Eldred Gregory Peck was an American actor and one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1970s. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Peck the 12th-greatest male star of Classic Hollywood Cinema.
The Paradine Case is a 1947 American film noir courtroom drama film, set in England, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by David O. Selznick. The screenplay was written by Selznick and an uncredited Ben Hecht, from an adaptation by Alma Reville and James Bridie of the 1933 novel of the same title by Robert Smythe Hichens. The film stars Gregory Peck, Ann Todd, Alida Valli, Charles Laughton, Charles Coburn, Ethel Barrymore, and Louis Jourdan. It tells of an English barrister who falls in love with a woman who is accused of murder, and how it affects his relationship with his wife.
Joan Geraldine Bennett was an American stage, film, and television actress. She was one of three acting sisters from a show-business family. Beginning her career on the stage, Bennett appeared in more than 70 films from the era of silent films, well into the sound era. She is best remembered for her film noir femme fatale roles in director Fritz Lang's films—including Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944), and Scarlet Street (1945)—and for her television role as matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard in the gothic 1960s soap opera Dark Shadows, for which she received an Emmy nomination in 1968.
Affair in Trinidad is a 1952 American film noir directed by Vincent Sherman and starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. It was produced by Hayworth's Beckworth Corporation and released by Columbia Pictures.
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Set in Africa, it was published in the September 1936 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine concurrently with "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". The story was eventually adapted to the screen as the Zoltan Korda film The Macomber Affair (1947).
The Killers is a 1946 American film noir starring Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien and Sam Levene. Based in part on the 1927 short story of the same name by Ernest Hemingway, it focuses on an insurance detective's investigation into the execution by two professional killers of a former boxer who was unresistant to his own murder. Directed by Robert Siodmak, it featured an uncredited John Huston and Richard Brooks co-writing the screenplay, which was credited to Anthony Veiller. As in many films noir, it is mostly told in flashback.
Francis Bosley Crowther Jr. was an American journalist, writer, and film critic for The New York Times for 27 years. His work helped shape the careers of many actors, directors and screenwriters, though his reviews, at times, were perceived as unnecessarily mean. Crowther was an advocate of foreign-language films in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly those of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, and Federico Fellini.
White hunter is a literary term used for professional big game hunters of European descent, from all over the world, who plied their trade in Africa, especially during the first half of the 20th century. The activity continues in the dozen African countries which still permit big-game hunting. White hunters derived their income from organizing and leading safaris for paying clients, or from the sale of ivory.
Johnny O'Clock is a 1947 American film noir crime film directed by Robert Rossen and starring Dick Powell, Evelyn Keyes, Lee J. Cobb and Ellen Drew. It was distributed by Columbia Pictures.
Geraldine Brooks was an American actress whose three-decade career on stage as well as in films and on television was noted with nominations for an Emmy in 1962 and a Tony in 1970. She was married to author Budd Schulberg.
Yellow Sky is a 1948 American Western film directed by William A. Wellman and starring Gregory Peck, Richard Widmark, and Anne Baxter. The story is believed to be loosely adapted from William Shakespeare's The Tempest. The screenplay concerns a band of reprobate outlaws who flee after a bank robbery and encounter an old man and his granddaughter in a ghost town.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a 1952 American Technicolor romantic adventure film directed by Henry King from a screenplay by Casey Robinson, based on the 1936 short story of the same name by Ernest Hemingway. It stars Gregory Peck as Harry Street, Susan Hayward as Helen, and Ava Gardner as Cynthia Green. The film's ending does not mirror that of the short story.
21 Days is a 1940 British drama film based on the short 1919 play The First and the Last by John Galsworthy. It was directed by Basil Dean and stars Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and Leslie Banks. The film was renamed 21 Days Together for the American market.
Third Finger, Left Hand is a 1940 American romantic comedy film directed by Robert Z. Leonard and starring Myrna Loy, Melvyn Douglas and Raymond Walburn. The screenplay concerns a woman who pretends to be married to fend off would-be suitors and jealous wives, then has to live with her deception when she meets an artist who pretends to be her husband.
Philip Hope Percival (1886–1966) was an English-born renowned white hunter and early safari guide in colonial Kenya. During his career, he guided Theodore Roosevelt, Baron Rothschild, and Ernest Hemingway on African hunts. Hemingway modelled the fictional hunter Robert Wilson in his story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" after Percival. Percival also worked with well-known white hunters like Bror von Blixen-Finecke and mentored Sydney Downey and Harry Selby, and was known in African hunting circles as the "Dean of Hunters".
Donald Ker was a famous Kenyan white hunter, safari guide and conservationist of British descent. As a young man he teamed up with Sydney Downey to create Ker and Downey Safaris Ltd., one of the first guide companies to transition from hunting to photographic safaris. He is also known for leading two long expeditions with Edgar Monsanto Queeny for the American Museum of Natural History which resulted in the production of several nature documentaries and in Ker's own dedication to conservation.
The Arnelo Affair is a 1947 American film noir starring John Hodiak, George Murphy, Frances Gifford, and Dean Stockwell, and co-written and directed by Arch Oboler.
Gregory Peck (1916–2003) was an American actor who had an extensive career in film, television, radio, and on stage. Peck's breakthrough role was as a Catholic priest who attempts to start a mission in China in the 1944 film The Keys of the Kingdom, for which he received his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. In the same year, he played Count Vronsky in a radio adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. He followed this by starring in Alfred Hitchcock's psychological thriller Spellbound (1945) with Ingrid Bergman. In the late 1940s, Peck received three more nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his roles as a caring father in The Yearling (1946), a journalist who pretends to be Jewish to write an exposé on American antisemitism in Gentleman's Agreement (1947), and a brave airman in Twelve O'Clock High (1949).
Jane Kendall Mason was an American debutante, socialite, and outdoorswoman.
