Hollywood Actors
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 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 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
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:
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”.
IMDB entry:
American character actor of rather bizarre range, a member of the so-called “John Ford Stock Company.” Originally a New York stage actor of some repute, Whitehead entered films in the 1930s. He played a wide variety of character parts, often quite different from his own actual age and type. He is probably most familiar as Al Joad in ‘John Ford (I)”sThe Grapes of Wrath (1940). But twenty-two years later, in his fifth film for Ford, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Whitehead at 51 was playing a lollipop-licking schoolboy! He continued to work predominantly on the stage, appearing now and again in films or on television. In his last years, he suffered from cancer and died in 1998 in Dublin, Ireland, where he had lived in semi- retirement for many years.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Jim Beaver <jumblejim@prodigy.net>
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Michael Tolan
Michael Tolan was an excellent actor who was born in 1925 in Detroit. He had a very profilic career on television from the mid-1950’s appearing in many of the more popular drama’s over the next thirty years including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”, “Mannix”, “Kojack” and “Murder She Wrote”. His films include “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and “Presumed Innocent”. He died in 2011.
His obituary in “The New York Times”:
Michael Tolan, an actor who became a recurring presence on television in the 1960s and ’70s after walking away from film and Broadway but who returned to the stage to help found the American Place Theater, a successful Off Broadway house, died on Monday in Hudson, N.Y. He was 85.
Michael Tolan and Mary Tyler Moore on her show in 1971.
The cause was heart disease and renal failure, his partner, Donna Peck, said. They lived in Ancram, N.Y.
By the early 1960s Mr. Tolan had had roles in films, like Edwin L. Marin’s western “Fort Worth” (1951), and on Broadway, including big parts in long-running romantic comedies like Peter Ustinov’s “Romanoff and Juliet.” But he was dissatisfied.
“This Broadway is for the birds,” he told The New York Times in 1965. “In 99 percent of the cases it has nothing to do with acting as a craft, as an art.”
So Mr. Tolan began acting in televised plays, which led to roles on weekly series. In 1964 he starred as Dr. Alex Tazinski, a character he called “hard-hitting, uncompromising, somewhat antisocial” on the CBS prime-time medical drama “The Doctors and the Nurses.”
He later starred on the NBC drama “The Senator” (1970-71) and appeared on other shows, including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” as Ms. Moore’s journalism teacher and boyfriend, Dan Whitfield.
Mr. Tolan founded the nonprofit American Place Theater with Wynn Handman and Sidney Lanier at St. Clement’s Church on West 46th Street in 1963. The theater has since moved to 9th Avenue between 44th and 45th Streets.
“We wanted to attract some of the writers who wrote fine, intelligent, deep material about American life, and see if we could interest them in writing for the theater,” Mr. Tolan wrote in an unpublished memoir.
The American Place produced first plays by writers like Donald Barthelme and Anne Sexton. Faye Dunaway, Morgan Freeman and other Hollywood stars performed there early in their careers.
Michael Tolan was born Seymour Tuchow on Nov. 27, 1925, in Detroit. He graduated from Wayne State University in 1947 and performed with a repertory company in Detroit. In New York he studied under Stella Adler and won a fellowship to study acting atStanford University.
A performance at Stanford led to his first movie role, as a gangster (under the name Lawrence Tolan, which he later changed) in “The Enforcer” (1951) with Humphrey Bogart.
He made his Broadway debut in George Axelrod’s “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” in 1955, and appeared in five more Broadway plays through 1961. He later had supporting roles in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965) and “Presumed Innocent” (1990), among other films.
His two marriages ended in divorce.
In addition to Ms. Peck, he is survived by a brother, Gerald Tuchow, of Detroit; a daughter, Alexandra, of Watertown, Mass., from his first marriage, to the actress Rosemary Forsyth; and two daughters, Jenny and Emilie, both of New York, from his marriage to Carol Hume.
The above “New York Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Tommy Clifford was brought to Hollywood from Dublin as a child actor in 1929 along with Maureen O’Sullivan to star in the movie “Song O’ My Heart”. He remained there for one more film “Part Time Wife” .
IMDB entry:
Tommy Clifford was born on September 19, 1918 in Southampton, Hampshire, England. He was an actor, known for Song o’ My Heart (1930) and Part Time Wife (1930). He was married to Dora Ennis. He died on June 14, 1988 in Dublin, Ireland.
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.