Richard Kimble

Of all the Canadians you could have picked (Mary Pickford, Glenn Ford, Walter Pidgeon, Mack Sennett, Donald Sutherland, Genevieve Bujold, Lorne Greene, Leslie Nielsen, Margot Kidder, Michael Sarrazin, Susan Clark, Kate Nelligan, John Vernon, various SNL and SCTV alumni, and that's just off the top of my head), you picked Hume Cronyn? There's just something very Canadian about that

From Wiki's entry on The Black Shield Of Falworth (which FWIW is a good movie):

(Hillbillies Pat Buttram and Robert Easton walk up to 1313 Mockingbird Lane and get a view of the Munsters' haunted mansion. They stare at it in slack-jawed disbelief). PAT: Son, did you ever see such a thing in all your born days? BOB: I never did, Paw. Ain't nobody back home had a house this nice.

A few others: Woody Allen was related by marriage to Abe Burrows, who helped him get started. Even Woody needed a relative in the business. Leslie Nielsen was related to Jean Hersholt. '50s pop singer Georgia Gibbs was related to '60s radical Abbie Hoffman. And perhaps my favorite: Tea Leoni is the grand-niece of Hank Patterson, Green Acres' immortal Mr Ziffel. Does that make her Arnold's step-cousin?

You may be right, but when I saw Randall tell the story he seemed to imply that she had long enough time to write back (I don't know when her letter was written -- Mr Peepers began in 1952), but chose not to.

1. Post pic to Imgur.com 2. Copy pic location 3. Click on the "Image" button in the icon tray above 4. Paste pic location url in the box that pops up. 5. Pic is posted

While a young actor making his name on the Mr Peepers TV series in the early '50s, Tony Randall got a letter complimenting him on his performance. It was from a distant relative he'd never met -- Theda Bara. He wrote back thanking her, but he never heard from her again.

I think my favorite Mitchum casting is in My Forbidden Past, where he plays... a medical researcher on the faculty of Tulane University?!? In one scene we see Dr. Bob peering through his microscope, busy discovering some cure that will save humanity from pestilence and plague. But later, after he is embroiled in scandal with Ava Gardner and suspended from his faculty position, there is a classic Mitchum moment: Leaning back in his office, bored (but with the classic Mitchum smirk), blandly tossing playing cards into a hat.

http://filmschoolrejects.com/opinions/superhero-movies-westerns-genre-filmmaking.php Why Superhero Movies Aren’t Like Westerns (and Probably Won’t be the Next Great Chapter in Genre Filmmaking)

If we're including interview books then I have to mention Kevin Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By, his classic collection of interviews with silent stars.

I've always thought Connie Stevens was cute-hot. She was mostly in TV, Warners series at first, then TV movies later. Not a great actress, but usually a pleasant presence. Dee's appeal has always eluded me.

He also appeared in the very last Hill Street Blues. IIRC, he had the last line of dialogue and is the last person seen on screen.

¿Que?

Am I the only one who thinks this sounds like some weird new one-man-show theatrical production? But instead of homespun witticisms a la Mark Twain Tonight!, Larry will be going into the audience and beating up selected theatregoers.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/eli-wallach-dead-good-bad-714794 The character actor from Brooklyn was at his best playing banditos in that Clint Eastwood classic as well as in "The Magnificent Seven," just two highlights of his six-decade-plus career.Eli Wallach, the enduring and artful character actor who starred as weaselly Mexican hombres in the 1960s film classics The Magnificent Seven and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, has died. He was 98. Wallach, who won a Tony Award in 1951 for playing Alvaro in Tennessee Williams’ original production of The Rose Tattoo, made his movie debut as a cotton-gin owner trying to seduce a virgin in Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll (1956) and worked steadily well into his nineties, died Tuesday, his daughter Katherine told The New York Times. No other details of his death were immediately available. “As an actor I’ve played more bandits, thieves, warlords, molesters and mafioso that you could shake a stick at,” Wallach said in November 2010 when he accepted an Honorary Academy Award at the second annual Governors Awards, becoming the oldest Oscar recipient. Among his survivors is actress and frequent co-star Anne Jackson, his wife of 66 years. In John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960), a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Japanese gem Seven Samurai, Wallach plays the merciless Calvera, a bandit with two gold-capped teeth whose marauders routinely raid a Mexican village for food. The pillaged recruit a veteran gunslinger (Yul Brynner) and six others, including Steve McQueen, to protect them. Six years later, Wallach starred in his most memorable role, as the fast-talking Tuco (The Ugly) opposite Clint Eastwood (The Good) and Lee Van Cleef (The Bad) in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Western set during the American Civil War and centered on a three-way hunt for gold buried in a cemetery. During shooting in Spain, Wallach was almost killed when a galloping horse carried him for a considerable distance while his hands were tied behind his back. Later, Leone positioned him in the dirt, where a speeding train’s protruding iron steps missed the actor by inches. Wallach refused to do another take, a decision that surely contributed to his longevity. The Brooklyn native also was memorable as a well-dressed hitman looking to retrieve heroin stuffed in a Japanese doll in Don Siegel’s The Lineup (1958); as **** [G-u-i-d-o is censored? Are you kidding???] in John Huston’s The Misfits opposite Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in their final film appearances; as Audrey Hepburn’s suitor in How to Steal a Million (1966); as James Caan’s harsh boot-camp instructor in Cinderella Liberty (1973); and as a mafioso with a sweet tooth in The Godfather: Part III (1990). The good-natured actor appeared in more than 90 films, including two released in 2010: Oilver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer. On television, Wallach won an Emmy for his role as a former drug merchant who is now in the aspirin business in ABC’s Poppies Are Also Flowers, a 1966 anti-narcotics telefilm produced by the United Nations from a story by Ian Fleming. He also earned noms for his work as a blacklisted writer on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip in 2006 and as an ailing patient on Nurse Jackie three years later. Plus, he got loads of fan mail for playing Mr. Freeze (the third actor to do so) on TV’s Batman in the 1960s. Wallach was born on Dec. 7, 1915, the son of Polish immigrants who owned a candy store and lived in the back. He went to Erasmus Hall High School and didn’t have the grades to get into City College in New York, so he wound up at the University of Texas, where he was friends with Zachary Scott and Walter Cronkite. After graduation, he ventured back to the Big Apple and studied method acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre, where his fellow students included Tony Randall, Gregory Peck and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. After serving as a medic in World War II, the 5-foot-7 Wallach returned to New York and landed his first Broadway part in 1945. Within the next few years, he rose to become a fixture on the New York stage and began doing live TV. Noticing his stirring performance at the Martin Beck Theater in The Rose Tattoo, Kazan cast Wallach in Baby Doll, whose screenplay also was written by Williams. With Wallach going after the virgin 19-year-old wife (Carroll Baker) of his competitor (Karl Malden), the film was condemned by the Catholic Church for being “grievously offensive to Christian and traditional standards of morality and decency.” “They said that anyone who goes to see it is in danger of being excommunicated,” Wallach told The Times in 2010. “I said, ‘I’m Jewish, what the hell are they going to know about me?’ ” In addition to his wife and daughter, Wallach is survived by his other children Peter and Roberta and film critic A.O. Scott, whose grandfather was Wallach’s brother.

My point is, Niven essentially moved away from the former superstar, and insinuated himself with the new superstar. Sheridan Morley's bio of Niven, The Other Side Of The Moon, paints a portrait of him as someone who was "an expert player of the Hollywood game" (in co-star Stewart Granger's words).

Also want to mention two hilarious if a bit frightening books by Oscar Levant: Memoirs of an Amnesiac (autobio) and The Unimportance of being Oscar (anecdotage).

Yes, Empty Horses is very entertaining (BTW it devotes a chapter to your boy Errol), but Balloon is the must-read (Niven's childhood and pre-Hollywood adventures in the army could make a great movie). Horses is essentially anecdotes that couldn't fit into Balloon. If you're skilled at reading between the lines, you can get an interesting picture of Niven and Flynn from the books. Before WWII, when Flynn is a superstar, he and Niven are inseparable pals, grown up schoolboys playing countless pranks. After the war and Flynn's trial, he is barely mentioned -- instead, Niven starts telling stories about hanging out with the new superstar Humphrey Bogart.

A few favorites: The Moon's A Balloon by David Niven -- The gold standard for movie star memoirs. Wonderfully entertaining. Notes On A Cowardly Lion by John Lahr -- About his father Bert. John would go on to become a distinguished theater critic. Groucho and Me by Groucho Marx. Not very reliable but very funny. Harpo's Harpo Speaks, published the next year, is more reliable but less amusing. Joe Adamson's Groucho, Harpo, Chico, & Sometimes Zeppo is one of my favorite film books, if that qualifies here. Act One by Moss Hart is not about film, but is fascinating for anyone interested in the show business of the 1920s, as is Howard Teichman's bio of George S. Kaufman. Too bad S.J. Perelman never finished his memoir The Hindsight Saga. Neil Simon's books, especially the first, give insight into the writer's life. Robert Parrish -- a child actor who became an Oscar winning editor, then an uneven director -- wrote two entertaining books full of great stories. Michael Powell's memoirs are also worth reading. When The Shooting Stops, The Editing Begins by film editor Ralph Rosenblum (I mentioned it in the Robert Osborne thread). Are They Really So Awful? by Christopher Challis gives the cinematographer's perspective. Least favorite: ANYTHING by Darwin Porter. His books are twisted sex fantasies masquerading as biography.

Anyone interested in Minsky's should read the classic When The Shooting Stops, The Editing Begins by veteran film editor Ralph Rosenblum. He claims that Friedkin despised the material and turned in an unwatchable mess, which Rosenblum edited into a releasable film by adding all the '60s-style quick cuts. (Rosenblum also claims to have taken a blob of incoherent footage called Anhedonia and removed everything not related to the main female character, a certain Annie Hall.) As for Minsky's itself, the unquestionable highlight for me is "Perfect Gentleman", the great duet with Robards and Wisdom. It should have won the best song Oscar (was it even nominated?). Trivia: the Robards role was originally to have been played by Tony Curtis, but he dropped out shortly before filming began.

For those who've never seen it, this Disney short was produced specifically to be shown only at the 1932 Academy Award ceremony, and never publicly screened again: Re relevance to this thread: it lets you see how Disney artists caricatured Fredric March.

Sylvia Sidney laughing and having fun?

I don't think so. It looks more like Tracy, the hairline is different, and March "appears" later in the cartoon as Mr. Hyde.

The question is how popular were they in 1933. Chester Morris did get an early Oscar nomination. But was he really all that popular? Tracy was playing leads, but he did not become a major star until leaving Fox for MGM a few years later. Helen Hayes Gloria Swanson

From Mickey's Gala Premier (1933): Wikipedia says the caricature at the bottom left is meant to be Chester Morris Could it perhaps actually be Spencer Tracy?