George K. Arthur (27 January 1899 – 30 May 1985) was an English actor and producer. He appeared in 59 films between 1919 and 1935. He won an Academy Award for Best Short Film in 1956 for the film The Bespoke Overcoat.
He was born in Littlehampton, Sussex and died in New York City. Some of his early success was in the late 1920s when partnered with Karl Dane as part of a comedic duo named 'Dane & Arthur'.
Ronald Charles Colman (9 February 1891 – 19 May 1958) was an English actor.
He was born in Richmond, Surrey, England, as Roland Charles Colman, the second son and fourth child of Charles Colman and his wife Marjory Read Fraser. His siblings included Eric, Edith, and Marjorie. He was educated at boarding school in Littlehampton, where he discovered he enjoyed acting. He intended to study engineering at Cambridge University, but his father's sudden death from pneumonia in 1907 made this financially impossible.
He became a well-known amateur actor and was a member of the West Middlesex Dramatic Society in 1908-09. He made his first appearance on the professional stage in 1914.
After working as a clerk at the British Steamship Company in the City of London, he joined the London Scottish Regiment in 1909 and was among the first of Territorial Army to fight in World War I. During the war, he served with fellow actors Claude Rains, Herbert Marshall, Cedric Hardwicke and Basil Rathbone. On 31 October 1914, at the Battle of Messines, Colman was seriously wounded by shrapnel in his ankle, which gave him a limp that he would attempt to hide throughout the rest of his acting career. He was invalided from the service in 1916.
Constance Talmadge (April 19, 1898 - November 23, 1973) was a silent movie star born in Brooklyn, New York, USA, and was the sister of fellow actresses Norma Talmadge and Natalie Talmadge.
Although her actual birth year has been in dispute, Talmadge was born on April 19, 1898 in Brooklyn, New York according to the 1900, 1910, and 1920 Censuses. Talmadge was born into a poor family. Her father, Fred, was an alcoholic, and left them when she was still very young. Her mother, Peg, made a living by doing laundry. When a friend recommended that Peg use Norma as a model for title slides in flickers, which were shown in early nickelodeons, Peg decided to try it. This led all three sisters into an acting career.
She began making films in 1914, in a Vitagraph comedy short, In Bridal Attire (1914). Her first major role was as The Mountain Girl and Marguerite de Valois in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916).
Griffith re-edited Intolerance repeatedly after its initial release, and even shot new scenes long after it was in distribution. Grace Kingsley found Talmadge in her dressing room at the Fine Arts Studio, in Los Angeles, in the midst of making up for some new shots.
Arthur Moreira Lima (born July 16, 1940, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a Brazilian classical pianist.
Arthur began learning the piano at the age of six and when he was nine he was already playing a Mozart piano concerto in public.
Already at the age of 17 he was a participant in the Contest for Pianists - Rio de Janeiro (other participants were Alexander Jenner, Sergei Dorensky, Augustin Anievas, Michael Voskresensky, and Nelson Freire). Yet he achieved international prominence after taking second place in the 1965 International Frédéric Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw (with Martha Argerich taking first place). At the Chopin Competition he took two additional prizes: public favourite and best sonata. He is also a prize winner at the Leeds International Pianoforte Competition (3rd prize) and the International Tchaikovsky Competition (3rd prize).
Moreira Lima has in the last years travelled in Brazil from north to south in a truck playing in places where classical music is rarely heard. In the 1970s Moreira Lima recorded all of Chopin's works. And he recorded the inspiring music of Ernesto Nazareth.
Edith Norma Shearer (August 10, 1902 – June 12, 1983) was a Canadian actress. Shearer was one of the most popular actresses in North America from the mid-1920s through the 1930s. Her early films cast her as the girl-next-door but for most of the Pre-Code film era beginning with the 1930 film The Divorcee, for which she won an Oscar for Best Actress, she played sexually liberated women in sophisticated contemporary comedies. Later she appeared in historical and period films.
Unlike many of her MGM contemporaries, Shearer's fame declined steeply after retirement. By the time of her death in 1983, she was largely remembered at best for her "noble" roles in The Women, Marie Antoinette, and Romeo and Juliet. Shearer's legacy began to be re-evaluated in the 1990s with the publication of two biographies and the TCM and VHS release of her films, many of them unseen since the implementation of the Production Code some sixty years before. Focus shifted to her pre-Code "divorcee" persona and Shearer was rediscovered as "the exemplar of sophisticated [1930's] woman-hood... exploring love and sex with an honesty that would be considered frank by modern standards".