Burton Stephen Lancaster was an American actor and film producer. Initially known for playing tough guys with a tender heart, he went on to achieve success with more complex and challenging roles over a 45-year career in films and television series. He was a four-time nominee for the Academy Award for Best Actor, and he also won two BAFTA Awards and one Golden Globe Award for Best Lead Actor. The American Film Institute ranks Lancaster as #19 of the greatest male stars of classic Hollywood cinema.
Charles Laughton was a British-American actor. He was trained in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and first appeared professionally on the stage in 1926. In 1927, he was cast in a play with his future wife Elsa Lanchester, with whom he lived and worked until his death.
The Prince and the Pauper is a novel by American author Mark Twain. It was first published in 1881 in Canada, before its 1882 publication in the United States. The novel represents Twain's first attempt at historical fiction. The plot concerns the ascension of nine-year-old Edward VI of England in 1547 and his interactions with look-alike Tom Canty, a London pauper who lives with his abusive, alcoholic father.
The Mark of Zorro is a 1920 American silent Western romance film starring Douglas Fairbanks and Noah Beery. This genre-defining swashbuckler adventure was the first movie version of The Mark of Zorro. Based on the 1919 story The Curse of Capistrano by Johnston McCulley, which introduced the masked hero, Zorro, the screenplay was adapted by Fairbanks and Eugene Miller.
Lloyd Benedict Nolan was an American stage, film and television actor who rose from a supporting player and B-movie lead early in his career to featured player status after creating the role of Captain Queeg in Herman Wouk's play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial in the mid-1950s. Nolan won a Best Actor Emmy Award reprising the part in 1955 TV play based on Wouk's tale of military justice.
Carl Foreman, CBE was an American screenwriter and film producer who wrote the award-winning films The Bridge on the River Kwai and High Noon, among others. He was one of the screenwriters who were blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1950s because of their suspected communist sympathy or membership in the Communist Party.
Casino Royale is a 1967 spy parody film originally distributed by Columbia Pictures featuring an ensemble cast. It is loosely based on the 1953 novel of the same name by Ian Fleming, the first novel to feature the character James Bond.
Harold Adolphe Hecht was an American film producer, dance director and talent agent. He was also, though less noted for, a literary agent, a theatrical producer, a theatre director and a Broadway actor. He was a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and the Screen Producers Guild.
Katherine Cecil Thurston, born Kathleen Annie Josephine Madden, was an Irish novelist, best known for two political thrillers.
Apache is a 1954 American Western film directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Burt Lancaster, Jean Peters and John McIntire. The film was based on the novel Broncho Apache by Paul Wellman, which was published in 1936. It was Aldrich's first color film.
The Lost Patrol is a 1934 American pre-Code war film by RKO, directed and produced by John Ford, with Merian C. Cooper as executive producer and Cliff Reid as associate producer from a screenplay by Dudley Nichols from the 1927 novel Patrol by Philip MacDonald. Max Steiner provided the Oscar-nominated score. The film, a remake of a 1929 British silent film, starred Victor McLaglen, Boris Karloff, Wallace Ford, Reginald Denny, J. M. Kerrigan and Alan Hale.
Steven Sater is a Tony Award, Grammy Award, and Laurence Olivier Award-winning American poet, playwright, lyricist, television writer and screenwriter. He is best known for writing the book and lyrics for the Tony Award-winning 2006 Broadway musical Spring Awakening.
High Treason is a 1929 film based on a play by Noel Pemberton Billing. It was directed by Maurice Elvey, and stars James Carew, Humberstone Wright, Benita Hume, Henry Vibart, Hayford Hobbs, Irene Rooke, and Jameson Thomas. Raymond Massey makes his first screen appearance in a small role. The film was initially produced as a silent but mid-way during production, Elvey was pushed by the studio to add sound to the film in order to cash in on the talkies. Although a third of the film was filmed in sound, Elvey maintained much of the silent footage and dubbed over the dialogue for shots that were originally silent, with Elvey himself voicing some of the minor characters, which he admitted when interviewed by the Manitoba Free Press shortly after the film was released in the US. Likewise, BIP's Blackmail, directed by Alfred Hitchcock was also turned into a sound picture mid-way during production and many of the silent scenes used dubbed dialogue and sound effects in a similar fashion to High Treason.
The Clue of the New Pin is a 1929 all-talking sound British crime film directed by Arthur Maude and starring Benita Hume, Kim Peacock, and Donald Calthrop. The soundtrack was recorded using the British Phototone sound-on-disc system. It was made at Beaconsfield Studios. This film is important historically as being Britain's first all-talking feature film produced entirely in Britain. The first all-talking British feature production, a film entitled Black Waters, had been produced in the United States due to a lack of sound recording equipment in Britain.
The Masquerader is a 1917 play by the American weiter John Hunter Booth. It premiered in New York City on 3 September 1917. It was based on the 1904 novel The Masquerader by Katherine Cecil Thurston. A leading British politician chooses to swap places with his cousin, a journalist who is his doppelganger. This leads to a dilemma for his wife who falls in love with the double.
The Masquerader is a 1933 American pre-Code drama film directed by Richard Wallace and starring Ronald Colman, Elissa Landi and Juliette Compton.
Guy Bates Post was an American character actor who appeared in at least 21 Broadway plays and 25 Hollywood films over a career that spanned more than 50 years. He was perhaps best remembered in the role of Omar Khayyám in the 1914 stage and 1922 film productions of Richard Walton Tully's Omar the Tentmaker and for his over 1,500 performances in John Hunter Booth's 1917 play The Masquerader.
British horror cinema is a sub-category of horror films made by British studios. Horror films began in Britain with silent films in the early 20th century. Some of the most successful British horror films were made by Hammer Film Productions around the 1960s. A distinguishing feature of British horror cinema from its foundations in the 1910s until the end of Hammer's prolific output in the genre in the 1970s was storylines based on, or referring to, the gothic literature of the 19th century.
The Green Archer is a 1923 thriller novel by the British writer Edgar Wallace. The novel was serialized in The Detective Magazine, Amalgamated Press, London, July 20, 1923-Oct 1, 1924, in 14 parts. The first UK book edition was published by Hodder & Stoughton in London in 1923. The first US book editions were by Small, Maynard & Co, New York, 1924 and by A.L. Burt Co., New York, 1924. Hodder & Stoughton reprinted the book in 1940 and in 1953.
A Bill of Divorcement is a play by English author Clemence Dane. It was her first play, and her most popular, and was adapted to films of the same name three times, in 1922, 1932, and 1940.
