “problem”. The blaxploitation movies would eventually lead to such films as Beverly Hills Cop and Lethal Weapon, and O’Neal, with Richard Roundtree (Shaft), Jim Brown (Slaughter), Pam Grier (Foxy Brown), Fred Williamson (Black Caesar) and Richard Pryor (The Mack), became a role model for the likes of Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover, Martin Lawrence and Halle Berry.

When voices were raised against the blaxploitation movies – for giving a stereotypical view of blacks, and glorifying crime – O’Neal protested that the point of the film was missed. He claimed that Youngblood Priest got into his drug-pushing life, not out of choice, but because of his social and economic position, and that he “actually wants out of the business after one last big score.”

In order to address some of the criticism levelled at Superfly, O’Neal directed and starred in the sequel Superfly T.N.T. (1973), transplanting Youngblood Priest from Harlem to a small African country, and getting him to fight for the greater good. It was no surprise, however, that the film was a box-office failure; everything that had made its predecessor so entertaining was jettisoned.

O’Neal’s career never fully recovered, and, after the 1970s, he found it difficult to make the transition from blaxploitation movies into more mainstream films. “Outside New York, people assumed I really was a hustler,” he told an interviewer in 1979. “Superfly took me from relative obscurity, but I haven’t been offered that many roles since.”

O’Neal was born in Utica, in New York state, and grew up in the Cleveland ghetto, the son of a wannabe jazz musician who became a factory worker to support the family. After one academically disastrous term at Ohio State University, the young O’Neal went to see an amateur production of the musical Finian’s Rainbow, in which a bigoted southern senator turns black. “It blew my mind,” he recalled. “I’d never seen a play before.”

He immediately joined Karamu House, an interracial theatre troupe, with whom, for the next six years, he played everything from Walter Lee, in A Raisin In The Sun, to Stanley Kowalski, in A Streetcar Named Desire. He earned money working as a house painter.

After moving to New York in the mid-1960s, he taught acting in Harlem, and performed in summer stock and off Broadway. He first gained recognition in 1970, starring in the Joseph Papp/Public Theatre production of Charles Gordone’s No Place To Be Somebody, as a pimp and barkeeper trying to take control of local rackets. The work earned him a number of awards, and caught the attention of the Superfly producers.

O’Neal’s subsequent film career was undistinguished, made up mainly of appearances in low-budget, violent thrillers, such as A Force Of One (1979).

On television, aside from guest appearances in series like Murder She Wrote and Hill Street Blues, he took leading roles in the mini-series Bring ‘Em Back Alive (1982-83) and The Equalizer (1985-89). In 1996, he joined blaxploitation stars Pam Grier, Fred Williamson, Jim Brown and Richard Roundtree in Larry Cohen’s Original Gangstas, but it was a pale copy of the films that made their reputations. His last movie was On The Edge (2002), in which he appeared with Williamson and the rapper Ice-T.

He is survived by his wife Audrey.

· Ron O’Neal, actor, born September 1 1937; died January 14 2004

The above “Guardian” obituary can be also accessed online here.

Creighton Hale was born Patrick Fitzgerald in Cork in 1882. He acheived US fame for his role in “Inian Summer” on Broadway. In 1914 he made his film debut in the silent “The Exploits of Elaine”. He starred opposite Lillian Gish in “Way Down East” in 1920 and “Orphans of the Storm” with Lillian and her sister Dorothy. His career survived the coming of sound and he was featured in films such as “The Maltese Falcon” in 1941 and “Casablanca”. He died in 1965.

Akim Tamiroff & Leonid Kinskey

The great character actor was born in Georgia, Russia in 1899. He came to the United States in 1923. His film debut came in 1932 in “Okay, America”. He developed a solid reputation as a supporting player and was featured in such movies as “The Lives of a Benal Lancer” in 1935, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in 1943 and “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” amongst several others. He died in 1972. He was married to the actress Tamara Shayne.

TCM overview:

Flamboyant, husky character actor in the US from 1923, who acted with the New York Theatre Guild before entering films. Ubiquitous in Paramount productions of the late 1930s, he usually played eccentric Slavic types, though he had a rare leading role in “The Way of the Flesh” (1940). From the early 1950s Tamiroff appeared in many European productions, with memorably baroque performances in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville” (1965) and three Orson Welles films. (He also played the title character of Welles’ unfinished “Sancho Panza”.)

Patty Peterson

Patty Peterson was the younger sister of Paul Peterson and also acted with him in “The Donna Reed Show” from 1963 until 1966.

“Wikipedia” entry:

Petersen was born in Glendale, California, the youngest of three children. When her parents divorced in 1962, she and older brother Paul Petersen moved in with their mother, who later remarried. Paul Petersen costarred on ABC‘s The Donna Reed Show. Patty was written into the cast as Trisha, an adopted child after Shelley Fabares left the series. She stayed with the show until it ended in 1966.

After many commercials and industrial films, she semi-retired to marry and rear a family of her own. She was a country songwriter/singer for a while. Now known as Patti Petersen Mirkovich, she is a writer and founder of Internovel, an Internet company for novice authors. She is also a teacher of English and computer science at a Roman Catholic school and a volunteer coach for the girls’ softballteam. She has two children, Tim and Melissa.

Torin Thatcher

Torin Thatcher was a very prolific character actor in British and U.S. films especially in the 1940’s and 50’s. he was born in Bombay, India in 1905. He began his career on the British stage and then was featured in a number of classics of the British cinema including “Major Barbara” in 1941 and “Great Expectations” in 1946. In the early 1950’s he settled in Hollywood and his credits there included “Blackbeard the Pirate”, “The Robe”, “The Black Shield of Falworth” and “Love Is a Many Splendoured Thing” with Jennifer Jones and William Holden in 1955. He died in 1981.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Associated with gritty, flashy film villainy, veteran character actor Torin Thatcher was born in Bombay, India to British parents on January 15, 1905, and was educated in England at the Bedford School and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. A former schoolteacher, he appeared on the London stage in 1927 before entering British films in 1934. During World War II he served with the Royal Artillery and achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was an extremely imposing, powerfully built specimen and it offered him a number of tough, commanding, often sinister roles over the years primarily in larger-than-life action sequences. He made a number of classic British films in the late 1930s and 1940s including Sabotage (1936), Major Barbara (1941), The Captive Heart(1946), Great Expectations (1946), in which he played Bentley (“The Spider”) Drummle, and The Fallen Idol (1948). In Hollywood from the 1950s on, his looming figure and baleful countenance were constantly in demand, gnashing his teeth in a slew of popular costumers such as The Crimson Pirate (1952), Blackbeard, the Pirate (1952) as reformed pirate Sir Henry Morgan, The Robe (1953), Helen of Troy (1956) as Ulysses, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) as the evil, shaven-domed magician Sokurah who shrinks the princess to miniature size, Witness for the Prosecution (1957) as the prosecuting attorney, The Miracle (1959) as the Duke of Wellington, the Marlon Brando/’Trevor Howard’ remake of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), and Hawaii (1966). Thatcher returned to the stage quite frequently, notably on Broadway, in such esteemed productions as “Edward, My Son” (1948), “That Lady” (1949) and “Billy Budd” (1951). In 1959 he portrayed Captain Keller in the award-winning play “The Miracle Worker” with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. Also a steady fixture on TV, he appeared in such made-for-TV films as the Jack Palance version of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “Brenda Starr.” Thatcher died of cancer on March 4, 1981, in the near-by Los Angeles area.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

The Narrow Corner, poster, from left: Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Patricia Ellis on midget window card, 1933. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Dictionary of Irish biography:

Digges, (John) Dudley (1880–1947), actor, stage manager, and director, was born 9 June 1880, son of James Dudley Digges, clerk, of 16 Beechwood Avenue, Ranelagh, Dublin, and Catherine Digges (née Forsythe). He was educated by the Christian Brothers (1886–90), and at St Mary’s college, Rathmines (1890–93). After studying theatre methods under Frank Fay (qv), in 1898 he joined the Ormond Dramatic Company run by Frank and his brother William Fay (qv), performing in sketches such as ‘The comic tutor’ at St Theresa’s Hall, Clarendon St. He was a member of the Celtic Literary Society at the time of its merger with Cumann na nGaedhael (1900). A member from 1899 of William Fay’s Comedy Combination, he performed in W. Bayle Bernard’s farce ‘His last legs’ at the Coffee Palace Hall, Townsend St., in 1901. When William Fay formed the National Dramatic Company in 1902, Digges acted as Naisi in the first public production of ‘Deirdre’ byGeorge Russell (qv) (‘Æ’), and in ‘Kathleen ni Houlihan’ by William Butler Yeats (qv), at St Theresa’s Hall (2–4 April). A founding member of the Irish National Theatre Society (February 1903), Digges played the Wise Man in Yeats’s ‘The hour glass’ at the society’s premiere performance, in Dublin’s Molesworth Hall (14 March). After the controversial first performance of ‘In the shadow of the glen’ by J. M. Synge (qv) (10 October 1903), Digges walked out in protest along with Maud Gonne MacBride (qv) and Mary Quinn (the future Mary Digges (qv)), and resigned from the society. He directed a series of plays – including Henry Connell’s ‘Robert Emmet’, in which he played the title role – for the Cumann na nGaedhael Theatre Company at the 1903 Samhain theatre festival. He worked under Arthur Griffith (qv) as a secretary on the United Irishman in 1904, while performing with the Celtic Players at the Dublin Workman’s Club, York St.

In 1904 Digges travelled to America to perform with Quinn and P. J. Kelly at the St Louis world exhibition; involved in a fracas with the stage manager, Luke Martin, over supposed anti-Irish elements in one of the offerings, he was fired from the company, having appeared only in Russell’s ‘Deirdre’. Remaining permanently in America, in 1905 he performed at the Garrick Theatre, New York, in ‘John Bull’s other island’ by George Bernard Shaw (qv), and in 1906 acted with Ben Greet’s Shakespearean company. He married Mary Quinn in 1907; it is not recorded that they had children. Touring with the Fiske Theatre company, Digges became friendly with the noted English actor George Arliss. He collaborated with visiting Irish actors to perform ‘The rising of the moon’ by Lady Gregory (qv) at the Savoy Theatre, New York, in 1908, under the management of Charles Frohman, and he acted with his wife and Frank Fay in ‘The building fund’ by William Boyle (qv; 1853–1923) at Powers Theatre, Chicago. Over the next decade he worked primarily as a stage manager, with Frohman productions (1908–12) and for Arliss (1912–19). A founding member of the New York Theatre Guild in 1919, he performed in its first production, Jacinto Benavente’s ‘The bonds of interest’. His sensitive and highly praised acting as the unsavoury tradesman James Caesar in ‘John Ferguson’ by St John Greer Ervine (qv) at the Garrick Theatre (1919) won him star status, and helped establish the lasting reputation of the Theatre Guild. He appeared in over 3,500 performances for the guild, most notably as Mr Zero in Elmer Rice’s landmark expressionistic play ‘The adding machine’ (1923). He also directed plays with the guild, including Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’, ‘Heartbreak house’, ‘The doctor’s dilemma’, and ‘Man’s estate’. He was a director of the Actors’ Theatre, New York (1924–5), and staged Shaw’s ‘Candida’ and Ibsen’s ‘The wild duck’. Moving to Hollywood in 1929, he embarked on a prolific film career, his roles including that of Casper Gutman in the first filmed version of The Maltese falcon(1931), and the ship’s surgeon in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).

Presented with a gold medal by the American Irish Historical Society in New York for his defining role in the creation of the modern Irish theatre, Digges delivered an acceptance address entitled ‘A theatre was made’, dealing with his early theatrical experiences (1939). He was vice-president of Actor’s Equity, and belonged to the Lambs and Players clubs. In his last performance for the Theatre Guild, on Broadway in 1946, he played Harry Hope in Eugene O’Neill’s ‘The iceman cometh’ to wide critical acclaim. He died after suffering a stroke in his residence at 1 West Sixty-fourth St., New York, on 24 October 1947, survived by a sister and two brothers living in Ireland; his wife had died only two months earlier. An elegiac poem, ‘The dead player’, by Padraic Colum (qv), was published in the Dublin Magazine in 1953

Dudley Digges was born in Dublin in 1879. He came to the U.S. in 1904 and was in Hollywood by 1930. Among his movie credits are “Tess of the Storm Country” in 1932 and “The Light that Failed” in 1939. He died in 1947.

“Wikipedia” entry:

Opposite the Sam Spade of Ricardo Cortez in The Maltese Falcon (1931), Warner Bros.’ 1931 adaptation of Dashiell Hammett‘s novel, Digges portrayed “Kasper Guttman” – the role wonderfully reprised in Warners’ 1941 version (The Maltese Falcon (1941)) by Sydney Greenstreet.

Though his on-screen persona never seemed to vary much from that of, say, Ebenezer Scrooge, he was a very well-respected stage actor and director, with a particular fondness for the works of Henrik Ibsen. Digges enjoyed an enormously successful career as a Broadway actor and director (active there from 1906-1947) in addition to his work as a character actor in Hollywood.

Acted on stage from 1902 and moved to the U.S. two years later. Was briefly stage manager for Charles Frohman and George Arliss, before embarking on a prolific Broadway career (1906-47) which lasted until his death.

Michael North was born in 1916. He had a few leading roles in Hollywood movies of the 1940’s most notably “The Unsuspected” in 1947 and “The Devil Thumbs A Ride”.

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Ann Miller

Alfred Lunt

Ron O’Neal

Creighton Hale

Akim Tamiroff

Patty Peterson

Torin Thatcher

Dudley Digges

Dictionary of Irish biography:

Michael North

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