Émilie Chauchoin, professionally known as Claudette Colbert, was an American actress. Colbert began her career in Broadway productions during the late 1920s and progressed to films with the advent of talking pictures. Initially contracted to Paramount Pictures, Colbert became one of the few major actresses of the period who worked freelance, independent of the studio system.
Charles Boyer was a French-American actor who appeared in more than 80 films between 1920 and 1976. After receiving an education in drama, Boyer started on the stage, but he found his success in American films during the 1930s. His memorable performances were among the era's most highly praised, in romantic dramas such as The Garden of Allah (1936), Algiers (1938), and Love Affair (1939), as well as the mystery-thriller Gaslight (1944). He received four Oscar nominations for Best Actor. He also appeared as himself on the CBS sitcom I Love Lucy.
Susan Hayward was an Academy Award-winning American film actress, best known for her film portrayals of women that were based on true stories.
Bowen Charlton "Sonny" Tufts III was an American stage, film, and television actor. He is best known for the films he made as a contract star at Paramount in the 1940s, including So Proudly We Hail!. He also starred in the cult classic Cat-Women of the Moon.
So Proudly We Hail! is a 1943 American war film directed and produced by Mark Sandrich and starring Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard – who was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance – and Veronica Lake. Also featuring George Reeves, it was produced and released by Paramount Pictures.
Boom Town is a 1940 American Western film starring Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Claudette Colbert, and Hedy Lamarr, and directed by Jack Conway. The supporting cast features Frank Morgan, Lionel Atwill, and Chill Wills. A story written by James Edward Grant in Cosmopolitan magazine entitled "A Lady Comes to Burkburnett" provided the inspiration for the film. The film was produced and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
The Palm Beach Story is a 1942 screwball comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges, and starring Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Mary Astor and Rudy Vallée. Victor Young contributed the musical score, including a fast-paced variation of the William Tell Overture for the opening scenes. Typical of a Sturges film, the pacing and dialogue of The Palm Beach Story are very fast. The film was distributed by Paramount Pictures.
John Lund was an American film, stage, and radio actor who is probably best remembered for his role in the film A Foreign Affair (1948) and a dual role in To Each His Own (1946).
The Ghost Breakers is a 1940 American mystery/horror comedy film directed by George Marshall and starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard. It was adapted by screenwriter Walter DeLeon as the third film version of the 1909 play The Ghost Breaker by Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard.
Norman Krasna was an American screenwriter, playwright, producer, and film director who penned screwball comedies centered on a case of mistaken identity. Krasna directed three films during a forty-year career in Hollywood. He garnered four Academy Award screenwriting nominations, winning once for 1943's Princess O'Rourke, which he also directed.
Hands Across the Table is a 1935 American romantic screwball comedy film directed by Mitchell Leisen and released by Paramount Pictures. It stars Carole Lombard as a manicurist looking for a rich husband and Fred MacMurray as a poor playboy, with Ralph Bellamy as a wealthy ex-pilot in a wheelchair. The teaming of Lombard and MacMurray was so well received, they went on to make three more films together, The Princess Comes Across (1936), Swing High, Swing Low (1937), and True Confession (1937).
Mark Sandrich was an American film director, writer, and producer.
Nob Hill is a 1945 Technicolor film about a Barbary Coast, San Francisco, United States saloon keeper, starring George Raft and Joan Bennett. Part musical and part drama, the movie was directed by Henry Hathaway. It remains one of Raft's lesser known movies even though it was a big success, in part because it was a musical.
Arise, My Love is a 1940 American romantic comedy film directed by Mitchell Leisen and starring Claudette Colbert, Ray Milland and Dennis O'Keefe. It was made by Paramount Pictures and written by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and Jacques Théry. Containing an interventionist message, it tells the love story of a pilot and a journalist who meet in the latter days of the Spanish Civil War and follows them through the early days of World War II. Colbert once said that Arise, My Love was her personal favorite motion picture of all the films she had made.
No Time for Love is a 1943 American romantic comedy film produced and directed by Mitchell Leisen and starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. Written by Claude Binyon, Robert Lees, and Frederic I. Rinaldo, the film is about a sophisticated female photographer assigned to photograph the tough "sandhog" construction workers at a tunnel project site. After saving one of the sandhogs from a fatal accident, she becomes attracted to this cocky well-built man they call Superman. Unsettled by her feelings, she hires the man as her assistant, believing that her attraction to him will diminish if she spends time with him. Their time together, however, leads to feelings of love, and she struggles to overcome her haughtiness and make her true feelings known.
The Bride Comes Home is a 1935 comedy film made by Paramount Pictures, directed by Wesley Ruggles, and starring Claudette Colbert, Fred MacMurray and Robert Young. It was written by Claude Binyon and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding.
Princess O'Rourke is a 1943 American romantic comedy film directed and written by Norman Krasna, and starring Olivia de Havilland, Robert Cummings and Charles Coburn. Krasna won the 1944 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Kitty is a 1945 film, a costume drama set in London during the 1780s, directed by Mitchell Leisen, based on the novel of the same name by Rosamond Marshall, with a screenplay by Karl Tunberg. It stars Paulette Goddard, Ray Milland, Constance Collier, Patric Knowles, Reginald Owen, and Cecil Kellaway as the English painter Thomas Gainsborough. In a broad interpretation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, the film tells the rags-to-riches story of a beautiful young cockney guttersnipe who is given a complete makeover by an impoverished aristocrat (Milland) and his aunt (Collier) in hopes of arranging her marriage to a peer, thereby repairing their fortunes and their social status.
Bride of Vengeance is a 1949 American historical drama film directed by Mitchell Leisen and starring Paulette Goddard, John Lund and Macdonald Carey. Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures, it is set in the Italian Renaissance era. Ray Milland was originally cast in the film but refused the assignment, leading the studio to suspend him for ten weeks.
Dear Ruth is a 1947 American romantic comedy film starring Joan Caulfield, William Holden, Mona Freeman, Billy de Wolfe and Edward Arnold. It was based on the 1944 Broadway play of the same name by Norman Krasna.
