The following is an overview of 1936 in film, including significant events, a list of films released and notable births and deaths.
Sir Cedric Webster Hardwicke was an English stage and film actor whose career spanned over 50 years. His theatre work included notable performances in productions of the plays of Shakespeare and Shaw, and his film work included leading roles in several adapted literary classics.
Oak Bay is a municipality incorporated in 1906 that is located on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, in the Canadian province of British Columbia. It is one of thirteen member municipalities of the Capital Regional District, and is bordered to the west by the city of Victoria and to the north by the district of Saanich. It is an eastern residential suburb of Victoria.
Victor David Sjöström, also known in the United States as Victor Seastrom, was a pioneering Swedish film director, screenwriter, and actor. He began his career in Sweden, before moving to Hollywood in 1924. Sjöström worked primarily in the silent era; his best known films include The Phantom Carriage (1921), He Who Gets Slapped (1924), and The Wind (1928). Sjöström was Sweden's most prominent director in the "Golden Age of Silent Film" in Europe. Later in life, he played the leading role in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957).
William Gilbert Barron, known professionally as Billy Gilbert, was an American actor and comedian. He was known for his comic sneeze routines. He appeared in over 200 feature films, short subjects and television shows beginning in 1929.
John Villiers Farrow, KGCHS was an Australian film director, producer, and screenwriter. Spending a considerable amount of his career in the United States, in 1942 he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Wake Island, and in 1957 he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Around the World in Eighty Days. He had seven children by his wife, actress Maureen O'Sullivan, including actress Mia Farrow.
Robert Coote was an English actor. He played aristocrats or British military types in many films, and created the role of Colonel Hugh Pickering in the long-running original Broadway production of My Fair Lady.
Ann Carter was an American child actress who worked with dozens of film stars, compiling an "unimaginably distinguished résumé" despite an acting career which lasted only slightly more than a decade. She is best known for her starring role as Amy Reed in the film The Curse of the Cat People (1944), and also acted alongside stars including Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Bing Crosby, Fredric March, and Barbara Stanwyck among others.
Mona Barrie was an English-born actress, active on stage in Australia before establishing a career in the US, and in Hollywood films.
Egon Brecher was an Austria-Hungary-born actor and director, who also served as the chief director of Vienna's Stadttheater, before entering the motion picture industry.
Louis Gruenberg was a Russian-born American pianist and prolific composer, especially of operas. An early champion of Schoenberg and other contemporary composers, he was also a highly respected Oscar-nominated film composer in Hollywood in the 1940s.
George Zucco was a British character actor who appeared in plays and 96 films, mostly American-made, during a career spanning over two decades, from the 1920s to 1951. In his films, he often played a suave villain, a member of nobility, or a mad doctor.
Irving Pichel was an American actor and film director, who won acclaim both as an actor and director in his Hollywood career.
King Solomon's Mines is a 1937 British adventure film directed by Robert Stevenson and starring Paul Robeson, Cedric Hardwicke, Anna Lee, John Loder and Roland Young. A film adaptation of the 1885 novel of the same name by Henry Rider Haggard, the film was produced by the Gaumont British Picture Corporation at Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd's Bush. Sets were designed by art director Alfred Junge. Of all the novel's adaptations, this film is considered to be the most faithful to the book.
Billy Bevan was an Australian-born vaudevillian who became an American film actor. He appeared in more than 250 American films from 1916 to 1952. He died just before new audiences discovered him in Robert Youngson's silent-comedy compilations. The Youngson films mispronounce his name as "Be-VAN"; Bevan himself offered the proper pronunciation in a Voice of Hollywood reel in 1930: "Bevan" rhyming with "seven".
William Beatman Davidson was an American film actor. He appeared in more than 300 films between 1915 and 1947.
Constance Worth was an Australian actress who became a Hollywood star in the late 1930s. She was also known as Jocelyn Howarth.
Louis Jean Heydt was an American character actor in film, television and theatre, most frequently seen in hapless, ineffectual, or fall guy roles.
First Comes Courage is a 1943 American war film, the final film directed by Dorothy Arzner, one of the few female directors in Hollywood at the time. The film was based on the 1943 novel Commandos by Elliott Arnold, adapted by George Sklar, with a screenplay by Melvin Levy and Lewis Meltzer. It stars Merle Oberon and Brian Aherne.
Peter George Lynn was an American actor and writer.
