The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database
Biography:
Ben Turpin was born in New Orleans in 1869, the son of a French-born confectionery store owner. When 7 years old, his father moved to New York’s lower East Side. A wanderlust fellow by nature, Turpin lived the life of a hobo in his early adult years. He started up his career by chance while bumming in Chicago where he drew laughs at parties. An ad in a newspaper looking for comedy acts caught his eye and he successfully booked shows along with a partner. Going solo, he performed on the burlesque circuit as well as under circus tents and invariably entertained his audiences by doing tricks, vigorous pratfalls and, of course, crossing his eyes. One of his more familiar sight gags was a backwards tumble he called the “108.” He happened upon the Happy Hooligan persona while playing on the road and kept the hapless character as part of routine for 17 years.
He started in films at age 38 in 1907, joining Essanay Studios shortly after the company began operating in Chicago. He also became their resident janitor for a spell. He stayed with the company for two years but remained on the edges of obscurity. Appearing sporadically in silent comedy shorts, he typically played dorky characters who always did something wrong. His big break came when he returned to Essanay and was introduced to Charles Chaplin, who immediately took to him and set him up with Mack Sennett. By 1917 Sennett had turned Turpin into a top comedy draw. With his trademark crossed eyes and thick mustache, he made scores of slapstick films alongside the likes of Mabel Normand and ‘Roscoe ’Fatty’ Arbuckle’, among others. Most notable were his films that parodied hit movies of the day such as his The Shriek of Araby (1923), in which his character lampooned Rudolph Valentino. Turpin’s true forte was impersonating the most dashingly romantic and sophisticated stars of the day and turning them into clumsy oafs.
Turpin retired from full time acting in 1924 to care for his ailing wife Canadian comedy actress Carrie Turpin (nee LeMieux). After her death the following year he returned but his marquee value had slipped drastically. The advent of sound pretty much marked the end to his special brand of physical comedy. He was only glimpsed from then on, mostly in comic cameos for other top stars such as a bit as a plumber with Laurel & Hardy in Saps at Sea (1940), his last. He died of heart disease that same year.
–Internet Movie Database
Biography:
Albert Dieudonné (26 November 1889 – 19 March 1976) was a French actor, screenwriter, film director and novelist.
Dieudonné was born in Paris, France, and made his acting debut in silent film in 1908 for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise, with musical score by Camille Saint-Saëns. In 1924, he directed the film drama “Catherine”, in which he also appeared as a major character. Jean Renoir acted as his assistant director on the film.
Between 1915 and 1916, Dieudonné acted in five films for director Abel Gance, including the 1915 film La Folie du Docteur Tube and the 1916 film Le périscope. In 1927 he was hired back to star in the title role in Gance’s epic film, Napoléon. In 1929 Dieudonné wrote a novel that was made into a 1930 musical comedy film titled “La Douceur D’Aimer” (Sweetness of Love), and he wrote the script for the 1936 La Garçonne.
Albert Dieudonne died in Paris in 1976.
–Wikipedia
Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy, Aleksandr Kajdanovsky, Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, and Alexander Kaidonovsky are the same person. His name is just transliterated in various ways.
Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy on IMDb and Wikipedia.
Biography:
Alexander Leonidovich Kaidanovsky (23 July 1946, Rostov-on-Don, USSR – 3 December 1995, Moscow, Russia) was a Soviet and Russian actor and film director.
His best known roles are in films such as At Home Among Strangers (1974), Telokhranitel/The Bodyguard (1979) and Stalker (1979).
Prior to pursuing an acting career, Kaidanovsky attended technical college where he was training to become a welder. Apparently a prospect of becoming a worker did not appeal to him and in 1965 he started studying acting at The Rostov Theatre School and the Schukin Institute in Moscow. Before completing the course he took his first part in the film Tainstvennaya stena (A Mysterious Wall), (1967) and upon graduation in 1969, he worked as stage actor.
In 1985 he directed A Simple Death, which was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival.
Kaidanovsky made his theatre debut at the Eugene Vakhtangov Theatre in 1969. In 1971 he was invited to join MKHAT, the Moscow Arts Theatre, the best classical theatre in Russia, a rare privilege for a 25-year-old graduate.
He made his major film debut in Yours Among Strangers and a Stranger Among Yours (1974), and over the next few years appeared in some two dozen films, including the satirical comedy Diamonds for Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1976) and The Life of Beethoven (1980). At his peak in the ‘70s Kaidanovsky was among Soviet Russia’s most popular actors, and it was at this point that famed Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, impressed by the looks and the acting technique of Kaidanovsky in Diamonds, invited him to play the title-role in his new film, Stalker (1979). This role earned Kaidanovsky international acclaim.
–Wikipedia
Synopsis for Burning Patience:
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (Roberto Parada) helps postman Mario (Oscar Castro) to woo local lass Beatriz (Marcela Osorio). Set in Chile but shot in Portugal, exiled writer Antonio Skármeta directed this adaptation of his own novel, which was later given the big-budget treatment as Il postino (1994).
Synopsis for Four Times That Night:
What happened last night in Tina’s apartment? Did she sleep with Gianni willingly, or was she raped? And what was that other couple doing in the apartment with them? Tina, Gianni, Tina’s mother, and Tina’s peeping tom concierge all have differing opinions in this shagadelic sex farce from horror maestro Mario Bava! A spicy Italian variation on the multi-perspective storyline of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. – Amazon
Forgotten Silver should have the a running time of 53 minutes.
Duplicate entries for Hamid Jebeli:
http://mubi.com/cast_members/101764
and
http://mubi.com/cast_members/364363
Quote:
“If the movie theaters were suddenly closed in America, there would be a revolution.”
Bio:
Paul Fejos (January 27, 1897 – April 23, 1963) was a Hungarian-born director of feature films and documentaries who worked in a number of countries including the United States. He also studied medicine in his youth and became a prominent anthropologist later in life
Fejos was born in Budapest, Hungary as Pál Fejös to parents Desiré Fejös and the former Aurora Novelly. He had one older sister, Olga Fejös. Like many film directors, Fejos exaggeratd or invented myths for large portions of his life story and according to him his father was a captain with the Hussars and his mother was a Lady-in-waiting for the Austrian-Hungarian Empress, and that as a youth Fejos himself was an official of the Imperial Court. The truth was that his mother’s family originated from Italy but did have an aristocratic background and his father was a pharmacist in Dunaföldvár. Shortly before Fejos was born his father sold his business and moved the family to Budapest in order to buy a shop there, but died of a heart attack before the new shop was purchased. He was then raised by his mother in his grandparents’ home. As a boy he was said to be a smart student and to have loved films from an early age. He was sent to a school run by Piarist Fathers in Veszprém and later to a school in Kecskemét. He eventually studied medicine and in 1921 he received an M.D. from the Royal Hungarian Medical University of Budapest. In 1914 he married his first wife Mara Jankowsky. World War I started soon afterwards and Fejos worked as a medical orderly for the Imperial Austrian Army on the Italian front lines. During the war he also managed a theatre that performed for the troops. Some additional myths about Fejos’ life that surfaced year later include that he was an officer in the Hussars, was wounded three times and that he was the first person to pilot a combat airplane in the entire war. After the war Fejos returned to Budapest and began working as a set painter for an opera company and eventually for the Orient-Film production company. He was divorced from his first wife in 1921, allegedly because of his irrational jealousy.
Fejos first began directing films in either 1919 or 1920 for Mobil Studios in Hungary. His earliet silent films included Pán, a fantasy based on the mythological character, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, based on a play by Oscar Wilde, The Black Captain, a film about police corruption in New York City, The Last of Asène Lupin, a remake of the popular American serial film, and The Queen of Spades, based on the novel by Alexander Pushkin. Fejos always saw film as closer to painting than to theatre and was more concerned about issues of light and shadow than story. He also stated at this time that no great film would be made until it could be shot in color.
Just as other prominent Hungarian filmmakers like Michael Curtiz and Alexander Korda had done, Fejos left Hungary in 1923 to escape the White Terror and the Horthy regime. He first travelled to Vienna where he was briefly employed by Max Reinhardt, then to Berlin where he worked as an extra on a Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen. He then moved to Paris where he staged an unsuccessful production of Walter Hasenclever’s avant-garde play L’Homme. He finally emigrated to the United States in October 1923. He arrived in New York City penniless and spoke little English, but managed to get several low paying jobs at funeral parlors or piano factories. By the spring on 1924 his English had improved and he managed to get a job as a laboratory technician at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. He earned $80 a week and was employed there for two years. In 1925 he married a co-worker named Mimosa Pfalz, but the marriage lasted only 30 days. While living in New York he did manage to land one theater gig as a technical advisor to ensure the Hungarian atmosphere of an adaptation of Ferenc Molnár’s The Glass Slipper. In the spring of 1926, Fejos spent his entire life savings of $45 on an old Buick and took a cross country trip to move to Los Angeles in pursuit of a film career there.
When Fejos arrived in Hollywood he once again struggled to get by and only managed to land a few odd jobs working on scripts. Sometimes he would only survive by hitchhiking to Pasadena to steal fruit from orange orchards. On one of his hitchhiking trips he was picked up by a rich, young New Yorker named Edward Spitz, who had recently moved to Hollywood with ambitions to produce films. Fejos told Spitz all about his film career in Hungary and convinced Spitz to finance a film. Spitz agreed to give Fejos $5,000 to make a feature film, which was approximately only about 1% of the average film budget at that time. Fejos managed to work with this small budget and began production on his first American feature in October 1927. He was able to convince actor friends to appear in the film for free with the promise of compensation if it was successful, and even charmed Charlie Chaplin’s frequent co-star Georgia Hale to appear in the film with the same promise at a time when Hale was earning $5,000 a week. He hired the inexperienced cameraman Leon Shamroy to shoot the film and rented studio space by the minute instead of by the day. Fejos also utilized sets that had been used for other films and made changes to the script when circumstances changed. When sets or actors were unavailable, Fejos had his crew film close-ups of hands, feet, cars or anything else that stuck him as interesting. Fejos was also able to get free film stock from the DuPont company, which was then trying to compete with the more established Kodak and Agfa companies. Filming lasted for 28 days.
The Last Moment starred Otto Matiesen as a man who commits suicide by drowning and then remembers the events of his life that lead up to his death in flashbacks. The finished film was seven reels and silent, but contained no title cards. It is currently a lost film, but a review described it as having “dizzying wipes, multiple superimpositions and vertiginous camera movements.” The Last Moment was released in 1928 and received rave reviews and was a financial hit. Charlie Chaplin praised it and writer Tamar Lane called it “one of the most remarkable films that has ever been presented on the screen.” With the films success and Fejos’s overnight celebrity status, major studios were suddenly competing for the former vagrant to sign contracts with them. Fejos settled with Universal Studios because its contract offered him complete artistic control.
In 1928 Fejos quickly began production on his next and best-known film: Lonesome. The script was written by Edward T. Lowe Jr. and Tom Reed, and was based on a newspaper article about lonliness in the modern American cities. Carl Laemmle Jr. produced the film. In the film Glenn Tryon and Barbara Kent play two lonely New Yorkers who live in adjoining apartments but have never met. They meet by chance at Coney Island and begin a romance, but lose each other only to be reunited at their apartment building. The film was hand-tinted and, after the success of The Jazz Singer, “talkie” scenes were added after production had finished. The film was another box office hit and its reputation has grown throughout the years. Georges Sadoul called it a precursor to neorealism. Jonathan Rosenbaum praised the film and compared Fejos to such better known contemporaries as F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. Andrew Sarris has called it “a tender love story in its silent passages…[but} crude, clumsy and tediously tongue-tied in its talkie passages.” Charles Higham stated that although “its visual style, initially attractive, becomes a monotonous succession of busy shots, dissolving over each other in a perpetual flurry…[but] the films charm is real.”
Fejos’s third Hollywood film was The Last Performance, another box office success for Universal Studios in 1929. The film starred Conrad Veidt as a stage magician who falls in love with his assistant and was another part sound, part silent film. Later that year Fejos began production on his largest and most ambitious film: Broadway, based on the hit stage production produced by Jed Harris, George Abbott and Phillip Dunning. Fejos was given a $1 million budget, most of which was spent on the huge cubist nightclub set and on a 28 ton camera crane, which was the largest and most versatilw crane built up to that point. The film starred Glenn Tryon and Evelyn Brent. When released, the film was only a modest success and Fejos considered it a failure. It was remade by William A. Seiter in 1942. Film critic Miles Krueger said that “the images of the Paradise Club and the huge musical number (Final in Technicolor) have become basic screen literature.”
Fejos then began filming the musical Captain of the Guard (AKA Marsellaise) in 1930, the year he became an American citizen. During the shooting of an ambitious sequence with over 300 extras that depicted the storming of the Bastille, Fejos fell from a high scaffolding and suffered a concussion. It took him six weeks in bed to recover and John Stuart Robinson finished the film, with Fejos receiving no screen credit. He then worked on King of Jazz, which was officially directed by John Murray Anderson. Fejos became angry with Universal that once again he did not receive screen credit for his contributions to the film. His frustration with Universal and Hollywood reached its peak when he was not hired to direct All Quiet on the Western Front and Fejos broke his contract with the studio. He signed a contract with Metro Goldwyn Mayer shortly afterwards, but only directed the German and French language versions of The Big House.
In 1931 Fejos accepted an invitation from Pierre Braunberger to direct early sound films in France and left Hollywood for good. Fejos complained to a reporter that Hollywood was too commercial and like a drug for the public. He went on to state that the Hollywood-fantasy happy endings simply blinded working people from their hopeless lives and that “if the movie theaters were suddenly closed in America, there would be a revolution”, but that in Europe he hoped for “films made in the name of art.” Fejos’s career in France was short lived and began with his supervision of Claude Heyman’s L’Amour á l’Americaine in 1931. Next Fejos made the ambitious Fantômas, a remake of the famous serial made by Louis Feuillade in the 1910s.
In 1932 Fejos returned to Hungary to direct Spring Shower (Tavaszi Zápor), which some film critics have called his best film. The film stars Annabella as a young girl who is seduced and abandoned, has a child and dies in poverty only to have to scrub floors in Heaven. While in Heaven, she sees that her now teenage daughter is about to make the same mistake that she made and dumps her wash bucket to cause a rain storm and prevent it. Jonathan Rosenbaum praised the film, stating that it had “some magical moments of its own. Much as Lonesome seems indebted to the city and amusement park scenes in Sunrise, the nocturnal lighting and sensuality of Marie’s seduction and its mysterious musical aftermath recall certain rustic night scenes in the same film. But unlike the determinism of Murnau’s compositions and camera movements, Fejos’ anthropological distance and fairy-tale encapsulations imply a different sort of relationship to his characters: the rapid cutting between details in a brothel parlous to convey Marie’s confusion before fainting encourages an identification with sensations, not thoughts or feelings. And the beauty of Annabella’s performance and a violin-and-clarinet theme may help one overlook some of the more reductive aspects of the folk legend that define the films dimensions.” Fejos fell in love with Annabella and supposedly flew over her train back to France in a small plane and showered it with roses. Fejos’s friend John W. Dodds has stated that “every time [Fejos] moved to another country, it was because of an ending love affair” and Fejos would spend the next few years throughout different European countries, often with frequent collaborators Lothar Wolff, his assistant director, and Ferenc Farkas, his composer. Fejos’ second Hungarian film was The Verdict of Lake Balaton (Itél a Balaton) in 1932. In this film Fejos used beautiful documentary-like footage of local fishermen and their everyday lives. The film was highly criticized in Hungary for its depiction of the fisherman and accused of bigotry against village life.
In 1933 Fejos moved to Austria and made Ray of Sunshine (Sonnenstahl), again starring Annabella. The film focused on unemployment and poverty in post-World War I Austria and was praised by critics as “the summit of Fejos’ art in Europe…too often ignored by the critics.” Later that year Fejos made the light comedy The Voice of Spring (Frühlingstimmen).
In 1934 Fejos moved to Denmark and made three films for the Nordisk Films company: a light comedy in 1934 called Flight of the millions (Fluten fra millioerne), a farce about a world where there are no prisoners or police officers called Prisoner Number 1 (Frange Nr. 1) in 1935, and an adaptation of playwright Kaj Munk’s The Golden Smile (det Gyldne Smil) about the relationship between art and life in 1935.
By 1935 Fejos had grown tired of narrative films and their inauthentic sets and stories. That year he was sent by Nordisk to scout filming locations in Madagascar and loved the country so much that he ended up staying for nine months. He filmed over 30,000 feet of footage of animals, plants, tribal societies and local customs, all of which was unusable for a narrative feature. He also collected many artifacts and eventually donated them to the Royal Danish Geographical Society. When he returned to Denmark the unusable footage that he had shot was brought to the attention Svensk Filmindustri’s Gunnar Skoglund who commissioned a series of six short documentaries to be made from the footage. These films included Black Horizons (Svarta Horisenter), The Dancers of Esira, Beauty Salon in the Jungle, The Most Useful Tree in the World, Sea Devil and The Graves of our Father, all released between 1935 and 1936. In 1936, he married Inga Arvad, a Danish journalist, noted for a romantic relationship with John F. Kennedy and known as the mistress of Axel Wenner-Gren. Arvad had appeared in Flight of the millions and the two remained married until the early 1940s.
Inspired by his new found passion for cultures and history, Fejos studied cultural anthropology at the Museum of Copenhagen in 1936 and studies under Dr. Thompson. He was then commissioned by Svensk to make a series of Ethnographic film in such countries as Indonesia, the Philippines, New Guinea, Ceylon and Thailand from 1937 to 1938. These films included A Handful of Rice (En Handfull Ris), Man and Woman (Man och Kivinna), The Tribe Still Lives, The Bamboo Age of Mentawei, The Chief’s Son is Dead, The Komodo Dragon and The Village Near Pleasant Fountain.
In 1938 while returning from filming in Thailand Fejos met a Swedish industrialist named Axel Wenner-Gren, who would change Fejos’ life in the same way that Edward Spitz had ten years earlier. The two men became fast friends and Wenner-Gren agreed to finance an expedition to Peru in late 1939. While in Cusco Fejos was told by a Franciscan monk about a legendary lost city somewhere in the jungle. He immediately contacted Wenner-Gren, who agreed to give additional financing for the expedition. Fejos discovered 18 ancient Incan cities1 and traveled to the headwaters of the Amazon river. In total he spent a year in Peru studying the culture and filming the Yagua tribe. His research resulted in Fejos’ final series of films Yagua, released in 1940 and 1941. It also resulted in the publication of Ethnology of the Yagua, published by the Viking Fund Series of Publications in Anthropology in 1943.
In 1941, Fejos both stopped making films and travelling to become Director of Research and acting head of the Viking Fund, a non-lucrative association based in New York City and created that same year by Axel Wenner-Gren. It was later renamed the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He went on to become highly respected in his field and was considered ahead of his time for calling for communication between various branches of anthropology. During this time Fejos also taught at Stanford, Yale and Columbia University.
In 1958 Fejos married anthropologist Lita Binns, who would succeed him as research Director when he died on April 23, 1963. His obituary writer David Bidney said that “Paul Fejos had the temperament of an artist rather than a scholar or research scientist…He supported not only research projects but also, and primarily. individuals whom he trusted and considered worthy of support…His personal support of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin during the last years of the life of this eccentric genius is but one outstanding example…He leaves behind him the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research which he built, an international host of friends whom he helped, and a wife whom he cherished and appreciated.”—Wikipedia
Quote:
“If I’m in something funny, I like to try and find some kind of serious line in it that people can relate to.”
New Still Suggestion:
Biography:
The release of Weekend marked Chris’ big screen debut. Chris trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and, after graduating in 2006, built up an impressive reputation for his stage and small screen work. He starred opposite Alan Cumming in the 2006 revival of Martin Sherman’s iconic play Bent in London’s West end, only weeks after graduating from RADA, for which he was nominated for the Evening Standard Award for Outstanding Newcomer and the WhatsOnStage Theatregoers’ Choice Award for London Newcomer of the Year. He then went on to work at the National Theatre, under the direction of Sir Richard Eyre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Young Vic, The Royal Exchange and London’s Sadler’s Wells. In 2009 he returned to the West End to star as Joe Orton in the stage adaptation of Prick Up Your Ears, and in 2010 made his New York debut leading the company of Peter Nichols’ LIngua Franca which transferred to New York from London’s Finborough Theatre. He has also worked regularly for the BBC in numerous television and Radio Productions. —Internet Movie Database
Quote:
“I’m an actor and I like to just keep working.”
Biography:
Walsh was born in Ogdensburg, New York, the son of Agnes Kathrine (née Sullivan) and Harry Maurice Walsh, Sr., a customs agent. He is of Irish descent. He was raised in a rural area of Vermont, and attended college at Clarkson University.
He came to prominence in the 1978 crime drama, Straight Time, in which he played a sadistic parole officer. He also had a memorable role as a crazed sniper in the Steve Martin comedy The Jerk. One of his most well-known roles was Bryant in Ridley Scott’s cult classic Blade Runner. His most acclaimed performance, arguably, was the double-crossing private detective in Blood Simple (1984), for which he won the 1986 Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead. Walsh made occasional guest appearances on Home Improvement as Tim Allen’s father-in-law. In 1992 he appeared as a powerful U.S. Senator in David Winning’s Killer Image, playing Michael Ironside’s brother. In Christmas with the Kranks, he played one of Allen’s neighbors. He also appeared as Alex Lembeck, a motorcycle cop who appointed himself as Sandy Stockton’s (Sandy Duncan) chaperone/protector on The Sandy Duncan Show in 1972. —Wikipedia
Quote:
“The older you get the more you understand what you’re doing.”
Biography:
Edward James Olmos (born February 24, 1947) is a Mexican American actor and director (with dual citizenship). Among his most memorable roles are William Adama in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, Lt. Martin Castillo in Miami Vice, teacher Jaime Escalante in Stand and Deliver, patriarch Abraham Quintanilla in the film Selena, Detective Gaff in Blade Runner, and narrator El Pachuco in both the stage and film versions of Zoot Suit.
In 1988, Olmos was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for the film Stand and Deliver.
He has also been a longtime pioneer for more diversified roles and images of Latinos in the U.S. media in addition to his most notable roles/work by him starring, directing and producing films, Made for TV Movies and TV shows such as American Me, The Burning Season, My Family/Mi Familia, 12 Angry Men, The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca, Walkout, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and American Family: Journey of Dreams. —Wikipedia
Biography:
Turkel was born in Brooklyn, New York, and served in the U.S. Military during World War II. He currently lives in southern California, and has been involved in writing screenplays.
His most famous roles are Dr. Eldon Tyrell, the eccentric God-figure in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Lloyd, the ghostly bartender in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). He has the distinction of being one of only two actors (the other being Philip Stone) to work with Kubrick as a credited character three times: in The Killing (1956, as “Tiny”), in Paths of Glory (1957, as the doomed Private Arnaud), and in The Shining.
His first film appearance was 1948’s City Across the River. Other film appearances include Bert I. Gordon’s The Boy and the Pirates (1960) as Abu the Genie; the 1988 horror feature The Dark Side of the Moon; The Sand Pebbles (1966) as Bronson; and Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik in The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Turkel’s television appearances include Kojak, Tales from the Darkside and Miami Vice (in the episode “Indian Wars”). He also played the janitor in an episode of Boy Meets World. —Wikipedia
Biography:
Hong was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His father, Frank W. Hong, immigrated from Hong Kong to Chicago via Canada, where he owned a restaurant. Hong’s grandfather was from Taishan, China. For his early education, Hong moved to Hong Kong, and returned to the United States at age ten. He studied civil engineering at the University of Southern California, but later became interested in acting and trained with Jeff Corey. Hong was a road engineer for Los Angeles County for 7½ years, acting during his vacations and sick days. He finally quit engineering for good to devote himself to acting and voice work full time. —Wikipedia
Biography:
Sanderson was born in Memphis, Tennessee to an elementary school teacher mother and a landscape designer father. He holds business (B.B.A., 1968) and law (J.D., 1971) degrees from the University of Memphis (then known as Memphis State University).
Sanderson has appeared in many movies, and is known for his role in the 1982 classic science fiction film Blade Runner as J. F. Sebastian. Sanderson also portrayed a character named “Deuce” in an episode of the science fiction television series Babylon 5, and later reprised the role in the television movie Babylon 5: Thirdspace. He is also the basis and the voice for the recurring character of Dr. Karl Rossum (voiced by Jeff Bennett) in Batman: The Animated Series. Sanderson starred in the controversial film Fight for Your Life, which has a strict ban in the United Kingdom.
As a guest, he has made appearances in television shows, and his credits include The X-Files, Knight Rider, Married… with Children, Babylon 5, ER, Walker, Texas Ranger, and Coach. He plays a key role in an audio dramatization of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” in NPR’s 2000X series. In 2001, Sanderson played a courageous bartender named Dewey in the TNT film Crossfire Trail.
He played Larry in Newhart from 1982 to 1990, famous for the catchphrase, “Hi, I’m Larry. This is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl.”
Sanderson returned to television playing E. B. Farnum in the HBO television series Deadwood from 2004 to 2006. His role is a tragicomic hotelier and first mayor of Deadwood. In 2008, Sanderson joined the cast of True Blood playing town Sheriff Bud Dearborne.
Sanderson portrayed “Oldham”, the resident interrogation expert of the DHARMA Initiative in the 10th episode of the fifth season of ABC’s series Lost. He appears in the Current TV series Bar Karma as a bartender. —Wikipedia
Quote:
“You have to work, you have to have your craft. Every job you do, you gain more experience. You never stop learning.”
Biography:
Joanna Cassidy (born August 2, 1945) is an American film and television actress. She is known for her role as the replicant Zhora in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982). She has won a Golden Globe Award, was nominated for three Emmy Awards and also was nominated for Saturn Award and Screen Actors Guild Awards.
She also has starred in films such as Under Fire, The Fourth Protocol, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Package, Where the Heart Is and Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, Vampire in Brooklyn and Ghosts of Mars. From 2001 to 2005, she acted out the role of Margaret Chenowith on the HBO drama series Six Feet Under. She currently plays Joan Hunt on the ABC series Body of Proof. —Wikipedia
Biography:
After graduating from the University of Southern California, Woods became an actor. He appeared at the old Salt Lake Theatre in “The Copperhead,” as Lionel Barrymore’s teenage son. In New York City, he appeared in many successful Broadway productions then began a movie career. He worked with Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, John Barrymore, and Clark Gable.
His most famous role was playing “Matt Doyle” opposite James Cagney’s “Tom Powers” in The Public Enemy (1931), a seminal and arguably the most widely acclaimed gangster movie. Although initially cast in the lead role as Powers, director William Wellman switched Woods’ role with Cagney’s after viewing Cagney’s electrifying performance in the dailies. In the flashback sequences at the beginning of the film, the children’s appearances are reversed because those scenes were filmed before the switch and the studio opted not to pay to refilm them, which has confused viewers ever since. The studio had promised to make the role switch up to him with later parts but reneged and dropped him when his contract expired. Woods soon wound up working at the worst B-picture studios, terminally damaging his movie career.
After his film acting career ended, Woods went into producing, directing, and theatrical management, working with the Schubert Organization and 20th Century Fox. During WWII he worked with Ronald Reagan making training films for the U.S Army. He retired in 1975, and moved to Salt Lake City. —Wikipedia
Biography:
Born Charles John Holt III in Beverly Hills, California, he was the son of actor Jack Holt and his wife, Margaret Woods. Holt was sent to study at Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana, from which he graduated in 1936. Immediately afterward, he went to work in the Hollywood film business.
In 1938 at the age of 19, Holt, after five minor roles, landed a major role under star Harry Carey in The Law West of Tombstone. It was the first of the many Western films he made during the 1940s. During this time his sister, Jennifer Holt, also became a leading star in the western film genre.
After playing young Lieutenant Blanchard in the 1939 classic Stagecoach, Tim Holt had one of the leading roles in Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). He also starred as a Nazi in Hitler’s Children (1943). After making this film, he became a decorated combat veteran of World War II, flying in the Pacific Theatre with the United States Army Air Force as a B-29 bombardier. He returned to films after the war, appearing as Virgil Earp to Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp in the John Ford western My Darling Clementine. Holt was next cast in the role that he is probably most remembered for (in a film in which his father also appeared in a small part)—that of Bob Curtin to Humphrey Bogart’s Fred C. Dobbs in John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Before the film was released, Holt did another four westerns and afterward made two dozen more up until 1952. He was then absent from the screen for five years until he starred in a less-than-successful horror film, The Monster That Challenged the World, in 1957. Over the next 16 years, he appeared in only two more motion pictures.
In 1973, at the age of 54, Tim Holt died from bone cancer in Shawnee, Oklahoma, where he had been managing a radio station. He was interred in the Memory Lane Cemetery in Harrah, Oklahoma. Tim Holt Drive in Harrah, where he and his wife had lived, was subsequently named in his honor.
In 1991, Tim Holt was inducted posthumously into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. —Wikipedia
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“Every dancer hopes to dance with Fred Astaire. He is the goal we all set. So when my second picture was “Ziegfeld Follies,” with Fred Astaire as my dancing partner, I felt my dream had come true sooner than I had a right to expect."
Bio:
Lucille Bremer (February 21, 1917 – April 16, 1996) was an American film actress and dancer.
Bremer was born in Amsterdam, New York and began her career as a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, aged 16. Bremer, along with fellow stars Vera-Ellen and June Allyson, appeared as a ‘Pony Girl’ in the Broadway musical Panama Hattie in 1940. Spotted by a talent scout, she was taken to Hollywood where her screen test impressed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer mogul Louis B. Mayer. An accomplished dancer, she was also considered to display potential as a dramatic actress.
She made her screen debut in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) as Judy Garland’s sister, and followed this with a co-starring role opposite Fred Astaire in Yolanda and the Thief (1945), and a featured dance performance, once again with Astaire, in two memorable sequences in Ziegfeld Follies (1946). Her last major film was Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), but after this MGM began to lose interest in promoting her. After a few minor films, she played her last starring role in Behind Locked Doors (1948).
Reportedly disappointed with her Hollywood career, she elected not to renew her contract and left the film industry. She had also met and fallen in love with the son of the former president of Mexico, Abelardo Luis Rodriguez, who bore the same name as his father. She moved with him to Baja California Sur Mexico at the beginning of the Golden Age of Baja and started the illustrious private resort Rancho Las Cruces, as well as the original Palmilla Hotel and the Hacienda Hotel. With her contacts in Hollywood and her husband “Rod” Rodriguez’s influence they drew the daring adventurers from Hollywood who sought to enjoy this newly found paradise.
After her divorce (in 1963) she settled in La Jolla, California where she owned a children’s clothing boutique. She died in 1996 from a heart attack at age 79.
To her memory she left 4 children (Nicholas, Torry, Christina and Karen) and numerous grandchildren (Francesca, Amanda, Andres, Alexis, Kamal and David) and great-grandchildren.—Wikipedia
Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel (23 April 1922 – 24 June 1995) was an artist, occultist, actress, and wife of rocket pioneer and occultist Jack Parsons. Cameron played a major role in the 1946 Babalon Working ritual.
Cameron was born in 1922 in Belle Plaine, Iowa, and graduated from Davenport High School in 1940. She enlisted in the Navy and served drawing maps and working with photographs.
Cameron left the Navy after World War Two and moved to Pasadena where she met Parsons after he performed the Babalon Working, an occult rite to manifest the Goddess potential in society and throughout the human race. He said that she was at his home when he returned, and he believed her to be the entity he and L. Ron Hubbard had conjured. Cameron identified herself with the Scarlet Woman, as did those around her.
After further magical workings together, Parsons, Hubbard and Cameron felt that they had conceived a Moonchild, as described in the novel of the same name by Aleister Crowley, although no physical child was born. They were referring to a spiritual entity. Cameron said that she had an abortion after conceiving a child within two weeks of meeting Parsons, so clearly a physical child was not the aim. Aleister Crowley thought that their workings were idiocy (although he never met Cameron), and some believers feel that Parsons, Hubbard, and Cameron had unleashed a magical force on the world, the goddess Babalon. Paradoxically, at times Cameron herself was referred to as an incarnation of Babalon by Parsons, and later claimed this identity for herself, saying she had given birth to a spiritual child.
Like many women interested in magic, such as Ithell Colquhoun, Vali Myers, Rosaleen Norton and the surrealist Leonora Carrington, Cameron was also an artist. Her art depicts many images of an otherworldly nature drawn from the Elemental Kingdom and the astral plane.
She played a prominent role in Kenneth Anger’s film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, again as the Scarlet Woman. She also appeared in two films of Curtis Harrington, – - his ten minute 1956 portrait, The Wormwood Star, which focused on Cameron and her artwork, The Wormwood Star and Night Tide (1961), where she starred as a mysterious woman credited as ‘Water Witch’. A brief excerpt from The Wormwood Star can be seen by searching Youtube under ’House of Harrington Part 1" – the excerpt runs from 6:19 to 7:04. —Wikipedia
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Laurie Bird (September 26, 1953 – June 15, 1979) was an American actress and photographer.
Bird’s mother died when she was three. Her father, an electrical engineer, was ex-United States Navy and worked long hours. Although she had two brothers, she more or less raised herself.
Described by Hollywood columnist Dick Kleiner as “look[ing] like an innocent Hayley Mills”, Bird appeared in just three films: Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Cockfighter (1974), and a small role in Annie Hall (1977). Bird was the still photographer on Cockfighter, and shot the cover photo for Art Garfunkel’s 1977 album Watermark. She was romantically involved with her Blacktop and Cockfighter director Monte Hellman, and later with Garfunkel for several years.
In 1979, Bird committed suicide in the apartment she shared with Garfunkel in New York. At Bird’s funeral, her father revealed that her mother’s death, which was thought to be from ovarian cancer, was also a suicide. Garfunkel referred to his relationship to Bird in the liner notes of his 1988 album Lefty.
She was briefly featured in the 2006 documentary film Wanderlust. —Wikipedia
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Paul Gustave Simonon (born 15 December 1955) is an English musician and artist best known as the bass guitarist for punk rock band The Clash. More recent work includes his involvement in the project The Good, the Bad & the Queen in 2007 with Damon Albarn, Simon Tong and Tony Allen and the Gorillaz album, Plastic Beach in 2010, which along with Albarn saw him reunite with Mick Jones.
Simonon was born in Croydon, Surrey. His father, Gustave, was a clerk in the civil service and his mother, Elaine, was a librarian. He grew up in the South London area of Brixton, spending around a year in Siena, Italy with his mother and stepfather. Before joining The Clash, he had planned to become an artist and attended the Byam Shaw School of Art, then based in Campden St, Kensington (now part of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and relocated in Archway, London).
He was asked to join The Clash in 1976 by lead guitarist Mick Jones, who planned to teach Simonon guitar. However, the instrument proved difficult for Simonon, so Jones decided to teach him bass instead. Simonon would learn his bass parts by rote from Jones in the early days of The Clash and still did not know how to play the bass when the group first recorded. He is credited with coming up with the name of the band and was mainly responsible for the visual aspects such as clothing & stage backdrops. He was also immortalised on the front cover of the band’s double album London Calling; Pennie Smith’s image of him smashing his bass has become one of the iconic pictures of the punk era.
Paul Simonon wrote three of the Clash’s songs: “The Guns of Brixton” on London Calling, “The Crooked Beat” on Sandinista!, and the B-side “Long Time Jerk”. He sang “Red Angel Dragnet” from Combat Rock but this song was written by Joe Strummer.
Simonon played bass on almost all of the Clash’s songs. Recordings that he did not play on include: “The Magnificent Seven” and “Lightning Strikes (Not Once but Twice)” on Sandinista! (played by Norman Watt-Roy), “Rock the Casbah” on Combat Rock (played by Topper Headon), and 10 of the 12 tracks on Cut the Crap (played by Norman Watt-Roy). Many of the tracks on Combat Rock are thought to have bass tracks laid down by Mick Jones or engineer Eddie Garcia and early recordings on Sandinista! featured bass played by Jones or Strummer, some but possibly not all of which Simonon later re-recorded once he rejoined the sessions after filming Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains.
Simonon promoting the band, Havana 3am, in Tokyo, Japan
Simonon’s contrapuntal reggae/ska-influenced lines set him apart from the bulk of other punk rock bassists of the era in terms of complexity and the role of the bass guitar within the band. He usually played with a pick as opposed to plucking the strings with his fingers.
After the Clash dissolved in 1986, Simonon started a band called Havana 3am. They recorded one album in Japan before breaking up. He also participated in a Bob Dylan session along with the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones that became part of the Dylan album Down in the Groove. Currently, Simonon works as an artist – his first passion before joining the Clash. He has had several gallery shows, and designed the cover for Big Audio Dynamite’s album, Tighten Up, Vol. 88, as well as the cover for “Herculean” from the album The Good, the Bad and the Queen, a project with Damon Albarn on which Simonon plays bass. In 2008, after a seven year gap, Simonon began exhibiting paintings again with an exhibition at Thomas Williams Fine Art, London. One of his paintings was bought by British singer Lily Allen for £23,500, according to the Telegraph newspaper. Paul reunited with Damon Albarn and Mick Jones on the new Gorillaz album Plastic Beach, and is also the bassist of the Gorillaz live band supporting Plastic Beach, along with Mick Jones on guitar. The band headlined the 2010 Coachella Festival, and took up residence at the Camden roundhouse for two nights in late April 2010.
In 2011, Simonon spent time aboard the Greenpeace vessel Esperanza incognito under the guise of “Paul the assistant cook” in response to Arctic oil drilling in Greenland by Cairn oil. He joined other Greenpeace activists in illegally boarding one of Cairn’s oil rigs; an action which earned him two weeks in a Greenland jail. His identity was revealed to other crew members after the voyage, and he joined Damon Albarn and the other members of The Good, the Bad, and the Queen for a performance in London celebrating Greenpeace’s 40th anniversary.
Simonon and Mick Jones are now working as executive producers for a new film based on the recording of The Clash classic 1979 album London Calling. —Wikipedia
Kevin Courtright
W.H. Auden
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“Art is born of humiliation.”
Biography:
Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.
Auden grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined traditional forms and styles with new forms devised by Auden himself. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.
He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably “Funeral Blues” (“Stop all the clocks”) and “September 1, 1939”, became widely known through films, broadcasts and popular media.
–Wikipedia