We all know and love Angela Lansbury from Murder She Wrote, plus she was the voice of Mrs. Potts in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. However she didn’t start out in life as a middle-aged crime-solving widow (or a singing teapot). Back in the 40s and 50s she looked rather different and played a huge(…)
Ina Claire was best known as a Broadway actress, but she also made movies between 1915 and 1943. She was born Ina Fagan in 1893, and first made her name on stage by doing impersonations of other people – something for which she had a great talent. Apparently a young F. Scott Fitzgerald fell madly(…)
I couldn’t find out very much about this beautiful girl, except that her name is Pearl Aufrere, a chorus girl and actress in the early 1910s in London. She seems to have made the news more for her illustrious engagements rather than her stage appearances. She was engaged to Viscount Dangan, an engagement which was(…)
When we think of silent movie stars we inevitably think of Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino as well as perhaps Lillian Gish (not forgetting the quintessential flappers Clara Bow and Louise Brooks). But for every movie icon there were hundreds of actresses who appeared in silent movies whose names haven’t stood the test of time(…)
Ida Lupino was a British actress and director who appeared in over 50 movies as well as becoming a pioniering and prolific director. She started her movie career working out of Teddington Studios in England in the early 1930s and moved to Hollywood in 1933. She continued to work in Hollywood throughout the 30s and(…)
Marion Davies, Ziegfeld girl, Hollywood actress, self-described “silly, giggly idiot” and mistress to William Randolph Hearst, half length, seated, facing left; in Yolanda. Photograph by Alfred Cheney Johnston, 1924.