CONNIE FRANCIS – Courage through adversity.

August 14, 2015 admin 0

  Connie Francis is a Brooklyn girl, although she was born in Newark, New Jersey. Her mother was visiting relatives in New Jersey and suddenly went into labour while attending an all-night dance marathon. It was 1938, and the future ‘Queen of Song’ was born Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero to […]

Did You Know? – Items of interest Pt 1.

August 12, 2015 admin 2

  From time to time I shall post a dozen or so short items, snippets of information about movie and television actors that I have found interesting. Hopefully, you will, too. Somehow it is hard to imagine that Don Adams, the little guy who played Agent Maxwell Smart in the […]

DORIS DAY – Class with a capital ‘C’.

August 10, 2015 admin 6

  It is hard to imagine it, but on April 3, 2016, Doris Day will be 94 years old. Ninety-four! I still watch her best movies, the ones made in the fifties, and still marvel at her exuberance, her vitality, and her unmistakable singing (and acting) talent. Movies back then […]

The real ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’.

August 8, 2015 admin 11

  One of the many movies I look at in Movies Based On True Stories (2015), is the 1962 biopic, Birdman of Alcatraz, starring Burt Lancaster as the ‘birdman’ Robert Stroud. As a sample of what you can expect to find in this, my second book, I thought I might […]

SPENCER TRACY – A nightmare of a man.

August 6, 2015 admin 41

  As an actor Spencer Tracy had few peers and cinema-goers adored him. Off screen he was a very ordinary human being, a man beset with all kinds of problems. He was a violent alcoholic his entire life and a rampant womanizer who had almost as many conquests to his […]

What’s in a Name – Part Two?

August 4, 2015 admin 0

  Part Two of ‘What’s in a Name?’ features some of the more stupid names thought up by the studios in their endeavours to create phony images for their stars. One of the silliest was the one they lumbered poor Ann Sheridan with – The Oomph Girl. She simply did […]

What’s in a name Part One?

August 2, 2015 admin 0

Back in the good old studio days it was customary for studios to come up with snappy nicknames for their female stars. Well, they thought they were snappy, anyway. For some reason these were seldom given to male actors, although that is not to say that some of these guys […]

CAROLE LOMBARD – The Profane Angel.

July 31, 2015 admin 1

  Finding really likeable movie stars from the studio era can be quite a challenge at times. Carole Lombard, however, courtesy of her brazen, down to earth approach to life, was a woman who enjoyed the trappings of fame, but never let them seduce her. And that made her a […]

ROBERT MITCHUM – an all-time great.

July 28, 2015 admin 6

  Mitchum’s father was killed in an accident when he was just two years old. As a teenager Bob criss-crossed the country as a train hobo until he was arrested at 15, charged with being ‘a suspicious character with no visible means of support’. He spent that summer on a […]

LOUELLA PARSONS – A law unto herself.

July 24, 2015 admin 7

  When the studio system was at its peak in the thirties and forties, a ‘Gossip Columnist’ could wreck a career with just a couple of acid-laced lines. They did not even need to be true. Louella Parsons, the Hollywood mouthpiece for the Hearst empire of newspapers, became a most […]