What happened to Glenn Miller?

August 25, 2017 Alan Royle 7

  Major Glenn Miller 1944 Bernie Woods was the Music Editor of Variety during the Big Band Era. In that capacity he got to know all the bandleaders, singers and musicians. His 1994 memoir titled ‘When the Music Stopped’ pulls no punches when he discusses individuals, and he had little […]

The Divine Dinah Shore (1916-94).

August 23, 2017 Alan Royle 8

  DINAH SHORE                                     She was born Frances Rose Shore in Winchester, Tennessee in 1916. Friends called her ‘Fanny’, but to the music-loving world she was known as Dinah Shore. She altered her […]

SNAPSHOTS

August 21, 2017 Alan Royle 6

           PIPER LAURIE (1932 – )                with Ronald Reagan in Louisa (1950)   with Paul Newman in The Hustler My favourite Piper Laurie performance was in The Hustler (1961), where she played Paul Newman’s lame girlfriend Sarah Packard. In her highly readable […]

PETER O’TOOLE – the actor and the man.

August 19, 2017 Alan Royle 4

  PETER O’TOOLE   (1932 – 2013)                                      Peter O’Toole hailed from Leeds in Yorkshire. He always maintained he was born in Ireland, but there are simply no records indicating that. As a teenager he started out as a newspaper copy boy, showed promise as a reporter, but was drawn to the […]

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STEVE MCQUEEN – Not a nice guy.

August 17, 2017 Alan Royle 71

  Steve McQueen’s mother was a prostitute, his father a circus stuntman and neither cared a fig about their boy. He lost his virginity at 13 to an obese teenaged hooker who accepted candy for sex. At 16 he was a towel boy in a brothel and encouraged to sample […]

The Many Loves of Bette Davis (1908-89).

August 15, 2017 Alan Royle 4

  Bette Davis was never a raving beauty. Indeed, when Jack Warner sent a representative to the railway station to greet her on her arrival in Tinsel Town, the man returned empty-handed, declaring that nobody even remotely looking like a movie star got off the train. Be that as it […]

The Hollywood Canteen – a unique experience.

August 13, 2017 Alan Royle 6

  Between 1941 and 1944 over 6,000 Hollywood workers entered the services, 1,500 of whom were registered actors and actresses. The ‘Hollywood Unit’ made training and recruitment films (and newsreels). One recruitment film starring Jimmy Stewart was said to have been responsible for 100,000 men joining the air force. Hundreds […]

The many loves of Rita Hayworth

August 7, 2017 Alan Royle 14

  RITA HAYWORTH (1918-87) As a teenager Margarita Cansino (Rita Hayworth) was sexually abused by her abominable father, a Latin dancer named Eduardo Cansino, who not only abused her himself, but rented her out to his cronies. When she confided this to her husband Orson Welles he was rightly appalled. […]

The many loves of Ingrid Bergman.

August 5, 2017 Alan Royle 31

  INGRID BERGMAN (1915 – 82)                   Most fans are genuinely surprised to find that many of the screen’s biggest movie stars are diminutive in stature. It probably has a lot to do with cinema-goers seeing their idols enlarged on theatre screens, […]

The many loves of Ava Gardner.

August 3, 2017 Alan Royle 29

  AVA GARDNER (1922-90)            Ava was a ‘knockout’, possibly the sexiest woman ever to grace a movie screen. She married Mickey Rooney when he was the number one box-office draw in movies (she refused to sleep with him unless he married her first). Within three weeks or so of the […]