The following is an overview of events in 1980 in film, including the highest-grossing films, award ceremonies and festivals, a list of films released and notable deaths.
Oliver Burgess Meredith was an American actor and filmmaker whose career encompassed radio, theater, film, and television.
Ann Sothern was an American actress who worked on stage, radio, film, and television, in a career that spanned nearly six decades. Sothern began her career in the late 1920s in bit parts in films. In 1930, she made her Broadway stage debut and soon worked her way up to starring roles. In 1939, MGM cast her as Maisie Ravier, a brash yet lovable Brooklyn showgirl. The character proved to be popular and spawned a successful film series and a network radio series.
Joe Don Baker is an American retired actor, known for playing "tough guy" characters on both sides of the law. He established himself as an action star with supporting roles the Westerns in Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969) and Wild Rovers (1971), before his breakthrough role as real-life Tennessee Sheriff Buford Pusser in the film Walking Tall (1973).
James Milton Kelly was an American athlete, martial artist, and actor. After winning several karate championships, Kelly rose to fame in the early 1970s appearing in various action films within the martial arts and blaxploitation genres. Kelly played opposite Bruce Lee in 1973's Enter the Dragon, and had lead roles in 1974's Black Belt Jones as the title character and Three the Hard Way as Mister Keyes.
Black Belt Jones is a 1974 American blaxploitation martial arts film directed by Robert Clouse and starring Jim Kelly and Gloria Hendry. The film is a spiritual successor to Clouse's prior film Enter the Dragon, in which Kelly had a supporting role. Here, Kelly features in his first starring role as the eponymous character, a local hero who fights the Mafia and a local drug dealer threatening his friend's dojo.
Donald Cecil Porter was an American stage, film, and television actor.
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires is a 1974 martial arts horror film directed by Roy Ward Baker. The film opens in 1804, when seven vampires clad in gold masks are resurrected by Count Dracula. A century later, Professor Van Helsing, known in the world for his exploits with Dracula, is recruited by a man and his seven siblings after giving a lecture at a Chinese university to take on the vampires. The film is a British-Hong Kong co-production between Hammer Film Productions and Shaw Brothers Studio.
Joe Butterfly is a 1957 American comedy film directed by Jesse Hibbs starring Audie Murphy, George Nader and Keenan Wynn, with Burgess Meredith in the title role as a Japanese man. The movie was action star Murphy's only outright comedy, and it suffered by comparison to the similar Teahouse of the August Moon, released seven months earlier. The film was based on an unproduced play.
The Man with the Golden Gun is a 1974 spy film and the ninth in the James Bond series produced by Eon Productions, and the second to star Roger Moore as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. A loose adaptation of Ian Fleming's posthumously published 1965 novel of the same name, the film has Bond sent after the Solex Agitator, a breakthrough technological solution to contemporary energy shortages, while in a game of cat and mouse facing the assassin Francisco Scaramanga, the "Man with the Golden Gun". The action culminates in a duel between them that settles the fate of the Solex.
Elizabeth Ann Cole, known professionally as Elizabeth Ashley, is an American actress of theatre, film, and television. She has been nominated for three Tony Awards, winning once in 1962 for Take Her, She's Mine. Ashley was also nominated for the BAFTA and Golden Globe awards for her supporting performance in The Carpetbaggers (1964), and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1991 for Evening Shade. Elizabeth was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson 24 times. She appeared in several episodes of In the Heat of the Night as Maybelle Chesboro. She also appeared in an episode of Mannix, "The Dark Hours", in 1974. She is a 2024 inductee into the Theatre Hall of Fame.
Robert Clouse was an American film director and producer, known primarily for his work in the action/adventure and martial arts genres. He died on February 4, 1997, in Oregon of kidney failure.
Superdad is a 1973 American comedy film by Walt Disney Productions starring Bob Crane, Barbara Rush, Kurt Russell, Joe Flynn, and Kathleen Cody. Directed by Vincent McEveety, the film marks the motion picture debut of Bruno Kirby.
Albert E. Lewis was a Polish-born Broadway and film producer. His family emigrated to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York when he was a boy. He became a vaudeville comedian, then started a partnership producing one-act plays for vaudeville. Around 1930 he moved to Hollywood and worked as a film producer with Paramount, RKO, and MGM until after World War II.
There Goes the Groom is a 1937 screwball comedy film directed by Joseph Santley and starring Ann Sothern and Burgess Meredith. It was Burgess Meredith's second film and his first screen comedy; his first film, Winterset (1936), was a serious romantic drama.
Joe and Ethel Turp Call on the President is a 1939 American comedy film directed by Robert B. Sinclair and written by Melville Baker. The film stars Ann Sothern, Lewis Stone, Walter Brennan, William Gargan, Marsha Hunt and Tom Neal. It was released on December 1, 1939, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Roger Pryor was an American film actor.
April Showers is a 1948 American musical film directed by James V. Kern and written by Peter Milne. The film stars Jack Carson, Ann Sothern, Robert Alda, S. Z. Sakall, Robert Ellis and Richard Rober. The film was released by Warner Bros. on March 27, 1948.
The Hell Cat is a 1934 pre-Code American crime film directed by Albert S. Rogell and starring Robert Armstrong, Ann Sothern and Benny Baker.
A Death of Innocence is a 1971 American made-for-television drama film directed by Paul Wendkos.
