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Actress Christina Bradford at SRK Headshot Day in San Francisco.
Lighting: Paul C Buff Einstein with 64" reflecting Umbrella and Diffuser camera right. Einstein with 86" Reflecting Umbrella Camera Left. Fired with Cybersyncs. Skylight for fill.
British postcard by Star Graphics, London, no. S 127.
American actress Meryl Streep (1949) is one of the best actresses of her generation, known for her versatility and accents.She has been nominated for the Oscar an astonishing 21 times, and has won it three times. Among her other accolades, she has received 32 Golden Globe nominations, more than any other person, and won eight.
Mary Louise 'Meryl' Streep was born in 1949, in Summit, New Jersey. She is the daughter of Mary Wilkinson Streep (née Mary Wolf Wilkinson), a commercial artist and art editor; and Harry William Streep, Jr., a pharmaceutical executive. She has two younger brothers: Harry William Streep III and Dana David Streep, who are also actors. At the age of 12, Streep was selected to sing at a school recital, leading to her having opera lessons from Estelle Liebling. She quit after four years. Although Streep appeared in numerous school plays during her high school years, she was uninterested in serious theatre until acting in the play Miss Julie at Vassar College in 1969, in which she gained attention across the campus. She received her B.A. cum laude from the college in 1971, before applying for an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. Streep played a variety of roles on stage, from Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream to an 80-year-old woman in a wheelchair in a comedy written by then-unknown playwrights Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato. She received her MFA from Yale in 1975. That year, Streep made her stage debut in New York in Trelawny of the Wells by Arthur Wing Pinero. The following year, she received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play for appearing in the 1976 double bill of '27 Wagons Full of Cotton' by Tennessee Williams and 'A Memory of Two Mondays' by Arthur Miller. She made her screen debut in the television film The Deadliest Season (Robert Markowitz, 1977), a sports drama with Michael Moriarty. Her film debut was the award-winning Holocaust drama Julia (Fred Zinnemann, 1977), starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. It is based on a chapter from Lillian Hellman's book Pentimento about the author's relationship with a lifelong friend, 'Julia,' who fought against the Nazis in the years prior to World War II. Streep had a small role during a flashback sequence. She received her first Oscar nomination for the epic war drama The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978). Critic Pauline Kael remarked that she was a "real beauty" who brought much freshness to the film with her performance. The film, starring Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken, was also successful at the box office, grossing $49 million. She also won an Emmy Award for her role in the miniseries Holocaust (Marvin J. Chomsky, 1978), which recounts the trajectory of the Holocaust from the perspectives of the fictional Weiss family of German Jews and that of a rising member of the SS (Michael Moriarty), who gradually becomes a merciless war criminal. Streep travelled to Germany and Austria for filming while her partner, actor John Cazale, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer, remained in New York. Upon her return, Streep found that Cazale's illness had progressed, and she nursed him until his death in March 1978. Streep starred opposite Dustin Hoffman in the legal drama Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979). It tells the story of a couple's (Streep and Dustin Hoffmann) divorce, its impact on their young son (Justin Henry), and the subsequent evolution of their relationship and views on parenting. For Kramer vs. Kramer, Streep won both the Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, which she famously left in the ladies' room after giving her speech.
Meryl Streep's first leading role was in the British romantic drama The French Lieutenant's Woman (Karel Reisz, 1981), a story within a story drama. The film paired Streep with Jeremy Irons as contemporary actors, telling their modern story, as well as the Victorian era drama they were performing. She got an Oscar nomination for her performance. Streep won the Oscar for Best Actress for Sophie's Choice (Alan J. Pakula, 1982). Streep was very determined to get the role. After obtaining a bootlegged copy of the script, she went after Pakula, and threw herself on the ground, begging him to give her the part. She portrayed a Polish survivor of Auschwitz, caught in a love triangle between a young naïve writer (Peter MacNicol) and a Jewish intellectual (Kevin Kline). Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote: "Though it's far from a flawless movie, 'Sophie's Choice' is a unified and deeply affecting one. Thanks in large part to Miss Streep's bravura performance, it's a film that casts a powerful, uninterrupted spell." In 1983, Streep played her first non-fictional character, the nuclear whistleblower and labor union activist Karen Silkwood, who died in a suspicious car accident while investigating alleged wrongdoing at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant, in Mike Nichols' biographical drama Silkwood (Mike Nichols, 1983) with Cher. Then she portrayed a fighter for the French Resistance during World War II in the British drama Plenty (Fred Schepisi, 1985), adapted from the play by David Hare. Her next release, the epic romantic drama Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1985), established her as a Hollywood superstar. In the film, Streep starred as the Danish writer Karen Blixen, opposite Robert Redford's Denys Finch Hatton. It earned her another Oscar nomination. Karina Longworth notes in 'Meryl Streep: Anatomy of an Actor' (2013) that the dramatic success of Out of Africa led to a backlash of critical opinion against Streep in the years that followed, especially as she was now demanding $4 million a picture. Unlike other stars at the time, such as Sylvester Stallone and Tom Cruise, Streep "never seemed to play herself", and certain critics felt her technical finesse led people to literally see her acting.
Meryl Streep's other Oscar-nominated roles were in Ironweed (Héctor Babenco, 1987) with Jack Nicholson, the Australian drama Evil Angels/A Cry in the Dark (Fred Schepisi, 1988), the comedy-drama Postcards from the Edge (Mike Nichols, 1990) with Shirley MacLaine, the romantic drama The Bridges of Madison County (Clint Eastwood, 1995), One True Thing (Carl Franklin, 1998) with Renee Zellweger, the musical drama Music of the Heart (Wes Craven, 1999), Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002) starring Nicholas Cage, the comedy-drama The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006) with Anne Hathaway, the period drama Doubt (John Patrick Shanley, 2008), the comedy-drama Julie & Julia (Nora Ephron, 2009) with Amy Adams, August: Osage County (John Wells, 2013) with Julia Roberts, the musical fantasy Into the Woods (Rob Marshall, 2014), the biographical comedy-drama Florence Foster Jenkins (Stephen Frears, 2016) with Hugh Grant, and the historical political thriller The Post (Steven Spielberg, 2017), starring Tom Hanks. Streep won the Best Actress Oscar again for The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, 2011), the British-French biographical drama based on the life and career of Margaret Thatcher. While the film was met with mixed reviews, Streep's performance was widely acclaimed, and considered to be one of the greatest of her career. Her stage roles include The Public Theater's 2001 revival of 'The Seagull', and her television roles include two projects for HBO, the acclaimed miniseries Angels in America (2003), for which her performance won her another Emmy Award, and the drama series Big Little Lies (2019). Streep has also been the recipient of many honorary awards. She was awarded Commander of the Order of the Arts and Letters by French culture minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon in 2003. In the cinema, she appeared as Emmeline Pankhurst, a British political activist and leader of the British suffragette movement who helped women win the right to vote in the period drama Suffragette (Sarah Gavron, 2015), co-starring Carey Mulligan and Helena Bonham Carter. Streep reprised the role of Donna Sheridan in the musical sequel Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (Ol Parker, 2018). She also played a supporting part in Mary Poppins Returns (Rob Marshall, ), starring Emily Blunt in the title role. In 2019, she starred in the biographical comedy The Laundromat (Steven Soderberg, 2019), the first Netflix film in which Streep starred. The film focused on the Panama Papers in particular and Beneficial ownership in general. Streep was whistleblower John Doe who released incriminating documents to the media. In addition, she played Aunt March in Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019). Despite her stardom, for decades Streep has managed to maintain a relatively normal personal life. Streep lived with actor John Cazale for three years until his death from lung cancer in March 1978. Streep married sculptor Don Gummer six months after Cazale's death. They have four children: one son and three daughters, son Henry Wolfe Gummer (1979), a musician; daughters Mary Willa 'Mamie' Gummer (1983), an actress; Grace Jane Gummer (1986), an actress; and Louisa Jacobson Gummer (1991), a model. In February 2019, Streep became a grandmother for the first time, through her eldest daughter Mamie.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
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An actor at Kentucky's Perryville Battlefield State Historical Park
"You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub."
[Letter to Alexander Stephens by Abraham Lincoln, Dec 22, 1860]
"Now we are told in advance the Government shall be broken up unless we surrender to those we [Republicans] have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they [Southern secessionist states] are either attempting to play upon us or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us and of the [U.S.] Government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. A year will not pass till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union."
[President-elect Lincoln in January, 1861 about the vast majority of states being taken hostage by a minority of southern states.]
Romanian postcard by Casa Filmului Acin, no. C.P.V.S. c-sa 53066.
American film actor Paul Newman (1925-2008) was a matinee idol with the most famous blue eyes of Hollywood, who often played detached yet charismatic anti-heroes and rebels. He was nominated for nine acting Academy Awards in five different decades and won the Oscar for The Color of Money (1986). He was also a prominent social activist, a major proponent of actors' creative rights, and a noted philanthropist.
Paul Leonard Newman was born in 1925, in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. He was the second son of Arthur Sigmund Newman and Theresa Fetsko. His father was a Jewish businessman who owned a successful sporting goods store. His mother was a practicing Christian Scientist with an interest in the creative arts, and it rubbed off on her son. At age 10, he performed in a stage production of 'Saint George and the Dragon' at the Cleveland Play House. He also acted in high school plays. By 1950, the 25-year-old Newman had been kicked out of Ohio University, where he belonged to the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity, for unruly behavior (denting the college president's car with a beer keg), served three years in the United States Navy during World War II as a radio operator, graduated from Ohio's Kenyon College, married his first wife, actress Jacqueline "Jackie" Witte, and had his first child, Scott. That same year, his father died. When he became successful in later years, Newman said if he had any regrets it would be that his father was not around to witness his success. He brought Jackie back to Shaker Heights and he ran his father's store for a short period. Then, knowing that wasn't the career path he wanted to take, he sold his interest in the store to his brother and moved with Jackie and Scott to New Haven, Connecticut. There he attended Yale University's School of Drama. While doing a play there, Newman was spotted by two agents, who invited him to come to New York City to pursue a career as a professional actor. After moving to New York, he acted in guest spots for various television series, and in 1953 came a big break. He got the part of understudy of the lead role in the successful Broadway play 'Picnic' by William Inge. Through this play, he met actress Joanne Woodward, who was also an understudy in the play. While they got on very well and there was a strong attraction, Newman was married and his second child, Susan, was born that year. During this time, Newman was accepted into the much admired and popular New York Actors Studio, although he did not actually audition. In 1954, a film Newman was very reluctant to do was released, the failed costume drama The Silver Chalice (Victor Saville, 1954). He considered his performance in this costume epic to be so bad that he took out a full-page ad in Variety apologising for it to anyone who might have seen it. He immediately wanted to return to the stage, and performed in 'The Desperate Hours'. In 1956, he got the chance to redeem himself in the film world by portraying boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me (Robert Wise, 1956) with Pier Angeli. The role of Rocky was originally awarded to James Dean, who died before filming began. Critics praised Newman's performance. Dean also was signed to play Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun (Arthur Penn, 1958), but that role was also inherited by Newman after Dean's death. With a handful of films to his credit, he was cast in The Long, Hot Summer (1958), an acclaimed adaptation of a pair of William Faulkner short stories. His co-star was Joanne Woodward. During the shooting of this film, they realised they were meant to be together and by now, so did his then-wife Jackie, who gave Newman a divorce. He and Woodward wed in Las Vegas in January 1958. They went on to have three daughters together. They raised them in Westport, Connecticut. In 1959, Newman received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958), based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Tennessee Williams. Well-received by both critics and audiences, Cat on Hot Tin Roof was MGM's most successful release of 1958 and became the third highest-grossing film of that year.
Paul Newman traveled back to Broadway to star in Tennessee Williams' 'Sweet Bird of Youth'. Upon his return to the West Coast, he bought himself out of his Warner Bros. contract before starring in the smash From the Terrace (Mark Robson, 1960) with Joanne Woodward. Exodus (Otto Preminger, 1960), another major hit, quickly followed. The 1960s would bring Paul Newman into superstar status, as he became one of the most popular actors of the decade. In 1961, he played one of his most memorable roles as pool shark "Fast" Eddie Felson in The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961) with Jackie Gleason and Piper Laurie. It garnered him the first of three Best Actor Oscar nominations during the decade. The other two were for the Western Hud (Marin Ritt, 1963), and the superb chain-gang drama Cool Hand Luke (Jack Smight, 1967). He also appeared in the political thriller Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966) with Julie Andrews. The film, set in the Cold War, is about an American scientist who appears to defect behind the Iron Curtain to East Germany. Other minor hits were the mystery Harper (Jack Smight, 1966), with Lauren Bacall, and the Western Hombre (Martin Ritt, 1967), based on the novel by Elmore Leonard and co-starring Fredric March. In 1968, his debut directorial effort Rachel, Rachel (Paul Newman, 1968) was given good marks. He directed three actors to Oscar nominations: Joanne Woodward (Best Actress, Rachel, Rachel (1968)), Estelle Parsons (Best Supporting Actress, Rachel, Rachel (1968)), and Richard Jaeckel (Best Supporting Actor, Sometimes a Great Notion (1971)). Newman won a Golden Globe Award for his direction of Rachel, Rachel (1968). 1969 brought the popular screen duo of Newman and Robert Redford together for the first time when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969) was released. It was a box office smash. Through the 1970s, Newman had hits and misses from such popular films The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973) with Robert Redford, which won the 1973 Best Picture Oscar, and the star-studded disaster epic The Towering Inferno (John Guillermin, 1974), to lesser-known films as the Western The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (Robert Altman, 1972) with Jacqueline Bisset, to a cult classic, the sports comedy Slap Shot (George Roy Hill, 1977) with Michael Ontkean. In 1978, Newman's only son, Scott, died of a drug overdose. After Scott's death, Newman's personal life and film choices moved in a different direction.
Paul Newman's acting work in the 1980s and on is what is often most praised by critics today. He became more at ease with himself and it was evident in The Verdict (Sidney Lumet, 1982) with Charlotte Rampling, for which he received his sixth Best Actor Oscar nomination. In 1987, he finally received his first Oscar for The Color of Money (Marin Scorsese, 1986) with Tom Cruise, almost thirty years after Woodward had won hers. Friend and director of Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Robert Wise accepted the award on Newman's behalf as the actor did not attend the ceremony. Previously, Newman had been nominated as the same character in The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961). In total, he was nominated for the Oscar nine times: Best Lead Actor for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958), The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961), Hud (Marin Ritt, 1963), Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967), Absence of Malice (Sydney Pollack, 1981), The Verdict (Sidney Lumet, 1982), The Color of Money (Martin Scorsese, 1986), Nobody's Fool (Robert Benton, 1994)) and finally for Best Supporting Actor in Road to Perdition (Sam Mendes, 2002). In 1994 Newman also played alongside Tim Robbins as the character Sidney J. Mussburger in the Coen Brothers comedy The Hudsucker Proxy. Films were not the only thing on his mind during this period. A passionate race car driver since the early 1970s (despite being color-blind), he was a co-founder of Newman-Haas racing in 1982. He also founded 'Newman's Own', a line of food products, featuring mainly spaghetti sauces and salad dressings. The company made more than $100 million in profits over the years, all of which he donated to various charities. He also started The Hole in the Wall Gang Camps, an organization for children with serious illness. He was as well known for his philanthropic ways and highly successful business ventures as he was for his legendary actor status. Newman's marriage to Woodward lasted a half-century. Connecticut was their primary residence after leaving Hollywood and moving East in 1960. Renowned for his sense of humor, in 1998 he quipped that he was a little embarrassed to see his salad dressing grossing more than his films. During his later years, he still attended races, was much involved in his charitable organisations, and in 2006, he opened a restaurant called Dressing Room, which helps out the Westport Country Playhouse, a place in which Newman took great pride. In 2003, Newman appeared in a Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder's 'Our Town', receiving his first Tony Award nomination for his performance. The animated Disney-Pixar comedy Cars (John Lasseter, 2006) was his final film. It was the highest-grossing film of his career. In 2007, while the public was largely unaware of the serious illness from which he was suffering, Newman made some headlines when he said he was losing his invention and confidence in his acting abilities and that acting was "pretty much a closed book for me". A smoker for many years, Paul Newman died in 2008, aged 83, from lung cancer. With his first wife Jackie, he had three children, Scott, Stephanie, and Susan. Susan Kendall Newman is well known for stage acting and her philanthropic activities. His three daughters with Joanne Woodward are actress Melissa Newman, Nell Potts, and Claire Newman. Nine years after Paul Newman's death, he reprised his role as Doc Hudson in Cars 3 (2017): unused recordings from Cars (2006) were used as new dialogue.
Sources: Tom McDonough/Robert Sieger (IMDb), Jason Ankeny (AllMovie), AllMovie, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
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Actor/Director/Model
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Audubon Park
Uptown
New Orleans, Louisiana
Two actors with masks in the role of farmers head towards the market. One carries a calf on his shoulders, the other has a basket in front of him and a sack resting on his back..
In the later part of the fifth and the early fourth century, the actors of comedy as of all Greek drama were males. They wore tights that covered them from neck to wrists and ankles; under the tights they had heavy padding fixed over the belly and backside, and sometimes breasts as well. The seams down the sides of sleeves or leggings were often made clear by painters. On the outside of the tights at the front was affixed a large leather phallos. Earlier depictions show it as long and hanging, but from the last years of the fifth century onwards, more and more productions seem to have had it looped up in a way that, to judge from the texts, was regarded as rather more decent. A performer wearing only this body-costume was regarded as ‘stage-naked’, and it was worn by all actors, even those playing female roles. The modifiers or creators of particular identity were any clothes placed over this costume such as a tunic, a cloak, sandals, a dress for a female, and of course the mask.
In Old Comedy there was not a great range of masks - this and the subtlety they represented came with time - but enough to distinguish between free man and slave, stupid and clever. The other major source of evidence for the appearance of the comic actor from this period on is a huge number of terracotta figurines. An original and influential series was made in Athens, probably in the last years of the fifth century, and it was continued in the same style and reproduced in copies for the next three quarters of a century, and sometimes even beyond.
Part of their attraction must have been that they could be reproduced cheaply in two-part moulds or often just from molds taken from the fronts of existing figurines, so that they reached a very wide public, a much wider public than did painted vases. They could also be (and were) reproduced in towns throughout the Greek world that had no tradition of making painted vases. This local copying also tells us that they had a market in the community which must therefore have known Athenian comedy.
Source: Gregory W. Dobrov, “Brill’s Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy”
Attic clay statuette
Ca. 375 - 350 BC
Munich, Staatliche Antikensammlungen
Actor John Joseph Quinlan - Former Cruiser Weight Boxing Champion of The World Character on Set Live Filming Prep @ Dullea's Boxing via Boston Film/Series with Trainer Greg Rich.
12/19/2015
www.johnjosephquinlan.com/actor-john-joseph-quinlan-forme...
#JohnQuinlan
German postcard by H.S.K.-Verlag, Kölm (Cologne), no. 505. Photo: Paramount. Ray Milland in Copper Canyon (John Farrow, 1950).
British actor and director Ray Milland (1905-1986) had a screen career that ran from 1929 to 1985. He appeared in many Hollywood movies as the archetypal, unflappable British gentleman. Milland is best remembered for his gut-wrenching, Academy Award-winning portrayal of an alcoholic writer in The Lost Weekend (1945), for the murder-plotting husband in Dial M for Murder (1954), and as Oliver Barrett III in Love Story (1970).
Ray Milland was born Reginald Alfred John Truscott-Jones on a mountain called Cymla, above the town of Neath in Wales in 1905. Milland was the son of Alfred Jones and Elizabeth Annie (née Truscott). As a child, he took the name of his stepfather, Mullane, and was known in his early career as Jack Mullane. He later took his stage name Raymond Milland from the flat area of land called the mill lands in Neath, which he remembered fondly from his youth. In 1925, Milland enlisted as a guardsman with the Royal Household Cavalry in London. As part of his training, he became skilled in fencing, boxing, horsemanship and marksmanship. An expert shot, he became a member of his company's rifle team, winning many prestigious competitions, including the Bisley Match in England. When his duty service was completed in 1928, Milland stumbled into acting when a British filmmaker spotted him at a party and offered the 22-year-old a bit part in the romance The Plaything (Castleton Knight, 1929). More small and big roles in the British cinema and on stage followed. Among his British films were the silent ‘backstage’ drama Piccadilly (Ewald André Dupont, 1929) starring Anna May Wong, the adventure The Flying Scotsman (Castleton Knight, 1929) and the drama The Informer (Arthur Robison, 1929). Raymond Milland was discovered by a Hollywood talent scout while performing on the stage in London, and travelled to America under a short-term contract with MGM. MGM shortened his first name to Ray and continued casting the acting novice in minor supporting roles. MGM agreed to loan him out for more substantial parts in Will Rogers' Ambassador Bill (Sam Taylor, 1931) at Fox in which he tries to overthrow the boy-king of a fictional European country, and Warner Bros.' Blonde Crazy (Roy Del Ruth, 1931) in which he competes with con-artist James Cagney for Joan Blondell's affections.
When his contract with MGM expired, Ray Milland bounced around taking whatever roles he could get, including a supporting part in Fox's Charlie Chan in London (Eugene J. Forde, 1934). He returned to England for roles in This Is the Life (Albert de Courville, 1933) with Gordon Harker and the comedy Orders is Orders (Walter Forde, 1934), a satire on Hollywood movie-making. Finally, based on the strength of two films he made with Carole Lombard - Bolero (Wesley Ruggles, 1934) and We’re Not Dressing (Norman Taurog, 1934) - as well as the endorsement of his leading lady, Paramount Pictures signed Milland to a long-term contract. He would remain with the studio for some twenty years. Charming and debonair, he can be seen as suave, self-assured romantic leading man in a number of excellent drawing-room comedies, mysteries and adventures, including The Big Broadcast of 1937 (Mitchell Leisen, 1936), The Jungle Princess (William Thiele, 1936) featuring Dorothy Lamour, Beau Geste (William Wellman, 1939) with Gary Cooper, and I Wanted Wings (Mitchell Leisen, 1941) with Veronica Lake. At Film Reference, Frank Thompson writes: “The quintessential Milland performances of the ‘leading man’ variety are contained in Leisen's delightful Easy Living and Kitty. The darker, more sinister side of his personality first came to the fore in Farrow's Alias Nick Beal, a film in which Milland plays the Devil himself.” Easy Living (Mitchell Leisen, 1937) was a depression-era screwball comedy and social satire written by Preston Sturges and starring Jean Arthur. Reel Classics calls it “an often-overlooked delight”. Kitty (1945, Mitchell Leisen) was a variation on Pygmalion, in which a London aristocrat (Milland) takes it upon himself to make a lady of a guttersnipe (Paulette Goddard). Milland had a terrible accident during the filming of Hotel Imperial (Henry Hathaway, 1939) with Isa Miranda, when, taking his horse over a jump, the saddle-girth broke and he landed head-first on a pile of bricks. His most serious injuries were a concussion that left him unconscious for 24 hours, a 3-inch gash in his skull that took 9 stitches to close, and numerous fractures and lacerations on his left hand. When the Second World War began, Milland tried to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Forces, but was rejected because of his impaired left hand. He worked as a civilian flight instructor for the Army, and toured with a United Service Organisation (USO) South Pacific troupe in 1944.
Ray Milland had made over 60 feature films by the time he won an Oscar for his portrayal of an alcoholic trying to kick the booze in Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945). It would be pinnacle of Ray Milland's career and an acknowledgement of his serious dramatic abilities. The surprise shown by the critical establishment at Milland's proficiency in the role suggests that nothing much had ever been expected of him. Milland was the first Welsh actor to ever win an Oscar. He was also the first actor not to have spoken a single word during his acceptance speech, preferring to simply bow his appreciation before casually walking to the stage exit. For this performance, he was also given an award at the first Cannes Film Festival. Five years later, he gave a strong performance in Close to My Heart (William Keighley, 1951), starring with Gene Tierney as a couple trying to adopt a child. As Milland grew older and his value as a romantic lead began to wane, the more sinister aspects of this self-assuredness became more evident. In 1954, he starred as the suave and mannerly accomplice opposite Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954). Other films that exploited the murderous glint in Milland's eloquent eyes include The Thief (Russel Rouse, 1951) a Film Noir without any dialogue, and The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (Richard Fleischer, 1955) with Joan Collins. He made many television appearances. He starred as a professor in the CBS sitcom Meet Mr. McNutley (1953-1955). The program was renamed in its second season as The Ray Milland Show. From 1959–1960, he starred in the CBS detective series Markham. In the late 1960s, he hosted rebroadcasts of certain episodes of the syndicated western anthology series, Death Valley Days under the title Trails West.
In 1955, Ray Milland started directing films, such as the western A Man Alone (Ray Milland, 1955) with Raymond Burr, and the well-paced espionager Lisbon (1956, Ray Milland) with Maureen O’Hara for Republic Pictures that he also produced and starred in. He did it with surprising proficiency, but the films failed to make him successful. He achieved more success with directing for television. According to Kit and Morgan Benson at Find A Grave, he “was considered a solid and capable director and producer.” Milland returned as a film character actor in such fascinating low-budget horror films as The Premature Burial (Roger Corman, 1962) and The Man with the X-ray Eyes (Roger Corman, 1963), the latter providing Milland with the wittiest, most energetic role of his later career. He appeared in the TV classic Daughter of the Mind (Walter Grauman, 1969) in which he was reunited with Gene Tierney, and he played Ryan O'Neal's father in the hit tearjerker Love Story (Arthur Hiller, 1970). He can also be seen in such dreadful horror films as The Thing with Two Heads (Lee Frost, 1972), the British Crazy House/The House in Nightmare Park (Peter Sykes, 1973), and Terror in the Wax Museum (Georg Fenady). One of the best of that bad lot is Frogs (George McCowan, 1972), a surprisingly enjoyable entry from the ‘nature-run-amok’ horror subgenre. Milland wrote an autobiography, Wide Eyed in Babylon, published in 1974. Toward the end of his life, he guest starred in TV series as Battlestar Galactica (Glen A. Larson, 1978-1979) and the Harold Robbins’ adaptation The Dream Merchants (Vincent Sherman, 1980). His last film was the Spanish fantasy-adventure The Sea Serpent (Gregory Greens, 1986) with Timothy Bottoms, after which his declining health forced him to retire. A book-loving homebody, Milland kept away from the Hollywood glitter and was rarely mentioned in the gossip columns. At 81, he died of lung cancer in Torrance, California in 1986. He was survived by his wife, Muriel ‘Mal’ Weber, to whom he had been married since 1932. They had a son, Daniel, and an adopted daughter, Victoria. Frank Thompson at Film Reference: “Hollywood never quite knew what it had in Ray Milland, but he continuously showed himself to be an adventurous artist, always interested in exposing his established image to radical and surprising lights.”
Sources: Frank Thompson (Film Reference), Lynn Dougherty (Classic Movie Favorites), Kit and Morgan Benson (Find A Grave), Reel Classics, AllMovie, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
French postcard by Viny, no. 49. Photo: Warner Bros.
Australian-born actor Errol Flynn (1909-1959) achieved fame in Hollywood with his suave, debonair, devil-may-care attitude. He was known for his romantic Swashbuckler roles in films like Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), often co-starring Olivia de Havilland. In 1942, the tall, athletic and exceptionally handsome, Flynn became an American citizen. He developed a reputation for womanising, hard-drinking, and for a time in the 1940s, narcotics abuse. He was linked romantically with Lupe Vélez, Marlene Dietrich, and Dolores del Río, among many others.
Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn was born in a suburb of Hobart, Tasmania, in 1909. His father, Theodore, was a lecturer and later professor of biology at the University of Tasmania. His mother was Lily Mary Young. After early schooling in Hobart, from 1923 to 1925 Flynn was educated at the South West London College, a private boarding school in Barnes, London, and in 1926 returned to Australia to attend Sydney Church of England Grammar School (Shore School) where he was the classmate of a future Australian prime minister, John Gorton. His formal education ended with his expulsion from Shore for theft. After being dismissed from a job as a junior clerk with a Sydney shipping company for pilfering petty cash, he went to Papua New Guinea at the age of eighteen, seeking his fortune in tobacco planting and metals mining. He spent the next five years oscillating between the New Guinea frontier territory and Sydney. In early 1933, Flynn appeared as an amateur actor in the low-budget Australian film In the Wake of the Bounty (Charles Chauvel, 1933), in the lead role of Fletcher Christian. Later that year he returned to Britain to pursue a career in acting and soon secured a job with the Northampton Repertory Company at the town's Royal Theatre, where he worked and received his training as a professional actor for seven months. In 1934 Flynn was dismissed from Northampton Rep. reportedly after he threw a female stage manager down a stairwell. He returned to Warner Brothers' Teddington Studios in Middlesex where he had worked as an extra in the film I Adore You (George King, 1933) before going to Northampton. With his newfound acting skills, he was cast as the lead in Murder at Monte Carlo (Ralph Ince, 1935), now considered a lost film. During its filming, he was spotted by a talent scout for Warner Bros. and Flynn emigrated to the U.S. as a contract actor.
In Hollywood, Errol Flynn was first cast in two insignificant films, but then he got his great chance. He could replace Robert Donat in the title role of Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz, 1935). Flynn's natural athletic talent and good looks rocketed him overnight to international stardom. Over the next six years, he was typecast as a dashing adventurer in The Charge of the Light Brigade (Michael Curtiz, 1936), The Prince and the Pauper (William Keighley, 1937), The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz, William Keighley, 1938; his first Technicolor film), The Dawn Patrol (Edmund Goulding, 1938) with David Niven, Dodge City (Michael Curtiz, 1939), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (Michael Curtiz, 1939) and The Sea Hawk (Michael Curtiz, 1940). His striking good looks and screen charisma won him millions of fans. Flynn played an integral role in the re-invention of the action-adventure genre. In collaboration with Hollywood's best fight arrangers, Flynn became noted for fast-paced sword fights. He demonstrated an acting range beyond action-adventure roles in light, contemporary social comedies, such as The Perfect Specimen (Michael Curtiz, 1937) and Four's a Crowd (Michael Curtiz, 1938), and melodrama The Sisters (Anatole Litvak, 1938). During this period Flynn published his first book, 'Beam Ends' (1937), an autobiographical account of his sailing experiences around Australia as a youth. He also travelled to Spain, in 1937, as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. Flynn co-starred with Olivia de Havilland a total of eight times, and together they made the most successful on-screen romantic partnership in Hollywood in the late 1930s-early 1940s in eight films. Flynn's relationship with Bette Davis, his co-star in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (Michael Curtiz, 1939), was quarrelsome. Davis allegedly slapped him across the face far harder than necessary during one scene.
In 1940, at the zenith of his career, Erroll Flynn was voted the fourth most popular star in the US. Flynn became a naturalised American citizen in 1942. As the United States had by then entered the Second World War, he attempted to enlist in the armed services but failed the physical exam due to multiple heart problems and other diseases. This created an image problem for both Flynn, the supposed paragon of male physical prowess, and for Warner Brothers, which continued to cast him in athletic roles, including such patriotic productions as Dive Bomber (Michael Curtiz, 1941), Desperate Journey (Raoul Walsh, 1942) and Objective, Burma! (Raoul Walsh, 1945). His womanizing lifestyle caught up with him in 1942 when two underage girls, Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee, accused him of statutory rape at the Bel Air home of Flynn's friend Frederick McEvoy, and onboard Flynn's yacht, respectively. The scandal received immense press attention. Many of Flynn's fans, assuming that his screen persona was a reflection of his actual personality, refused to accept that the charges were true. Flynn was acquitted, but the trial's widespread coverage and lurid overtones permanently damaged his carefully cultivated screen image as an idealised romantic leading player. In 1946, Flynn published an adventure novel, 'Showdown', and earned a reported $184,000. In 1947 he signed a 15-year contract with Warner Bros. for $225,000 per film. After the Second World War, the taste of the American film-going audience changed from European-themed material and the English history-based escapist epics in which Flynn excelled to more gritty, urban realism and film noir, reflecting modern American life. Flynn tried unsuccessfully to make the transition in Uncertain Glory (Raoul Walsh, 1944) with Paul Lukas and Cry Wolf (Peter Godfrey, 1947) with Barbara Stanwyck, and then increasingly passé Westerns such as Silver River (Raoul Walsh, 1948) and Montana (Ray Enright, 1950). Flynn's behaviour became increasingly disruptive during filming; he was released from his contract in 1950 by Jack L. Warner as part of a stable-clearing of 1930s glamour-generation stars. His Hollywood career over at the age of 41, Flynn entered a steep financial and physical decline.
In the 1950s, Errol Flynn became a parody of himself. He lost his savings from the Hollywood years in a series of financial disasters, including The Story of William Tell (Jack Cardiff, 1954) with Waltraut Haas. Aimlessly he sailed around the Western Mediterranean aboard his yacht Zaca. Heavy alcohol abuse left him prematurely aged and overweight. He staved off financial ruin with roles in forgettable productions such as Hello God (William Marshall, 1951), Il maestro di Don Giovanni/Crossed Swords (Milton Krims, 1954) opposite Gina Lollobrigida and King's Rhapsody (Herbert Wilcox, 1955) with Anna Neagle. He performed in such also-ran Hollywood films as Mara Maru (Gordon Douglas, 1952) and Istanbul (Joseph Pevney, 1957) with Cornell Borchers, and made occasional television appearances. As early as 1952 he had been seriously ill with hepatitis resulting in liver damage. In 1956 he presented and sometimes performed in the television anthology series The Errol Flynn Theatre which was filmed in Britain. He enjoyed a brief revival of popularity with The Sun Also Rises (Henry King, 1957); The Big Boodle (Richard Wilson, 1957), filmed in Cuba; Too Much, Too Soon (Art Napoleon, 1958); and The Roots of Heaven (John Huston, 1958) with Juliette Gréco. In these films, he played drunks and washed-out bums and brought a poignancy to his performances that had not been there during his glamorous heydays. He met with Stanley Kubrick to discuss a role in Lolita, but nothing came of it. Flynn went to Cuba in late 1958 to film the self-produced B film Cuban Rebel Girls (Barry Mahon, 1959), where he met Fidel Castro and was initially an enthusiastic supporter of the Cuban Revolution. He wrote a series of newspaper and magazine articles for the New York Journal American and other publications documenting his time in Cuba with Castro. Many of these pieces were lost until 2009 when they were rediscovered in a collection at the University of Texas at Austin's Center for American History. He narrated a short film titled Cuban Story: The Truth About Fidel Castro Revolution (1959), his last known work as an actor. He published his autobiography, My Wicked Wicked Ways. In 1959, Errol Flynn died of a heart attack in Vancouver, Canada. Flynn was married three times. His first wife was actress Lili Damita (1935-1942). They had one son, actor and war correspondent Sean Flynn (1941-1971). Sean and his colleague Dana Stone disappeared in Cambodia in 1970, during the Vietnam War, while both were working as freelance photojournalists for Time magazine. It is generally assumed that they were killed by Khmer Rouge guerrillas. Errol was married a second time to Nora Eddington from 1943 to 1949. They had two daughters, Deirdre (1945) and Rory (1947). His third wife was actress Patrice Wymore from 1950 until his death. They had one daughter, Arnella Roma (1953–1998). In 1980, author Charles Higham published a controversial biography, 'Errol Flynn: The Untold Story', in which he alleged that Flynn was a fascist sympathiser who spied for the Nazis before and during the Second World War and that he was bisexual and had multiple gay affairs. Later Flynn biographers were critical of Higham's allegations and found no evidence to corroborate them.
Sources: Charles Culbertson (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
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British postcard. in the Picturegoer Series, London Films, no. 1049. Photo: London Films. Publicity still for Sanders of the River (Zoltan Korda, 1935).
Paul Robeson (1898-1976) was a handsome, eloquent, and highly charismatic actor and singer, who became one of the foremost interpreters of Eugene O'Neill's plays and one of the most treasured names in song during the first half of the twentieth century. With his powerful bass singing voice, Robeson made an evergreen of the song 'Old Man River'. He starred in The Emperor Jones (1933), the first film to feature an African American in a starring role. At the height of his popularity in the 1930s, Robeson became a major box office attraction in British films. In the USA, he courted disdain and public controversy for most of his career as a staunch Cold War-era advocate for human rights, as well as his very vocal support for Joseph Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. While the backlash of his civil rights activities and left-wing ideology left him embittered and practically ruined his career, he remains today a durable symbol of racial pride and consciousness.
Paul LeRoy Bustill Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1898. His siblings were William, Benjamin, Reeve, and Marian Robeson. Their father, William Drew Robeson, was a humble Presbyterian minister and former slave. In 1900, a disagreement between William and white financial supporters of the Witherspoon church arose with apparent racial undertones. William, who had the support of his entirely black congregation, resigned in 1901. The loss of his position forced him to work menial jobs. The young, impressionable Paul grew up singing spirituals in his father's church. He was only six when he and his four siblings, William, Benjamin, Reeve, Marian, lost their mother, Maria Louisa Bustill, a schoolteacher. She was nearly blind and died in a stove fire accident at home. His father then raised the family singlehandedly. Paul was a natural athlete and the tall, strapping high school fullback had no trouble earning a scholarship to prestigious Rutgers University in 1915. At the age of 17, he became only the third member of his race to be admitted at the time. He excelled in football, baseball, basketball, and track, and field, and was the class valedictorian. In his speech, he was already preaching idealism. Paul subsequently played professional football to earn money while attending Columbia University's law school, and also took part in amateur dramatics. During this time he met and married Eslanda Cardozo Goode in 1921. She eventually became his personal assistant. Following graduation, he obtained work at a New York law firm, but quit when a stenographer refused to copy a memo, telling him, "I never take diction from a n*****." His wife persuaded him to play Simon in Ridgely Torrence's 'Simon the Cyrenian' at the Harlem YMCA in 1921. This was followed by his Broadway debut the following year as Jim in Mary Hoyt Wiborg's play 'Taboo', a drama set in Africa, which also went to London. As a result, he was asked to join the Provincetown Players, a Greenwich Village theatre group that included in its membership playwright Eugene O'Neill. Gary Brumburgh at IMDb: "O'Neill personally asked Paul to star in his plays 'All God's Chillun Got Wings' and 'The Emperor Jones' in 1924. The reaction from both critics and audiences alike was electrifying...an actor was born." In 1925, he sang the first concert recital consisting solely of black spirituals, at the Greenwich Village Theatre in New York. That year, he also made his film debut starring in Body and Soul (Oscar Micheaux, 1925). Gary Brumburgh: "a rather murky melodrama that nevertheless was ahead of its time in its depictions of black characters. Although Robeson played a scurrilous, corrupt clergyman who takes advantage of his own people, his dynamic personality managed to shine through." Radio and recordings helped spread his name across foreign waters. His resonant bass was a major highlight in the London production of Jerome Kern's and Oscar Hammerstein II's 'Show Boat'. The role of Joe, the deckhand, was written for him, but because of schedule conflicts and Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.'s delay in putting on the show, he had been unable to star in the first stage production but played the role in London five months later. His rendition of "Ol' Man River" became the benchmark for all future performers of the song. In 1928, he made the second-ever recording of 'Ol' Man River'. (Bing Crosby did the first). Show Boat continued for 350 performances. At the time no U.S. company would hire Robeson and so, he remained in London to play the role of William Shakespeare's 'Othello' in 1930. Paul caused a slight stir by co-starring opposite a white actress, Peggy Ashcroft, who played Desdemona. After his wife Essie discovered Robeson had been having an affair with Ashcroft, she decided to seek a divorce and they split up. Around this time Robeson starred in the film Borderline (Kenneth MacPherson, 1930), a silent film that dealt strongly with racial themes. Stephen Bourne at BFI Screen-on-Line: "Black characters in American cinema of the period rarely moved beyond Al Jolson in blackface, or the dim-witted buffoons played by comedy actors like Stepin Fetchit. For the ambitious Robeson, there were hardly any opportunities to play challenging roles." In 1931, he returned to the stage in the O'Neill play 'The Hairy Ape'. The following year he appeared in a Broadway revival of 'Show Boat' again as Joe, to critical and popular acclaim. In the same production, Helen Morgan repeated her original 1927 performance as the half-caste role of Julie, but the white actress Tess Gardella played the role of Queenie in her customary blackface opposite Robeson. In 1932, Ashcroft and Robeson's relationship ended. Robeson and Essie reconciled, although their relationship was scarred permanently.
Throughout the 1930s, Paul Robeson spent most of his time singing and performing in England. He also was given the opportunity to recapture two of his greatest stage successes on film: The Emperor Jones (Dudley Murphy, 1933) and Show Boat (James Whale, 1936), with Irene Dunne, Helen Morgan, and Hattie McDaniel. His performance of 'Old Man River' in this film version of Show Boat became legendary, both for its quality and for Robeson’s purposeful changing of the lyrics "I'm tired of livin' and 'feared of dyin’" to the more activist "I must keep fightin' until I'm dying". In Britain, he played Bosambo in Sanders of the River (Zoltan Korda, 1935), which he felt would render a realistic view of colonial African culture. It made Robeson an international film star. Stephen Bourne: "When Robeson became a major star in British films in the mid-1930s, he negotiated for roles that projected a positive image of a black man, roles that broke away from one-dimensional and offensive racial stereotypes. But he often found himself in conflict with an industry that glorified the British Empire and colonialism. This was certainly the case with his first commercial film, Sanders of the River (d. Zoltan Korda, 1935), one of a cycle of imperial adventures produced by Alexander Korda for London Films."Robeson also appeared in such British films as Song of Freedom (J. Elder Wills, 1936), King Solomon's Mines (Robert Stevenson, Geoffrey Barkas, 1937), Jericho (Thornton Freeland, 1937), and The Proud Valley (Pen Tennyson, 1940), set in a Welsh coal-mining town. After returning to America, Robeson played a sharecropper in a segment of the Hollywood movie Tales of Manhattan (Julien Duvivier, 1942) but, after the film was released, he was criticised for perpetuating a racist stereotype. Robeson agreed with his critics and volunteered to join protestors outside cinemas where the film was being shown. He said he wouldn't make any more films until there were better roles for blacks. During the 1930s he gravitated strongly towards economics and politics with a burgeoning interest in social activism. In 1934 he made the first of several trips to the Soviet Union and outwardly extolled the Soviet way of life and his belief that it lacked racial bias, despite the Holodomor and the later Rootless Cosmopolitan Campaign. He was a popular figure in Wales where he became personally involved in their civil rights affairs, notably the Welsh miners. Developing a marked leftist ideology, he continued to criticize the blatant discrimination he found so prevalent in America. In 1939, he premiered Earl Robinson’s multi-ethnic cantata 'Ballad for Americans' on CBS radio, which he would eventually perform in twenty-five languages. In addition to his creative work, Robeson used his personal prominence to push for social and political reform. He supported the Spanish partisans against Franco’s fascist Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, raised funds for refugees from Hitler’s Germany well before such activities were fashionable, and organized a coalition that challenged President Truman to support an anti-lynching law in 1945. The 1940s was a mixture of performance triumphs and poignant, political upheavals. While his title run in the musical drama 'John Henry' (1940), was short-lived, he earned widespread acclaim for his Broadway 'Othello' in 1943 opposite José Ferrer as Iago and Uta Hagen as Desdemona. This production is still the longest-running non-musical production of a Shakespeare play ever to be staged in the United States, due almost entirely to Robeson's enormous popularity. He appeared in a World War II-era U.S. Government War Department propaganda film, Easy to Get, aimed at combating the spread of venereal diseases among black soldiers. In the film, Robeson appears at the end in his capacity as a celebrity football star and singer to advise viewers to stay "clean". By this time, however, Robeson was being reviled by much of white America for his outspoken civil rights speeches against segregation and lynchings, particularly in the South. A founder of the Progressive Party, an independent political party, his outdoor concerts sometimes ignited violence and he was now a full-blown target for "Red Menace" agitators. In 1946, he denied under oath being a member of the Communist Party but steadfastly refused to refute the accusations under subsequent probes. His continued support for the Soviet Union became even more controversial after Stalin publicly turned against Israel in November 1948. As a result, his passport was withdrawn and he became engaged in legal battles for nearly a decade in order to retrieve it. Adding fuel to the fire was his only son's (Paul Jr.) marriage to a white woman in 1949 and his being awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952. He was unable to receive it until 1958 when his passport was returned to him.
Paul Robeson was essentially blacklisted, and tainted press statements continued to hound him. He began performing less and less in America. Despite his growing scorn towards America, he never gave up his American citizenship although the anguish of it all led to a couple of suicide attempts, nervous breakdowns, and a dependency on drugs. Europe was a different story. The people continued to hold him in high regard as an artist above reproach. He had a command of about 20 languages and wound up giving his last acting performance in Tony Richardson's production of 'Othello' at Stratford-on-Avon in 1959. Although he did give a few interviews on television, he never played any dramatic or musical roles in that medium. In 1960, in what was his final concert performance in Great Britain, Robeson sang to raise money for the Movement for Colonial Freedom at the Royal Festival Hall. In October 1960, Robeson embarked on a two-month concert tour of Australia and New Zealand with Essie. While in Sydney, he became the first major artist to perform at the construction site of the future Sydney Opera House. Back in London, Robeson expressed a desire to return to the United States and participate in the civil rights movement, while his wife argued that he would be unsafe there and "unable to make any money" due to government harassment. His health suddenly took a turn for the worse and he finally returned to the United States in 1963. His poet/wife Eslanda Robeson died of cancer two years later. Double pneumonia and a kidney blockage in 1965 nearly killed Robeson too. Robeson moved in with his son's family in New York City. He remained in poor health for pretty much the rest of his life. His last years were spent in Harlem at his sister's house in near-total isolation, denying all interviews and public correspondence. At a Carnegie Hall tribute to mark his 75th birthday in 1973, he was unable to attend, but a taped message from him was played that said: "Though I have not been able to be active for several years, I want you to know that I am the same Paul, dedicated as ever to the worldwide cause of humanity for freedom, peace, and brotherhood." In 1976, Paul Robeson died at age 77 of complications from a stroke. He was interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Among his many honours: he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1995; he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998; was honored with a postage stamp during the 'Black Heritage' series, and both a Cultural Center at Penn State University and a high school in Brooklyn bear his name. In 1995 his autobiography 'Here I Stand' was published in England in 1958. His son, Paul Robeson Jr., also chronicled a book about his father, 'Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist's Journey' in 2001. When appearing before HUAC, the Committee asked him why he didn't relocate to Russia. He replied: "Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay right here and have a part of it just like you."
Sources: Gary Brumburgh (IMDb), Stephen Bourne (BFI Screen-on-Line), Ronnie D. Lankford, Jr. (AllMusic), Find A Grave, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.