MOVIE TRIVIA. – PT184

MOVIE TRIVIA. – PT184

November 1, 2021 Alan Royle 2

  Ben Kingsley British actor Ben Kingsley will quite rightly be remembered for winning the Oscar in the title role of Gandhi (1982), yet he had been a musician/singer, busking for over a decade before fame caught up with him. It was 1966 when the twenty-three year old Ben made […]

Girl # 27 – Patricia Douglas Part 1.

March 17, 2016 admin 2

     This story will be in two parts. It is a tale of a young woman’s quest for justice in an era and a place where greedy and powerful men determined who was entitled to fair treatment and who was not. Ptricia Douglas was a ‘nobody’, one of thousands […]

Studio cover-ups in the early days of Hollywood.

January 7, 2016 admin 2

  A British actor in the fifties named Steve Hayes probably summed up the studio bosses as well as anyone, not that he said so when he was under contract, of course. To do so would have been career suicide, as well he knew. ‘All these guys were ruthless bastards’, […]

Tragic Hollywood – Who killed funnyman Ted Healy?

December 18, 2015 admin 8

  Wallace Beery won the Oscar in 1931-2 for The Champ, even though he actually scored one less vote than Fredric March that year. The rules of the previous year awarded Oscars to performers who finished within three votes of the winner. Presenter Conrad Nagel, unaware that the regulations had […]

MGM’s ‘fixers – Mannix & Strickling.

November 29, 2015 admin 0

    Back when the studio system was in vogue, back in the ‘Golden Years of Hollywood, each of the ‘Big Five’ had its ‘fixers’, men whose job it was to keep scandal and bad publicity at bay; to do whatever it took to ensure that the paying public remained […]

Did you know? Points of Interest Pt. 7

September 7, 2015 admin 2

  Twenty year-old Brigitte Bardot was understudy to the star of Helen of Troy (1956), but ended up with a small role as Rosanna Podesta’s handmaiden. She would make her British screen debut in Doctor At Sea in the same year. The French actress has had psychological issues for much […]

MICKEY ROONEY – Will the real Mickey please stand up?

August 28, 2015 admin 3

  young Lana Turner If you happen to be a Mickey Rooney fan (I am most certainly not, by the way), then you should definitely not read his sleazy autobiography titled Life Is Too Short. I have and I wish I hadn’t. My reason for repeating a couple of excerpts […]

‘America’s Sweethearts’ – or were they?

July 2, 2015 admin 12

  Biographers have tried for years to figure out the relationship between singers Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. Most have given up. On the one hand we have Eddy, lifelong ‘sissy’, tied to his mother’s apron-strings, a bisexual man who definitely preferred male lovers to female ones, but who seemed […]

George Reeves – who killed Superman?

March 19, 2015 admin 7

  Today, to the younger generations, the name George Reeves means nothing. To baby-boomers (those born just after the end of World War Two) he was just a TV actor whose face became instantly recognizable because he portrayed Superman in 102 episodes of the hit TV series The Adventures of […]