Category: Oscar Profile

Born April 3, 1924 in Cincinnati, Ohio to William Kappelhoff, a music teacher and choir master, and his wife Alma, a housewife, Doris Kappelhoff was the third of three children and the only girl. Her parents separated when she was ten and she lived thereafter with her mother. Intent on becoming a professional dancer, young…

Born October 31, 1896 in Chester, Pennsylvania as the result of the rape of her 15-year-mother Louise Anderson by her 18-year-old father, pianist John Waters, Ethel Waters was raised in poverty by her grandmother, Sally Anderson who worked as a housemaid, along with two aunts and an uncle, her mother having married another man shortly…

Born January 26, 1946 in Faial, Azores, Portugal to British parents, Christopher Hampton’s father was a marine telecommunications engineer. He spent his early childhood in Egypt, Hong Kong and Zanzibar among other places. He was educated at a prep school in Surrey, Lancing College in West Sussex and at Oxford University where he read German…

Born December 31, 1897 in Meredosia, Illinois, Frank Skinner was the composer of more than 200 film scores utilized in close to 500 films. He was the author of several textbooks on arranging, composing and orchestrating music, most notably 1934’s F. Skinner’s Simplified Method for Modern Arranging and 1950’s Underscore. A graduate of the Chicago…

Born May 26, 1891 in Budapest, Hungary, Paul Lukas was the son of Adolf Munkácsi and Mária Schneckendorf. He was later adopted by Mária (née Zilahy) and János Lukács, an advertising executive, possibly in 1895, the year given as his year of birth during his lifetime. Lukas volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1913 and…

Born September 29, 1923 in Los Angeles, California, William A. Fraker III was the son of William A. Fraker, Jr., Department Head of Still Photography at Columbia, and his Mexican born wife who fled Mazatlan, Mexico with her mother and sister on a mule during Mexico’s revolution in 1910. Both parents died of influenza in…

Born February 2, 1923 in New York, New York, Bonita Granville was the daughter of stage performers Rosina (née Timponi) and Bernard “Bunny” Granville. Unsurprisingly, she became a child actress at 9, and made her film debut at 10. Granville’s second credited screen role was as Fanny Bridges, the young dancer daughter of Una O’Connor…

Born August 16, 1895 in River Point, Rhode Island, William Howard Greene, whose nickname was “Duke”, was a pioneer in color cinematography. He won two honorary Academy Awards for his work before color cinematography became an Oscar category and was then nominated in each of the first five years in which it was a category…

Born May 31, 1949 in Chicago, Illinois as Thomas Michael Moore, the future Tom Berenger’s father was a printer for the Chicago Sun-Times and a traveling salesman. After graduating from Rich East High School in Park Forest, Illinois in 1967, Moore studied journalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, but decided to seek…

Born September 18, 1905 in Stockholm, Sweden to a mother who later worked in a jam factory and a father who was a laborer, Greta Gustafffson (later Garbo) was the middle of three children in an impoverished family that lived in a slum. Her father became ill during the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1919, began…

Born October 5, 1933 in Queensland, Australia, Diane Cilento was the daughter of distinguished medical practitioners, Sir Raphael Cilento and Phyllis, Lady Cilento. She wanted to become an actress from an early age, and after being expelled from school in Australia, was educated in New York while living with her father. She later won a…

Born October 8, 1897 in Tiflis, Georgia, Russian Empire to Armenian parents, Rouben Mamoulian’s mother was a director of the Armenian Theatre and his father was a bank president. Educated in Tiflis and Paris, he founded a drama studio in Tiflis in 1918. He relocated to England and started directing plays in London in 1922.…

Born October 20, 1958 in New York, New York, Viggo Mortensen (Jr.) was the first of three brothers born to Grace and Viggo Mortensen, Sr. The family moved to Venezuela, then Demark, then Argentina, the boys and their mother returning to New York when Viggo was 11 after their parents’ divorce. After graduating from St.…

Born July 17, 1935 in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, Donald Sutherland survived rheumatic fever, hepatitis and polio as a child to study engineering in college but gave it up to study drama in England’s London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) in 1957. He later spent a year and a half in a…

Born May 11, 1892 in London, England, Margaret Rutherford was the only child of William Rutherford Benn, a journalist and poet and his wife, Florence. Her parents were married in 1882. In 1883, her father murdered his father, a Congregational Church minister, was declared insane and admitted to Bethnal House Lunatic Asylum where he spent…