Leslie Caron Caron began her career as a ballerina. She made her film debut in the musical An American in Paris (1951), followed by roles in The Man with a Cloak (1951), Glory Alley (1952) and The Story of Three Loves (1953), before her role of an orphan in Lili (also 1953).
As a leading lady, Caron starred in films such as The Glass Slipper (1955), Daddy Long Legs (1955), Gigi (1958), Fanny (1961), both of which earned her Golden Globe nominations, Guns of Darkness (1962), The L-Shaped Room (1962), Father Goose (1964) and A Very Special Favor (1965).
For her role as a single pregnant woman in The L-Shaped Room, Caron, in addition to receiving a second Academy Award nomination, won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama and a second BAFTA Award.
Doris Day Having become primarily recognized as a musical-comedy actress, Day gradually took on more dramatic roles to broaden her range.
Her dramatic star turn as singer Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me (1955), with top billing above James Cagney, received critical and commercial success.
Day starred in Alfred Hitchcock's suspense film The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) with James Stewart. She sang two songs in the film one of which 'Que Sera, Sera' won an Academy Award.
In 1959, Day entered her most successful phase as a film actress with a series of romantic comedies. This success began with Pillow Talk (1959), co-starring Rock Hudson who became a lifelong friend, and Tony Randall. Day received a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actress. It was the only Oscar nomination she received in her career.
Day, Hudson, and Randall made two more films together, Lover Come Back (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964).
Audrey Hepburn Birthday: May 4, 1929
Birthplace: Ixelles, Belgium
Audrey Hepburn's reign as Hollywood's storybook princess lasted 15 years, long enough for her to be made a paradigm of sparkling charisma and class. From a traumatic youth in Nazi-occupied Europe, Hepburn effortlessly charmed her way into the hearts of producers, directors, co-stars and movie-goers alike, earning no less than drama's highest-profile honor for her first major film outing, 'Roman Holiday' (1953).
She seemed to define irrepressible, from her 'Sabrina' (1954) through her deceptively sweet girl-about-town in 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' (1961) to her heartwarming rags-to-riches Eliza Doolittle in the film version of one of the last old school hit musicals, 'My Fair Lady' (1964) to even late in her life when traveled the world as a high-profile spokeswoman for UNICEF.
Her legacy on screen and off would be that of someone disarmingly defying her 'place' and pedigree, transcending them, and in the process, becoming that rare movie star who men wanted to be with and women concurrently wanted to be..
Richard Burton Richard Burton, 1925 – 1984, was a Welsh actor noted for his mellifluous baritone voice, Burton established himself as a formidable Shakespearean actor in the 1950s, and he gave a memorable performance of Hamlet in 1964.
He was called 'the natural successor to Olivier' by critic Kenneth Tynan. A heavy drinker, Burton's purported failure to live up to those expectations disappointed some critics and colleagues and added to his image as a great performer who had wasted his talent. Nevertheless, he is widely regarded as one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation.
Burton was nominated for an Academy Award seven times, but never won an Oscar. By the late 1960s, Burton was one of the highest-paid actors in the world, receiving fees of $1 million or more plus a share of the gross receipts.[ He remained closely associated in the public consciousness with his second wife, actress Elizabeth Taylor. The couple's turbulent relationship was rarely out of the news.
Hedy Lamarr Often called 'The Most Beautiful Woman in Film,' Hedy Lamarr's beauty and screen presence made her one of the most popular actresses of her day. She was part of 30 films in an acting career spanning 28 years .
She was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on November 9, 1914 in Vienna, Austria. At 17 years old, Hedy starred in her first film, a German project called Geld auf der Strase. Hedy continued her film career by working on both German and Czechoslavakian productions. The 1932 German film Exstase brought her to the attention of Hollywood producers, and she soon signed a contract with MGM. .
Once in Hollywood, she officially changed her name to Hedy Lamarr and starred in her first Hollywood film, Algiers (1938), opposite Charles Boyer. She continued to land parts opposite the most popular and talented actors of the day, including Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, and Jimmy Stewart. Some of her films include an adaptation of John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat (1942), White Cargo (1942), Cecil B DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949), and The Female Animal (1957).
Walter Matthau Walter Matthau was an American actor. He is best known for his film roles in A Face in the Crowd, King Creole and as a coach of a hapless little league team in the baseball comedy The Bad News Bears.
Fail Safe (1964)
Mirage (1965)
The Odd Couple (1968)
The Sunshine Boys (1975)
Burt Lancaster Lancaster performed as a circus acrobat in the 1930s. After serving in World War II, the 32-year-old Lancaster landed a role in a Broadway play and drew the attention of a Hollywood agent. His breakthrough role was the film noir The Killers in 1946 alongside Ava Gardner. A critical success, it launched both of their careers.
In 1953, Lancaster played the illicit lover of Deborah Kerr in the military drama From Here to Eternity. A box office smash, it won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and landed a Best Actor nomination for Lancaster. In 1956, he starred in The Rainmaker, with Katharine Hepburn, earning a Best Actor Golden Globe nomination, and in 1957 he starred in Gunfight at the OK Corral with frequent co-star Kirk Douglas.
During the 1950s, his production company, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, was highly successful, with Lancaster acting in films such as: Trapeze in 1956, a box office smash in which he used his acrobatic skills; Sweet Smell of Success (1957), a dark drama today considered a classic; Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), a WWII submarine drama with Clark Gable; and Separate Tables (1958), a hotel-set drama which received seven Oscar nominations.
In the early 1960s, Lancaster starred in a string of critically successful films, each in very disparate roles. Playing a charismatic biblical con-man in Elmer Gantry in 1960 won him the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Actor. He played a Nazi war criminal in 1961 in the all-star, war-crime-trial film, Judgment at Nuremberg. Playing a bird expert prisoner in Birdman of Alcatraz in 1962, he earned the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actor and his third Oscar nomination. In 1963, Lancaster traveled to Italy to star as an Italian prince in the epic period drama The Leopard. In 1964, he played a US Air Force General who, opposed by a Colonel played by Kirk Douglas, tries to overthrow the President in Seven Days in May.
Sydney Greenstreet Greenstreet's stage debut was as a murderer in a 1902 production of a Sherlock Holmes story at the Marina Theatre, Ramsgate, Kent.
He toured Britain with Ben Greet's Shakespearean company, and in 1905 made his New York City debut in Everyman. He appeared in such plays as a revival of As You Like It (1914). He appeared in numerous plays in Britain and America, working through most of the 1930s with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne at the Theatre Guild. His stage roles ranged from musical comedy to Shakespeare, and years of such versatile acting on two continents led to many offers to appear in films. He refused until he was 61.
In 1941, Greenstreet began working for Warner Bros. His debut film role was as Kasper Gutman ('The Fat Man') co-starring with Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. In Casablanca (1942), Greenstreet played crooked club owner Signor Ferrari (for which he received a salary of $3,750 per week—equivalent to $60,179.91 in 2020 dollars—for seven weeks' work).
He also appeared in Background to Danger (1943), with George Raft; Passage to Marseille (1944), reuniting with Casablanca stars Bogart, Peter Lorre and Claude Rains; The Mask of Dimitrios (1944); The Conspirators (1944) with Hedy Lamarr and Paul Henreid; Hollywood Canteen (1944); Conflict (1945), again with Bogart; Three Strangers (1946); and The Verdict (1946).
In the last two, and The Mask of Dimitrios, he received top billing. He had dramatic roles, such as William Makepeace Thackeray in Devotion (1946), and witty performances in screwball comedies, such as Alexander Yardley in Christmas in Connecticut (1944).
Near the end of his film career, he played opposite Joan Crawford in Flamingo Road (1949).
Gloria Grahame In 1944 Louis B Mayer saw Gloria Grahame on Broadway and gave her an MGM contract. Her debut in the title role of Blonde Fever (1944) was auspicious, but her first public recognition came on loan-out in It's a Wonderful Life (1946).
Although her talent and sex appeal were of star quality, she did not fit the star pattern at MGM, who sold her contract to RKO in 1947. Here the same problem resurfaced; her best film in these years was made on loan-out, In a Lonely Place (1950).
Soon after, she left RKO. The 1950s, her best period, brought her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar and typecast her as shady, inimitably sultry ladies in seven well-known film-noir classics.
Rumours of being difficult to work with on the set of Oklahoma! (1955) helped sideline her film career from 1956 onward.
Ann Bancroft Anne Bancroft was born in 1931 in The Bronx, NY. She made her cinema debut in Don't Bother to Knock (1952) in 1952, and over the next five years appeared in a lot of undistinguished movies. By 1957 she grew dissatisfied with the scripts she was getting, left the film business and spent the next five years doing plays on Broadway.
She returned to screens in 1962 with her portrayal of Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker (1962), for which she won an Oscar. Bancroft went on to give acclaimed performances in The Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Slender Thread (1965), Young Winston (1972), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975), The Elephant Man (1980), To Be or Not to Be (1983), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987) and other movies, but her most famous role would be as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate (1967).
Her status as the 'older woman' in the film is iconic, although in real life she was only eight years older than Katharine Ross and just six years older than Dustin Hoffman.
Bancroft would later express her frustration over the fact that the film overshadowed her other work.
Ida Lupino Ida was born in London to a show business family. In 1932, her mother brought Ida with her to an audition and Ida got the part her mother wanted. The picture was Her First Affaire (1932). Ida, a bleached blonde, came to Hollywood in 1934 and played small and insignificant parts.
Peter Ibbetson (1935) was one of her few noteworthy movies and it was not until The Light That Failed (1939) that she got a chance to get better parts. In most of her movies, she was cast as the hard, but sympathetic woman from the wrong side of the tracks. In The Sea Wolf (1941) and High Sierra (1941), she played the part magnificently.
It has been said that no one could do hard-luck dames the way Lupino could do them. She played tough, knowing characters who held their own against some of the biggest leading men of the day - Humphrey Bogart, Ronald Colman, John Garfield and Edward G Robinson.
She made a handful of films during the forties playing different characters ranging from Pillow to Post (1945), where she played a traveling saleswoman to the tough nightclub singer in The Man I Love (1946).
But good roles for women were hard to get and there were many young actresses and established stars competing for those roles. She left Warner Brothers in 1947 and became a freelance actress. When better roles did not materialize, Ida stepped behind the camera as a director, writer and producer.
Her first directing job came when director Elmer Clifton fell ill on a script that she co-wrote Not Wanted (1949). Ida had joked that as an actress, she was the poor man's Bette Davis.
Now, she said that as a director, she became the poor man's Don Siegel. The films that she wrote, or directed, or appeared in during the fifties were mostly inexpensive melodramas.
John Williams John Williams (1903 – 983) was a Tony Award-winning English stage, film, and television actor. He is remembered for his role as Chief Inspector Hubbard in Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder.
The Paradine Case (1947)
Dial M for Murder (1954)
Sabrina (1954)
To Catch a Thief (1955)
Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
Midnight Lace (1960)
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955 to 1959)
Leo Carroll Carroll, who had moved to Hollywood, made his film debut in Sadie McKee (1934).
He often played doctors or butlers, but he made appearances as Marley's ghost in A Christmas Carol (1938) and as Joseph in Wuthering Heights (1939).
In the original version of Father of the Bride (1950), he played an unctuous wedding caterer.
In the 1951 film The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel he played a sympathetic German Field marshal, Gerd von Rundstedt, presenting him as a tragic, resigned figure completely disillusioned with Hitler.
Carroll as Alexander Waverly on The Man from UNCLE, with guest star Diana Hyland.
Carroll is perhaps best known for his roles in six Alfred Hitchcock films: Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), Spellbound (1945), The Paradine Case (1947), Strangers on a Train (1951) and North by Northwest (1959). He appeared in more Hitchcock films than anyone other than Clare Greet (1871–1939) (who appeared in seven) and Hitchcock himself, whose cameos were a trademark.
As with earlier roles, he was often cast as doctors or other authority figures (such as the spymaster 'Professor' in North by Northwest). He also appeared in a couple of Charlie Chan films, one being 'City of Darkness' (1939) as a shady French locksmith, followed by a role in Charlie Chan's 'Murder Cruise' (1940) as a passenger on ship.
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