Category: Oscar Profile

I’m trying something new this week. Instead focusing on the careers of individual contributors to film, I’m taking a look at some of the principal performers in a particular film. I’m not sure how many films I will cover, or how often, but I have enough to keep this going for several weeks, if not…

Born August 30, 1898 in Brooklyn, New York as Marjory Ford but known growing up as Thelma Ford, this future Tony, Oscar, and Emmy winner would be known professionally as Shirley Booth. Booth made her stage debut in a stock company production of Mother Carey’s Chickens. She changed her name due to her father’s objections…

Born January 2, 1961 in Los Angeles, California, Todd Haynes was one of four children of Allen and Shelley Haynes. His mother’s family was Ashkenazi Jewish (from Poland, Romania, and Russia) and his father, who was a cosmetics importer, had English/Welsh ancestry. Haynes developed an interest in film at an early age. In 1978, he…

Born September 29, 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts, Madeline Gail Wolfson known professionally as Madeline Kahn, was the daughter of a garment manufacturer and his wife. Her parents were divorced when she was two and she moved to New York with her mother. Her mother later married her stepfather, Hiller Kahn, who adopted her. Kahn graduated…

Born October 24, 1947, in St. Louis, Missouri, Kevin Kline was the second of four children of Robert and Margaret Kline. His father was of German Jewish descent and his mother was Irish Catholic. He was raised in mother’s faith. His father’s family owned a chain of stores. His father was an amateur opera singer…

Born September 20, 1906, in Los Angeles, California, Russell Metty first worked in the film industry as a lab technician, becoming an apprentice cameraman for Paramount in 1929. He then became a lighting cameraman at RKO. His first credit as cinematographer was for 1934’s West of the Pecos. Metty’s first major film of note as…

Born December 5, 1897, in Columbus, Georgia, Nunnally (Hunter) Johnson was the son of a railway superintendent. Educated in Columbus, he graduated from high school in 1915. Having worked for his local newspaper as a delivery boy, he became a junior reporter for the Savannah Press before moving to New York in 1919, the year…

Born May 9, 1896, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada to Patience Day and architect Robert Scott, Richard Day developed a spinal curvature that prevented him from attending school and was instead home-schooled. He never graduated high school or pursued higher education. Day was a Captain in the Canadian Army stationed in London during World War…

Born January 5, 1931, in San Diego, California, Robert Duvall was the son of an amateur actress and a U.S. Navy rear admiral. His lineage traces back to Martha Washington and Robert E. Lee. His father expected him to attend the Naval Academy at Annapolis, but he chose acting instead. Studying at New York’s Neighborhood…

Born August 10, 1896, in Memphis, Tennessee, Walter Lang entered the film business as a young man when he got a job in a production company, working his way up to assistant director and then director. His first film as director was 1925’s The Red Kimono. He worked steadily even though he temporarily quit the…

Born September 19, 1901, in a town in Austria-Hungary that is now part of Romania, József Paszternák, known professionally as Joe Pasternak, was one of eleven children of a town clerk. He emigrated to the US as a teenager in 1920 and stayed with an uncle in Philadelphia. He had a variety of jobs while…

Born April 17, 1911, in South Bend, Indiana, George Stenius grew up in Detroit, Michigan. Determined to become an actor he joined a stock company rather than continue his education at Yale. In addition to his stage work, he voiced The Lone Ranger from its inception on Detroit Radio in 1933. He invented the Lone…

Born March 20, 1891 in Feltham, England, Edmund Goulding was the son of a butcher who objected to his son’s early acting and writing ambitions, wanting him to keep working in his butcher shop. It wasn’t until World War I, that he got his chance to escape his oppressive homelife by joining the Army. Wounded…