Humphrey DeForest Bogart, nicknamed Bogey, was an American film and stage actor. His performances in Classical Hollywood cinema films made him an American cultural icon. In 1999, the American Film Institute selected Bogart as the greatest male star of classic American cinema.
Sydney Hughes Greenstreet was a British-American actor. While he did not begin his career in films until the age of 61, he had a run of significant motion pictures in a Hollywood career lasting through the 1940s. Greenstreet is best remembered for his Warner Bros. films with Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, which include The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), and Passage to Marseille (1944). Greenstreet portrayed Nero Wolfe on radio during 1950 and 1951. He became a naturalized United States citizen in 1925.
Paul Henreid was an Austrian-British-American actor, director, producer, and writer. He is best remembered for two film roles: Victor Laszlo in Casablanca and Jerry Durrance in Now, Voyager, both released between 1942 and 1943.
The Petrified Forest is a 1936 American film directed by Archie Mayo and based on Robert E. Sherwood's 1935 Broadway drama of the same name. The motion picture stars Leslie Howard, Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart. The screenplay was written by Delmer Daves and Charles Kenyon, and adaptations were later performed on radio and television. The film is set in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.
Arthur "Dooley" Wilson was an American actor, singer and musician who is best remembered as Sam in the 1942 film, Casablanca; in the film, he also performed its theme song, "As Time Goes By".
Edna May Oliver was an American stage and film actress. During the 1930s, she was one of the better-known character actresses in American films, often playing tart-tongued spinsters.
Lee Patrick was an American actress whose career began in 1922 on the New York stage with her role in The Bunch and Judy which headlined Adele Astaire and featured Adele's brother Fred Astaire. Patrick continued to perform in dozens of roles on the stage for the next decade, frequently in musicals and comedies, but also in dramatic parts like her 1931 performance as Meg in Little Women. She began to branch out into films in 1929. For half a century she created a credible body of cinematic work, her most memorable being as Sam Spade's assistant Effie in The Maltese Falcon (1941), and her reprise of the role in the George Segal comedy sequel The Black Bird (1975). Her talents were showcased in comedies such as the Jack Benny film George Washington Slept Here (1942) and as one of the foils of Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame (1958). Dramatic parts such as an asylum inmate in The Snake Pit (1948) and as Pamela Tiffin's mother in the Summer and Smoke (1961) were another facet of her repertoire. She made numerous guest roles in American television, but became a staple for that medium during the two-year run of Topper. As Henrietta Topper, her comedic timing played well against Leo G. Carroll as her husband, and against that of the two ghosts played by Robert Sterling and Anne Jeffreys. Patrick lent her voice to various animated characters of The Alvin Show in the early 1960s.
Key Largo is a 1948 American film noir crime drama directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and Lauren Bacall. The supporting cast features Lionel Barrymore and Claire Trevor. The film was adapted by Richard Brooks and Huston from Maxwell Anderson's 1939 play of the same name, starring Paul Muni in his return to the stage. It opened on November 27 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway for 105 performances in 1939 and 1940.
Howard Da Silva was an American actor, director and musical performer on stage, film, television and radio. He was cast in dozens of productions on the New York stage, appeared in more than two dozen television programs, and acted in more than fifty feature films. Adept at both drama and musicals on the stage, he originated the role of Jud Fry in the original 1943 run of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!, and also portrayed the prosecuting attorney in the 1957 stage production of Compulsion. Da Silva was nominated for a 1960 Tony Award as Best Featured Actor in a Musical for his work in Fiorello!, a musical about New York City mayor LaGuardia. In 1961, Da Silva directed Purlie Victorious, by Ossie Davis.
Shirley Temple (1928–2014) was an American child actress, dancer, and singer who began her film career in 1931, and continued successfully through 1949. When Educational Pictures director Charles Lamont scouted Meglan Dancing School for prospective talent, three-year-old student Temple hid behind the piano. Lamont spotted her and immediately decided she was the one he was looking for. Starting at $10 a day, she was eventually under contract for $50 per film. The production company generated its Baby Burlesks one-reeler film short satires of Hollywood films in 1931–1933, produced by Jack Hays and directed by Lamont. Temple made eight Baby Burlesks films, and 10 other short films, before being signed to star in feature-length motion pictures.
Rhys Williams was a Welsh Shakespearean thespianin the New York City Broadway theatre genre of acting, and had a prolific career as a character actor in 78 American films. In a body of work that spanned more than 30 years, he later appeared on numerous American television shows.
Warren William was a Broadway and Hollywood actor, immensely popular during the early 1930s; he was later nicknamed the "King of Pre-Code". He was the first actor to play Perry Mason.
Passage to Marseille, also known as Message to Marseille, is a 1944 war film made by Warner Brothers, directed by Michael Curtiz. The screenplay was by Casey Robinson and Jack Moffitt from the novel Sans Patrie by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. The music score was by Max Steiner and the cinematography was by James Wong Howe.
Ingrid Bergman was a multilingual, Academy Award-winning actress born in Stockholm, conversant in Swedish, German, English, Italian and French. She had been preparing for an acting career all her life. After her mother Frieda died when she was three years old, she was raised by her father Justus Samuel Bergman, a professional photographer who encouraged her to pose and act in front of the camera. As a young woman, she was shy, taller than the average women of her generation, and somewhat overweight. Acting allowed her to transcend these constraints, enabling her to transform herself into a character. She first appeared as an uncredited extra in the film Landskamp (1932) and was accepted into the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm as a scholarship student in 1933.
The Bad Man is a 1930 American Pre-Code Western film starring Walter Huston which was produced and released by First National Pictures, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. The movie is based on Porter Emerson Browne's 1920 play of the same name and is a sound remake of the 1923 silent version of the same name. The film stars Walter Huston and features Dorothy Revier, Sidney Blackmer and James Rennie.
Claudette Colbert (1903–1996) was an American actress of French ancestry, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1935. Her family moved from France to the United States when she was a small child. Born Émilie Claudette Chauchoin, she had early ambitions for a career in fashion design. Although she is more generally remembered for her film work, Colbert's show business career began on stage, and theatrical work remained part of her professional life for six decades. It was her friend, Anne Morrison, an aspiring playwright, who nudged her towards the acting profession. She chose the professional name of Claudette Colbert, using a family name three generations removed on her father's side.
Barbara Stanwyck was a prolific American actress and dancer who appeared in a total of 95 theatrically released full-length motion pictures. Orphaned before she was old enough to attend school, she became fascinated by the burgeoning film industry, and actress Pearl White in particular, whom she would mimic on the playgrounds. "Pearl White was my goddess, and her courage, her grace and her triumphs lifted me out of this world."
Michael Curtiz (1886–1962) was a Hungarian-born American film director whose career spanned from 1912 to 1961. During this period he directed, wholly or in part, 181 films. He began his cinematic career in Hungary, then moved to Austria and finally the United States. As his biographer Alan K. Rode notes, "A cinematic pioneer, Curtiz made a seamless transition from hand-cranking cameras in silent films to directing the first sound feature where the characters spoke their parts. He led the way in two- and three-color Technicolor, directed the first motion-picture produced in VistaVision, and worked extensively in CinemaScope." Rode also notes that "he helmed rousing adventures, westerns, musicals, war movies, romances, historical dramas, horror films, tearjerkers, melodramas, comedies, spectacles, and film noirs."
Leo Carrillo (1881–1961) was an American cartoonist, a comedian in vaudeville, and an actor on stage, film and television. He was best known in the United States as the Cisco Kid's sidekick Pancho on 1950s children's television, a role which capped a long show business career that began decades earlier.
Gladys Gale was an American nightclub singer and vaudeville performer, before becoming a character actress in films during the 1930s and 1940s. The wife of a millionaire, she led a checkered life before dying under mysterious circumstances in a Los Angeles hotel room under an assumed name.
