The original premise for the show was Petticoatless Junction. It featured a lecherous Uncle Joe moving kinda slow until the show's young women climbed up the water tower to bathe. Then he moved in kinda fast.

Today's edition of Armchair Traveling takes me back to our visit to Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City a few years ago. We were part of the studio audience for a taping of "Jeopardy", but we went early enough to take in the Studio Lot tour in the morning. The famous set from the Seinfeld sitcom has been faithfully maintained - just like a time capsule !

British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. D. 416. Photo: Warner Bros. Philip Carey, Doris Day and Howard Keel in Calamity Jane (David Butler, 1953).

American actress and singer Doris Day (1922-2019) sang with several big bands before going solo in 1947. In the 1950s, she made a series of popular film musicals, including Calamity Jane (1953) and The Pajama Game (1957). With Rock Hudson, she starred in the box office hit Pillow Talk (1959). On TV, she starred in the sitcom The Doris Day Show (1968-1973).

Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff was born in 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Alma Sophia (Welz), a housewife, and William Joseph Kappelhoff, a music teacher and choirmaster. Her mother named her after her favourite silent film star, Doris Kenyon. She had two brothers, Richard, who died before she was born and Paul, a few years older. For many years it was uncertain whether she was born in 1922 or 1924, with Day herself reportedly believing her birth year was the latter and giving her age accordingly. It wasn't until 3 April 2017, her 95th, not 93rd, birthday, that her birth certificate was found by the Associated Press, which confirmed she was born in 1922. Her parents divorced while she was still a child and she lived with her mother. Like most little girls, Doris liked to dance. At fourteen, she formed a dance act with a boy, Jerry Doherty, and they won $500 in a local talent contest. She and Jerry took a brief trip to Hollywood to test the waters. They felt they could succeed, so she and Jerry returned to Cincinnati with the intention of packing and making a permanent move to Hollywood. Tragically, the night before Doris was to move to Hollywood, her car was hit by a train and she badly injured her right leg. The accident ended the possibility of a dancing career. She spent her next years wheelchair-bound, but during this time began singing along with the radio. Observing her daughter sing Alma decided Doris should have singing lessons. She engaged a teacher, Grace Raine. After three lessons, Raine told Alma that young Doris had "tremendous potential". Raine was so impressed that she gave Doris three lessons a week for the price of one. Years later, Day said that Raine had the biggest effect on her singing style and career. At age 17, Day had her first professional jobs as a vocalist, on the WLW radio program 'Carlin's Carnival', and in a local restaurant, Charlie Yee's Shanghai Inn. While performing for the radio, she was approached by bandleader Barney Rapp. He felt that her name, Kappelhoff, was too harsh and awkward and that she should change her name to something more pleasant. The name 'Day' was suggested by Rapp from one of the songs in Doris' repertoire, 'Day by Day'. She didn't like the name at first, feeling that it sounded too much like a burlesque performer. While she was performing in Barney Rapp's band, she met trombonist Al Jorden, and they married in 1941. The marriage was extremely unhappy and there were reports of Jordan's alcoholism and abuse of the young star. They divorced within two years, not long after the birth of their son Terrence Jorden called Terry. Despondent and feeling his life had little meaning after the much publicised divorce, Jorden later committed suicide. After working with Rapp, Day worked with bandleaders Jimmy James, Bob Crosby, and Les Brown. The years touring with Les Brown & His Band of Renown, she later called 'the happiest times in my life'. In 1941, Day appeared as a singer in three Soundies (three-minute film clips containing a song, dance and/or band or orchestral number) with the Les Brown band. Her first hit recording was 'Sentimental Journey' in 1945. It became an anthem of the desire of World War II demobilising troops to return home. In 1946, Doris married saxophone player and former child actor George Weidler, but this union lasted less than a year. After leaving Brown to embark on a solo career, she recorded more than 650 songs from 1947 to 1967. Day's agent talked her into taking a screen test at Warner Bros. The executives there liked what they saw and signed her to a contract. Her first starring role was in Romance on the High Seas (Michael Curtiz, Busby Berkeley, 1948), with Jack Carson and Janis Paige. The next year, she made two more films, My Dream Is Yours (Michael Curtiz, 1949) and It's a Great Feeling (David Butler, 1949). Audiences took to her beauty, terrific singing voice, and bubbly personality, and she turned in fine performances in the films she made - in addition to several hit records.

Doris Day made three films for Warner Bros. in 1950 and five more in 1951. She co-starred with Gordon MacRae in five nostalgic period musicals: Tea for Two (David Butler, 1950), The West Point Story (Roy Del Ruth, 1950) with James Cagney and Virginia Mayo, On Moonlight Bay (Roy Del Ruth, 1951), Starlift (Roy Del Ruth, 1951), and By the Light of the Silvery Moon (David Butler, 1953). Her most commercially successful film for Warner was I'll See You in My Dreams (1951), which broke box-office records of 20 years. The film is a musical biography of lyricist Gus Kahn, played by Danny Thomas. It was Day's fourth film directed by Michael Curtiz. One of her few dramatic roles was in Storm Warning (Stuart Heisler, 1951) with Ginger Rogers and Ronald Reagan. She briefly dated Ronald Reagan - with whom she also co-starred in The Winning Team (1952) - shortly after his divorce from Jane Wyman when she and Reagan were contract players at Warner Bros. Doris Day met and married Martin Melcher in 1951. He adopted her young son Terry and became her manager. In 1953, Doris starred in Calamity Jane (David Butler, 1953), which was a major hit. She performed 'Secret Love' in the film, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Several more hits followed including Lucky Me (Jack Donohue, 1954), Love Me or Leave Me (Charles Vidor, 1955) with James Cagney. Alfred Hitchcock had seen her dramatic role in Storm Warning and choose her to play Jo McKenna opposite James Stewart in his re-make The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). In the film she sang the song 'Que Será, Será! (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)', which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and became an evergreen. In 1959, Day entered her most successful phase as a film actress with a series of romantic comedies. Her best-known film is probably the first one, Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959) with Rock Hudson and Tony Randall. For her performance, she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Leading Actress. She later co-starred with Hudson and Randall again in Lover Come Back (Delbert Mann, 1961), and Send Me No Flowers (Norman Jewison, 1964). In all three, Day and Hudson played love interests while Randall played Hudson's close friend.

Doris Day started out in the 1960s with the hit Please Don't Eat the Daisies (Charles Walters, 1960) in which her co-star was David Niven. In 1962, Day appeared with Cary Grant in the comedy That Touch of Mink (Delbert Mann, 1962), the first film in history ever to gross $1 million in one theatre (Radio City Music Hall). During 1960 and the 1962 to 1964 period, she ranked number one at the box office. Despite her successes at the box office, the late 1950s and early 1960s were a difficult period for Day. In 1958, her brother Paul had died. Around this time, her husband, who had also taken charge of her career, made deals for her to star in films she didn't really care about, which led to a bout with exhaustion. The 1960s weren't to be a repeat of the previous busy decade. She made fewer films, but the ones she did make were successful: Do Not Disturb (Ralph Levy, 1965) with Rod Taylor, and The Glass Bottom Boat (Frank Tashlin, 1966). By the late 1960s, the sexual revolution of the baby boomer generation had refocused public attitudes about sex. Times had changed, but Day's films had not. Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? (Hy Averback, 1968) and With Six You Get Eggroll (Howard Morris, 1968) with Brian Keith, would be her final features. In 1968, her husband Martin Melcher suddenly died. Between 1956 and his death, he had produced 18 of her films. A shocked Day discovered she was millions of dollars in debt. Melcher and his business partner Jerome Bernard Rosenthal had squandered virtually all of her considerable earnings, but she was eventually awarded $22 million by the courts in a case against Rosenthal.

After Martin Melcher's death, Doris Day never made another film. She professed not to have known that he had negotiated a multimillion-dollar deal with CBS to launch her own TV series, The Doris Day Show, the following fall. Day hated the idea of performing on television, but felt obligated to do it and needed the work to help pay off her debts. The show became successful and lasted from 1968 until 1973. The Doris Day Show was a light and fluffy sitcom, which changed formats and producers almost every season. Originally it was about widow Doris Martin and her two young sons (Philip Brown and Todd Stark) who left the big city for the quiet and peace of her family's ranch, which was run by her dad Buck (Denver Pyle) and ranchhand Leroy (James Hampton). Later Doris, Buck, and sons Billy and Toby moved to San Francisco, where Doris got a job as a secretary to bumbling magazine publisher Michael Nicholson (McLean Stevenson). In Season Three, the Martin family moved into an apartment above the Paluccis' Italian restaurant, and Doris began writing features for Today's World magazine. Finally, the kids, family, Nicholson, the Paluccis' and all other cast members vanished, and Doris became a single staff writer for Today's World, where her new boss was Cy Bennett (John Dehner). After her series went off the air, Doris Day only made occasional TV appearances. She did two television specials, The Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff Special (1971) and Doris Day Today (1975). She also appeared on the John Denver TV show (1974). In 1976, she married for the fourth time, to Barry Comden, 12 years her junior. They had met at the Beverly Hills Old World Restaurant where he was the maitre d'. The couple divorced in 1982. Comden complained that Day preferred the company of her dogs more than him. From then on Doris devoted her life to animals. During the location filming of The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956) she had seen how camels, goats, and other 'animal extras' in a marketplace scene were being treated. It began her lifelong commitment to prevent animal abuse. For years, she ran the Doris Day Animal League in Carmel, a resort town a little south of San Francisco. In the 1985–1986 season, Day returned to the screen with her own television talk show, Doris Day's Best Friends, on CBN. The network cancelled the show after 26 episodes, despite the worldwide publicity it received. Much of that came from her interview with Rock Hudson, in which a visibly ill Hudson was showing the first public symptoms of AIDS. Hudson would die from the syndrome a year later. Her son Terry Melcher had become a music producer and composer who worked with The Beach Boys, Bobby Darin, and The Byrds. With Terry and a partner, she co-owned the Cypress Inn in Carmel, a small inn built in a Mediterranean motif. Terry died of melanoma in 2004, aged 62. In June 2004 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. She did not attend the White House award ceremony because of her intense fear of flying. In 2006, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In a rare interview with The Hollywood Reporter on 4 April 2019, a day after her 97th birthday, Day talked about her work on the Doris Day Animal Foundation, founded in 1978. On the question of what her favourite film was, she answered Calamity Jane: "I was such a tomboy growing up, and she was such a fun character to play. Of course, the music was wonderful, too—'Secret Love,' especially, is such a beautiful song." As per her last wishes, there will be no funeral or graveside service. Doris Day will be cremated and her ashes scattered in Carmel.

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Dutch postcard by Gebr. Spanjersberg N.V., Rotterdam (Sparo), no. 20. Photo: publicity still for the TV series The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966).

American sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966) presented the misadventures of a TV writer both at work and at home. The legendary TV show was created by Carl Reiner and starred Dick Van Dyke as Rob Petrie and Mary Tyler Moore as his wife Laura. With their son Richie (Larry Mathews), they live in suburban New Rochelle. In Manhattan, Rob writes with Buddy (Morey Amsterdam) and Sally (Rose Marie) for the Alan Brady TV show under the thumb of Brady's brother-in-law Mel (Richard Deacon). The star of the fictitious TV show, Alan Brady, was only a minor character in the real series and was played by Carl Reiner. Many of the show's plots were inspired by Reiner's experiences as a writer for Your Show of Shows, which starred Sid Caesar, but though he based the character of Rob Petrie on himself, Rob's egocentric boss Alan Brady is less Caesar than a combination of the more abrasive Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason, according to Reiner himself. CBS had intended to cancel the show after its first season, but Procter & Gamble threatened to pull its advertising from the network's lucrative daytime line-up and the show was renewed, keeping its Wednesday night time slot. After going into summer reruns, the show jumped into the top 10 by the third episode of its second season. It may have been helped by coming directly after the new #1 hit, The Beverly Hillbillies. The Dick Van Dyke Show would go on to win 15 Emmy Awards.

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

For now, this was the final postcard in our series of vintage TV heroes.

Belgian collectors card by Kwatta, no. C. 283. Photo: MGM. Ann Sothern in Shadow on the Wall (Pat Jackson, 1950).

American actress Ann Sothern (1909-2001) had a career on stage, radio, film, and television, that spanned nearly six decades. In 1939, MGM cast her as Maisie Ravier, a brash yet lovable Brooklyn showgirl, which lead to a successful film series. In 1953, Sothern moved into television as the star of her own sitcom Private Secretary. In 1987, Sothern appeared in her final film The Whales of August, and earned her only Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Ann Sothern was born Harriette Arlene Lake in 1909 in Valley City, North Dakota. She was the oldest of three daughters born to Walter J. Lake and Annette Yde. Her two younger sisters were Marion and Bonnie. Annette Yde was a concert singer, while Sothern's father worked in importing and exporting. Harriette and her sisters were raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her parents separated when she was four years old (they would later divorce in 1927). At the age of five, she began taking piano lessons. She later studied at McPhail School of Music, where her mother also taught piano. She also began accompanying her mother on her concert tours when her school schedule permitted. By age 11, she had become an accomplished pianist and was singing solos in her church choir. At age 14, she began voice lessons and also continued to study piano and music composition. As a teen at Minneapolis Central High School, she appeared in numerous stage productions and also directed several shows. While visiting her mother in California, she won a role in the Warner Bros. revue The Show of Shows. She did a screen test for MGM and signed a six-month contract. Her film career started as an extra in Broadway Nights (Joseph Boyle, 1927). She worked as an extra for the next six years. It barely paid the bills. As a singer, she performed with Artie Shaw and His Orchestra. She was also a published songwriter and recorded two albums.

Originally a redhead, Ann Sothern began to bleach her hair blonde for comedy roles. After working at MGM and on Broadway, Ann was signed by Columbia Pictures for Let's Fall in Love (David Burton, 1933). Harry Cohn changed her name to Ann Sothern. The next year she would work with Eddie Cantor in his hit Kid Millions (Roy Del Ruth, 1934). Sothern would be in 11 "B" pictures, until she was dropped by Columbia in 1936. She then went to RKO, where the quality of her films did not improve. She appeared in a series of "B' films such as Dangerous Number (Richard Thorpe, 1937) and She's Got Everything (Joseph Santley, 1937) with Gene Raymond, but her career was going nowhere. In 1938 she left RKO and played played Jean Livingstone, the tart in Trade Winds (Tay Garnett, 1938), starring Fredric March and Joan Bennett, which got her a contract at MGM. She was given the lead in Maisie (Edwin L. Marin, 1939), a "B" comedy about a brassy, energetic showgirl not salesgirl - a role originally intended for Jean Harlow. The character was based on the Maisie short stories by Nell Martin. Maisie (Edwin L. Marin, 1939) became a huge hit and spawned a series of ten films with the last being Undercover Maisie (Harry Beaumont, 1947). The popularity of the film series led to her own radio program, 'The Adventures of Maisie', broadcast on CBS from 1945 to 1947.

Ann Sothern also appeared in such well received features as Brother Orchid (Lloyd Bacon, 1940) with Edward G. Robinson, Cry 'Havoc' (Richard Thorpe, 1943) with Margaret Sullavan and Joan Blondell, and A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949) with Linda Darnell and Jeanne Crain. During the 1950s, she played in only four films, including Fritz Lang's Film Noir The Blue Gardenia (1953) with Anne Baxter. By this time, however, Sothern had turned to the relatively new medium - television, where she would attract legions of new fans. She played the meddlesome Susie in the TV series Private Secretary (1953). Sothern was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for her role on the series four times. The series was canceled in 1957 and Ann came back in The Ann Sothern Show (1958-1961). After The Ann Sothern Show ended, she returned tothe cinema in The Best Man (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1964), opposite Henry Fonda. She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe for her work in the film. In 1965, she had a recurring role on her friend Lucille Ball's The Lucy Show as the "Countess Framboise" (née Rosie Harrigan). She also would be the voice of the 1928 Porter in the camp classic My Mother the Car (1965). This TV series was about a man (Jerry Van Dyke) who bought a 1928 Porter and, lo and behold, it was "Mom". The 1970s and 1980s were relatively quiet for Ann. She appeared in some B-films like the horror film The Killing Kind (Curtis Harrington, 1973) as the mother of psycho John Savage, but finally she would be nominated for an Academy Award for her role as the neighbour of Lillian Gish and Bette Davis in The Whales of August (Lindsay Anderson, 1987). After, she lived in quiet retirement in Ketcham, Idaho near her daughter and granddaughter, until her death of heart failure at 92. Ann Sothern passed away in 2001 in Ketchum, Idaho.

Sources: Tony Fontana (IMDb), Denny Jackson (IMDb), Wikipedia and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

11 YEAR OLD ACTRESS JULIA ROSE

479 pieces, available August 1, 2015; MSRP $59.99 US / EUR 59,99.

ideas.lego.com/blogs/1-blog/post/33

"Indulge your inner genius and build this LEGO® version of Leonard and Sheldon's living room as seen in the hit American sitcom The Big Bang Theory! This set was created by two LEGO fan designers-Alatariel from Sweden and Glen Bricker from the USA-and selected by LEGO Ideas members. Featuring loads of authentic details to satisfy all The Big Bang Theory devotees and including minifigures of all seven main characters from the show, it's ideal for display or role-play fun. Includes 7 minifigures with assorted accessory elements: Leonard, Sheldon, Penny, Howard, Raj, Amy and Bernadette."

Monkey's head's warm, the egg!

My wife bought me these for Christmas as stocking fillers, I love them, and couldn't resist getting some festive pictures!

Monkey (also known as The Monkey, ITV Digital Monkey or PG Tips Monkey, and often pronounced "Munkeh" in imitation of Johnny Vegas' Lancashire accent), is an animated puppet advertising character in the form of a knitted sock monkey. He was first produced by The Jim Henson Company via their UK Creature Shop, puppeteered by Nigel Plaskitt and Susan Beattie and voiced by comedian Ben Miller.

Monkey has appeared in advertising campaigns in the United Kingdom for both the television company ITV Digital (now defunct) and the tea brand PG Tips, as well as being occasionally featured in TV programmes. Monkey is notable as one of a small number of advertising characters to eclipse the popularity of the product they advertise and also to be reused to advertise a completely different product.

A series of high-profile adverts for ITV Digital featured the laid-back, droll and composed Monkey (in a variety of T-shirts) playing the straight man to the comedian Johnny Vegas's womanizer of a character "Al". Monkey was one of the few positive public relations successes of ITV Digital. Purchasers of ITV Digital were sent a free soft toy Monkey with their subscription.

For a period during the advertising campaign and after ITV Digital's bankruptcy, the original promotional Monkey toy were in high demand and short supply. One sold for £150 at the bankruptcy auction and they were selling for several hundred pounds on eBay, where you could also find replica Monkey knitting patterns delivered by email selling for several pounds. Later, The Gadget Shop purchased the remaining promotional toys from ITV Digital's liquidators and sold them through their retail stores. These saw a boost in popularity after an appearance in the second series of award-winning British sitcom The Office.

Anyone in need of a sitcom wife?

Vintage autograph tcard.

Dark-haired Hollywood beauty Yvonne De Carlo (1922–2007) was a Canadian American actress, singer, and dancer whose career in film, television, and musical theatre spanned six decades. From the 1950s on, she also starred in British and Italian films. She achieved her greatest popularity as the ghoulish matriarch Lily in the TV sitcom The Munsters (1964-1966).

Yvonne De Carlo was born Margaret Yvonne Middleton in 1922 in West Point Grey (now part of Vancouver), British Columbia, Canada. She was the only child of William Middleton, an Australian-born salesman, and Marie DeCarlo, a French-born aspiring actress. Her father deserted the home, leaving her mother to make a living as a waitress. When De Carlo was ten her mother enrolled her in a local dance school and also saw that she studied dramatics. De Carlo and her mother made several trips to Los Angeles to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood. In 1940, she was first runner-up to Miss Venice Beach, and she also came fifth in the 1940s Miss California competition. A year later, she landed a bit part as a bathing beauty in Harvard, Here I Come (Lew Landers, 1941). She also appeared in the three-minute Soundies musical, The Lamp of Memory (1942), shown in coin-operated movie jukeboxes. Other roles were slow to follow, and De Carlo took a job in the chorus line of Earl Carroll. During World War II she performed for U.S. servicemen and received many letters from GIs. She got her big break when she was chosen over a reported 20,000 girls to play the lead role as a European seductress in the Technicolor spectacle Salome, Where She Danced (Charles Lamont, 1945), with Rod Cameron and Walter Slezak. She played a dancer during the Austrian-Prussian war who is forced to flee her country after she is accused of being a spy and ends up in a lawless western town in Arizona. Producer Walter Wanger described her as "the most beautiful girl in the world." Though not a critical success, it was a box office favourite, and the heavily-promoted De Carlo was hailed as an up-and-coming star. Universal signed her to a long-term contract. De Carlo was given a small role in the prison film Brute Force (Jules Dassin, 1947), starring Burt Lancaster. Two years later she was again cast opposite Lancaster in her first important role in the classic Film Noir Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949). Claudio Carvalho at IMDb: "Burt Lancaster has an outstanding performance in the role of an honest man obsessed with his former wife, who becomes a criminal trying to regain the love of his fickle ex-wife. Yvonne De Carlo is also perfect and very beautiful, in the role of a cold and manipulative woman, being a perfect 'femme-fatale'." However, Universal preferred to cast De Carlo in more conventional fare, such as Casbah (John Berry, 1948) a musical remake of the 1938 film Algiers, the adventure film River Lady (George Sherman, 1948), and Buccaneer's Girl (Frederick de Cordova, 1950). In the latter, she played a New Orleans singer who becomes involved with a Pirate Lord (Philip Friend).

When Yvonne De Carlo was in England making Hotel Sahara (Ken Annakin, 1951), she asked Universal for a release of her contract even though she still had three months to go. The studio agreed. De Carlo had always travelled extensively to promote her films and her appearances were widely publicised. In 1951 she became the first American star to visit Israel. De Carlo regularly played in European films from now on. She starred in the British comedy The Captain's Paradise (Anthony Kimmins, 1953), about a captain of a ferry boat between the restricted British colony in Gibraltar and Spanish Morocco (Alec Guinness) who keeps two wives in separate ports. De Carlo of course played the hot-blooded mistress, Nita in Tangiers. She persuaded director Anthony Kimmins to talk Alec Guinness into doing the mambo with her in a nightclub sequence. Guinness, not usually thought of as a physical actor, consented to a week's worth of dance lessons from De Carlo and the sequence is one of the film's highlights. In England, Yvonne De Carlo also co-starred with David Niven in the comedy Happy Ever After (Mario Zampi, 1954). Her film career reached its peak when director Cecil B. DeMille cast her as Sephora, the wife of Moses (Charlton Heston) in his biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1956). It was to be her most prominent role. She later played a lead performance in the Civil War drama Band of Angels (Raoul Walsh, 1957) with Clark Gable, starred as Mary Magdalene in the Italian biblical epic La spada e la croce/The Sword and the Cross (Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, 1958), with Jorge Mistral and Rossana Podestà, and had a supporting role in the Western McLintock! (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1963) featuring John Wayne. In 1964, De Carlo was deeply in debt, her film career was over and she was suffering from depression. Then, she was offered the role of Lily Munster, the wife of Herman Munster, in the legendary TV sitcom The Munsters (1964-1966). The Munsters are a weird but honest family. Herman, the father (Fred Gwynne) is Frankenstein's monster. Lily, his wife (Yvonne De Carlo), and the cigar-chomping Grandpa, her father (Al Lewis) are vampires. Their little son Eddie (Butch Patrick) is a werewolf. Their niece Marilyn (Pat Priest) is the only normal one. She is the ugly duck of the family. The sitcom went on the air in 1964 and lasted only two seasons, but achieved a kind of pop-culture immortality in decades of reruns and movie and television spinoffs. Wolfgang Saxon in The New York Times: "In her cape and robes and with a streak of white in her black hair, Miss De Carlo’s Lily was a glamorous ghoul and a kind of Bride of Frankenstein as a homemaker, “dusting” her gothic mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane with a vacuum cleaner set on reverse. The humor mostly derived from the family members’ oblivious belief that they were no different from their neighbors." After the show's cancellation, De Carlo reprised the role as Lily Munster in the Technicolor film Munster, Go Home! (Earl Bellamy, 1966). After 1967, De Carlo became increasingly active in musicals, appearing in off-Broadway productions of Pal Joey and Catch Me If You Can. Her defining stage role was as Carlotta Campion in the original Broadway cast of Stephen Sondheim's musical Follies (1971-1972). Playing a washed-up star at a reunion of old theater colleagues, she introduced the song I'm Still Here, which would become well-known. Yvonne De Carlo married stuntman Robert Drew Morgan, whom she met on the set of the Western Shotgun (Lesley Selander, 1955). They had two sons, Bruce Ross (1956) and Michael (1957-1997). After Bob Morgan's untimely accident, De Carlo was dismissed from her contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1960. Morgan became an alcoholic and they divorced in 1974. De Carlo kept appearing in films and TV series. After her role in the TV Movie The Barefoot Executive (Susan Seidelman, 1995), she retired from acting at age 72. In 2007, she died from heart failure in Los Angeles. De Carlo was 84.

Sources: Wolfgang Saxon (The New York Times), IMDb, and Wikipedia.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Belgian postcard, no. 1061. Nand Buyl in the Belgian TV series Schipper naast Mathilde/Skipper next to Mathilde (1955-1963).

Schipper naast Mathilde/Skipper next to Mathilde (1955-1963) is the first classic TV series of Flemish television. The sitcom was created by Valeer Van Kerkhove and broadcast on the Flemish public service TV station N.I.R. (nowadays the VRT). At the time it was tremendously successful. 189 episodes were filmed between 1955 and 1962, but since many of them went live in the air without recording a copy the majority are lost today.

Schipper naast Mathilde took place in a typical Flemish village. It revolved around a former skipper (Nand Buyl), his sister Mathilde (Jetje Cabanier), their adopted daughter Marianne (Francine De Weerdt, later Chris Lomme), the nosy neighbour Madame Krielemans (Josée Puissant ), the stuttering and posh Philidoor (Tuur Bouchez), the stupid Sander (Jan Reusens) and his friend Hyppoliet Maréchal (René Peeters), who tried to talk French, but always made language mistakes. When people corrected him he always replied: "That's what I said!". The family also had a parrot, Jules, who often commented on the proceedings in the house. The series' popularity thrived on farcical situations and the fact that all the characters spoke in the dialect of the province Antwerp. Wikipedia: "While Schipper naast Mathilde was very popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s the program has seldom been repeated on TV since. This has to do with the fact that only nine episodes remain available today, but also because the show itself is extremely out-dated. In terms of television direction, it's comparable to a filmed theatrical play."

Originally the N.I.R. only planned 13 episodes. The series was originally going to be named 'Het Koperen Anker' or 'De avonturen van kapitein Biebuyck', centering around a former army colonel. Since there was an actual military captain with that name who overheard the plans this idea was scrapped. In 1959 the character Marianne was written out of the series and replaced by a new character, Marieke. The actress who played Marianne, Francine De Weerdt, was replaced by Chris Lomme. Nand Buyl, who played the skipper, developed a love affair with Lomme and the couple later married.They also acted together in the youth series Axel Nort. Theologian Max Wildiers wrote scripts for the series, as well as Anton van Casteren, Rik de Bruyn, and Gerard Walschap. In 1955 Willy Vandersteen made a celebrity comics newspaper comic strip based on the success of the TV show, drawn by his assistants Eduard de Rop and Gene Deschamps, but it didn't last long. In 1960 Eddy Ryssack and Johan Anthierens also made a comic strip based on the show, 'De geheime avonturen van Kapitein Matthias' (The secret adventures of Captain Matthias), which was published in Humo. A series of novelisations was also published, as well as an audio play released on vinyl record.In 2005 a DVD was made available which contains all the remaining episodes of Schipper naast Mathilde, nine in total.

Sources: Wikipedia (English and Dutch) and IMDb.

And, please check out our albums Dutch TV History and Vintage TV Heroes, and our blog European Film Star Postcards.

From 1979: An appearance by Robin Williams on the premiere episode couldn't even save this dreadful sitcom called "Out of the Blue" from early cancellation by ABC. Not to mention the network's boneheaded decision to change the format of breakaway hit "Mork & Mindy:" and move it from Thursday to Sunday. The cokeheads were running things back then.

I'm actually of the opinion that ABC should have given it more of a chance. They cancelled it after just four or five weeks. I could have seen it continuing and eventually becoming a viable afternoon kids' show in syndicated reruns a few years later.

From TV Guide 1979 Fall Preview, Minneapolis-St. Paul edition. Local ABC affiliate KSTP-TV Channel 5.

In an arrangement that reminded me of that sitcom, the cinematographer Chris Doyle, director Stewart Laing and choreographer Ian Spink relax at the opening party of the Glasgow Film Festival. In one article that reviewed the event, I was flattered to be described as an "unruly youth."

Glasgow, 2013.

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A "Big Bang Theory" sitcom themed slot machine casts a spell on its seated gamester.

It's important to remember that slot machine payouts are based on luck, not skill. Every play on a slot machine is an independent event. Make sure to find a machine equipped with a comfortable chair and video graphics and lights that are fun to watch. To some, this is entertainment, and for many it is a social activity.

Last of the Summer Wine was a very popular British sitcom that ran over 295 episodes during the period 1973 to 2010. It became the longest running situation comedy in the world

Much of the filming was done in the Northern English town of Holmfirth and thanks to the popularity of the TV series the filming locations in and around the town have become a big tourist attraction.

Two of the main characters in the programme were Bill Owen and Peter Sallis. Sadly both have died, Mr Owen (real name William John Owen Rowbotham) who died in 1999 and Peter John Sallis who died in 2017. Both actors came to love the town and area and both elected to be buried in the church there.

My Favorite Martian (1963-1966) was a sci-fi sitcom starring Ray Walston as the lovable extraterrestrial trying to repair his spaceship to get back to his home planet. He's wearing a green spacesuit for his appearance here on the cover of this 45-rpm Little Golden Record, which contains renditions of "The Martian Song" and "When I Was a Boy on Mars" by the Satellite Singers.

See also Donald Deveau's copy of My Favorite Martian Little Golden Record on Flickr.

My Favorite Martian

Starring Ray Walston

The Martian Song

When I Was a Boy on Mars

Music written by George H. Greeley (courtesy of Reprise Records).

Jack Chertok Television, Inc.

764. Little Golden Record, 29c. 35c in Canada. 45 rpm.

Lego Simpsons 71005

The Simpsons is an American adult animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company.The series is a satirical depiction of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its family of the same name, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. The show is set in the fictional town of Springfield and parodies American culture, society, television, and many aspects of the human condition.

The family was conceived by Groening shortly before a solicitation for a series of animated shorts with the producer James L. Brooks. Groening created a dysfunctional family and named the characters after members of his own family, substituting Bart for his own name. The shorts became a part of The Tracey Ullman Show on April 19, 1987. After a three-season run, the sketch was developed into a half-hour prime time show and was an early hit for Fox, becoming the network's first series to land in the Top 30 ratings in a season (1989–1990).

Since its debut on December 17, 1989, the show has broadcast 548 episodes and the 25th season began on September 30, 2013. The Simpsons is the longest-running American sitcom, the longest-running American animated program, and in 2009 it surpassed Gunsmoke as the longest-running American primetime, scripted television series. The Simpsons Movie, a feature-length film, was released in theaters worldwide on July 26 and 27, 2007, and grossed over $527 million.

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Les Simpson (The Simpsons) est une série télévisée d'animation américaine créée par Matt Groening et diffusée depuis le 17 décembre 1989 sur le réseau FOX.

Elle met en scène les Simpson, stéréotype d'une famille de classe moyenne. Leurs aventures servent une satire du mode de vie américain. Les membres de la famille, tous ayant la pigmentation de peau de couleur jaune, sont Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa et Maggie.

[My Portfotolio] [My Google + ]

[My GETTY Images @] [My MOST FAVE on Flickriver] [My RECENT on Fluidr] [My STREAM on Darckr]

British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. D 669. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Donna Reed (1921-1986) was an American film, television actress, and producer. Her career spanned more than 40 years, with performances in more than 40 films. She is well known for her role as Mary Hatch Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946). She received the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Lorene Burke in the war drama From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953). Reed is also known as Donna Stone, a middle-class American mother, and housewife in the sitcom The Donna Reed Show (1958–1966).

Donna Reed was born Donna Belle Mullenger on a farm near Denison, Iowa, in 1921. She was the daughter of Hazel Jane and William Richard Mullenger. The eldest of five children, she was raised as a Methodist. In 1936, while she was a sophomore at Denison (Iowa) High School, her chemistry teacher Edward Tompkins gave her the book How to Win Friends and Influence People. Upon reading it she won the lead in the school play, was voted Campus Queen, and was in the top 10 of the 1938 graduating class. After graduating from Denison High School, she decided to move to California to attend Los Angeles City College on the advice of her aunt. While attending college, she performed in various stage productions, although she had no plans to become an actress. After receiving several offers to screen test for studios, Reed eventually signed with MGM. Reed made her film debut in The Get-Away (Edward Buzzell, 1941). She had a support role in Shadow of the Thin Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1941) and in Wallace Beery's The Bugle Sounds (S. Sylvan Simon, 1942). Like many starlets at MGM, she played opposite Mickey Rooney in an Andy Hardy film, in her case the hugely popular The Courtship of Andy Hardy (George B. Seitz, 1942). Reed starred in the drama Calling Dr. Gillespie (Harold S. Bucquet, 1942), featuring Lionel Barrymore, and Apache Trail (Richard Thorpe, 1942). Then she did a thriller with Edward Arnold, Eyes in the Night (Fred Zinnemann, 1942). Reed had a support role in The Human Comedy (Clarence Brown, 1943) with Mickey Rooney, a big film for MGM. She was one of many MGM stars to make cameos in Thousands Cheer (George Sidney, 1943). Produced at the height of the Second World War, the film was intended as a morale booster for American troops and their families. Her "girl-next-door" good looks and warm onstage personality made her a popular pin-up for many GIs during World War II. She personally answered letters from many GIs serving overseas. She was in the Oscar Wilde adaptation The Picture of Dorian Gray (Albert Lewin, 1945) and played a nurse in John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945), opposite John Wayne. MGM was very enthusiastic about Reed's prospects at this time. Reed was top-billed in a romantic comedy Faithful in My Fashion (Sidney Salkow, 1946) with Tom Drake which lost money. MGM lent her to RKO Pictures for the role of Mary Bailey in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. The film has since been named as one of the 100 best American films ever made by the American Film Institute and is regularly aired on television during the Christmas season. Back at MGM, she appeared in Green Dolphin Street (Victor Saville, 1947) with Lana Turner and Van Heflin. It was a big hit. Reed was borrowed by Paramount to make two films with Alan Ladd, Beyond Glory (John Farrowm 1948), where she replaced Joan Caulfield at the last moment, and the Film Noir Chicago Deadline (Lewis Allen, 1949). In 1949 she expressed a desire for better roles.

In 1950, Donna Reed signed a contract with Columbia Studios.[ She appeared in two Film Noirs which teamed her with John Derek, Saturday's Hero (David Miller, 1951) and Scandal Sheet (Phil Karlson, 1952). Reed was the love interest of Randolph Scott in the Western Hangman's Knot (Roy Huggins, 1952), then was borrowed by Warner Bros for the comedy Trouble Along the Way (Michael Curtiz, 1953) with John Wayne. She was loaned out to play John Payne's love interest in Raiders of the Seven Seas (Edward Small, 1953). Reed played the role of Alma "Lorene" Burke, the girlfriend of Montgomery Clift's character, in the World War II drama From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953). The role earned Reed an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for 1953. The qualities of her parts did not seem to improve: she was the love interest in The Caddy (Norman Taurog, 1953) with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at Paramount; the Western Gun Fury (Raoul Walsh, 1953) with Rock Hudson; and the Western Three Hours to Kill (Alfred L. Werker, 1954) with Dana Andrews. Reed returned to MGM to act in the romantic drama The Last Time I Saw Paris (Richard Brooks, 1954) with Elizabeth Taylor. Reed began guest-starring on television shows such as The Ford Television Theatre, Tales of Hans Anderson, General Electric Theater, and Suspicion. She continued to appear in features, usually as the love interest, in The Benny Goodman Story (1956) with Steve Allen, playing Goodman's wife; Ransom! (1956) as Glenn Ford's wife; the Western Backlash (1956), with Richard Widmark. In Kenya, she filmed Beyond Mombasa (1957), with Cornel Wilde. She was injured while making the film. In England, she shot The Whole Truth (1958), with Stewart Granger. From 1958 to 1966, Reed starred in The Donna Reed Show, a television series produced by her then-husband, Tony Owen. The show featured her as Donna Stone, the wife of pediatrician Alex Stone (Carl Betz) and mother of Jeff (Paul Petersen) and Mary Stone (Shelley Fabares). Reed was attracted to the idea of being in a comedy, something with which she did not have much experience. She also liked playing a wife. The show ran for eight seasons. Reed won a Golden Globe Award and earned four Emmy Award nominations for her work on the series. Later in her career, Reed replaced Barbara Bel Geddes as Miss Ellie Ewing Farlow in the 1984–1985 season of the television melodrama Dallas. When she was abruptly fired upon Bel Geddes' decision to return to the show, she sued the production company for breach of contract. From 1943 to 1945, Donna Reed was married to make-up artist William Tuttle. After they divorced, in 1945 she married producer Tony Owen. They raised four children together: Penny Jane, Anthony, Timothy, and Mary Anne (the two older children were adopted). After 26 years of marriage, Reed and Owen divorced in 1971. Three years later, Reed married Grover W. Asmus, a retired United States Army colonel. They remained married until her death in 1986. Donna Reed died of pancreatic cancer in Beverly Hills, California, in 1986, 13 days shy of her 65th birthday. Her remains are interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Vintage postcard.

American actress Ann Sothern (1909-2001) had a career on stage, radio, film, and television, that spanned nearly six decades. In 1939, MGM cast her as Maisie Ravier, a brash yet lovable Brooklyn showgirl, which lead to a successful film series. In 1953, Sothern moved into television as the star of her own sitcom Private Secretary. In 1987, Sothern appeared in her final film The Whales of August, and earned her only Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Ann Sothern was born Harriette Arlene Lake in 1909 in Valley City, North Dakota. She was the oldest of three daughters born to Walter J. Lake and Annette Yde. Her two younger sisters were Marion and Bonnie. Annette Yde was a concert singer, while Sothern's father worked in importing and exporting. Harriette and her sisters were raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her parents separated when she was four years old (they would later divorce in 1927). At the age of five, she began taking piano lessons. She later studied at the McPhail School of Music, where her mother also taught piano. She also began accompanying her mother on her concert tours when her school schedule permitted. By age 11, she had become an accomplished pianist and was singing solos in her church choir. At age 14, she began voice lessons and also continued to study piano and music composition. As a teen at Minneapolis Central High School, she appeared in numerous stage productions and also directed several shows. While visiting her mother in California, she won a role in the Warner Bros. revue The Show of Shows. She did a screen test for MGM and signed a six-month contract. Her film career started as an extra in Broadway Nights (Joseph Boyle, 1927). She worked as an extra for the next six years. It barely paid the bills. As a singer, she performed with Artie Shaw and His Orchestra. She was also a published songwriter and recorded two albums.

Originally a redhead, Ann Sothern began to bleach her hair blonde for comedy roles. After working at MGM and on Broadway, Ann was signed by Columbia Pictures for Let's Fall in Love (David Burton, 1933). Harry Cohn changed her name to Ann Sothern. The next year she would work with Eddie Cantor in his hit Kid Millions (Roy Del Ruth, 1934). Sothern would be in 11 "B" pictures until she was dropped by Columbia in 1936. She then went to RKO, where the quality of her films did not improve. She appeared in a series of "B' films such as Dangerous Number (Richard Thorpe, 1937) and She's Got Everything (Joseph Santley, 1937) with Gene Raymond, but her career was going nowhere. In 1938 she left RKO and played Jean Livingstone, the tart in Trade Winds (Tay Garnett, 1938), starring Fredric March and Joan Bennett, which got her a contract at MGM. She was given the lead in Maisie (Edwin L. Marin, 1939), a "B" comedy about a brassy, energetic showgirl, not a salesgirl - a role originally intended for Jean Harlow. The character was based on the Maisie short stories by Nell Martin. Maisie (Edwin L. Marin, 1939) became a huge hit and spawned a series of ten films with the last being Undercover Maisie (Harry Beaumont, 1947). The popularity of the film series led to her own radio program, 'The Adventures of Maisie', broadcast on CBS from 1945 to 1947.

Ann Sothern also appeared in such well-received features as Brother Orchid (Lloyd Bacon, 1940) with Edward G. Robinson, Cry 'Havoc' (Richard Thorpe, 1943) with Margaret Sullavan and Joan Blondell, and A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949) with Linda Darnell and Jeanne Crain. During the 1950s, she played in only four films, including Fritz Lang's Film Noir The Blue Gardenia (1953) with Anne Baxter. By this time, however, Sothern had turned to the relatively new medium - television, where she would attract legions of new fans. She played the meddlesome Susie in the TV series Private Secretary (1953). Sothern was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for her role in the series four times. The series was cancelled in 1957 and Ann came back in The Ann Sothern Show (1958-1961). After The Ann Sothern Show ended, she returned to the cinema in The Best Man (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1964), opposite Henry Fonda. She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe for her work in the film. In 1965, she had a recurring role on her friend Lucille Ball's The Lucy Show as the "Countess Framboise" (née Rosie Harrigan). She also would be the voice of the 1928 Porter in the camp classic My Mother the Car (1965). This TV series was about a man (Jerry Van Dyke) who bought a 1928 Porter and, lo and behold, it was "Mom". The 1970s and 1980s were relatively quiet for Ann. She appeared in some B-films like the horror film The Killing Kind (Curtis Harrington, 1973) as the mother of psycho John Savage, but finally, she would be nominated for an Academy Award for her role as the neighbour of Lillian Gish and Bette Davis in The Whales of August (Lindsay Anderson, 1987). After, she lived in quiet retirement in Ketcham, Idaho near her daughter and granddaughter, until her death of heart failure at 92. Ann Sothern passed away in 2001 in Ketchum, Idaho.

Sources: Tony Fontana (IMDb), Denny Jackson (IMDb), Wikipedia and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Kat Dennings como Max Black y Beth Behrs como Caroline Wesbox Channing en el sitcom 2 Broke Girls (2011-Presente).

Belgian collectors card by Kwatta, no. C. 253. Photo: MGM. Publicity still for On the Town (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1949).

Betty Garrett (1919-2011) was a sunny American actress, comedian, singer and dancer. She originally performed on Broadway and was then signed to a film contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She appeared successfully in several classic musicals like On the Town (1949) when the Communist scare in the 1950s brought her career to a screeching, ugly halt. She returned to Broadway and made guest appearances on several television series. Garrett later became known for the roles she played in two prominent 1970s sitcoms: Archie Bunker's liberal neighbour Irene Lorenzo in All in the Family (1973-1975) and Landlady Edna Babish in Laverne & Shirley (1976-1981).

Betty Garrett was born in 1919 in Saint Joseph, Missouri. She was the daughter of Elizabeth Octavia (née Stone) and Curtis Garrett. Shortly after her birth, her parents relocated to Seattle, Washington, where her mother managed the sheet music department at Sherman Clay, and her father worked as a travelling salesman. His alcoholism and fiscal irresponsibility eventually led to their divorce, and Garrett and her mother lived in a series of residential hotels in order to minimise expenses. When Garrett was eight years old, her mother married the fiancé she had jilted in order to marry Curtis. They settled in Regina, Saskatchewan, where her new stepfather worked in the meat packing industry. A year later her mother discovered that her new husband was involved in a sexual relationship with his male assistant, so she and Betty returned to Seattle. After graduating from public grammar school, Garrett enrolled at the Annie Wright School in Tacoma, which she attended on a full scholarship. The school had no drama department, so she frequently organised musical productions and plays. Following her senior year performance in 'Twelfth Night', the bishop urged her to pursue a career on the stage. At the same time, her mother's friend arranged an interview with Martha Graham, who was in Seattle for a concert tour, and the dancer recommended her for a scholarship at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City. There, she felt she was destined to be a dramatic actress and shied away from playing comedic roles.

During the summer months, Betty Garrett performed in the Borscht Belt, where she had the opportunity to work with Danny Kaye, Jerome Robbins, Carol Channing, Imogene Coca, and Jules Munshin, and she was encouraged to hone her singing and dancing skills. She joined Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre as an understudy in what was to be its last stage presentation, a poorly-reviewed and short-lived production of 'Danton's Death' that gave her the opportunity to work with Joseph Cotten and Arlene Francis. She performed with Martha Graham's dance company at Carnegie Hall and the Alvin Theatre, sang at the Village Vanguard, and appeared in satirical and political revues staged by the Brooklyn-based Flatbush Arts Theatre, which eventually changed its name to the American Youth Theatre and relocated to Manhattan. During this period she joined the Communist Party and began performing at fundraisers for progressive causes. Garrett made her Broadway debut in 1942 in the revue 'Of V We Sing', which closed after 76 performances but led to her being cast in the Harold Rome revue 'Let Freedom Sing' later that year. It closed after only eight performances, but producer Mike Todd saw it and signed her to understudy Ethel Merman and play a small role in the 1943 Cole Porter musical 'Something for the Boys'. Merman became ill during the run, allowing Garrett to play the lead for a week. During this time she was seen by producer Vinton Freedley, who cast her in 'Jackpot', a Vernon Duke/Howard Dietz musical also starring Nanette Fabray and Allan Jones. The show closed quickly, and Garrett began touring the country with her nightclub act.

Betty Garrett then appeared on Broadway in 'Laffing Room Only', and 'Call Me Mister'. She won critical acclaim and the Donaldson Award for her performance in the latter, which prompted Al Hirschfeld to caricature her in The New York Times. It led to her being signed to a one-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer by Louis B. Mayer. Garrett made her film debut portraying nightclub performer Shoo Shoo O'Grady in Big City (Norman Taurog, 1948). Mayer renewed her contract and she appeared in the musicals Words and Music (Norman Taurog, 1948) with Mickey Rooney, On the Town (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1949), starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, Take Me Out To The Ball Game (Busby Berkeley, 1949) with Frank Sinatra and Esther Williams, and Neptune's Daughter (Edward Buzzell, 1949) in quick succession. Because of their past affiliations with the Communist Party, Betty Garrett and Larry Parks became embroiled with the House Un-American Activities Committee, although only Parks was forced to testify. He willingly admitted that he had been a member of the party and initially refused to name others, but he later did so. Despite this, he found himself on the Hollywood blacklist. Garrett also had trouble finding work, although as the mother of two young sons, she did not mind being unemployed as much as her husband did. The Jolson Story (Alfred E. Green, 1946) starring Larry Parks, had been a huge hit in the United Kingdom, so Garrett and Parks decided to capitalise on its popularity by appearing at the London Palladium and then touring the U.K. with their nightclub act. Its success prompted them to return to the country three times but the increasing popularity of television eventually led to the decline of music hall entertainment. Garrett was then cast opposite Janet Leigh and Jack Lemmon in My Sister Eileen (Richard Quine, 1955), a musical remake of a 1940 theatrical adaptation of stories by Ruth McKenney. Garrett got the part when Judy Holliday dropped out of the project due to a contract dispute. The following year she and Parks replaced Holliday and Sydney Chaplin in the Broadway production of 'Bells Are Ringing' during their vacation from the show. Parks formed a highly successful construction business, and eventually, the couple owned many apartment buildings which were scattered throughout the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Rather than sell them upon completion, Parks decided to retain ownership and collect rents as a landlord, a decision that proved to be extremely profitable. Over the next two decades, Garrett worked sporadically, appearing on Broadway in two short-lived plays, 'Beg, Borrow or Steal' with Parks and 'A Girl Could Get Lucky' with Pat Hingle, and a musical adaptation of 'Spoon River Anthology'. On TV she made guest appearances on The Dinah Shore Chevy Show (1961), The Lloyd Bridges Show (1962), and The Fugitive (1964).

In the fall of 1973, the hit TV show All in the Family added two new people to the neighbourhood, Frank Lorenzo and his feisty Irish-American wife, Irene. Lear had been the publicity man for 'Call Me Mister', All in the Family writers Bernard West and Mickey West knew Garrett from her time with the American Youth Theatre, and Jean Stapleton had been in the cast of 'Bells Are Ringing', so Garrett appeared to be a frontrunner for the role of Irene. It went instead to Sada Thompson, but Thompson, unhappy after filming one episode, asked to be released from her commitment, freeing the role for Garrett. Irene was Catholic—a source of annoyance for Protestant Archie—and assumed many of the household duties normally associated with husbands, and she, therefore, presented a kind of nemesis to Archie Bunker. She later worked with Archie at his place of employment, driving a forklift, and was paid less than the man she replaced (but more than Archie). Garrett remained with the series from 1973 through 1975. She won the 1974 Golden Globe for her performance in the series. The following year, Garrett was performing her one-woman show 'Betty Garrett and Other Songs' in Westwood when she was offered the role of landlady Edna Babish in Laverne & Shirley (1976-1981). The character was a five-time divorcée who eventually married Laverne's father Frank. Although Garrett reportedly felt she was never given enough to do on the show, she appreciated the fact that her musical talents occasionally were incorporated into the plot. In 1981, when the series was extended beyond what had been intended to be its final season, Garrett was forced to drop out because she already had committed to performing with Sandy Dennis, Jack Gilford, Hope Lange, and Joyce Van Patten in 'The Supporting Cast' (1981) on Broadway. The play closed after only eight performances, but returning to Laverne & Shirley was not an option, as the writers had explained Edna's disappearance by having her divorce Frank, although this was not directly addressed until the series' final season.

In the ensuing years, Betty Garrett appeared on television in Murder, She Wrote (1987-1991), The Golden Girls (1992), Harts of the West (1994), Union Square (1998), Boston Public (2003), Becker (2003; for which she was nominated for the Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series), and Grey's Anatomy (2006), among others, and on stage in Plaza Suite (with Larry Parks), And Miss Reardon Drinks A Little, Meet Me in St. Louis as Katie, the feisty Irish maid, and the 2001 Broadway revival of Follies, receiving excellent notices for singing 'Broadway Baby'. At Theatre West, which she had co-founded in 1962, she directed Arthur Miller's 'The Price' and appeared in the play 'Waiting in the Wings'. Her last film appearance was in Dark and Stormy Night (Larry Blamire, 2009), an independent film spoofing the haunted house and murder mystery films produced by Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. She won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award twice, for 'Spoon River Anthology' and 'Betty Garrett and Other Songs'. Garrett received a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame in 2003 on her 84th birthday. While appearing in Los Angeles, Garrett was invited to perform a comedy sketch at the Actor's Lab in Hollywood and met Larry Parks, who was producing the show. He invited her to join him for a drink, then drove her to the top of Mulholland Drive and told her, "You're the girl I'm going to marry." During the next two weeks, the two were inseparable. Garrett departed for a nightclub engagement in Chicago. Eventually, Parks joined her and introduced her to his mother, who lived in nearby Joliet. Parks returned to Los Angeles to begin filming Counter-Attack and Garrett travelled to New York to prepare for Laffing Room Only with Olsen and Johnson, but before rehearsals began she called Parks and proposed marriage. The two were wed on 8 September 1944, four months after their initial meeting. Garrett and Parks spent a month honeymooning in Malibu Beach, and they then lived apart for the next two years while pursuing their careers. Garrett and Parks remained married until his death in 1975. They had two sons, composer Garrett Parks and actor Andrew Parks. Betty Garrett has one granddaughter, Madison Claire Parks, by her son Garrett Parks, and daughter-in-law, Broadway actress Karen Culliver. Betty Garrett died of an aortic aneurysm in Los Angeles in 2011, at the age of 91. Her body was cremated.

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

British postcard by Photographs, no. 130.

American actor Rob Lowe (1964) was one of the members of the Brat Pack. He is known for the television series The West Wing, in which he played the role of Sam Seaborn.

Robert Hepler (Rob) Lowe was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1964. He was the son of Charles Lowe and Barbara Hepler and grew up in Dayton (Ohio) and Los Angeles. Lowe has one brother, the actor Chad Lowe (1968), and a younger half-brother from his father's second marriage, Justin. His career began when he was eight years old, with appearances on the local television station and summer theatre. After his parents' divorce, Lowe moved with his mother and brother to Los Angeles where, along with Emilio Estevez and others, he was educated at Santa Monica High School. In 1979, Lowe got the role of Tony Flanagan in the television sitcom A New Kind of Family (1979-1980). The series ended after only 11 episodes. However, his name stuck when the media noticed him and compared him to up-and-coming members of the Brat Pack. Along with Judd Nelson, Mare Winningham, Anthony Michael Hall, Demi Moore, Andrew McCarthy, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy, he was among the nine original members of the Brat Pack. He did a number of television films and earned his first Golden Globe nomination for the teen drama Thursday's Child (David Lowell Rich, 1983). Lowe appeared alongside Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise in The Outsiders (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983). The following year, he got the lead role in the film The Hotel New Hampshire (Tony Richardson, 1984), alongside Jodie Foster and Nastassja Kinski. Lowe starred with his fellow "Brat packers" in the coming-of-age film St. Elmo's Fire (Joel Schumacher, 1985). For this film, Lowe won his first award: a Razzie Award for worst male supporting actor. Partly because of his looks, Lowe became one of the Pack's most popular members. In between, Lowe starred in less noteworthy productions. In 1988, Lowe received his second Golden Globe nomination for the film Square Dance (Daniel Petrie, 1987). In 1988, however, his popularity suffered serious damage when a video emerged showing Lowe filming himself having sex with two girls, one of whom appeared to be underage. This happened in Atlanta, where Lowe was attending the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Lowe claimed he did not know she was underage, which was confirmed by the doorman of the bar where they met. She had also lied to get into the bar. For this, Lowe performed 20 hours of community service in Dayton. Around the same time, a leaked home video, in which Lowe could be seen with a model called Jennifer and a boyfriend, Justin Morris, while they were doing a threesome in a hotel room in Paris, was commercially marketed. This was one of the first celebrity sex videos to be sold commercially. Both videos caused a lot of damage to Lowe's career.

After these scandals, Rob Lowe sought treatment at a clinic for alcohol and sex addiction. After the scandals faded into oblivion, Lowe's career revived. This was partly because he mocked his irresponsible behaviour during an appearance as host of Saturday Night Live. In one of his appearances with the church lady, played by Dana Carvey, the latter promises to keep quiet about sex videos during the interview. In return, Lowe gets spanked by her on TV. When Lowe is also spanked at the end of the skit, it turns out that, to the dismay of the church lady, this gets him sexually aroused. She starts exclaiming that Satan should be expelled from Lowe's buttocks, to which Lowe tells reporters, "I love getting spanked. I love the feeling of a glowing ass so much". In 1989, he sang the song 'Proud Mary' with the band Snow White at the Academy Awards, which was not a success. His role in the film Bad Influence (1990), in which he had to portray a villain, brought Lowe positively back into the limelight. In 1992, he made his Broadway debut in the play 'A Little Hotel on the Side'. The roles he was offered improved and in the same year Lowe appeared in Wayne's World. For his portrayal of the deaf-mute Nick Andros in the miniseries The Stand (Mick Garris, 1994) based on a book by Stephen King, Lowe received rave reviews. After this, Lowe temporarily disappeared behind the camera, where he produced the Western Frank & Jesse in 1994. In 1997, he wrote and directed the television film Desert's Edge. Also in 1997, he played the role of the right-wing leader of a Christian movement in the film Contact. In the film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), he imitated the voice of Robert Wagner for the role of Young Number Two.

In 1999, Rob Lowe was back on television regularly when he got the role of acting head of communications Sam Seaborn in the NBC hit series The West Wing, about the life of President Bartlett (Martin Sheen). Basically, the series was supposed to revolve around his role, which was then the focus of the pilot episode, but the reviews for the complete cast were so raved, that a shift was made in the role assignment. In 2000 and 2001, Lowe received Golden Globe nominations in the "Best Actor" category for this, and in 2001 he also received an Emmy Award in the same category. In 2002, however, Lowe left the series because he could not agree on his role and salary. He wanted a more prominent role in the series with an accompanying salary than NBC was willing to give him. Although the other actors and especially Martin Sheen tried to keep him in the series, the episode featuring his departure was aired in February 2003, earlier than expected. During the final season of The West Wing, Lowe returned to his role of Sam Seaborn, appearing in two of the final four episodes. After this, he featured in the series Lyon's Den (2003), where he plays an idealistic attorney trying to get out of the shadow of his father, who is a senator. The series flopped and was taken off TV after 13 episodes. The same happened with the series Dr Vegas, also produced by Lowe. It stopped after 10 episodes due to a lack of success. Lowe starred in the remake of the Stephen King miniseries Salem's Lot (2004). In 2005, Lowe played the role of Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee in the theatre production of Aaron Sorkin's play 'A Few Good Men' in West End London. Lowe played a supporting role as a movie agent in the satirical black comedy Thank You for Smoking (Jason Reitman, 2006) starring Aaron Eckhart. In 2013, Lowe played a notable role as the evil plastic surgeon Dr Jack Startz in Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh, 2013), the successful film about the last decade of pianist and entertainer Liberace's life. In 2017, Lowe began a reality series with his two sons, the then 24-year-old Matthew and 22-year-old Jon Owen, The Lowe Files. With the exception of the hour-long pilot, the series featured 30-minute road trips with the Lowe boys, and occasional TV guest stars known in the field, investigating common urban myths and legends that Rob has loved since he was a young boy and has shared with his boys throughout their growth. In 2015, Lowe received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Lowe has been married to makeup artist Sheryl Berkoff since 1991. They met on a blind date in 1983.

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

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The set contains 479 pieces and will be available starting August 1 for a recommended retail price of $59.99 US / EUR 59,99.

ideas.lego.com/projects/07cc9fdd-c712-4fff-af98-75368f449f11

French postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. D 419. Photo: Warner Bros. Doris Day in Calamity Jane (David Butler, 1953).

American actress and singer Doris Day (1922-2019) sang with several big bands before going solo in 1947. In the 1950s, she made a series of popular film musicals, including Calamity Jane (1953) and The Pajama Game (1957). With Rock Hudson, she starred in the box office hit Pillow Talk (1959). On TV, she starred in the sitcom The Doris Day Show (1968-1973).

Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff was born in 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Alma Sophia (Welz), a housewife, and William Joseph Kappelhoff, a music teacher and choirmaster. Her mother named her after her favourite silent film star, Doris Kenyon. She had two brothers, Richard, who died before she was born, and Paul, a few years older. For many years, it was uncertain whether she was born in 1922 or 1924, with Day herself reportedly believing her birth year was the latter and giving her age accordingly. It wasn't until 3 April 2017, her 95th, not 93rd, birthday, that her birth certificate was found by the Associated Press, which confirmed she was born in 1922. Her parents divorced while she was still a child, and she lived with her mother. Like most little girls, Doris liked to dance. At fourteen, she formed a dance act with a boy, Jerry Doherty, and they won $500 in a local talent contest. She and Jerry took a brief trip to Hollywood to test the waters. They felt they could succeed, so she and Jerry returned to Cincinnati with the intention of packing and making a permanent move to Hollywood. Tragically, the night before Doris was to move to Hollywood, her car was hit by a train, and she badly injured her right leg. The accident ended the possibility of a dancing career. She spent her next years wheelchair-bound, but during this time began singing along with the radio. Observing her daughter sing, Alma decided Doris should have singing lessons. She engaged a teacher, Grace Raine. After three lessons, Raine told Alma that young Doris had "tremendous potential". Raine was so impressed that she gave Doris three lessons a week for the price of one. Years later, Day said that Raine had the biggest effect on her singing style and career. At age 17, Day had her first professional job as a vocalist, on the WLW radio program 'Carlin's Carnival', and in a local restaurant, Charlie Yee's Shanghai Inn. While performing for the radio, she was approached by bandleader Barney Rapp. He felt that her name, Kappelhoff, was too harsh and awkward and that she should change her name to something more pleasant. The name 'Day' was suggested by Rapp from one of the songs in Doris' repertoire, 'Day by Day'. She didn't like the name at first, feeling that it sounded too much like a burlesque performer. While she was performing in Barney Rapp's band, she met trombonist Al Jorden, and they married in 1941. The marriage was extremely unhappy and there were reports of Jordan's alcoholism and abuse of the young star. They divorced within two years, not long after the birth of their son Terrence Jorden called Terry. Despondent and feeling his life had little meaning after the much-publicised divorce, Jorden later committed suicide. After working with Rapp, Day worked with bandleaders Jimmy James, Bob Crosby, and Les Brown. The years touring with Les Brown & His Band of Renown, she later called 'the happiest times in my life'. In 1941, Day appeared as a singer in three Soundies (three-minute film clips containing a song, dance, and/or band or orchestral number) with the Les Brown band. Her first hit recording was 'Sentimental Journey' in 1945. It became an anthem of the desire of World War II demobilising troops to return home. In 1946, Doris married saxophone player and former child actor George Weidler, but this union lasted less than a year. After leaving Brown to embark on a solo career, she recorded more than 650 songs from 1947 to 1967. Day's agent talked her into taking a screen test at Warner Bros. The executives there liked what they saw and signed her to a contract. Her first starring role was in Romance on the High Seas (Michael Curtiz, Busby Berkeley, 1948), with Jack Carson and Janis Paige. The next year, she made two more films, My Dream Is Yours (Michael Curtiz, 1949) and It's a Great Feeling (David Butler, 1949). Audiences took to her beauty, terrific singing voice, and bubbly personality, and she turned in fine performances in the films she made - in addition to several hit records.

Doris Day made three films for Warner Bros. in 1950 and five more in 1951. She co-starred with Gordon MacRae in five nostalgic period musicals: Tea for Two (David Butler, 1950), The West Point Story (Roy Del Ruth, 1950) with James Cagney and Virginia Mayo, On Moonlight Bay (Roy Del Ruth, 1951), Starlift (Roy Del Ruth, 1951), and By the Light of the Silvery Moon (David Butler, 1953). Her most commercially successful film for Warner was I'll See You in My Dreams (1951), which broke box-office records of 20 years. The film is a musical biography of lyricist Gus Kahn, played by Danny Thomas. It was Day's fourth film directed by Michael Curtiz. One of her few dramatic roles was in Storm Warning (Stuart Heisler, 1951) with Ginger Rogers and Ronald Reagan. She briefly dated Ronald Reagan - with whom she also co-starred in The Winning Team (1952) - shortly after his divorce from Jane Wyman when she and Reagan were contract players at Warner Bros. Doris Day met and married Martin Melcher in 1951. He adopted her young son Terry and became her manager. In 1953, Doris starred in Calamity Jane (David Butler, 1953), which was a major hit. She performed 'Secret Love' in the film, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Several more hits followed including Lucky Me (Jack Donohue, 1954), Love Me or Leave Me (Charles Vidor, 1955) with James Cagney. Alfred Hitchcock had seen her dramatic role in Storm Warning and choose her to play Jo McKenna opposite James Stewart in his re-make The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). In the film she sang the song 'Que Será, Será! (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)', which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and became an evergreen. In 1959, Day entered her most successful phase as a film actress with a series of romantic comedies. Her best-known film is probably the first one, Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959) with Rock Hudson and Tony Randall. For her performance, she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Leading Actress. She later co-starred with Hudson and Randall again in Lover Come Back (Delbert Mann, 1961), and Send Me No Flowers (Norman Jewison, 1964). In all three, Day and Hudson played love interests while Randall played Hudson's close friend.

Doris Day started out in the 1960s with the hit Please Don't Eat the Daisies (Charles Walters, 1960) in which her co-star was David Niven. In 1962, Day appeared with Cary Grant in the comedy That Touch of Mink (Delbert Mann, 1962), the first film in history ever to gross $1 million in one theatre (Radio City Music Hall). During 1960 and the 1962 to 1964 period, she ranked number one at the box office. Despite her successes at the box office, the late 1950s and early 1960s were a difficult period for Day. In 1958, her brother Paul had died. Around this time, her husband, who had also taken charge of her career, made deals for her to star in films she didn't really care about, which led to a bout with exhaustion. The 1960s weren't to be a repeat of the previous busy decade. She made fewer films, but the ones she did make were successful: Do Not Disturb (Ralph Levy, 1965) with Rod Taylor, and The Glass Bottom Boat (Frank Tashlin, 1966). By the late 1960s, the sexual revolution of the baby boomer generation had refocused public attitudes about sex. Times had changed, but Day's films had not. Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? (Hy Averback, 1968) and With Six You Get Eggroll (Howard Morris, 1968) with Brian Keith, would be her final features. In 1968, her husband Martin Melcher suddenly died. Between 1956 and his death, he had produced 18 of her films. A shocked Day discovered she was millions of dollars in debt. Melcher and his business partner Jerome Bernard Rosenthal had squandered virtually all of her considerable earnings, but she was eventually awarded $22 million by the courts in a case against Rosenthal.

After Martin Melcher's death, Doris Day never made another film. She professed not to have known that he had negotiated a multimillion-dollar deal with CBS to launch her own TV series, The Doris Day Show, the following fall. Day hated the idea of performing on television, but felt obligated to do it and needed the work to help pay off her debts. The show became successful and lasted from 1968 until 1973. The Doris Day Show was a light and fluffy sitcom, which changed formats and producers almost every season. Originally it was about widow Doris Martin and her two young sons (Philip Brown and Todd Stark) who left the big city for the quiet and peace of her family's ranch, which was run by her dad Buck (Denver Pyle) and ranchhand Leroy (James Hampton). Later Doris, Buck, and sons Billy and Toby moved to San Francisco, where Doris got a job as a secretary to bumbling magazine publisher Michael Nicholson (McLean Stevenson). In Season Three, the Martin family moved into an apartment above the Paluccis' Italian restaurant, and Doris began writing features for Today's World magazine. Finally, the kids, family, Nicholson, the Paluccis' and all other cast members vanished, and Doris became a single staff writer for Today's World, where her new boss was Cy Bennett (John Dehner). After her series went off the air, Doris Day only made occasional TV appearances. She did two television specials, The Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff Special (1971) and Doris Day Today (1975). She also appeared on the John Denver TV show (1974). In 1976, she married for the fourth time, to Barry Comden, 12 years her junior. They had met at the Beverly Hills Old World Restaurant where he was the maitre d'. The couple divorced in 1982. Comden complained that Day preferred the company of her dogs more than him. From then on Doris devoted her life to animals. During the location filming of The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956) she had seen how camels, goats, and other 'animal extras' in a marketplace scene were being treated. It began her lifelong commitment to preventing animal abuse. For years, she ran the Doris Day Animal League in Carmel, a resort town a little south of San Francisco. In the 1985–1986 season, Day returned to the screen with her own television talk show, Doris Day's Best Friends, on CBN. The network cancelled the show after 26 episodes, despite the worldwide publicity it received. Much of that came from her interview with Rock Hudson, in which a visibly ill Hudson was showing the first public symptoms of AIDS. Hudson would die from the syndrome a year later. Her son Terry Melcher had become a music producer and composer who worked with The Beach Boys, Bobby Darin, and The Byrds. With Terry and a partner, she co-owned the Cypress Inn in Carmel, a small inn built in a Mediterranean motif. Terry died of melanoma in 2004, aged 62. In June 2004 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. She did not attend the White House award ceremony because of her intense fear of flying. In 2006, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In a rare interview with The Hollywood Reporter on 4 April 2019, a day after her 97th birthday, Day talked about her work on the Doris Day Animal Foundation, founded in 1978. On the question of what her favourite film was, she answered Calamity Jane: "I was such a tomboy growing up, and she was such a fun character to play. Of course, the music was wonderful, too—'Secret Love,' especially, is such a beautiful song." As per her last wishes, there will be no funeral or graveside service. Doris Day will be cremated and her ashes scattered in Carmel.

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

I Simpson è una popolare sitcom animata creata dal fumettista statunitense Matt Groening a fine degli anni ottanta per la Fox Broadcasting Company. È una parodia satirica della società e dello stile di vita statunitensi, personificati dalla famiglia protagonista, di cui fanno parte Homer, Marge e i loro tre figli Bart, Lisa e Maggie

British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. D 421. Photo: Warner Bros. Doris Day and Howard Keel in Calamity Jane (David Butler, 1953).

American actress and singer Doris Day (1922-2019) sang with several big bands before going solo in 1947. In the 1950s, she made a series of popular film musicals, including Calamity Jane (1953) and The Pajama Game (1957). With Rock Hudson, she starred in the box office hit Pillow Talk (1959). On TV, she starred in the sitcom The Doris Day Show (1968-1973).

Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff was born in 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Alma Sophia (Welz), a housewife, and William Joseph Kappelhoff, a music teacher and choirmaster. Her mother named her after her favourite silent film star, Doris Kenyon. She had two brothers, Richard, who died before she was born, and Paul, a few years older. For many years, it was uncertain whether she was born in 1922 or 1924, with Day herself reportedly believing her birth year was the latter and giving her age accordingly. It wasn't until 3 April 2017, her 95th, not 93rd, birthday, that her birth certificate was found by the Associated Press, which confirmed she was born in 1922. Her parents divorced while she was still a child, and she lived with her mother. Like most little girls, Doris liked to dance. At fourteen, she formed a dance act with a boy, Jerry Doherty, and they won $500 in a local talent contest. She and Jerry took a brief trip to Hollywood to test the waters. They felt they could succeed, so she and Jerry returned to Cincinnati intending to pack and make a permanent move to Hollywood. Tragically, the night before Doris was to move to Hollywood, her car was hit by a train, and she badly injured her right leg. The accident ended the possibility of a dancing career. She spent her next years wheelchair-bound, but during this time began singing along with the radio. Observing her daughter sing, Alma decided Doris should have singing lessons. She engaged a teacher, Grace Raine. After three lessons, Raine told Alma that young Doris had "tremendous potential". Raine was so impressed that she gave Doris three lessons a week for the price of one. Years later, Day said that Raine had the biggest effect on her singing style and career. At age 17, Day had her first professional jobs as a vocalist, on the WLW radio program 'Carlin's Carnival', and in a local restaurant, Charlie Yee's Shanghai Inn. While performing for the radio, she was approached by bandleader Barney Rapp. He felt that her name, Kappelhoff, was too harsh and awkward and that she should change her name to something more pleasant. The name 'Day' was suggested by Rapp from one of the songs in Doris' repertoire, 'Day by Day'. She didn't like the name at first, feeling that it sounded too much like a burlesque performer. While she was performing in Barney Rapp's band, she met trombonist Al Jorden, and they married in 1941. The marriage was extremely unhappy, and there were reports of Jordan's alcoholism and abuse of the young star. They divorced within two years, not long after the birth of their son, Terrence Jorden, called Terry. Despondent and feeling his life had little meaning after the much-publicised divorce, Jorden later committed suicide. After working with Rapp, Day worked with bandleaders Jimmy James, Bob Crosby, and Les Brown. The years touring with Les Brown & His Band of Renown, she later called 'the happiest times in my life'. In 1941, Day appeared as a singer in three Soundies (three-minute film clips containing a song, dance and/or band or orchestral number) with the Les Brown band. Her first hit recording was 'Sentimental Journey' in 1945. It became an anthem of the desire of World War II demobilised troops to return home. In 1946, Doris married saxophone player and former child actor George Weidler, but this union lasted less than a year. After leaving Brown to embark on a solo career, she recorded more than 650 songs from 1947 to 1967. Day's agent talked her into taking a screen test at Warner Bros. The executives there liked what they saw and signed her to a contract. Her first starring role was in Romance on the High Seas (Michael Curtiz, Busby Berkeley, 1948), with Jack Carson and Janis Paige. The next year, she made two more films, My Dream Is Yours (Michael Curtiz, 1949) and It's a Great Feeling (David Butler, 1949). Audiences took to her beauty, terrific singing voice, and bubbly personality, and she turned in fine performances in the films she made, in addition to several hit records.

Doris Day made three films for Warner Bros. in 1950 and five more in 1951. She co-starred with Gordon MacRae in five nostalgic period musicals: Tea for Two (David Butler, 1950), The West Point Story (Roy Del Ruth, 1950) with James Cagney and Virginia Mayo, On Moonlight Bay (Roy Del Ruth, 1951), Starlift (Roy Del Ruth, 1951), and By the Light of the Silvery Moon (David Butler, 1953). Her most commercially successful film for Warner was I'll See You in My Dreams (1951), which broke box-office records of 20 years. The film is a musical biography of lyricist Gus Kahn, played by Danny Thomas. It was Day's fourth film directed by Michael Curtiz. One of her few dramatic roles was in Storm Warning (Stuart Heisler, 1951) with Ginger Rogers and Ronald Reagan. She briefly dated Ronald Reagan, with whom she also co-starred in The Winning Team (1952) - shortly after his divorce from Jane Wyman, when she and Reagan were contract players at Warner Bros. Doris Day met and married Martin Melcher in 1951. He adopted her young son, Terry, and became her manager. In 1953, Doris starred in Calamity Jane (David Butler, 1953), which was a major hit. She performed 'Secret Love' in the film, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Several more hits followed, including Lucky Me (Jack Donohue, 1954), Love Me or Leave Me (Charles Vidor, 1955) with James Cagney. Alfred Hitchcock had seen her dramatic role in Storm Warning and chose her to play Jo McKenna opposite James Stewart in his remake, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). In the film she sang the song 'Que Será, Será! (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)', which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and became an evergreen. In 1959, Day entered her most successful phase as a film actress with a series of romantic comedies. Her best-known film is probably the first one, Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959), with Rock Hudson and Tony Randall. For her performance, she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Leading Actress. She later co-starred with Hudson and Randall again in Lover Come Back (Delbert Mann, 1961), and Send Me No Flowers (Norman Jewison, 1964). In all three, Day and Hudson played love interests while Randall played Hudson's close friend.

Doris Day started in the 1960s with the hit Please Don't Eat the Daisies (Charles Walters, 1960) in which her co-star was David Niven. In 1962, Day appeared with Cary Grant in the comedy That Touch of Mink (Delbert Mann, 1962), the first film in history ever to gross $1 million in one theatre (Radio City Music Hall). During 1960 and the 1962 to 1964 period, she ranked number one at the box office. Despite her successes at the box office, the late 1950s and early 1960s were a difficult period for Day. In 1958, her brother Paul had died. Around this time, her husband, who had also taken charge of her career, made deals for her to star in films she didn't care about, which led to a bout with exhaustion. The 1960s weren't to be a repeat of the previous busy decade. She made fewer films, but the ones she did make were successful: Do Not Disturb (Ralph Levy, 1965) with Rod Taylor, and The Glass Bottom Boat (Frank Tashlin, 1966). By the late 1960s, the sexual revolution of the baby boomer generation had refocused public attitudes about sex. Times had changed, but Day's films had not. Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? (Hy Averback, 1968), and With Six You Get Eggroll (Howard Morris, 1968) with Brian Keith, would be her final features. In 1968, her husband, Martin Melcher, suddenly died. Between 1956 and his death, he had produced 18 of her films. A shocked Day discovered she was millions of dollars in debt. Melcher and his business partner Jerome Bernard Rosenthal had squandered virtually all of her considerable earnings, but she was eventually awarded $22 million by the courts in a case against Rosenthal.

After Martin Melcher's death, Doris Day never made another film. She professed not to have known that he had negotiated a multimillion-dollar deal with CBS to launch her own TV series, The Doris Day Show, the following fall. Day hated the idea of performing on television, but felt obligated to do it and needed the work to help pay off her debts. The show became successful and lasted from 1968 until 1973. The Doris Day Show was a light and fluffy sitcom which changed formats and producers almost every season. Originally, it was about widow Doris Martin and her two young sons (Philip Brown and Todd Stark) who left the big city for the quiet and peace of her family's ranch, which was run by her dad, Buck (Denver Pyle) and ranchhand Leroy (James Hampton). Late,r Doris, Buck, and sons Billy and Toby moved to San Francisco, where Doris got a job as a secretary to bumbling magazine publisher Michael Nicholson (McLean Stevenson). In Season Three, the Martin family moved into an apartment above the Paluccis' Italian restaurant, and Doris began writing features for Today's World magazine. Finally, the kids, family, Nicholson, the Paluccis, and all other cast members vanished, and Doris became a single staff writer for Today's World, where her new boss was Cy Bennett (John Dehner). After her series went off the air, Doris Day only made occasional TV appearances. She did two television specials, The Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff Special (1971) and Doris Day Today (1975). She also appeared on the John Denver TV show (1974). In 1976, she married for the fourth time, to Barry Comden, 12 years her junior. They had met at the Beverly Hills Old World Restaurant, where he was the maitre d'. The couple divorced in 1982. Comden complained that Day preferred the company of her dogs more than him. From then on, Doris devoted her life to animals. During the location filming of The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956), she had seen how camels, goats, and other 'animal extras' in a marketplace scene were being treated. It began her lifelong commitment to prevent animal abuse. For years, she ran the Doris Day Animal League in Carmel, a resort town a little south of San Francisco. In the 1985–1986 season, Day returned to the screen with her own television talk show, Doris Day's Best Friends, on CBN. The network cancelled the show after 26 episodes, despite the worldwide publicity it received. Much of that came from her interview with Rock Hudson, in which a visibly ill Hudson was showing the first public symptoms of AIDS. Hudson would die from the syndrome a year later. Her son, Terry Melcher, had become a music producer and composer who worked with The Beach Boys, Bobby Darin, and The Byrds. With Terry and a partner, she co-owned the Cypress Inn in Carmel, a small inn built in a Mediterranean motif. Terry died of melanoma in 2004, aged 62. In June 2004, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. She did not attend the White House award ceremony because of her intense fear of flying. In 2006, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In a rare interview with The Hollywood Reporter on 4 April 2019, a day after her 97th birthday, Day talked about her work on the Doris Day Animal Foundation, founded in 1978. On the question of what her favourite film was, she answered Calamity Jane: "I was such a tomboy growing up, and she was such a fun character to play. Of course, the music was wonderful, too—'Secret Love,' especially, is such a beautiful song." As per her last wishes, there will be no funeral or graveside service. Doris Day will be cremated and her ashes scattered in Carmel.

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Ad for the TV sitcom "Three's Company" on former ABC affiliate KMSP-TV Channel 9 in Minneapolis-St. Paul, from the 1977-78 season. ABC-9's Still The One.

Meanwhile, at Dunder Mifflin...

Michael: "Hey team! What's going on?"

Pam: "We're leaving, Michael. It's after 5."

Michael: "Hey, but who's watching clocks, huh? Haha!"

Darryl: "We're watching the clock, Michael. Every day. And now is the time we've been watching the clock for. Goodbye."

Dwight: "Mr. Scott, I'll stay and work late with you."

Michael: "What? Dwight, I'm not staying. It's after 5. So, are you guys going home or going out for some drinks? You know, office camaraderie around some brewskis?"

Darryl: "We're going home Michael."

Dwight: "I'll go get beer with you."

Michael: "Jim? Pam? What about you?"

Jim: "Well, we were going to grab dinner, but we'd like it to be just the two of us."

Michael: "Haha! Sure, I get it! Maybe you two need me along as a chaperone! I can-"

Pam: "No. No, Michael."

Michael: "-keep an eye-"

Pam: "Michael, no. Just, no."

Dwight: "I'll go get beer with you."

Michael: *sigh* "Where's the new guy? George? Did he already leave?"

Jim: "He's out this week, Michael. He went to Mexico."*

Michael: "Well, sure! Okay, people have plans, I get it. But I was binge-watching a Korean drama on Papriflix and they always go out to have beer together after work. They gather around the boss and it's a real team building tradition."

Darryl: "Okay, Michael, see you tomorrow."

Dwight: "I'll go with you and we can have beer and Korean barbeque."

Michael: "Yeah, okay, I guess I'll just go home."

__________________________

A year of the shows and performers of the Bijou Planks Theater.

Funko

Mini Moments

The Office

Michael Scott

Dwight Schrute

Jim Halpert

Pam Beesly

Darryl Philbin

* As seen in BP 2023 Day 234!

www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/53135777128/

British postcard in the Greetings series. Photo: British Lion Films.

Last Sunday, 22 December 2019, British stage and screen actor Tony Britton died, aged 95. In a career spanning six decades, he went from being a leading juvenile at Stratford-upon-Avon, a film star with British Lion in the 1950s, to a West End star in the 1960s and then a TV sitcom favourite in the 1970s and 1980s. He was still touring into his mid-80s, playing Canon Chasuble in 'The Importance of Being Earnest' in 2007.

Anthony Edward Lowry Britton was born in 1924 in a room above the Trocadero pub in Temple Street, Birmingham, Doris Marguerite (née Jones) and Edward Leslie Britton. He attended Edgbaston Collegiate School, Birmingham and Thornbury Grammar School, Gloucestershire. He thought of doing nothing else except acting since childhood. On leaving school, he joined two amateur drama companies in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, while articled to an estate agent and then working in an aircraft factory. A professional debut followed in 1942 when he appeared in Esther McCracken’s 'Quiet Weekend' at the Knightstone Pavilion in the seaside town. He was called up and served during the Second World War with the Royal Artillery. While doing officer training, he formed a small drama group. After the war, he returned to the theatre, at first in the capacity of an assistant stage manager at the Manchester Library Theatre. While there he progressed to lead actor, then made his London debut in 'The Rising Wind' at the Embassy Theatre. His big break came in 1952 when he played the juvenile lead, the pharaoh Ramases, in Christopher Fry’s 'The Firstborn', about Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt, at the Winter Garden in London in 1952. His second big leading role, at the Edinburgh festival of the same year, and on tour, was opposite Cathleen Nesbitt in 'The Player King' by Christopher Hassall, a lyricist for Ivor Novello’s musicals. This experience with the two leading verse dramatists of the day led to a two-year stint in Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon (1953-1954) as Bassanio in 'The Merchant of Venice', Lysander in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', Mercutio in 'Romeo and Juliet' and Cassio to Anthony Quayle’s 'Othello'. He was now becoming established, and returned to the West End in Michael Burn’s The 'Night of the Ball' (1955) in a cast, directed by Joseph Losey, which included Wendy Hiller and Gladys Cooper; and in the Louis Jourdan role in Gigi (1956, before the film) with Leslie Caron, directed by Peter Hall.

Tony Britton's first two starring roles for British Lion – as a posh criminal in The Birthday Present (Pat Jackson, 1957) with Sylvia Syms, and as a surgeon covering for a fatal mishap in Behind the Mask (Brian Desmond Hurst, 1958) with Michael Redgrave – were virtually his last as the British film industry was transformed with the new wave of working-class subjects and actors. Britton’s polish and class were suddenly surplus to requirements. Something similar happened in the theatre, but Britton could adapt more easily there, playing Trigorin in The Seagull and Hotspur in Henry IV Part 1 at the Old Vic in 1961. As a slightly less irascible version of Rex Harrison, he toured for two years in 1964 as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. He repeated the role 10 years later in a touring revival by Cameron Mackintosh that was the first such commercial venture underpinned with money from the Arts Council. The show, in which Liz Robertson co-starred as Eliza Doolittle, settled at the Adelphi in the West End for a decent run. He was also the partner of Margaret Leighton in Abe Burrows’s Cactus Flower at the Lyric in 1967, and Margaret Lockwood in Somerset Maugham’s Lady Frederick at the Vaudeville in 1970.

Tony Britton appeared in a few, interesting films during the 1970s, including Sunday Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger, 1971) with Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson, The Day of the Jackal (Fred Zinnemann, 1973) starring Edward Fox, and Agatha (Michael Apted, 1979) starring Dustin Hoffman and Vanessa Redgrave. He reinvented himself as a television favourite, first in Arthur Hopcraft’s comic series on Westminster politics, The Nearly Man (1975). Britton won the Broadcasting Press Guild Award for Best Actor in 1975 for his role. Then, decisively, in Robin’s Nest (1977-1981), the first common-law marital sitcom. Britton starred as James Nicholls, business partner of Richard O’Sullivan’s aspirational chef, Robin Tripp whose “nest” was his Fulham bistro. Britton then consolidated his place in the sitcom firmament with Don’t Wait Up (1983-1990), about a tricky father-and-son relationship, with serious moral and political overtones, co-starring Nigel Havers. In the next decade, his pre-eminence on television was matched in three West End hits: starring with Cicely Courtneidge and Moira Lister in Ray Cooney and John Chapman’s mechanically ingenious farce of swapped apartments, Move Over Mrs Markham (1972); alongside Anna Neagle and Thora Hird in the musical No, No, Nanette at Drury Lane in 1973; and, in 1974, opposite a formidable Celia Johnson, as the invading Nazi commander on the Channel Islands in William Douglas Home’s The Dame of Sark at Wyndham’s. The Chichester Festival theatre was a natural habitat for him. In the 1987 season, he directed Wilde’s An Ideal Husband with Clive Francis and Joanna Lumley, and played Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons, with Roy Kinnear as the Common Man. In 1994, he returned to Stratford as Chorus in Henry V and Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night. His last West End appearance, at the Haymarket, was in Jeffrey Archer’s The Accused (2000). His last film appearance was in the comedy Run for Your Wife (Ray Cooney, John Luton, 2012) with Danny Dyer. Tony Britton married Ruth Hawkins in 1948. They divorced, and in 1962 he married the Danish portrait sculptor Eva Birkefeldt; she died in 2008. Britton is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Cherry, a scriptwriter, and Fern Britton, a TV presenter, and by a son, classical actor Jasper Britton, from his second marriage. His grandson is actor Peter Cant.

Sources: Michael Coveney (The Guardian), Gary Brumburgh (IMDb), Wikipedia and IMDb.

And please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

The Happy Days television sitcom show aired first-run from 1974, to 1984 on ABC. The show was created by Garry Marshall and presented an idealized vision of life in the mid-1950s to mid-1960s United States.

"Star of the sitcom Mrs Brown's Boys

In the 2000’s, O’Carroll’s various theatre productions featuring Agnes Brown were starting to garner attention from television producers in the UK and, in 2011; his plays were adapted into a BBC television sitcom.

Initially broadcast in a quiet late evening slot, Mrs Brown's Boys became a huge word-of-mouth hit, and quickly moved to primetime. Created by and starring O’Carroll in the lead role, Mrs Brown’s Boys also features his wife Jennifer Gibney, his sister Eilish, his son Danny and his daughter Fiona, and the show’s first series eventually pulled in an average audience of 3.6 million people in 2011.

The show found similar success in Ireland and every episode aired won its timeslot for RTÉ, with an average viewership of 753,500.

By 2013, the show’s third season was attracting a massive average audience of 9.4 million people in the UK.

The show has also aired acclaimed Christmas specials since 2011 with the audience figures hitting a massive 15.5 million in 2013 in the UK and 972,000 in Ireland in 2012.

A hit worldwide, Mrs Brown's Boys has now aired in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Malta, New Zealand, Serbia, Sweden and Africa. The success of the series led to a film adaptation being released in 2014. Mrs Brown’s Boys D’ Movie made a record breaking €1.02m at the Irish box office after its first three days on release, and proved a hit with audiences worldwide too as it went on to make $28,840,379 on a budget of just £3.6 million.

Mrs Brown’s Boys has also proved popular with O’Carroll’s peers in the industry, both in Ireland and the UK, and the show has so far won a BAFTA Award for Best Situation Comedy, an IFTA Award for Best Television Programme, a BAFTA Scotland Award for Best Comedy Entertainment Programme as well as a Writers Guild Of Great Britain British Comedy Award, among many other accolades."

Dutch postcard, no. AX 7376.

John Travolta (1954) is an American actor and singer, who rose to fame during the 1970s, when he appeared on the television sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (1975-1979), and starred in the box office successes Carrie (1976), Saturday Night Fever (1977), Grease (1978) and Urban Cowboy (1980). His acting career declined throughout the 1980s, but in 1994, Travolta made one of the most stunning comebacks in entertainment history by starring in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994). Since then he starred in such films as Get Shorty (1995), Face/Off (1997), Primary Colors (1998), and Hairspray (2007). Travolta was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for performances in Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. In 2016, he received his first Primetime Emmy Award, as a producer of the anthology series American Crime Story in which he also played lawyer Robert Shapiro.

The youngest of six children, John Travolta was born in 1954 in Englewood, New Jersey, an inner-ring suburb of New York City in Bergen County, New Jersey. His father, Salvatore "Sam" Travolta was a semiprofessional American football player turned tire salesman and partner in a tire company. His mother, Helen Travolta (née Helen Cecilia Burke) was an actress and singer who had appeared in The Sunshine Sisters, a radio vocal group, and acted and directed before becoming a high school drama and English teacher His siblings Joey, Ellen, Ann, Margaret, and Sam Travolta were all inspired by their mother's love of theatre and drama and became actors. He was raised Roman Catholic but converted to Scientology in 1975. Travolta attended Dwight Morrow High School. By the age of 12 Travolta himself had already joined an area actors' group, and soon began appearing in local musicals and dinner-theater performances. He started acting appearing in a local production of 'Who'll Save the Plowboy?'. At 16 he landed his first professional job in a summer stock production of the musical 'Bye Bye Birdie'. In 1971, he dropped out of school at age 17 and moved across the Hudson River to New York City. He made his off-Broadway debut in 1972 in 'Rain' and then landed a small role in the touring company of the hit musical 'Grease'. Then followed on Broadway 'Over Here!', starring The Andrews Sisters, in which he sang the Sherman Brothers' song 'Dream Drummin''. He then moved to Los Angeles to try Hollywood. Travolta's first screen role in California was as a fall victim in the television series Emergency!, in September 1972, but his first significant film role was as Billy Nolan, a bully who was goaded into playing a prank on Sissy Spacek's character in the horror film Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976), the first film adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Around the same time, he landed the role as Vinnie Barbarino in the ABC TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–1979), in which his sister, Ellen, also occasionally appeared as Arnold Horshack's mother. He shot to overnight superstardom, and his face instantly adorned T-shirts and lunch boxes. Travolta had a hit single titled 'Let Her In', peaking at number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in July 1976. That year, he starred in the TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (Randal Kleiser, 1976). Then followed the first of his two most noted screen roles: Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977). Jason Ankeny at AllMovie: " A latter-day Rebel Without a Cause set against the backdrop of the New York City disco nightlife, it positioned Travolta as the most talked-about young star in Hollywood. In addition to earning his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, he also became an icon of the era, his white-suited visage and cocky, rhythmic strut enduring as defining images of late-'70s American culture."He followed it up with the part of Danny Zuko in the film adaptation of Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978) with Olivia Newton-John. Its box-office success was even greater than Saturday Night Fever's. Both films were among the most commercially successful pictures of the decade and catapulted Travolta to international stardom. Saturday Night Fever earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, making him, at age 24, one of the youngest performers ever nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. Travolta performed several of the songs on the Grease soundtrack album. After the laughable May-December romance Moment by Moment (Jane Wagner, 1978) in which he starred with Lily Tomlin, Travolta, in 1980, inspired a nationwide country music craze that followed on the heels of his hit film Urban Cowboy (James Bridges, 1980), in which he starred with Debra Winger. Another success was the thriller Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) with Nancy Allen.

During the 1980s, John Travolta starred in a series of commercial and critical failures that sidelined his acting career. These included Two of a Kind (John Herzfeld, 1983), a romantic comedy reuniting him with Olivia Newton-John, and Perfect (James Bridges, 1985), co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis. He also starred in Staying Alive (Sylvester Stallone, 1983), the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, for which he trained rigorously and lost 20 pounds. The film was a financial success, grossing over $65 million, though it, too, was scorned by critics. During that time, Travolta was offered, but declined, lead roles in what would become box-office hits, including American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980) and An Officer and a Gentleman (Taylor Hackford, 1982), both of which went to Richard Gere, as well as Splash (Ton Howard, 1984), which went to Tom Hanks. In 1989, Travolta starred with Kirstie Alley in Look Who's Talking (Amy Heckerling, 1989), which grossed $297 million, making it his most successful film since Grease. He subsequently starred in Look Who's Talking Too (Amy Heckerling, 1990) and Look Who's Talking Now (Tom Ropelewski, 1993), but it was not until he played Vincent Vega in Quentin Tarantino's hit Pulp Fiction (1994), with Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, that his career was revived. Quentin Tarantino, a longtime Travolta fan, wrote the role of Vincent Vega specifically with the actor in mind. Jason Ankeny at AllMovie: "Travolta reportedly waived his salary to play the role. A critical as well as commercial smash, Pulp Fiction introduced Travolta to a new generation of moviegoers, and suddenly he was again a major star who could command a massive salary, with a second Academy Award nomination to prove it." Travolta was inundated with offers. He followed Pulp Fiction with the Elmore Leonard adaptation Get Shorty (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1995). His turn as Mafioso-turned-movie producer Chili Palmer is acclaimed by many critics as his finest performance to date. The film was another major hit. Then followed roles in White Man's Burden (Desmond Nakano, 1995), Broken Arrow (John Woo, 1996), and Face/Off (John Woo, 1997) with Nicolas Cage. He also played a charismatic, Bill Clinton-like U.S. President in Primary Colors (Mike Nichols, 1998) opposite Emma Thompson. The political satire was critically acclaimed but earned only $52 million from a $65 million budget.

In 2000, John Travolta starred in and co-produced the science fiction film Battlefield Earth (Roger Christian, 2000), based on the novel of the same name by L. Ron Hubbard, in which he played the villainous leading role as a leader of a group of aliens that enslaves humanity on a bleak future Earth. The film had been a dream project for Travolta since the book's release in 1982 when Hubbard had written to him to try to help make a film adaptation. The film received almost universally negative reviews and did very poorly at the box office. Travolta's performance in Battlefield Earth also earned him two Razzie Awards. Throughout the 2000s, Travolta remained busy as an actor, starring in many films, including Swordfish (Dominic Sena, 2001) with Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry, the crime-comedy Be Cool (F. Gary Gray, 2005) in which he again played ultra cool Chili Palmer, and the biker road comedy Wild Hogs (Walt Becker, 2007) starring Tim Allen. In 2007, Travolta played Edna Turnblad in the remake of Hairspray (Adam Shankman, 2008), his first musical since Grease. In the Disney computer-animated film Bolt (Chris Williams, Byron Howard, 2008), Travolta voiced the title character. The next year, he appeared in the re-make of The Taking of Pelham 123 (Tony Scott, 2009) opposite Denzel Washington and in Old Dogs (Walt Decker, 2009) with Robin Williams. Since 2010, Travolta has starred mostly in action films and thrillers. In 2016, he returned to television in the first season of the anthology series American Crime Story, titled The People v. O. J. Simpson, in which he played lawyer Robert Shapiro. Travolta was in a relationship with actress Diana Hyland, 18 years his senior, whom he met while filming The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976). They remained together until Hyland's death from breast cancer in 1977. Travolta also had an on-again/off-again relationship with actress Marilu Henner, which ended permanently in 1985. He married actress Kelly Preston in 1991, and they bought a house in Islesboro, Maine. They had three children: Jett (1992–2009), Ella Bleu (2000), and Benjamin (2010). In 2009, Jett died at age 16 while on a Christmas vacation in the Bahamas. A Bahamian death certificate was issued, attributing the cause of death to a seizure. Jett, who had a history of seizures, reportedly suffered from Kawasaki disease since the age of two. In 2020, Travolta's wife, Kelly Preston, died at the age of 57, two years after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Travolta has been a practitioner of Scientology since 1975. Following the death of his wife Kelly Preston in July 2020, Travolta hinted on his Instagram account that he would be putting his career on hold, stating "I will be taking some time to be there for my children who have lost their mother, so forgive me in advance if you don’t hear from us for a while."

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Vintage autograph photo. John Travolta in Broken Arrow (John Woo, 1996).

John Travolta (1954) is an American actor and singer, who rose to fame during the 1970s, when he appeared on the television sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (1975-1979), and starred in the box office successes Carrie (1976), Saturday Night Fever (1977), Grease (1978) and Urban Cowboy (1980). His acting career declined throughout the 1980s, but in 1994, Travolta made one of the most stunning comebacks in entertainment history by starring in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994). Since then he starred in such films as Get Shorty (1995), Face/Off (1997), Primary Colors (1998), and Hairspray (2007). Travolta was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for performances in Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. In 2016, he received his first Primetime Emmy Award, as a producer of the anthology series American Crime Story in which he also played lawyer Robert Shapiro.

The youngest of six children, John Travolta was born in 1954 in Englewood, New Jersey, an inner-ring suburb of New York City in Bergen County, New Jersey. His father, Salvatore "Sam" Travolta was a semiprofessional American football player turned tire salesman and partner in a tire company. His mother, Helen Travolta (née Helen Cecilia Burke) was an actress and singer who had appeared in The Sunshine Sisters, a radio vocal group, and acted and directed before becoming a high school drama and English teacher His siblings Joey, Ellen, Ann, Margaret, and Sam Travolta were all inspired by their mother's love of theatre and drama and became actors. He was raised Roman Catholic but converted to Scientology in 1975. Travolta attended Dwight Morrow High School. By the age of 12 Travolta himself had already joined an area actors' group and soon began appearing in local musicals and dinner-theater performances. He started acting appearing in a local production of 'Who'll Save the Plowboy?'. At 16 he landed his first professional job in a summer stock production of the musical 'Bye Bye Birdie'. In 1971, he dropped out of school at age 17 and moved across the Hudson River to New York City. He made his off-Broadway debut in 1972 in 'Rain' and then landed a small role in the touring company of the hit musical 'Grease'. Then followed on Broadway 'Over Here!', starring The Andrews Sisters, in which he sang the Sherman Brothers' song 'Dream Drummin''. He then moved to Los Angeles to try Hollywood. Travolta's first screen role in California was as a fall victim in the television series Emergency!, in September 1972, but his first significant film role was as Billy Nolan, a bully who was goaded into playing a prank on Sissy Spacek's character in the horror film Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976), the first film adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Around the same time, he landed the role as Vinnie Barbarino in the ABC TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–1979), in which his sister, Ellen, also occasionally appeared as Arnold Horshack's mother. He shot to overnight superstardom, and his face instantly adorned T-shirts and lunch boxes. Travolta had a hit single titled 'Let Her In', peaking at number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in July 1976. That year, he starred in the TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (Randal Kleiser, 1976). Then followed the first of his two most noted screen roles: Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977). Jason Ankeny at AllMovie: " A latter-day Rebel Without a Cause set against the backdrop of the New York City disco nightlife, it positioned Travolta as the most talked-about young star in Hollywood. In addition to earning his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, he also became an icon of the era, his white-suited visage and cocky, rhythmic strut enduring as defining images of late-'70s American culture."He followed it up with the part of Danny Zuko in the film adaptation of Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978) with Olivia Newton-John. Its box-office success was even greater than Saturday Night Fever's. Both films were among the most commercially successful pictures of the decade and catapulted Travolta to international stardom. Saturday Night Fever earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, making him, at age 24, one of the youngest performers ever nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. Travolta performed several of the songs on the Grease soundtrack album. After the laughable May-December romance Moment by Moment (Jane Wagner, 1978) in which he starred with Lily Tomlin, Travolta, in 1980, inspired a nationwide country music craze that followed on the heels of his hit film Urban Cowboy (James Bridges, 1980), in which he starred with Debra Winger. Another success was the thriller Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) with Nancy Allen.

During the 1980s, John Travolta starred in a series of commercial and critical failures that sidelined his acting career. These included Two of a Kind (John Herzfeld, 1983), a romantic comedy reuniting him with Olivia Newton-John, and Perfect (James Bridges, 1985), co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis. He also starred in Staying Alive (Sylvester Stallone, 1983), the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, for which he trained rigorously and lost 20 pounds. The film was a financial success, grossing over $65 million, though it, too, was scorned by critics. During that time, Travolta was offered, but declined, lead roles in what would become box-office hits, including American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980) and An Officer and a Gentleman (Taylor Hackford, 1982), both of which went to Richard Gere, as well as Splash (Ton Howard, 1984), which went to Tom Hanks. In 1989, Travolta starred with Kirstie Alley in Look Who's Talking (Amy Heckerling, 1989), which grossed $297 million, making it his most successful film since Grease. He subsequently starred in Look Who's Talking Too (Amy Heckerling, 1990) and Look Who's Talking Now (Tom Ropelewski, 1993), but it was not until he played Vincent Vega in Quentin Tarantino's hit Pulp Fiction (1994), with Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, that his career was revived. Quentin Tarantino, a longtime Travolta fan, wrote the role of Vincent Vega specifically with the actor in mind. Jason Ankeny at AllMovie: "Travolta reportedly waived his salary to play the role. A critical as well as commercial smash, Pulp Fiction introduced Travolta to a new generation of moviegoers, and suddenly he was again a major star who could command a massive salary, with a second Academy Award nomination to prove it." Travolta was inundated with offers. He followed Pulp Fiction with the Elmore Leonard adaptation Get Shorty (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1995). His turn as Mafioso-turned-movie producer Chili Palmer is acclaimed by many critics as his finest performance to date. The film was another major hit. Then followed roles in White Man's Burden (Desmond Nakano, 1995), Broken Arrow (John Woo, 1996), and Face/Off (John Woo, 1997) with Nicolas Cage. He also played a charismatic, Bill Clinton-like U.S. President in Primary Colors (Mike Nichols, 1998) opposite Emma Thompson. The political satire was critically acclaimed but earned only $52 million from a $65 million budget.

In 2000, John Travolta starred in and co-produced the science fiction film Battlefield Earth (Roger Christian, 2000), based on the novel of the same name by L. Ron Hubbard, in which he played the villainous leading role as a leader of a group of aliens that enslaves humanity on a bleak future Earth. The film had been a dream project for Travolta since the book's release in 1982 when Hubbard had written to him to try to help make a film adaptation. The film received almost universally negative reviews and did very poorly at the box office. Travolta's performance in Battlefield Earth also earned him two Razzie Awards. Throughout the 2000s, Travolta remained busy as an actor, starring in many films, including Swordfish (Dominic Sena, 2001) with Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry, the crime-comedy Be Cool (F. Gary Gray, 2005) in which he again played ultra cool Chili Palmer, and the biker road comedy Wild Hogs (Walt Becker, 2007) starring Tim Allen. In 2007, Travolta played Edna Turnblad in the remake of Hairspray (Adam Shankman, 2008), his first musical since Grease. In the Disney computer-animated film Bolt (Chris Williams, Byron Howard, 2008), Travolta voiced the title character. The next year, he appeared in the re-make of The Taking of Pelham 123 (Tony Scott, 2009) opposite Denzel Washington and in Old Dogs (Walt Decker, 2009) with Robin Williams. Since 2010, Travolta has starred mostly in action films and thrillers. In 2016, he returned to television in the first season of the anthology series American Crime Story, titled The People v. O. J. Simpson, in which he played lawyer Robert Shapiro. Travolta was in a relationship with actress Diana Hyland, 18 years his senior, whom he met while filming The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976). They remained together until Hyland's death from breast cancer in 1977. Travolta also had an on-again/off-again relationship with actress Marilu Henner, which ended permanently in 1985. He married actress Kelly Preston in 1991, and they bought a house in Islesboro, Maine. They had three children: Jett (1992–2009), Ella Bleu (2000), and Benjamin (2010). In 2009, Jett died at age 16 while on a Christmas vacation in the Bahamas. A Bahamian death certificate was issued, attributing the cause of death to a seizure. Jett, who had a history of seizures, reportedly suffered from Kawasaki disease since the age of two. In 2020, Travolta's wife, Kelly Preston, died at the age of 57, two years after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Travolta has been a practitioner of Scientology since 1975. Following the death of his wife Kelly Preston in July 2020, Travolta hinted on his Instagram account that he would be putting his career on hold, stating "I will be taking some time to be there for my children who have lost their mother, so forgive me in advance if you don’t hear from us for a while."

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

German promotion card by Polydor, no. 118. John Travolta in Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978).

John Travolta (1954) is an American actor and singer, who rose to fame during the 1970s, when he appeared on the television sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (1975-1979), and starred in the box office successes Carrie (1976), Saturday Night Fever (1977), Grease (1978) and Urban Cowboy (1980). His acting career declined throughout the 1980s, but in 1994, Travolta made one of the most stunning comebacks in entertainment history by starring in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994). Since then he starred in such films as Get Shorty (1995), Face/Off (1997), Primary Colors (1998), and Hairspray (2007). Travolta was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for performances in Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. In 2016, he received his first Primetime Emmy Award, as a producer of the anthology series American Crime Story in which he also played lawyer Robert Shapiro.

The youngest of six children, John Travolta was born in 1954 in Englewood, New Jersey, an inner-ring suburb of New York City in Bergen County, New Jersey. His father, Salvatore "Sam" Travolta was a semiprofessional American football player turned tire salesman and partner in a tire company. His mother, Helen Travolta (née Helen Cecilia Burke) was an actress and singer who had appeared in The Sunshine Sisters, a radio vocal group, and acted and directed before becoming a high school drama and English teacher His siblings Joey, Ellen, Ann, Margaret, and Sam Travolta were all inspired by their mother's love of theatre and drama and became actors. He was raised Roman Catholic but converted to Scientology in 1975. Travolta attended Dwight Morrow High School. By the age of 12 Travolta himself had already joined an area actors' group, and soon began appearing in local musicals and dinner-theater performances. He started acting appearing in a local production of 'Who'll Save the Plowboy?'. At 16 he landed his first professional job in a summer stock production of the musical 'Bye Bye Birdie'. In 1971, he dropped out of school at age 17 and moved across the Hudson River to New York City. He made his off-Broadway debut in 1972 in 'Rain' and then landed a small role in the touring company of the hit musical 'Grease'. Then followed on Broadway 'Over Here!', starring The Andrews Sisters, in which he sang the Sherman Brothers' song 'Dream Drummin''. He then moved to Los Angeles to try Hollywood. Travolta's first screen role in California was as a fall victim in the television series Emergency!, in September 1972, but his first significant film role was as Billy Nolan, a bully who was goaded into playing a prank on Sissy Spacek's character in the horror film Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976), the first film adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Around the same time, he landed the role as Vinnie Barbarino in the ABC TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–1979), in which his sister, Ellen, also occasionally appeared as Arnold Horshack's mother. He shot to overnight superstardom, and his face instantly adorned T-shirts and lunch boxes. Travolta had a hit single titled 'Let Her In', peaking at number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in July 1976. That year, he starred in the TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (Randal Kleiser, 1976). Then followed the first of his two most noted screen roles: Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977). Jason Ankeny at AllMovie: " A latter-day Rebel Without a Cause set against the backdrop of the New York City disco nightlife, it positioned Travolta as the most talked-about young star in Hollywood. In addition to earning his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, he also became an icon of the era, his white-suited visage and cocky, rhythmic strut enduring as defining images of late-'70s American culture."He followed it up with the part of Danny Zuko in the film adaptation of Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978) with Olivia Newton-John. Its box-office success was even greater than Saturday Night Fever's. Both films were among the most commercially successful pictures of the decade and catapulted Travolta to international stardom. Saturday Night Fever earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, making him, at age 24, one of the youngest performers ever nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. Travolta performed several of the songs on the Grease soundtrack album. After the laughable May-December romance Moment by Moment (Jane Wagner, 1978) in which he starred with Lily Tomlin, Travolta, in 1980, inspired a nationwide country music craze that followed on the heels of his hit film Urban Cowboy (James Bridges, 1980), in which he starred with Debra Winger. Another success was the thriller Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) with Nancy Allen.

During the 1980s, John Travolta starred in a series of commercial and critical failures that sidelined his acting career. These included Two of a Kind (John Herzfeld, 1983), a romantic comedy reuniting him with Olivia Newton-John, and Perfect (James Bridges, 1985), co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis. He also starred in Staying Alive (Sylvester Stallone, 1983), the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, for which he trained rigorously and lost 20 pounds. The film was a financial success, grossing over $65 million, though it, too, was scorned by critics. During that time, Travolta was offered, but declined, lead roles in what would become box-office hits, including American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980) and An Officer and a Gentleman (Taylor Hackford, 1982), both of which went to Richard Gere, as well as Splash (Ton Howard, 1984), which went to Tom Hanks. In 1989, Travolta starred with Kirstie Alley in Look Who's Talking (Amy Heckerling, 1989), which grossed $297 million, making it his most successful film since Grease. He subsequently starred in Look Who's Talking Too (Amy Heckerling, 1990) and Look Who's Talking Now (Tom Ropelewski, 1993), but it was not until he played Vincent Vega in Quentin Tarantino's hit Pulp Fiction (1994), with Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, that his career was revived. Quentin Tarantino, a longtime Travolta fan, wrote the role of Vincent Vega specifically with the actor in mind. Jason Ankeny at AllMovie: "Travolta reportedly waived his salary to play the role. A critical as well as commercial smash, Pulp Fiction introduced Travolta to a new generation of moviegoers, and suddenly he was again a major star who could command a massive salary, with a second Academy Award nomination to prove it." Travolta was inundated with offers. He followed Pulp Fiction with the Elmore Leonard adaptation Get Shorty (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1995). His turn as Mafioso-turned-movie producer Chili Palmer is acclaimed by many critics as his finest performance to date. The film was another major hit. Then followed roles in White Man's Burden (Desmond Nakano, 1995), Broken Arrow (John Woo, 1996), and Face/Off (John Woo, 1997) with Nicolas Cage. He also played a charismatic, Bill Clinton-like U.S. President in Primary Colors (Mike Nichols, 1998) opposite Emma Thompson. The political satire was critically acclaimed but earned only $52 million from a $65 million budget.

In 2000, John Travolta starred in and co-produced the science fiction film Battlefield Earth (Roger Christian, 2000), based on the novel of the same name by L. Ron Hubbard, in which he played the villainous leading role as a leader of a group of aliens that enslaves humanity on a bleak future Earth. The film had been a dream project for Travolta since the book's release in 1982 when Hubbard had written to him to try to help make a film adaptation. The film received almost universally negative reviews and did very poorly at the box office. Travolta's performance in Battlefield Earth also earned him two Razzie Awards. Throughout the 2000s, Travolta remained busy as an actor, starring in many films, including Swordfish (Dominic Sena, 2001) with Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry, the crime-comedy Be Cool (F. Gary Gray, 2005) in which he again played ultra cool Chili Palmer, and the biker road comedy Wild Hogs (Walt Becker, 2007) starring Tim Allen. In 2007, Travolta played Edna Turnblad in the remake of Hairspray (Adam Shankman, 2008), his first musical since Grease. In the Disney computer-animated film Bolt (Chris Williams, Byron Howard, 2008), Travolta voiced the title character. The next year, he appeared in the re-make of The Taking of Pelham 123 (Tony Scott, 2009) opposite Denzel Washington and in Old Dogs (Walt Decker, 2009) with Robin Williams. Since 2010, Travolta has starred mostly in action films and thrillers. In 2016, he returned to television in the first season of the anthology series American Crime Story, titled The People v. O. J. Simpson, in which he played lawyer Robert Shapiro. Travolta was in a relationship with actress Diana Hyland, 18 years his senior, whom he met while filming The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976). They remained together until Hyland's death from breast cancer in 1977. Travolta also had an on-again/off-again relationship with actress Marilu Henner, which ended permanently in 1985. He married actress Kelly Preston in 1991, and they bought a house in Islesboro, Maine. They had three children: Jett (1992–2009), Ella Bleu (2000), and Benjamin (2010). In 2009, Jett died at age 16 while on a Christmas vacation in the Bahamas. A Bahamian death certificate was issued, attributing the cause of death to a seizure. Jett, who had a history of seizures, reportedly suffered from Kawasaki disease since the age of two. In 2020, Travolta's wife, Kelly Preston, died at the age of 57, two years after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Travolta has been a practitioner of Scientology since 1975. Following the death of his wife Kelly Preston in July 2020, Travolta hinted on his Instagram account that he would be putting his career on hold, stating "I will be taking some time to be there for my children who have lost their mother, so forgive me in advance if you don’t hear from us for a while."

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Romanian postcard by Casa Filmului Acin, no. C.P.C.S. 33 150. John Travolta in Staying Alive (Sylvester Stallone, 1983).

John Travolta (1954) is an American actor and singer, who rose to fame during the 1970s, when he appeared on the television sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (1975-1979), and starred in the box office successes Carrie (1976), Saturday Night Fever (1977), Grease (1978) and Urban Cowboy (1980). His acting career declined throughout the 1980s, but in 1994, Travolta made one of the most stunning comebacks in entertainment history by starring in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994). Since then he starred in such films as Get Shorty (1995), Face/Off (1997), Primary Colors (1998), and Hairspray (2007). Travolta was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for performances in Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. In 2016, he received his first Primetime Emmy Award, as a producer of the anthology series American Crime Story in which he also played lawyer Robert Shapiro.

The youngest of six children, John Travolta was born in 1954 in Englewood, New Jersey, an inner-ring suburb of New York City in Bergen County, New Jersey. His father, Salvatore "Sam" Travolta was a semiprofessional American football player turned tire salesman and partner in a tire company. His mother, Helen Travolta (née Helen Cecilia Burke) was an actress and singer who had appeared in The Sunshine Sisters, a radio vocal group, and acted and directed before becoming a high school drama and English teacher His siblings Joey, Ellen, Ann, Margaret, and Sam Travolta were all inspired by their mother's love of theatre and drama and became actors. He was raised Roman Catholic but converted to Scientology in 1975. Travolta attended Dwight Morrow High School. By the age of 12 Travolta himself had already joined an area actors' group and soon began appearing in local musicals and dinner-theater performances. He started acting appearing in a local production of 'Who'll Save the Plowboy?'. At 16 he landed his first professional job in a summer stock production of the musical 'Bye Bye Birdie'. In 1971, he dropped out of school at age 17 and moved across the Hudson River to New York City. He made his off-Broadway debut in 1972 in 'Rain' and then landed a small role in the touring company of the hit musical 'Grease'. Then followed on Broadway 'Over Here!', starring The Andrews Sisters, in which he sang the Sherman Brothers' song 'Dream Drummin''. He then moved to Los Angeles to try Hollywood. Travolta's first screen role in California was as a fall victim in the television series Emergency!, in September 1972, but his first significant film role was as Billy Nolan, a bully who was goaded into playing a prank on Sissy Spacek's character in the horror film Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976), the first film adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Around the same time, he landed the role as Vinnie Barbarino in the ABC TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–1979), in which his sister, Ellen, also occasionally appeared as Arnold Horshack's mother. He shot to overnight superstardom, and his face instantly adorned T-shirts and lunch boxes. Travolta had a hit single titled 'Let Her In', peaking at number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in July 1976. That year, he starred in the TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (Randal Kleiser, 1976). Then followed the first of his two most noted screen roles: Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977). Jason Ankeny at AllMovie: " A latter-day Rebel Without a Cause set against the backdrop of the New York City disco nightlife, it positioned Travolta as the most talked-about young star in Hollywood. In addition to earning his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, he also became an icon of the era, his white-suited visage and cocky, rhythmic strut enduring as defining images of late-'70s American culture."He followed it up with the part of Danny Zuko in the film adaptation of Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978) with Olivia Newton-John. Its box-office success was even greater than Saturday Night Fever's. Both films were among the most commercially successful pictures of the decade and catapulted Travolta to international stardom. Saturday Night Fever earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, making him, at age 24, one of the youngest performers ever nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. Travolta performed several of the songs on the Grease soundtrack album. After the laughable May-December romance Moment by Moment (Jane Wagner, 1978) in which he starred with Lily Tomlin, Travolta, in 1980, inspired a nationwide country music craze that followed on the heels of his hit film Urban Cowboy (James Bridges, 1980), in which he starred with Debra Winger. Another success was the thriller Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) with Nancy Allen.

During the 1980s, John Travolta starred in a series of commercial and critical failures that sidelined his acting career. These included Two of a Kind (John Herzfeld, 1983), a romantic comedy reuniting him with Olivia Newton-John, and Perfect (James Bridges, 1985), co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis. He also starred in Staying Alive (Sylvester Stallone, 1983), the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, for which he trained rigorously and lost 20 pounds. The film was a financial success, grossing over $65 million, though it, too, was scorned by critics. During that time, Travolta was offered, but declined, lead roles in what would become box-office hits, including American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980) and An Officer and a Gentleman (Taylor Hackford, 1982), both of which went to Richard Gere, as well as Splash (Ton Howard, 1984), which went to Tom Hanks. In 1989, Travolta starred with Kirstie Alley in Look Who's Talking (Amy Heckerling, 1989), which grossed $297 million, making it his most successful film since Grease. He subsequently starred in Look Who's Talking Too (Amy Heckerling, 1990) and Look Who's Talking Now (Tom Ropelewski, 1993), but it was not until he played Vincent Vega in Quentin Tarantino's hit Pulp Fiction (1994), with Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, that his career was revived. Quentin Tarantino, a longtime Travolta fan, wrote the role of Vincent Vega specifically with the actor in mind. Jason Ankeny at AllMovie: "Travolta reportedly waived his salary to play the role. A critical as well as commercial smash, Pulp Fiction introduced Travolta to a new generation of moviegoers, and suddenly he was again a major star who could command a massive salary, with a second Academy Award nomination to prove it." Travolta was inundated with offers. He followed Pulp Fiction with the Elmore Leonard adaptation Get Shorty (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1995). His turn as Mafioso-turned-movie producer Chili Palmer is acclaimed by many critics as his finest performance to date. The film was another major hit. Then followed roles in White Man's Burden (Desmond Nakano, 1995), Broken Arrow (John Woo, 1996), and Face/Off (John Woo, 1997) with Nicolas Cage. He also played a charismatic, Bill Clinton-like U.S. President in Primary Colors (Mike Nichols, 1998) opposite Emma Thompson. The political satire was critically acclaimed but earned only $52 million from a $65 million budget.

In 2000, John Travolta starred in and co-produced the science fiction film Battlefield Earth (Roger Christian, 2000), based on the novel of the same name by L. Ron Hubbard, in which he played the villainous leading role as a leader of a group of aliens that enslaves humanity on a bleak future Earth. The film had been a dream project for Travolta since the book's release in 1982 when Hubbard had written to him to try to help make a film adaptation. The film received almost universally negative reviews and did very poorly at the box office. Travolta's performance in Battlefield Earth also earned him two Razzie Awards. Throughout the 2000s, Travolta remained busy as an actor, starring in many films, including Swordfish (Dominic Sena, 2001) with Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry, the crime-comedy Be Cool (F. Gary Gray, 2005) in which he again played ultra cool Chili Palmer, and the biker road comedy Wild Hogs (Walt Becker, 2007) starring Tim Allen. In 2007, Travolta played Edna Turnblad in the remake of Hairspray (Adam Shankman, 2008), his first musical since Grease. In the Disney computer-animated film Bolt (Chris Williams, Byron Howard, 2008), Travolta voiced the title character. The next year, he appeared in the re-make of The Taking of Pelham 123 (Tony Scott, 2009) opposite Denzel Washington and in Old Dogs (Walt Decker, 2009) with Robin Williams. Since 2010, Travolta has starred mostly in action films and thrillers. In 2016, he returned to television in the first season of the anthology series American Crime Story, titled The People v. O. J. Simpson, in which he played lawyer Robert Shapiro. Travolta was in a relationship with actress Diana Hyland, 18 years his senior, whom he met while filming The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976). They remained together until Hyland's death from breast cancer in 1977. Travolta also had an on-again/off-again relationship with actress Marilu Henner, which ended permanently in 1985. He married actress Kelly Preston in 1991, and they bought a house in Islesboro, Maine. They had three children: Jett (1992–2009), Ella Bleu (2000), and Benjamin (2010). In 2009, Jett died at age 16 while on a Christmas vacation in the Bahamas. A Bahamian death certificate was issued, attributing the cause of death to a seizure. Jett, who had a history of seizures, reportedly suffered from Kawasaki disease since the age of two. In 2020, Travolta's wife, Kelly Preston, died at the age of 57, two years after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Travolta has been a practitioner of Scientology since 1975. Following the death of his wife Kelly Preston in July 2020, Travolta hinted on his Instagram account that he would be putting his career on hold, stating "I will be taking some time to be there for my children who have lost their mother, so forgive me in advance if you don’t hear from us for a while."

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

wrhstol.com/2ntp5ac

Romanian postcard by Casa Filmului Acin.

John Travolta (1954) is an American actor and singer, who rose to fame during the 1970s, when he appeared on the television sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (1975-1979), and starred in the box office successes Carrie (1976), Saturday Night Fever (1977), Grease (1978) and Urban Cowboy (1980). His acting career declined throughout the 1980s, but in 1994, Travolta made one of the most stunning comebacks in entertainment history by starring in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994). Since then he starred in such films as Get Shorty (1995), Face/Off (1997), Primary Colors (1998), and Hairspray (2007). Travolta was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for performances in Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. In 2016, he received his first Primetime Emmy Award, as a producer of the anthology series American Crime Story in which he also played lawyer Robert Shapiro.

The youngest of six children, John Travolta was born in 1954 in Englewood, New Jersey, an inner-ring suburb of New York City in Bergen County, New Jersey. His father, Salvatore "Sam" Travolta was a semiprofessional American football player turned tire salesman and partner in a tire company. His mother, Helen Travolta (née Helen Cecilia Burke) was an actress and singer who had appeared in The Sunshine Sisters, a radio vocal group, and acted and directed before becoming a high school drama and English teacher His siblings Joey, Ellen, Ann, Margaret, and Sam Travolta were all inspired by their mother's love of theatre and drama and became actors. He was raised Roman Catholic but converted to Scientology in 1975. Travolta attended Dwight Morrow High School. By the age of 12 Travolta himself had already joined an area actors' group, and soon began appearing in local musicals and dinner-theater performances. He started acting appearing in a local production of 'Who'll Save the Plowboy?'. At 16 he landed his first professional job in a summer stock production of the musical 'Bye Bye Birdie'. In 1971, he dropped out of school at age 17 and moved across the Hudson River to New York City. He made his off-Broadway debut in 1972 in 'Rain' and then landed a small role in the touring company of the hit musical 'Grease'. Then followed on Broadway 'Over Here!', starring The Andrews Sisters, in which he sang the Sherman Brothers' song 'Dream Drummin''. He then moved to Los Angeles to try Hollywood. Travolta's first screen role in California was as a fall victim in the television series Emergency!, in September 1972, but his first significant film role was as Billy Nolan, a bully who was goaded into playing a prank on Sissy Spacek's character in the horror film Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976), the first film adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Around the same time, he landed the role as Vinnie Barbarino in the ABC TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–1979), in which his sister, Ellen, also occasionally appeared as Arnold Horshack's mother. He shot to overnight superstardom, and his face instantly adorned T-shirts and lunch boxes. Travolta had a hit single titled 'Let Her In', peaking at number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in July 1976. That year, he starred in the TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (Randal Kleiser, 1976). Then followed the first of his two most noted screen roles: Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977). Jason Ankeny at AllMovie: " A latter-day Rebel Without a Cause set against the backdrop of the New York City disco nightlife, it positioned Travolta as the most talked-about young star in Hollywood. In addition to earning his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, he also became an icon of the era, his white-suited visage and cocky, rhythmic strut enduring as defining images of late-'70s American culture."He followed it up with the part of Danny Zuko in the film adaptation of Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978) with Olivia Newton-John. Its box-office success was even greater than Saturday Night Fever's. Both films were among the most commercially successful pictures of the decade and catapulted Travolta to international stardom. Saturday Night Fever earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, making him, at age 24, one of the youngest performers ever nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. Travolta performed several of the songs on the Grease soundtrack album. After the laughable May-December romance Moment by Moment (Jane Wagner, 1978) in which he starred with Lily Tomlin, Travolta, in 1980, inspired a nationwide country music craze that followed on the heels of his hit film Urban Cowboy (James Bridges, 1980), in which he starred with Debra Winger. Another success was the thriller Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) with Nancy Allen.

During the 1980s, John Travolta starred in a series of commercial and critical failures that sidelined his acting career. These included Two of a Kind (John Herzfeld, 1983), a romantic comedy reuniting him with Olivia Newton-John, and Perfect (James Bridges, 1985), co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis. He also starred in Staying Alive (Sylvester Stallone, 1983), the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, for which he trained rigorously and lost 20 pounds. The film was a financial success, grossing over $65 million, though it, too, was scorned by critics. During that time, Travolta was offered, but declined, lead roles in what would become box-office hits, including American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980) and An Officer and a Gentleman (Taylor Hackford, 1982), both of which went to Richard Gere, as well as Splash (Ton Howard, 1984), which went to Tom Hanks. In 1989, Travolta starred with Kirstie Alley in Look Who's Talking (Amy Heckerling, 1989), which grossed $297 million, making it his most successful film since Grease. He subsequently starred in Look Who's Talking Too (Amy Heckerling, 1990) and Look Who's Talking Now (Tom Ropelewski, 1993), but it was not until he played Vincent Vega in Quentin Tarantino's hit Pulp Fiction (1994), with Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, that his career was revived. Quentin Tarantino, a longtime Travolta fan, wrote the role of Vincent Vega specifically with the actor in mind. Jason Ankeny at AllMovie: "Travolta reportedly waived his salary to play the role. A critical as well as commercial smash, Pulp Fiction introduced Travolta to a new generation of moviegoers, and suddenly he was again a major star who could command a massive salary, with a second Academy Award nomination to prove it." Travolta was inundated with offers. He followed Pulp Fiction with the Elmore Leonard adaptation Get Shorty (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1995). His turn as Mafioso-turned-movie producer Chili Palmer is acclaimed by many critics as his finest performance to date. The film was another major hit. Then followed roles in White Man's Burden (Desmond Nakano, 1995), Broken Arrow (John Woo, 1996), and Face/Off (John Woo, 1997) with Nicolas Cage. He also played a charismatic, Bill Clinton-like U.S. President in Primary Colors (Mike Nichols, 1998) opposite Emma Thompson. The political satire was critically acclaimed but earned only $52 million from a $65 million budget.

In 2000, John Travolta starred in and co-produced the science fiction film Battlefield Earth (Roger Christian, 2000), based on the novel of the same name by L. Ron Hubbard, in which he played the villainous leading role as a leader of a group of aliens that enslaves humanity on a bleak future Earth. The film had been a dream project for Travolta since the book's release in 1982 when Hubbard had written to him to try to help make a film adaptation. The film received almost universally negative reviews and did very poorly at the box office. Travolta's performance in Battlefield Earth also earned him two Razzie Awards. Throughout the 2000s, Travolta remained busy as an actor, starring in many films, including Swordfish (Dominic Sena, 2001) with Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry, the crime-comedy Be Cool (F. Gary Gray, 2005) in which he again played ultra cool Chili Palmer, and the biker road comedy Wild Hogs (Walt Becker, 2007) starring Tim Allen. In 2007, Travolta played Edna Turnblad in the remake of Hairspray (Adam Shankman, 2008), his first musical since Grease. In the Disney computer-animated film Bolt (Chris Williams, Byron Howard, 2008), Travolta voiced the title character. The next year, he appeared in the re-make of The Taking of Pelham 123 (Tony Scott, 2009) opposite Denzel Washington and in Old Dogs (Walt Decker, 2009) with Robin Williams. Since 2010, Travolta has starred mostly in action films and thrillers. In 2016, he returned to television in the first season of the anthology series American Crime Story, titled The People v. O. J. Simpson, in which he played lawyer Robert Shapiro. Travolta was in a relationship with actress Diana Hyland, 18 years his senior, whom he met while filming The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976). They remained together until Hyland's death from breast cancer in 1977. Travolta also had an on-again/off-again relationship with actress Marilu Henner, which ended permanently in 1985. He married actress Kelly Preston in 1991, and they bought a house in Islesboro, Maine. They had three children: Jett (1992–2009), Ella Bleu (2000), and Benjamin (2010). In 2009, Jett died at age 16 while on a Christmas vacation in the Bahamas. A Bahamian death certificate was issued, attributing the cause of death to a seizure. Jett, who had a history of seizures, reportedly suffered from Kawasaki disease since the age of two. In 2020, Travolta's wife, Kelly Preston, died at the age of 57, two years after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Travolta has been a practitioner of Scientology since 1975. Following the death of his wife Kelly Preston in July 2020, Travolta hinted on his Instagram account that he would be putting his career on hold, stating "I will be taking some time to be there for my children who have lost their mother, so forgive me in advance if you don’t hear from us for a while."

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

One of my favourite sitcoms of all time is Friends, and although my favourite Friend varied according to my mood, actor Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing was usually my favourite, due to his quick, dry sense of humour. I was so sad to hear of his death at the weekend.

F*R*I*E*N*D*S

Black & white pencil drawing done on "Strathmore Recycled sketch paper. Size 16x20. A Steven Chateauneuf Creation. PLEASE do NOT post this image on other websites without my permission.

Wienerberg

Dutch postcard.

Donna Reed (1921-1986) was an American film, television actress, and producer. Her career spanned more than 40 years, with performances in more than 40 films. She is well known for her role as Mary Hatch Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946). She received the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Lorene Burke in the war drama From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953). Reed is also known as Donna Stone, a middle-class American mother, and housewife in the sitcom The Donna Reed Show (1958–1966).

Donna Reed was born Donna Belle Mullenger on a farm near Denison, Iowa, in 1921. She was the daughter of Hazel Jane and William Richard Mullenger. The eldest of five children, she was raised as a Methodist. In 1936, while she was a sophomore at Denison (Iowa) High School, her chemistry teacher Edward Tompkins gave her the book How to Win Friends and Influence People. Upon reading it she won the lead in the school play, was voted Campus Queen and was in the top 10 of the 1938 graduating class. After graduating from Denison High School, she decided to move to California to attend Los Angeles City College on the advice of her aunt. While attending college, she performed in various stage productions, although she had no plans to become an actress. After receiving several offers to screen test for studios, Reed eventually signed with MGM. Reed made her film debut in The Get-Away (Edward Buzzell, 1941). She had a support role in Shadow of the Thin Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1941) and in Wallace Beery's The Bugle Sounds (S. Sylvan Simon, 1942). Like many starlets at MGM, she played opposite Mickey Rooney in an Andy Hardy film, in her case the hugely popular The Courtship of Andy Hardy (George B. Seitz, 1942). Reed starred in the drama Calling Dr. Gillespie (Harold S. Bucquet, 1942), featuring Lionel Barrymore, and Apache Trail (Richard Thorpe, 1942). Then she did a thriller with Edward Arnold, Eyes in the Night (Fred Zinnemann, 1942). Reed had a support role in The Human Comedy (Clarence Brown, 1943) with Mickey Rooney, a big film for MGM. She was one of many MGM stars to make cameos in Thousands Cheer (George Sidney, 1943). Produced at the height of the Second World War, the film was intended as a morale booster for American troops and their families. Her "girl-next-door" good looks and warm onstage personality made her a popular pin-up for many GIs during World War II. She personally answered letters from many GIs serving overseas. She was in the Oscar Wilde adaptation The Picture of Dorian Gray (Albert Lewin, 1945) and played a nurse in John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945), opposite John Wayne. MGM was very enthusiastic about Reed's prospects at this time. Reed was top-billed in a romantic comedy Faithful in My Fashion (Sidney Salkow, 1946) with Tom Drake which lost money. MGM lent her to RKO Pictures for the role of Mary Bailey in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. The film has since been named as one of the 100 best American films ever made by the American Film Institute and is regularly aired on television during the Christmas season. Back at MGM, she appeared in Green Dolphin Street (Victor Saville, 1947) with Lana Turner and Van Heflin. It was a big hit. Reed was borrowed by Paramount to make two films with Alan Ladd, Beyond Glory (John Farrowm 1948), where she replaced Joan Caulfield at the last moment, and the Film Noir Chicago Deadline (Lewis Allen, 1949). In 1949 she expressed a desire for better roles.

In 1950, Donna Reed signed a contract with Columbia Studios.[ She appeared in two Film Noirs which teamed her with John Derek, Saturday's Hero (David Miller, 1951) and Scandal Sheet (Phil Karlson, 1952). Reed was the love interest of Randolph Scott in the Western Hangman's Knot (Roy Huggins, 1952), then was borrowed by Warner Bros for the comedy Trouble Along the Way (Michael Curtiz, 1953) with John Wayne. She was loaned out to play John Payne's love interest in Raiders of the Seven Seas (Edward Small, 1953). Reed played the role of Alma "Lorene" Burke, the girlfriend of Montgomery Clift's character, in the World War II drama From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953). The role earned Reed an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for 1953. The qualities of her parts did not seem to improve: she was the love interest in The Caddy (Norman Taurog, 1953) with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at Paramount; the Western Gun Fury (Raoul Walsh, 1953) with Rock Hudson; and the Western Three Hours to Kill (Alfred L. Werker, 1954) with Dana Andrews. Reed returned to MGM to act in the romantic drama The Last Time I Saw Paris (Richard Brooks, 1954) with Elizabeth Taylor. Reed began guest starring on television shows such as The Ford Television Theatre, Tales of Hans Anderson, General Electric Theater and Suspicion. She continued to appear in features, usually as the love interest, in The Benny Goodman Story (1956) with Steve Allen, playing Goodman's wife; Ransom! (1956) as Glenn Ford's wife; the Western Backlash (1956), with Richard Widmark. In Kenya, she filmed Beyond Mombasa (1957), with Cornel Wilde. She was injured while making the film. In England, she shot The Whole Truth (1958), with Stewart Granger. From 1958 to 1966, Reed starred in The Donna Reed Show, a television series produced by her then-husband, Tony Owen. The show featured her as Donna Stone, the wife of pediatrician Alex Stone (Carl Betz) and mother of Jeff (Paul Petersen) and Mary Stone (Shelley Fabares). Reed was attracted to the idea of being in a comedy, something with which she did not have much experience. She also liked playing a wife. The show ran for eight seasons. Reed won a Golden Globe Award and earned four Emmy Award nominations for her work on the series. Later in her career, Reed replaced Barbara Bel Geddes as Miss Ellie Ewing Farlow in the 1984–1985 season of the television melodrama Dallas. When she was abruptly fired upon Bel Geddes' decision to return to the show, she sued the production company for breach of contract. From 1943 to 1945, Donna Reed was married to make-up artist William Tuttle. After they divorced, in 1945 she married producer Tony Owen. They raised four children together: Penny Jane, Anthony, Timothy, and Mary Anne (the two older children were adopted). After 26 years of marriage, Reed and Owen divorced in 1971. Three years later, Reed married Grover W. Asmus, a retired United States Army colonel. They remained married until her death in 1986. Donna Reed died of pancreatic cancer in Beverly Hills, California, in 1986, 13 days shy of her 65th birthday. Her remains are interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Like every year, Sheldon, Leonard, Howard and Rajesh will go to Comicon. This year they decided to dress up as some of the most iconic characters in the Star Wars saga!

Sheldon will be an Imperial Stormtrooper, Leonard will be Luke Skywalker, Howard become Obi-Wan Kenobi and Rajesh the great Han Solo !!!

... is the question posed by this beautiful hunk of woman who stars in the TV sitcom "Sex and the City." She asks the burning question, would you rather look at me or an abandoned, trashed piece of condemned real estate?" The message she has for me is, "Look at the beauty in life, not the ugliness. Accept the beauty, not the ugly, Try to make things beautiful, not ugly." Then of course, someone thinks perhaps I'm a hypocrite because I make so many of my people distorted and ugly. That leads me to explain my goal, which is that most of us are neither movie star beautiful, not, as the saying goes, butt-ugly." We vary and we are diverse. We are truly beautiful in our diversity and I celebrate that diversity. In this wonderful, multisensational life we live, here are a few seconds for me to tell you how I see the beauty of God, as opposed to the bloated, pompous, self-righteous hypocracy of so many Pharasitic Bible thumpers. Give Sister Rosetta Tharpe a moment and see if she can explain God to you:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNq8DejQRN8

I received this "testimony" of Sister Rosetta Tharpe from delanceyplace.com and here's what they had to say:

In today's excerpt - Sister Rosetta Tharpe, viewed by some as the first rock and roll guitarist. Tharpe first gained widespread attention performing in Barney Josephson's Café Society, a New York City nightclub, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Josephson's club was the first to both feature black jazz artists and allow black patrons in the audience, and he brought a stellar variety of previously little known black talent to the broader public - including Billie Holiday and Lena Horne. Here Josephson reminisces about Tharpe:

"Sister Rosetta Tharpe not only could sing electrifying gospel but what an acoustic guitar she could play. [Jazz promoter] John Hammond explained, 'She is one of the first to use it for melody-plucked lines. Her technically astonishing lead breaks invented the rock and roll guitar.' In his 1938 'From Spirituals to Swing' concert, Sister Tharpe 'was a surprise smash; knocked the people out.'

"Rosetta Tharpe was a child star. Born in 1915 in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, she was a baby when her mother took up preaching, traveling from church to church to spread the gospel. As a four-year-old, Rosetta was already singing and playing the guitar. She was the big attraction that brought in the worshippers to her mother's services. Rosetta Tharpe was a pioneer. When she sang gospel on a secular stage she scandalized the sanctified church. They never forgave her. Religious folk opposed singing in cabarets; it was synonymous with the Devil, God's enemy. They told Sister Tharpe that either she serve the devil or God. She would respond that the Lord knew her heart and it wouldn't lead her astray. She was the first gospel singer to sign with a major recording company and to appear in a nightclub - mine. Her song style was filled with blues inversion. ... She bent her notes like a horn player, and syncopated in swing band manner. My secular audiences were fascinated with her blues-oriented gospel, a first for many of them.

"[Critic Malcolm Johnson wrote] 'Sister Rosetta Tharpe rates unqualified enthusiasm for the stirring quality of her songs, sung in the spiritual vein of swing tempo. At Cafe Society she is offering some new compositions of her own.' "

I have only one rule for learning. "Before you decide what you believe and who you are, remove head from ass."