A League of Their Own (1992) is a most entertaining film that tells us a little about the wartime decision to introduce women’s baseball to the American public at a time when most of the nation’s male players were in the services or overseas, or both. The idea originated, […]
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 […]
Peter Lawford (1923-84) Peter Lawford was still a teenager in 1943, not yet twenty, when he was offered the dream of every aspiring actor and actress – an MGM contract! It was a one-year agreement with an option for a second year, and it paid him $100 a week […]
Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1911, 16 year-old Harlean Carpenter ran away from home to marry a 21 year-old businessman named Charles McGrew in 1927. The couple lived off his rather large inheritance for a couple of years, but it is believed that his drinking led to an […]
It would most likely surprise fans of Frank Sinatra to learn that at his birth in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1915 he weighed an enormous 13.5 lbs! He would, however, grow up to be a very slight 5’7” (1.7m). His forceps delivery left a permanent scar on his face […]
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 […]
Irving Thalberg, the ‘boy genius’ in charge of production at MGM, died in 1936 while his wife, Norma Shearer, was in the middle of making Marie Antoinette. He was a genius when it came to organizing a film studio and making it run efficiently and profitably. The fledgling company […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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