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After a days sound testing on the Sizewell branch line the the 6Z69 1542 Sizewell C.E.G.B. to Stowmarket D.G.L. With 20 JNA Bogie Box wagons & No 68026 trailing on the rear seen at 1707 passes through Woodbridge station.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
... even the most beautiful sunset...
I thought myself for untouched by almost one of the heaviest illnesses..
so I did not go regularly for having a check-up etc.
and after an ultra-sound test I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
At this time I am recovering from a surgery which is following with
radiation, chemotherapy and so on ...
I thank all my family and friends for their support
(thank you Vasili, Vanessa, Bianca, Niko!!)))..
And a big "thank you" to all the medical staff for their prompt and professional help!!
Thank you dear Flickr-friends for remembering me!!!
PS. Für meine Deutschen Flickr-Freunde…:
Geht öfter zur Vorsorge-Untersuchung.!!!
Denn ALLES andere hat wirklich keinen Sinn.
My latest creation. Made from a hardwood step tread, a lawnmower muffler and other bits and pieces.
This is an ad hock sound bite to give you an idea. soundcloud.com/jagstang987/sound-test-of-my-three-string-...
6Z70 0729 Stowmarket D.G.L. to Sizewell C.E.G.B. This is a sound test run this will be conducted on the branch between Saxmundham and Sizewell, the service is seen approaching Woodbridge No 68026 brings up the rear seen at 0813.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
The main north facing entrance of the Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History taken on a cool autumn evening in 2014; Olympus E-5 with Olympus Zuiko Digital 14-42mm F3.5-5.6 lens, manual exposures on Slik tripod HDR processing Photomatix, cleaning up in Adobe Lightroom. This beautiful other worldly looking six story cubical glass edifice houses the world famous Hayden Planetarium, the beautiful sphere clearly visible in its center. The design by James Polshek and Todd Schliemann makes the Hayden Planetarium’s Sphere appear to be floating within the clear enclosure though obviously supported by strategically situated trusses which James Polshek refers to as a “cosmic cathedral”. The Rose Center opened its doors in 2000, as the original Hayden Planetarium was torn down in 1997.
The original Hayden Planetarium was constructed in 1935, a two story brick building which had a concrete-copper covered Art-Deco dome which was the predominant style of official buildings in New York City and the United States in general. It was named after the principal benefactor that contributed to the purchase of the gold-standard of planetarium projectors, the Zeiss II, bank mogul Charles Hayden. It was the fourth planetarium erected in the United States of America. The original planetarium set a high mark in 1935, with its state of the art instruments, projectors and design; it was considered “acoustically perfect” and the quietest building in the world as it scored a new decibel low in sound-test recording. I was fortunate to have viewed multiple shows in the 1970’s and 1980’s in the old Planetarium.
The new Planetarium is up to the task, with Computer Aided Design, aka CAD, the Polshek and Schliemann were able to design and build an appropriate successor to the old planetarium it replaced. Visually stunning, the new Hayden Planetarium houses two theaters, one featuring a one-of-a-kind Ziess Mark IX Hayden Edition projector on the top and bottom has an amazing light and laser extravaganza. The shows I viewed here were amazing and certainly the state of the art sound, acoustics and visuals make the Hayden Planetarium perhaps the most advanced planetarium in the world.
A few days ago, we had a crazy idea. We decided to host a beach party and get everyone to go retro. DJ Mel, who's pretty cool btw, agreed. And at 9am SLT today, she's going to take over the console and give us two hours of classic rock music. Come over if you're in the mood, cos we are all set to party
Your ride: Les Eclaireurs Coast
The High Gain Antenna of ESA’s Hera asteroid mission for planetary defence seen being prepared for testing in the acoustic reverberation chamber of the IABG test centre in Germany. This involves blasting it with launcher-level noise through the speakers seen in the wall.
Hera is Europe’s contribution to an international planetary defence experiment. Following the NASA DART mission’s impact with the Dimorphos asteroid last year – modifying its orbit and sending a plume of debris thousands of kilometres out into space – Hera will return to Dimorphos to perform a close-up survey of the crater left by DART. The mission will also measure Dimorphos’ mass and make-up, along with that of the larger Didymos asteroid that Dimorphos orbits around.
Hera’s 1.13-m diameter High Gain Antenna will play a crucial role in mission success, by transmitting high-volume data back to Earth while receiving detailed telecommands in turn – with the mission’s Low Gain Antenna serving as backup for low data rate emergency communications.
The antenna has previously undergone radio frequency evaluation at ESA’s Compact Antenna Test Range at the ESTEC technical centre in the Netherlands before passing on to IABG in Germany for vibration testing then AAC in Austria for a stay in representative extreme-temperature vacuum conditions.
Constructed from carbon fibre, the High Gain Antenna was manufactured by HPS in Germany and Romania. It will boost Hera’s signals more than 4000-fold to reach Earth, focused down to only half a degree in the sky, so that the entire spacecraft will move in order to line up with its homeworld.
Later this year the antenna will be combined with all the rest of Hera’s subsystems, for the start of the spacecraft-scale environmental test campaign at ESA’s ESTEC Test Centre in the Netherlands, due to begin this autumn. Hera is scheduled to be launched in October 2024.
Credits: HPS
6Z70 0729 Stowmarket D.G.L. to Sizewell C.E.G.B. This is a sound test run this will be conducted on the branch between Saxmundham and Sizewell, the service is seen on the Sizewell branch line near Knodishall No 66422 is on the front.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
TPE interloper on 6Z70 0729 Stowmarket D.G.L. to Sizewell C.E.G.B. This is a sound test run this will be conducted on the branch between Saxmundham and Sizewell, the service is seen passing through Woodbridge station in reverse formation from the day before on the occasion I only had my phone on me. The Greater Anglia service from Lowestoft sits in the platform ready to depart at 0839.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
6Z70 0729 Stowmarket D.G.L. to Sizewell C.E.G.B. This is a sound test run this will be conducted on the branch between Saxmundham and Sizewell, the service is seen on the Sizewell branch line near Knodishall No 68026 brings up the rear seen at 0953.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
After a days sound testing on the Sizewell branch line the TPE interloper passes through Woodbridge station on 6Z69 1542 Sizewell C.E.G.B. to Stowmarket D.G.L. with 20 JNA Bogie Box wagons No 66422 trailing on the rear seen at 1707.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
6Z70 0729 Stowmarket D.G.L. to Sizewell C.E.G.B. This is a sound test run this will be conducted on the branch between Saxmundham and Sizewell, the service is seen on the Sizewell branch line near Knodishall No 66422 is on the front.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
Bringing up the rear Trans Pennine Express interloper on the East Suffolk line with 6Z70 0729 Stowmarket D.G.L. to Sizewell C.E.G.B. sound test run to be done on the branch line between Saxmundham and Sizewell. No 66422 was on the front seen approaching Woodbridge at 0814.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
6Z70 0729 Stowmarket D.G.L. to Sizewell C.E.G.B. This is a sound test run this will be conducted on the branch between Saxmundham and Sizewell, the service is seen at Woodbridge station No 68026 brings up the rear seen at 0827.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
6Z70 0729 Stowmarket D.G.L. to Sizewell C.E.G.B. This is a sound test run this will be conducted on the branch between Saxmundham and Sizewell, the service is seen on the Sizewell branch line near Knodishall No 66422 is on the front.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
Bringing up the rear Trans Pennine Express interloper on the East Suffolk line with 6Z70 0729 Stowmarket D.G.L. to Sizewell C.E.G.B. sound test run to be done on the branch line between Saxmundham and Sizewell. No 66422 was on the front seen departing Woodbridge at 0839.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
In the fall of 1965, the "family space adventure" Lost in Space debuted on CBS television.
The storyline concerned the launch of the Jupiter 2 on October 16, 1997. Professor John Robinson, his wife Maureen and their children, Judy, Penny and Will, along with Major Don West (the spaceship's pilot) compromised the world's first "space family," selected to colonize a planet in the Alpha Centauri star system. They would all be frozen in suspended animation for a 98-year journey. Dr. Zachary Smith became trapped on board while sabotaging the Robinsons’ spaceship prior to launch. His dastardly handiwork causes the ship to spiral off course and crash-land on a desert planet.
Another member of the crew was the wonderfully impressive Environmental Control Robot known simply as "Robot". Art Director Robert Kinoshita (the talent behind Robby the Robot from the movie, Forbidden Planet) designed the automaton, finishing the suit to accomodate diminutive character actor Bob May. May spoke the robot's lines on stage, pressing a small telegraph switch inside the left claw in sync with the syllables to activate the neon in the chest plate. He would see out through the slatted collar with the upper half of his face blackened to avoid showing up on camera.
The television voice of Robot was provided by Dick Tufeld, already employed as the show's announcer. During the interview/sound test, producer Irwin Allen explained he wanted a cultured, laid back voice for his robot. After twenty minutes, Allen decided that Tufeld just wasn't what he was looking for. As he turned to leave, Tufeld asked him if could try one more thing. He delivered a series of robotian mechanical lines as he had originally intended, including the now famous "Warning, that does not compute." Allen looked stunned and said, "That's it! What took you so long?"
Dick Tufeld was never on the set for filming of the episodes. During post-production, he would come into the studio and loop the robots voice, using recordings of Bob May's lines delivered on the set played through headphones to synchronize with the original soundtrack. The sound engineers would then work to mix Tufeld's voice into the show. Depending on the number of lines to be recorded (the Robot often having more lines than the principal actors), it could take one and a half to two hours to lay down 60 to 70 lines of dialogue for one episode.
Tufeld reprised his role some 30 years later in 1998 for the motion picture version of Lost In Space.
- from various internet sources
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If you can, please make a contribution towards the disaster relief
efforts in New Orleans by donating to the American Red Cross.
ALSO - To bid on a signed (by myself and Jolene) 10x8 photographic print of my image entitled "Clash Of The Titans" for the Flickr Katrina Relief Auction, click HERE. All proceeds go to the above charity. My talented friend seanhfoto has started the bidding. Now, show him what you can do now.
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As a way of returning the extraordinary generosity and support you
have all shown me in this great community, whenever I upload a new
pic or series of shots this year, I'll provide a link to another flickr
photog whose work, personality, or spirit I feel you should discover.
Visit and introduce yourself. Make a friend. Share the love.
Open your eyes to neuskool today.
6Z70 0729 Stowmarket D.G.L. to Sizewell C.E.G.B. This is a sound test run this will be conducted on the branch between Saxmundham and Sizewell, the service is seen on the Sizewell branch line near Knodishall No 66422 is on the front.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
After a days sound testing on the Sizewell branch line the TPE interloper passes through Woodbridge station on 6Z69 1542 Sizewell C.E.G.B. to Stowmarket D.G.L. with 20 JNA Bogie Box wagons No 66422 trailing on the rear seen at 1707.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
The wrapped up ISIM structure pushed back to the clean room post acoustics-test, to prepare for the EMI test.
Credits: NASA/Desiree Stover
Read more: 1.usa.gov/1KvoY4p
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.
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German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 4176/2, 1929-1930. Photo: Fox.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921) according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del Río, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown.
During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from film-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Astonished Heart', and 'Still Life'. She also began performing regularly on the radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939) and Brigham Young (Henry Hathaway, 1940), starring Tyrone Power. In John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress and murderer Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the film in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends. Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside. That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre roles she called "Mothers for Metro". After Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in 'Many Happy Returns' (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (Walter Lang, 1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947) playing the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. In 1947 Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the Film Noir Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir 'A Life on Film'. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Mary Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, and the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-`1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959).
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
My kiddo taking a camel ride at Horse Shoe Cafe, Ludhiana.
While she was taking her joyride, our friends, members of grunge band 'Snorting Jatts', were around the stage sound testing for their evening concert. I saw that she was more interested in the rock music than her camel ride. I smiled, "like father like daughter".
German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 4398/1, 1929-1930. Photo: Fox. Collection: Geoffrey Donaldson Institute.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Lucille was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she later played piano in her films The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944). In 1919, Lucille sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. The family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Lucille took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with the haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky, and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons. Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of William Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921), according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's later fellow WAMPAS Baby Star, Dolores Costello, whom he married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish-style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year, when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del Río, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present, and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract, and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success, and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown. During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names, and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon, unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from filmmaking in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1952, Mary Astor was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and ageing film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic's urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959). Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion picture star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
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"Jani Ruscica’s works thrive in a space where they can enjoy freedom of movement. They linger in conditions where previously agreed upon guidelines for reading can be identified, but where compliance with them is challenging if not fully impossible. A space that opens up such different directions holds a place for the spectator and their interpretations.
In Ruscica’s works, the relationship between signs, objects and concepts is an unstable one. Prior context always forms a base for new layers of meaning. The phenomena and forms depicted by these works evade straightforward interpretation and binary categories.
Self reflexivity, both of form and medium, is elemental to the works. In the video work No Dot on the I (2021), materials and sounds test out their own qualities; their legibility and nameability. About Us (refrain to refrain) (2022), a new video to be premiered at Kunsthalle Helsinki, detaches from linguistic communication to rely instead on voice and bodily expression only. An algorithm disrupts the assumed linearity of the work, and the video starts to unfold randomly.
The new wall paintings adapt to the Kunsthalle’s architecture – expanding and stretching out according to the dimensions of the building. The sunlight filtering through the windows projects images into the space, fluid ones, that keep shifting and changing, depending on the time of day and intensity of the light.
Furthermore, a commissioned prose poem written by Taneli Viljanen is presented as part of the exhibition, as well as the performative piece Felt the Moonlight on my Feet – a, pro, pre, post, contra, ultra, hyper, alter, trans, re, dis, un, dys, extra, co, ex, non, inter, sub (2022) in collaboration with tap dancer Suzanna Pezo.
The exhibition is curated by Piia Oksanen.
Jani Ruscica (b. 1978) was born in Savonlinna, Finland and spent their childhood in Italy. They presently live and work in Helsinki. Ruscica studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, as well as at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki."
TPE interloper on 6Z70 0729 Stowmarket D.G.L. to Sizewell C.E.G.B. This is a sound test run this will be conducted on the branch between Saxmundham and Sizewell, the service is seen passing through Woodbridge station in reverse formation from the day before on the occasion I only had my phone on me.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. 240b.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921) according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del Río, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown.
During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from film-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Astonished Heart', and 'Still Life'. She also began performing regularly on the radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939) and Brigham Young (Henry Hathaway, 1940), starring Tyrone Power. In John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress and murderer Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the film in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends. Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside. That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre roles she called "Mothers for Metro". After Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in 'Many Happy Returns' (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (Walter Lang, 1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947) playing the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. In 1947 Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the Film Noir Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir 'A Life on Film'. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Mary Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, and the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-`1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959).
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
A photo of Bohus from our latest video shoot. In the video Bohus tests our V-Mic with a GoPro, comparing audio between it and the built in mic on the camera.
German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 4996/2, 1929-1930. Photo: Fox.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921) according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del Río, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown.
During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from film-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Astonished Heart', and 'Still Life'. She also began performing regularly on the radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939) and Brigham Young (Henry Hathaway, 1940), starring Tyrone Power. In John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress and murderer Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the film in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends. Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside. That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre roles she called "Mothers for Metro". After Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in 'Many Happy Returns' (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (Walter Lang, 1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947) playing the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. In 1947 Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the Film Noir Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir 'A Life on Film'. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Mary Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, and the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-`1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959).
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Our humble new podcast studio, with new kit.
From left: Behringer Eurorack UB802 Mixer, M-Audio Mobilepre USB (USB Bus-Powered Preamp and Audio Interface), Audio Technica AT-897 Shotgun condenser microphone, iPod 40Gb Clickwheel with Griffin iTalk and lapel mic, Sennheiser HD 280 Pro studio monitor headphones, Apple Powerbook G4, M-Audio Nova studio condenser microphone with Stedman Proscreen 101 pop filter, and Shure SM-58 dynamic microphone.
You may wish to listen to a podcast discussing it. Not a regular mrbrown show, but a sound test and audio tour of the mrbrown show podcast studio. Only listen if you are interested in our podcast gear. Though there is a fun little recording I included at the end of the show.
Austrian postcard by Iris-Verlag, no. 5429. Photo: Fox.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921) according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del Río, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown.
During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from film-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Astonished Heart', and 'Still Life'. She also began performing regularly on the radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939) and Brigham Young (Henry Hathaway, 1940), starring Tyrone Power. In John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress and murderer Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the film in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends. Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside. That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre roles she called "Mothers for Metro". After Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in 'Many Happy Returns' (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (Walter Lang, 1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947) playing the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. In 1947 Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the Film Noir Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir 'A Life on Film'. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Mary Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, and the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-`1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959).
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
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Dutch postcard, no. 648. Photo: Warner Bros.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921) according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del Río, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown.
During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from film-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Astonished Heart', and 'Still Life'. She also began performing regularly on the radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939) and Brigham Young (Henry Hathaway, 1940), starring Tyrone Power. In John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress and murderer Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the film in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends. Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside. That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre roles she called "Mothers for Metro". After Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in 'Many Happy Returns' (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (Walter Lang, 1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947) playing the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. In 1947 Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the Film Noir Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir 'A Life on Film'. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Mary Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, and the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-`1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959).
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
6Z70 0729 Stowmarket D.G.L. to Sizewell C.E.G.B. This is a sound test run this will be conducted on the branch between Saxmundham and Sizewell, the service is seen at Woodbridge station No 68026 brings up the rear seen at 0827.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
Austrian postcard by Iris-Verlag, no. 5428. Photo: Fox.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921) according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del Río, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown.
During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from film-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Astonished Heart', and 'Still Life'. She also began performing regularly on the radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939) and Brigham Young (Henry Hathaway, 1940), starring Tyrone Power. In John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress and murderer Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the film in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends. Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside. That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre roles she called "Mothers for Metro". After Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in 'Many Happy Returns' (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (Walter Lang, 1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947) playing the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. In 1947 Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the Film Noir Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir 'A Life on Film'. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Mary Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, and the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-`1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959).
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Is she or isn't she? On the 9th of August 2013 one of the headlines in the news around the World is about whether or not Tian Tian, one of Edinburgh Zoo's pandas, may be pregnant. If she is then it's just possible that this could surpass the excitement generated by the new Royal baby a month earlier. There has never before been a panda cub born in the UK.
The Zoo and Chinese officials believe Tian Tian and Yang Guang are perfect breeding specimens. Both have bred before but little is being left to chance. Tian Tian's enclosure, a converted gorilla enclosure, has its own hospital and maternity suite, complete with incubator and should she be pregnant then a baby panda will be born in September. This summer Tian Tian has been getting larger and a series of ultra-sound tests is being carried out.
At the end of 2011 Lothian Buses teamed up with Edinburgh Zoo in a special all-over promotion for the arrival of our pandas from China and fleet number 900 was given this special wrap-around promotion for a year. This photo was originally taken in January 2012.
One of the great hopes of the zoo keepers is that the pandas will have babies, but the mating season lasts for about as long as it takes for a 26 to get from Corstorphine Road here at the zoo to Seton Sands and back again. Well perhaps a little longer but you get the picture!
The pandas at Edinburgh Zoo have resulted in visitor numbers soaring beyond belief since they were seen at the start of 2012 and this gift to Scotland for ten years has a specific role: to increase knowledge for conservation science, educate the public about endangered species and, critically, to help boost the zoo's commercial income. With about 1,600 in the wild, and 332 in captivity, giant pandas are on the red list of critically endangered species.
Lothian's Volvo B9TL, Wright Eclipse Gemini number 900 (SN08 BXO) is no longer wearing this livery and perhaps if we are to have a baby panda then the vehicle might have to have new artwork in celebration. Pandamania is all set to top the bill at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival.
which would be your choice ? 1 - Dobro from China, 2 - concert guitar from Spain, 3 - Gitane from France, 4 - Gibson, nylon strings, from USA - compare flickrcomments.wordpress.com/2013/07/10/guitar-soundtest/
German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 3135/1, 1928-1929. Photo: Defina / First National.
American film actress Mary Astor (1906–1987) was famous for her part as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Great Lie (1941). Astor had a long acting career that already started in the silent era in 1921 and included over 100 films.
Mary Astor was born as Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906. She was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. Both of her parents were teachers. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in films. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930. A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Mary Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 either in the Buster Keaton comedy The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) - according to IMDb, or in Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson, 1921) according to Wikipedia. She then appeared in some short films with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the two-reeler The Beggar Maid (Herbert Blaché, 1921) with Reginald Denny. Her first feature-length film was John Smith (Victor Heerman, 1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God (F. Harmon Weight, 1922) starring George Arliss. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood. After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more films, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming film. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together. Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes' interference and Astor's inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor's fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as Moorcrest in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor's earnings but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second-floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. She returned when Otto Langhanke gave her a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realise more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Mary Astor continued to appear in films at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del Río, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (Irving Cummings, 1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1928). When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard Hawks) at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929. Astor took voice training and singing lessons in her time off with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play 'Among the Married' at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. In early 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox film Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with George Bancroft and her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more films, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown.
During the months of her illness, Mary Astor was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married in 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman (Gregory La Cava, 1931), playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (Michael Curtiz, 1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from film-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings. Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A legal battle drew press attention to Astor in 1936 when a custody battle resulted over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. News of the diary became public when Astor's role in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalised because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated. In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Astonished Heart', and 'Still Life'. She also began performing regularly on the radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (John Cromwell, 1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939) and Brigham Young (Henry Hathaway, 1940), starring Tyrone Power. In John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress and murderer Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the film in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends. Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside. That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre roles she called "Mothers for Metro". After Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in 'Many Happy Returns' (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (Walter Lang, 1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947) playing the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. In 1947 Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the Film Noir Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir 'A Life on Film'. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Mary Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, and the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', which was later made into the film Summertime (David Lean, 1955) with Katharine Hepburn, and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theatre and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson. Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. In 1954, she also appeared in the episode Fearful Hour of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller, in an episode titled Rose's Last Summer (1960). During these years, she appeared on many big shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-`1959), Rawhide (1961), and Dr. Kildare (1963-1963). She starred on Broadway again in 'The Starcross Story' (1954), another failure, and returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of 'Don Juan in Hell' directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's memoir, 'My Story: An Autobiography', was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the film industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, 'A Life on Film', where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction. She appeared in several films during this time, including A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956) with Robert Wagner, and A Stranger in My Arms (Helmut Käutner, 1959).
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the 'shocking' novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library and received good reviews for her performance. After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. In 'A Life on Film', she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the film business. She only appeared in the drama Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964), which premiered before Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After 109 films in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. Astor died in 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
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6Z70 0729 Stowmarket D.G.L. to Sizewell C.E.G.B. This is a sound test run this will be conducted on the branch between Saxmundham and Sizewell, the service is seen on the Sizewell branch line near Knodishall No 68026 brings up the rear seen at 1035.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
Press L now
Satsop is an unfinished Nuclear Power Plant, which commenced construction in 1977 and was stopped in 1983 after a $961,000,000
budget overrun, at only 76% completion. It was maintained, for 11 years, until 1994, when it was finally canceled in 1995, it was eventually turned Business Park.
Business seem to come and go, but ultimately the place offers a physically strong building built to withstand the force of a nuclear reactor overload and teh impact of a full speed Boeing 747 impact, and with that come some added bonuses like perfectly silent acoustics where one part of the main reactor room has been transformed into a sound testing facility.
Because of the budgetary screwup the common name for Satsop is whoops, an acronym; WPPSS (Washington Public Power Supply System).
Still learning the Panoramic function of my camera..
6Z70 0729 Stowmarket D.G.L. to Sizewell C.E.G.B. This is a sound test run this will be conducted on the branch between Saxmundham and Sizewell, the service is seen on the Sizewell branch line near Knodishall No 66422 is on the front.
Ian Sharman - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission.
"Jani Ruscica’s works thrive in a space where they can enjoy freedom of movement. They linger in conditions where previously agreed upon guidelines for reading can be identified, but where compliance with them is challenging if not fully impossible. A space that opens up such different directions holds a place for the spectator and their interpretations.
In Ruscica’s works, the relationship between signs, objects and concepts is an unstable one. Prior context always forms a base for new layers of meaning. The phenomena and forms depicted by these works evade straightforward interpretation and binary categories.
Self reflexivity, both of form and medium, is elemental to the works. In the video work No Dot on the I (2021), materials and sounds test out their own qualities; their legibility and nameability. About Us (refrain to refrain) (2022), a new video to be premiered at Kunsthalle Helsinki, detaches from linguistic communication to rely instead on voice and bodily expression only. An algorithm disrupts the assumed linearity of the work, and the video starts to unfold randomly.
The new wall paintings adapt to the Kunsthalle’s architecture – expanding and stretching out according to the dimensions of the building. The sunlight filtering through the windows projects images into the space, fluid ones, that keep shifting and changing, depending on the time of day and intensity of the light.
Furthermore, a commissioned prose poem written by Taneli Viljanen is presented as part of the exhibition, as well as the performative piece Felt the Moonlight on my Feet – a, pro, pre, post, contra, ultra, hyper, alter, trans, re, dis, un, dys, extra, co, ex, non, inter, sub (2022) in collaboration with tap dancer Suzanna Pezo.
The exhibition is curated by Piia Oksanen.
Jani Ruscica (b. 1978) was born in Savonlinna, Finland and spent their childhood in Italy. They presently live and work in Helsinki. Ruscica studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, as well as at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki."