Basil Leonard Rogers (20 June 1896 – 9 October 1975) was an English cricketer. Rogers was a right-handed batsman. Born in Bedford, Bedfordshire, he was the son of Richard Rogers and Julia Marsh. His father was head groundsman at Bedford Modern School, there is also an indication that he played for Bedfordshire or Oxfordshire, before either had a county cricket club.^{[n 1][n 2]} His family was large and he had 8 other siblings.^[3] He was educated in his hometown at Bedford Modern School, where he played for the school cricket team.^[4]

Rogers made his debut for Bedfordshire in the 1911 Minor Counties Championship against Hetfordshire. He continued to play Minor counties cricket for Bedfordshire after the First World War, appearing for the county until 1924.^[5]

1923 saw Rogers make his debut in first-class cricket for Glamorgan against Northamptonshire in the County Championship. On debut, Rogers scored 4 runs in the Glamorgan first-innings, before being dismissed by Albert Thomas, while in the second-innings he scored an unbeaten 16. He bowled 5 overs in the match, without taking a wicket.^[6] He played a further first-class match in 1923, against Lancashire.^[7] In this match, he scored 12 runs in Glamorgan's first-innings, before being dismissed by Lawrence Cook, while in the second-innings he was run out for 14. With the ball, Rogers claimed his only first-class wicket, that of Lancashire captain Jack Sharp.^[8]

Rogers only played 2 first-class matches for Glamorgan, and upon leaving Bedfordshire at the end of the 1924 season, he joined Oxfordshire, for whom he played Minor counties cricket for sporadically between 1925 and 1935.^[5] At some point during his life, he married a woman called Nellie Wilson.^[3] Rogers died at Pateley Bridge, Yorkshire on 9 October 1975. His death was not afforded an entry in the 1976 Wisden Cricketers' Almanack.

References and notes[link]

External links[link]

• Basil Rogers at ESPNcricinfo
• Basil Rogers at CricketArchive

Ginger Rogers
Born	Virginia Katherine McMath (1911-07-16)July 16, 1911 Independence, Missouri
Died	April 25, 1995(1995-04-25) (aged 83) Rancho Mirage, California
Occupation	Actress, singer, artist, and dancer
Years active	1929–1987
Spouse	Jack Pepper (m.1929–1931; divorced) Lew Ayres (m.1934–1941; divorced) Jack Briggs (m.1943–1949; divorced) Jacques Bergerac (m.1953–1957; divorced) William Marshall (m.1961–1969; divorced)

Ginger Rogers (July 16, 1911 – April 25, 1995) was an American actress, dancer, and singer who appeared in film, and on stage, radio, and television throughout much of the 20th century.

During her long career, she made a total of 73 films, and was best known as Fred Astaire's romantic interest and dancing partner in a series of ten Hollywood musical films that revolutionized the genre. She achieved great success on her own in a variety of film roles and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Kitty Foyle (1940). She ranks #14 on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars list of actress screen legends.

Early life[link]

Rogers was born Virginia Katherine McMath in Independence, Missouri, the only child of William Eddins McMath, an electrical engineer, and his wife, Lela Emogene (née Owens; 1891–1977).^[1] Ginger's parents separated soon after her birth, and she and her mother went to live with her grandparents, Walter and Saphrona (née Ball) Owens, in nearby Kansas City. Rogers' parents fought over her custody. After her mother denied him visitation, her father reportedly absconded with his daughter twice. After her parents divorced, Rogers stayed with her grandparents while her mother wrote scripts for two years in Hollywood. Rogers was to remain close to her grandfather (much later, when she was a star in 1939, she bought him a home at 5115 Greenbush Avenue in Sherman Oaks, California so that he could be close to her while she was filming at the studios).^{[citation needed]}

One of Rogers' young cousins, Helen, had a hard time pronouncing "Virginia", shortening it to "Ginga"; the nickname stuck. When "Ginga" was nine years old, her mother remarried, to John Logan Rogers. Ginger took the surname Rogers, although she was never legally adopted. They lived in Fort Worth, Texas. Her mother became a theater critic for a local newspaper, the Fort Worth Record. She attended but did not graduate from Fort Worth's Central High School. As a teenager, Rogers thought of becoming a schoolteacher, but with her mother's interest in Hollywood and the theater, her early exposure to the theater increased. Waiting for her mother in the wings of the Majestic Theatre, she began to sing and dance along with the performers on stage.^{[citation needed]}

Vaudeville and Broadway[link]

Rogers' entertainment career was born one night when the traveling vaudeville act of Eddie Foy came to Fort Worth and needed a quick stand-in. She then entered and won a Charleston dance contest which allowed her to tour for six months, at one point in 1926 performing at an 18-month-old theater called The Craterian in Medford, Oregon. This theater honored her many years later by changing its name to the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater.^[2]

At 17, Rogers married Jack Culpepper, a singer/dancer/comedian/recording artist of the day who worked under the name Jack Pepper (according to Ginger's autobiography, she knew Culpepper when she was a child, as her cousin's boyfriend). They formed a short-lived vaudeville double act known as "Ginger and Pepper". The marriage was over within months, and she went back to touring with her mother. When the tour got to New York City, she stayed, getting radio singing jobs and then her Broadway theater debut in a musical called Top Speed, which opened on Christmas Day, 1929.

Within two weeks of opening in Top Speed, Rogers was chosen to star on Broadway in Girl Crazy by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, the musical play widely considered to have made stars of both her and Ethel Merman. Fred Astaire was hired to help the dancers with their choreography. Her appearance in Girl Crazy made her an overnight star at the age of 19. In 1930, she was signed by Paramount Pictures to a seven-year contract.

Film career[link]

1929–1933[link]

Pre-blonde, early career portrait

Rogers' first movie roles were in a trio of short films made in 1929—Night in the Dormitory, A Day of a Man of Affairs, and Campus Sweethearts.

Rogers would soon get herself out of the Paramount contract—under which she had made five feature films at Astoria Studios in Astoria, Queens—and move with her mother to Hollywood. When she got to California, she signed a three-picture deal with Pathé Exchange. She made feature films for Warner Bros., Monogram, and Fox in 1932 and was named one of fifteen "WAMPAS Baby Stars". She then made a significant breakthrough as "Anytime Annie" in the Warner Brothers film 42nd Street (1933). She went on to make a series of films with Fox, Warner Bros. ("Gold Diggers of 1933"), Universal, Paramount, and RKO Radio Pictures and, in her second RKO picture, Flying Down to Rio (1933), she worked for the first time with Fred Astaire.

1933–1939: Astaire and Rogers[link]

The announcement of the Astaire-Rogers screen partnership – from the trailer to Flying Down to Rio

Rogers was most famous for her partnership with Fred Astaire. Together, from 1933 to 1939, they made nine musical films at RKO: Flying Down to Rio (1933), The Gay Divorcee (1934), Roberta (1935), Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), Swing Time (1936), Shall We Dance (1937), Carefree (1938), and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939) (The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) was produced later at MGM). They revolutionized the Hollywood musical, introducing dance routines of unprecedented elegance and virtuosity, set to songs specially composed for them by the greatest popular song composers of the day.

Arlene Croce, Hannah Hyam and John Mueller all consider Rogers to have been Astaire's finest dance partner, principally because of her ability to combine dancing skills, natural beauty, and exceptional abilities as a dramatic actress and comedienne, thus truly complementing Astaire, a peerless dancer who sometimes struggled as an actor and was not considered classically handsome. The resulting song and dance partnership enjoyed a unique credibility in the eyes of audiences. Of the 33 partnered dances she performed with Astaire, Croce and Mueller have highlighted the infectious spontaneity of her performances in the comic numbers "I'll Be Hard to Handle" from Roberta (1935), "I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket" from Follow the Fleet (1936) and "Pick Yourself Up" from Swing Time (1936). They also point to the use Astaire made of her remarkably flexible back in classic romantic dances such as "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" from Roberta (1935), "Cheek to Cheek" from Top Hat (1935) and "Let's Face the Music and Dance" from Follow the Fleet (1936). For special praise, they have singled out her performance in "Waltz in Swing Time" from Swing Time (1936), which is generally considered to be the most virtuosic partnered routine ever committed to film by Astaire. She generally avoided solo dance performances: Astaire always included at least one virtuoso solo routine in each film, while Rogers performed only one: "Let Yourself Go" from Follow the Fleet (1936).

Although the dance routines were choreographed by Astaire and his collaborator Hermes Pan, both have acknowledged Rogers's input and have also testified to her consummate professionalism, even during periods of intense strain, as she tried to juggle her many other contractual film commitments with the punishing rehearsal schedules of Astaire, who made at most two films in any one year. In 1986, shortly before his death, Astaire remarked, "All the girls I ever danced with thought they couldn't do it, but of course they could. So they always cried. All except Ginger. No no, Ginger never cried".^{[citation needed]} John Mueller summed up Rogers's abilities as follows: "Rogers was outstanding among Astaire's partners not because she was superior to others as a dancer but because, as a skilled, intuitive actress, she was cagey enough to realize that acting did not stop when dancing began...the reason so many women have fantasized about dancing with Fred Astaire is that Ginger Rogers conveyed the impression that dancing with him is the most thrilling experience imaginable".^{[citation needed]} According to Astaire, when they were first teamed together in Flying Down to Rio, "Ginger had never danced with a partner before. She faked it an awful lot. She couldn't tap and she couldn't do this and that ... but Ginger had style and talent and improved as she went along. She got so that after a while everyone else who danced with me looked wrong."^{[citation needed]} Astaire also had this to say to Raymond Rohauer, curator at the New York Gallery of Modern Art: "Ginger was brilliantly effective. She made everything work for her. Actually she made things very fine for both of us and she deserves most of the credit for our success."^{[citation needed]}

Rogers also introduced some celebrated numbers from the Great American Songbook, songs such as Harry Warren and Al Dubin's "The Gold Diggers' Song (We're in the Money)" from Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), "Music Makes Me" from Flying Down to Rio (1933), "The Continental" from The Gay Divorcee (1934), Irving Berlin's "Let Yourself Go" from Follow the Fleet (1936), the Gershwins' "Embraceable You" from Girl Crazy and "They All Laughed (at Christopher Columbus)" from Shall We Dance (1937). Furthermore, in song duets with Astaire, she co-introduced Berlin's "I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket" from Follow the Fleet (1936), Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields's "Pick Yourself Up" and "A Fine Romance" from Swing Time (1936) and the Gershwins' "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" from Shall We Dance (1937).

After 1939[link]

Ginger Rogers's feet and hand prints at Grauman's Chinese Theatre

After 15 months apart and with RKO facing bankruptcy, the studio hired Fred and Ginger for another movie called Carefree, but it lost money. Next came The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, but the serious plot and tragic ending resulted in the worst box office receipts of any of their films. This was driven not by diminished popularity, but by the hard 1930s economic reality. The production costs of musicals, always significantly more costly than regular features, continued to increase at a much faster rate than admissions. Everyone agreed it was time to stop.

Both before and immediately after her dancing and acting partnership with Fred Astaire ended, Rogers starred in a number of successful dramas and comedies. Stage Door (1937) demonstrated her dramatic capacity, as the loquacious yet vulnerable girl next door, a tough minded, theatrical hopeful, opposite Katharine Hepburn. In Roxie Hart (1942), based on the same play which served as the template for the later musical Chicago, Ginger played a wise-cracking wife on trial for a murder her husband committed. In the neo-realist Primrose Path (1940), directed by Gregory La Cava, she played a prostitute's daughter trying to avoid the fate of her mother. Further highlights of this period included Tom, Dick, and Harry, a 1941 comedy in which she dreams of marrying three different men; I'll Be Seeing You, with Joseph Cotten; La Cava's 5th Avenue Girl (1939), where she played an out-of-work girl sucked into the lives of a wealthy family; and especially the sharp and highly successful comedies: Bachelor Mother (1939), with David Niven, in which she played Polly Parrish, a shop girl who is falsely thought to have abandoned her baby; and Billy Wilder's first Hollywood feature film: The Major and the Minor (1942), in which she played a woman who masquerades as a 12-year-old to get a cheap train ticket and finds herself obliged to continue the ruse for an extended period. This film featured a performance by Rogers's own real mother, Lela, playing her film mother.

Ginger Rogers in the Oscar-winning, title role of Kitty Foyle

In 1941, Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in 1940's Kitty Foyle. She enjoyed considerable success during the early 1940s, and was RKO's hottest property during this period. Becoming a free agent, she made hugely successful films with other studios in the mid-'40s, including Tender Comrade (1943), Lady in the Dark (1944), and Week-End at the Waldorf (1945), and became the highest-paid performer in Hollywood. However, by the end of the decade, her film career had peaked. Arthur Freed reunited her with Fred Astaire in The Barkleys of Broadway in 1949.

Rogers' film career entered a period of gradual decline in the 1950s, as parts for older actresses became more difficult to obtain, but she still scored with some solid movies. She starred in Storm Warning (1950) with Ronald Reagan and Doris Day, the noir, anti Ku Klux Klan film by Warner Brothers, and in Monkey Business (1952) with Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe, directed by Howard Hawks. In the same year, she also starred in We're Not Married!, also featuring Marilyn Monroe, and in Dreamboat. She played the female lead in Tight Spot (1955), a mystery thriller, with Edward G. Robinson. After a series of unremarkable films she scored with a great popular success, playing Dolly Levi in the long-running Hello, Dolly! on Broadway in 1965.^{[citation needed]}

With Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe in Monkey Business (1952)

In later life, Rogers remained on good terms with Astaire: she presented him with a special Academy Award in 1950, and they were co-presenters of individual Academy Awards in 1967, during which they elicited a standing ovation when they came on stage in an impromptu dance. In 1969, she had the lead role in another long-running popular production of Mame, from the book by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in the West End of London, arriving for the role on the Liner QE2 from New York. Her docking there occasioned the maximum of pomp and ceremony at Southampton. She became the highest paid performer in the history of the West End up to that time. The production ran for 14 months and featured a Royal Command Performance for Queen Elizabeth II. The Kennedy Center honored Ginger Rogers in December 1992. This event, which was shown on television, was somewhat marred when Astaire's widow, Robyn Smith, who permitted clips of Astaire dancing with Rogers to be shown for free at the function itself, was unable to come to terms with CBS Television for broadcast rights to the clips (all previous rights holders having donated broadcast rights gratis).^[3]

From the 1950s onwards, Rogers would make occasional appearances on television. In the later years of her career, she made guest appearances in three different series by Aaron Spelling; The Love Boat (1979), Glitter (1984), and Hotel (1987), which would be her final screen appearance as an actress.

Personal life[link]

Rogers was an only child, and maintained a close relationship with her mother throughout her life. Lela Rogers (1891–1977) was a newspaper reporter, scriptwriter, and movie producer. She was also one of the first women to enlist in the Marine Corps, was a founder of the successful "Hollywood Playhouse" for aspiring actors and actresses on the RKO set, and was a founder of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Mother and daughter had an extremely close professional relationship as well. Lela Rogers was credited with many pivotal contributions to her daughter's early successes in New York and in Hollywood, not to mention contract negotiations with RKO.

In her classic 1930s musicals with Astaire, Ginger Rogers, co-billed with him, was paid less than Fred, the creative force behind the dances, who also received 10% of the profits. But she was also paid less than many of the supporting "farceurs" billed beneath her, in spite of her much more central role in the films' great financial success. This was personally grating to her, and had effects upon her relationships at RKO, especially with director Mark Sandrich, whose purported disrespect of Rogers prompted a sharp letter of reprimand from producer Pandro Berman, which she deemed important enough to publish in her autobiography. Rogers fought hard for her contract and salary rights, and for better films and scripts.

Rogers' first marriage was at age 17 to her dancing partner Jack Pepper (real name Edward Jackson Culpepper) on March 29, 1929. They divorced in 1931, having separated soon after the wedding. In 1934 she married actor Lew Ayres (1908–1996). They divorced seven years later. Rogers sued Sylvia of Hollywood for $100K for defamation. Sylvia, Hollywood's fitness guru and radio personality, had claimed that Rogers was on Sylvia's radio show when, in fact, she was not.^[4] In 1943, Rogers married her third husband, Jack Briggs, a Marine. Upon his return from World War II, Briggs showed no interest in continuing his incipient Hollywood career. They divorced in 1949. In 1953 she married Jacques Bergerac, a French actor 16 years her junior, whom she met on a trip to Paris. A lawyer in France, he came to Hollywood with her and became an actor. They divorced in 1957. Her fifth and final husband was director and producer William Marshall. They married in 1961, and divorced in 1971, after his bouts with alcohol, and the financial collapse of their joint film production company in Jamaica.

Rogers was lifelong friends with actresses Lucille Ball and Bette Davis. Rogers starred in one of the earliest films co-directed and co-scripted by a woman, Wanda Tuchock's Finishing School (1934). In 1985, Rogers fulfilled a long-standing wish to direct by directing the musical Babes in Arms off-Broadway in Tarrytown, New York, when she was 74 years old. She appeared with Ball in an episode of Here's Lucy on November 22, 1971, in which Rogers danced the Charleston for the first time in many years. Rogers maintained a close friendship with her cousin, writer/socialite Phyllis Fraser, but was not Rita Hayworth's natural cousin as has been reported. Hayworth's maternal uncle, Vinton Hayworth, was married to Rogers's maternal aunt, Jean Owens.

Rogers was a lifelong conservative and a member of the Republican Party.^[5] Along with her mother, and such contemporaries as Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Barbara Stanwyck, Rogers was a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a Hollywood anti-Communist group.

She was raised a Christian Scientist, and remained a lifelong adherent.^[6] She devoted a great deal of time in her autobiography to the importance of her faith throughout her career.

In 1977, Rogers's mother died. Rogers remained at the 4-Rs (Rogers's Rogue River Ranch) until 1990, when she sold the property and moved to nearby Medford, Oregon. Her last public appearance was on March 18, 1995 when she received the Women's International Center (WIC) Living Legacy Award. For many years, Rogers regularly supported, and held in-person presentations, at the Craterian Theater, in Medford, Oregon, where she had performed in 1926 as a vaudevillian. The theater was comprehensively restored in 1997, and posthumously renamed in her honor, as the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater.

Death[link]

Rogers would spend winters in Rancho Mirage and summers in Medford. She continued making public appearances (mostly at award shows) until suffering a stroke that left her relying on the use of a wheelchair due to being partially paralyzed. Rogers died at her Rancho Mirage home on April 25, 1995, at the age of 83. An autopsy was performed in compliance with California law that required post-mortem examination on anyone who had not received medical treatment within 40 days of death (despite her stroke, Rogers never saw a doctor or went to a hospital) and concluded that the cause of death was a heart attack.^[7] She was cremated and her ashes interred in the Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California, with her mother's remains.

Portrayals of Rogers[link]

No films have been made about Ginger Rogers, possibly because her best-known co-star Fred Astaire stipulated in his will that no film representations of him were ever to be made.

• Likenesses of Astaire and Rogers, apparently painted over from the Cheek to Cheek dance in Top Hat, are in the Lucy in the Skies section of The Beatles film Yellow Submarine (1968).

• Rogers' image is one of many famous women's images of the 1930s and 40s featured on the bedroom wall in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, a gallery of magazine cuttings pasted on the wall created by Anne and her sister Margot while hiding from the Nazis. When the house became a museum, the gallery the Frank sisters created was preserved under glass. Rogers' image is one of the larger and more prominent, which clearly indicates her global and mass appeal amongst the youth of the time.

• A musical about the life of Rogers, entitled Backwards in High Heels, premiered in Florida in early 2007.^[8][9]

• Rogers was the heroine of a novel, Ginger Rogers and the Riddle of the Scarlet Cloak (1942, by Lela E. Rogers), in which "the heroine has the same name and appearance as the famous actress but has no connection ... it is as though the famous actress has stepped into an alternate reality in which she is an ordinary person." It is part of a series known as "Whitman Authorized Editions", 16 books published between 1941–1947 that featured a film actress as heroine.^[10]

Filmography[link]

Features[link]

Short subjects[link]

• A Day of a Man of Affairs (1929)
• A Night in a Dormitory (1930)
• Campus Sweethearts (1930)
• Office Blues (1930)
• Hollywood on Parade (1932)
• Screen Snapshots (1932)
• Hollywood on Parade No. A-9 (1933)
• Hollywood Newsreel (1934)
• Screen Snapshots Series 16, No. 3 (1936)
• Show Business at War (1943)
• Battle Stations (Narrator, 1944)
• Screen Snapshots: The Great Showman (1950)
• Screen Snapshots: Hollywood's Great Entertainers (1954)

Television[link]

• The DuPont Show with June Allyson, as Kay Neilson in "The Tender Shoot" (October 18, 1959)
• What's My Line? (1954, 1957, 1963)
• The Jack Benny Program (1957)
• The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom (1959)
• Cinderella (1965)
• Here's Lucy (1971)(episode 4.11)
• The Love Boat (1979) (episodes 3.10 and 3.11)
• Glitter (1984) (episode 1.3)
• Hotel (1987) (episode 5.1) (final screen role)

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Fred Astaire: Steps in Time, 1959, multiple reprints.
• Arlene Croce: The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, Galahad Books 1974, ISBN 0-88365-099-1
• Jocelyn Faris: Ginger Rogers – a Bio-Bibliography, Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1994, ISBN 0-313-29177-2
• Hannah Hyam: Fred and Ginger – The Astaire-Rogers Partnership 1934–1938, Pen Press Publications, Brighton, 2007. ISBN 978-1-905621-96-5
• John Mueller: Astaire Dancing – The Musical Films of Fred Astaire, Knopf 1985, ISBN 0-394-51654-0
• Ginger Rogers: Ginger My Story, New York: Harper Collins, 1991

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ginger Rogers

Dance portal

• Ginger Rogers at the Internet Movie Database
• Ginger Rogers at the TCM Movie Database
• Ginger Rogers at the Internet Broadway Database
• Ginger Rogers – Appreciations
• Backwards in High Heels: The Ginger Musical
• Ginger Rogers biography from Reel Classics
• John Mueller's 1991 New York Times review of Ginger: My Story
• Photographs and literature

Adolphe Menjou
from the film A Star Is Born (1937).
Born	Adolphe Jean Menjou (1890-02-18)February 18, 1890 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Died	October 29, 1963(1963-10-29) (aged 73) Beverly Hills, California, U.S.
Cause of death	Hepatitis
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1914–1960
Spouse	Kathryn Carver (m. 1927–1933) «start: (1927)–end+1: (1934)»"Marriage: Kathryn Carver to Adolphe Menjou" Location: (linkback:http://en-wiki.pop.wn.com/index.php/Adolphe_Menjou) Verree Teasdale (m. 1934–1963) «start: (1934)–end+1: (1964)»"Marriage: Verree Teasdale to Adolphe Menjou" Location: (linkback:http://en-wiki.pop.wn.com/index.php/Adolphe_Menjou)

Adolphe Jean Menjou (February 18, 1890 – October 29, 1963) was an American actor.^[1] His career spanned both silent films and talkies, appearing in such films as The Sheik, A Woman of Paris, Morocco, and A Star is Born. He was nominated for an Academy Award for The Front Page in 1931.

Early life[link]

Menjou was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to a French father, Albert Menjou, and an Irish mother from Galway, Nora (née Joyce).^[2][3] He was raised Catholic and attended the Culver Military Academy, graduating from Cornell University with a degree in engineering. Attracted to the vaudeville stage, he made his movie debut in 1916 in The Blue Envelope Mystery. During World War I, he served as a captain in the ambulance service.

Stardom[link]

Returning from the war, he became a star in such films as The Sheik and The Three Musketeers. When he starred in 1923's A Woman of Paris, he solidified the image of a well-dressed man-about-town, and was later voted the Best Dressed Man in America nine times.^[4] His career stalled with the coming of talkies, but in 1930, he starred in Morocco, with Marlene Dietrich. He was nominated for an Academy Award for The Front Page (1931).

McCarthy era[link]

In 1947, Menjou cooperated with the House Committee on Un-American Activities in its hunt for Communists in Hollywood.^[5] Menjou was a leading member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a group formed to oppose Communist influence in Hollywood. Other members included John Wayne, Barbara Stanwyck (with whom he co-starred in Forbidden in 1932 and Golden Boy in 1939) and her husband, actor Robert Taylor.

Because of his political sympathies, Menjou came into conflict with actress Katharine Hepburn. Menjou appeared with her in the films Stage Door and State of the Union, which also starred Spencer Tracy. Hepburn was strongly opposed to Americans co-operating with the McCarthy hearings. Their clashes were reportedly instant, and mutually cutting; Menjou said of Hepburn during the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigation into alleged Communist infiltration, "Scratch a do-gooder, like Hepburn, and they'll yell, 'Pravda'."^[6] To this, Hepburn called Menjou, "Wisecracking, witty—a flag-waving superpatriot who invested his American dollars in Canadian bonds and had a thing about Communists."^[6] Unsurprisingly, it was reported by William Mann in his biography of Hepburn, Kate, that during the filming of State of the Union, she and Menjou only spoke to each other when required to in the film script.^{[6][citation needed]}

Later years and death[link]

Menjou ended his film career with such roles as French General George Broulard in 1957's Paths of Glory, and as the town curmudgeon in Pollyanna in 1960.

He guest starred as Fitch, with Orson Bean and Sue Randall as John and Ellen Monroe, in an 1961 episode, "The Secret Life of James Thurber", based on the works of the American humorist James Thurber, of the CBS anthology series The DuPont Show with June Allyson. He also appeared in the Thanksgiving episode of NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, which aired on November 22, 1956.^[7] His final film, Disney's Pollyanna (1960) was one his best known roles.

Menjou died on October 29, 1963 of hepatitis in Beverly Hills.^[8] He was interred at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

Legacy[link]

In 1948, he published his autobiography, It Took Nine Tailors. Menjou has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6822 Hollywood Blvd.

Menjou had a brother Henri Menjou (1891–1956) who made an attempt to become an actor. He made three films for Paramount in the mid 1930s.

Partial filmography[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Adolphe Menjou

Biography portal

• Adolphe Menjou at the Internet Movie Database
• Adolphe Menjou at the TCM Movie Database
• Adolphe Menjou at AllRovi
• Photographs of Adolphe Menjou

Basil Rathbone
from the trailer for the film Tovarich (1937)
Born	Philip St. John Basil Rathbone (1892-06-13)13 June 1892 Johannesburg, South African Republic
Died	21 July 1967(1967-07-21) (aged 75) New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1911–67
Spouse	Marion Foreman (1914–1926; divorced; 1 child) Ouida Bergère (1926–1967; his death; 1 adopted daughter)

Sir Philip St. John Basil Rathbone, KBE, MC, Kt (13 June 1892 – 21 July 1967) was a South African-born British actor. He rose to prominence in England as a Shakespearean stage actor and went on to appear in over 70 films, primarily costume dramas, swashbucklers, and, occasionally, horror films. He frequently portrayed suave villains or morally ambiguous characters, such as Murdstone in David Copperfield (1935) and Sir Guy of Gisbourne in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). His most famous role, however, was heroic—that of Sherlock Holmes in fourteen Hollywood films made between 1939 and 1946 and in a radio series. His later career included Broadway and television work; he received a Tony Award in 1948 as Best Actor in a Play.

Early life[link]

He was born Philip St. John Basil Rathbone in Johannesburg, South African Republic, to English parents Edgar Philip Rathbone, a mining engineer and scion of the Liverpool Rathbone family, and Anna Barbara née George, a violinist. He had two older half brothers Harold and Horace as well as two younger siblings, Beatrice and John. The Rathbones fled to England when Basil was three years old after his father was accused by the Boers of being a British spy near the onset of the Second Boer War at the end of the 1890s.

Rathbone was educated at Repton School in Repton, Derbyshire and was engaged with the Liverpool and Globe Insurance Companies. In 1916, he enlisted for the remaining duration of World War I, joining the London Scottish Regiment^[1] as a private, serving alongside his future successful acting contemporaries Claude Rains, Herbert Marshall and Ronald Colman. He later transferred with a commission as a lieutenant to the Liverpool Scottish, 2nd Battalion, where he served as an intelligence officer and eventually attained the rank of captain. During the war, Rathbone displayed a penchant for disguise (a skill which he coincidentally shared with what would become perhaps his most memorable character, Sherlock Holmes), when on one occasion, in order to have better visibility, Rathbone convinced his superiors to allow him to scout enemy positions during daylight hours instead of during the night, as was the usual practice in order to minimize the chance of detection by the enemy. Rathbone completed the mission successfully through his skillful use of camouflage, which allowed him to escape detection by the enemy. In September 1918, he was awarded the Military Cross. His younger brother, John, was killed in action during the war while also serving his country.

Career[link]

On 22 April 1911, Rathbone made his first appearance on stage at the Theatre Royal, Ipswich, as Hortensio in The Taming of the Shrew, with Sir Frank Benson's No. 2 Company, under the direction of Henry Herbert. In October 1912, he went to America with Benson's company, playing such parts as Paris in Romeo and Juliet, Fenton in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Silvius in As You Like It. Returning to England, he made his first appearance in London at the Savoy Theatre on 9 July 1914, as Finch in The Sin of David. That December, he appeared at the Shaftesbury Theatre as the Dauphin in Henry V. During 1915, he toured with Benson and appeared with him at London's Court Theatre in December as Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

During the Summer Festival of 1919, he appeared at Stratford-upon-Avon with the New Shakespeare Company playing Romeo, Cassius, Ferdinand in The Tempest, and Florizel in The Winter's Tale; in October he was at London's Queen's Theatre as the aide-de-camp in Napoleon, and in February 1920 he was at the Savoy Theatre in the title role in Peter Ibbetson with huge success.

During the 1920s, Rathbone appeared regularly in Shakespearean and other roles on the English stage. He began to travel and appeared at the Cort Theatre, New York, in October 1923 and toured in the United States in 1925, appearing in San Francisco in May and the Lyceum Theatre, New York, in October. He was in the U.S. again in 1927 and 1930 and again in 1931, when he appeared on stage with Ethel Barrymore. He continued his stage career in England, returning late in 1934 to the U.S., where he appeared with Katharine Cornell in several plays.

Rathbone was once arrested in 1926 along with every other member of the cast of The Captive, a play in which his character's wife left him for another woman. Though the charges were eventually dropped, Rathbone was very angry about the censorship because he believed that homosexuality needed to be brought into the open.^[2]

He commenced his film career in 1925 in The Masked Bride, appeared in a few silent films, and played the detective Philo Vance in the 1930 film The Bishop Murder Case, based on the best-selling novel. Like George Sanders and Vincent Price after him, Rathbone made a name for himself in the 1930s by playing suave villains in costume dramas and swashbucklers, including David Copperfield (1935) as the abusive stepfather Mr. Murdstone; Anna Karenina (1935) as her distant husband, Karenin; The Last Days of Pompeii (1935) portraying Pontius Pilate; Captain Blood (1935); A Tale of Two Cities (1935), as the Marquis St. Evremonde; The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) playing his best-remembered villain, Sir Guy of Gisbourne; The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938); and The Mark of Zorro (1940) as Captain Esteban Pasquale. He also appeared in several early horror films: Tower of London (1939), as Richard III, and Son of Frankenstein (1939), portraying the dedicated surgeon Baron Wolf von Frankenstein, son of the monster's creator, and, in 1949, was also the narrator for the segment "The Wind in the Willows" in the animated feature, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.

He was admired for his athletic cinema swordsmanship (he listed fencing among his favourite recreations). He fought and lost to Errol Flynn in a duel on the beach in Captain Blood and in an elaborate fight sequence in The Adventures of Robin Hood. He was involved in noteworthy sword fights in Tower of London, The Mark of Zorro, and The Court Jester (1956). Despite his real-life skill, Rathbone won only once onscreen, in Romeo and Juliet (1936). Rathbone earned Academy Award nominations for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performances as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet (1936) and as King Louis XI in If I Were King (1938). In The Dawn Patrol (1938), he played one of his few heroic roles in the 1930s, as a Royal Flying Corps (RFC) squadron commander brought to the brink of a nervous breakdown by the strain and guilt of sending his battle-weary pilots off to near-certain death in the skies of 1915 France. Errol Flynn, Rathbone's perennial foe, starred in the film as his successor when Rathbone's character was promoted.

According to Hollywood legend, Rathbone was Margaret Mitchell's first choice to play Rhett Butler in the film version of her novel Gone with the Wind. The reliability of this story may be suspect, however, as on another occasion Mitchell chose Groucho Marx for the role, apparently in jest. Rathbone actively campaigned for the role, however, but to no avail.

Despite his film success, Rathbone always insisted that he wished to be remembered for his stage career. He said that his favourite role was that of Romeo.

The Sherlock Holmes films[link]

Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes

Rathbone is most widely recognised for his many portrayals of Sherlock Holmes. In a radio interview Rathbone recalled that Twentieth Century-Fox producer Gene Markey proposed a film version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, and when asked who could possibly play Holmes, Markey incredulously replied, "Who?! Basil Rathbone!" The film was so successful that it spawned a series. Fourteen feature films were made between 1939 and 1946, all of which co-starred Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson. The first two films, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (both produced by Fox in 1939), were set in the late Victorian times of the original stories. Later installments, produced by Universal Pictures, beginning with Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), were set in contemporary times, and some had World War II-related plots. Rathbone and Bruce also reprised their film roles in a radio series, The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which began in October 1939. Rathbone appeared in the radio series as long as the film series was active, but after the films lapsed in 1946, Rathbone ceded his radio part to Tom Conway. Conway and Bruce carried on with the series for two seasons, until both dropped out in July 1947.

The many sequels typecast Rathbone, and he was unable to remove himself completely from the shadow of Holmes. However, in later years, Rathbone willingly made the Holmes association, as in a TV sketch with Milton Berle in the early 1950s, in which he donned the deerstalker cap and Inverness cape. In the 1960s, in his Sherlock Holmes costume, he appeared in a series of TV commercials for Getz Exterminators ("Getz gets 'em, since 1888!'").

Rathbone also brought Holmes to the stage in a play written by his wife Ouida. Thomas Gomez, who had appeared as a Nazi ringleader in Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, played the villainous Professor Moriarty. Nigel Bruce was too ill to take the part of Dr. Watson, and it was played by Jack Raine. Bruce's absence depressed Rathbone, particularly after Bruce died on 8 October 1953, while the play was in rehearsals. The play ran for only three performances.

Later career[link]

In the 1950s, Rathbone excelled in two spoofs of his earlier swashbuckling villains: Casanova's Big Night (1954) opposite Bob Hope and The Court Jester (1956) with Danny Kaye. He appeared frequently on TV game shows and continued to appear in major films, including the Humphrey Bogart comedy We're No Angels (1955) and John Ford's political drama The Last Hurrah (1958).

Rathbone also appeared on Broadway numerous times. In 1948, he won a Tony Award for Best Actor for his performance as the unyielding Dr. Austin Sloper in the original production of The Heiress, which featured Wendy Hiller as his timid, spinster daughter. He also received accolades for his performance in Archibald Macleish's J.B., a modernisation of the Biblical trials of Job.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, he continued to appear in several dignified anthology programmes on television. To support his second wife's lavish tastes, he appeared as a panelist on the television game show The Name's the Same (in 1954), and he also took roles in cheap film thrillers of far lesser quality, such as The Black Sleep (1956), Queen of Blood (1966), The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966, with comic Harvey Lembeck joking, "That guy looks like Sherlock Holmes"), Hillbillys in a Haunted House (1967, also featuring Lon Chaney Jr and John Carradine.), and his last film, a low-budget, Mexican horror film called Autopsy of a Ghost (1968).

He is also known for his spoken word recordings, including his interpretation of Clement C. Moore's "The Night Before Christmas". Rathbone's readings of the stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe are collected together with readings by Vincent Price in Caedmon Audio's The Edgar Allan Poe Audio Collection on CD. Rathbone also made many other recordings, of everything from a dramatised version of Oliver Twist to a recording of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf (with Leopold Stokowski conducting) to a dramatised version of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.^[3]

On television he appeared in two musical versions of Dickens's A Christmas Carol: one in 1954, in which he played Marley's Ghost opposite Fredric March's Scrooge, and the original 1956 live-action version of The Stingiest Man In Town, in which he starred as a singing Ebenezer Scrooge.

In the 1960s, he also toured with a one-man show titled (like his autobiography) In and Out of Character. In this show, he recited poetry and Shakespeare as well as giving reminiscences from his life and career (e.g., the humorous, "I could have killed Errol Flynn any time I wanted to!"). As an encore, he recited Vincent Starrett's famous poem "221B."

Vincent Price and Rathbone appeared together, along with Boris Karloff, in Tower of London (1939) and The Comedy of Terrors (1964). The latter was the only film to feature the "Big Four" of American International Pictures' horror films: Price, Rathbone, Karloff and Peter Lorre. Rathbone also appeared with Price in the final segment of Roger Corman's 1962 anthology film Tales of Terror, a loose dramatisation of Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar."

Basil Rathbone has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: one for films, at 6549 Hollywood Boulevard; one for radio, at 6300 Hollywood Boulevard; and one for television, at 6915 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood.

Personal life[link]

Rathbone married actress Ethel Marion Foreman in 1914. They had one son, Rodion Rathbone (1915–1996), who had a brief Hollywood career under the name John Rodion. The couple divorced in 1926. Rathbone was involved briefly with actress Eva Le Gallienne. In 1927, he married writer Ouida Bergère. Basil and his second wife adopted a daughter, Cynthia Rathbone (1939–1969). The American actor Jackson Rathbone is distantly related to him, being his grandfathers third cousin, several times removed.^[4] Another distant relative was Henry Rathbone, the U.S. Army officer who, along with his fiancé, was Abraham Lincoln's guest in the Presidential box at Ford's Theater when Lincoln was assassinated.

During Rathbone's Hollywood career, his second wife Ouida Bergère—who was also his business manager—developed a reputation for hosting elaborate expensive parties in their home, with many prominent and influential people on the guest lists. This trend inspired a joke in The Ghost Breakers (1940), a movie in which Rathbone does not appear: During a tremendous thunderstorm in New York City, Bob Hope observes that "Basil Rathbone must be throwing a party."

The actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell described Rathbone as "two profiles pasted together." ^[5] As cited in the same autobiography, Mrs. Campbell would later refer to him as, "a folded umbrella taking elocution lessons."

Unlike some of his British actor contemporaries in Hollywood and Broadway, Rathbone never renounced his British citizenship. His autobiography, In and Out of Character, was published in 1962.

Honours[link]

Rathbone was made a knight bachelor for services to the stage by King George VI in 1949, and became a member of The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire when he was created a KBE by Queen Elizabeth II in the 1961 New Year Honours List.^[5] Despite this, Rathbone rarely used his titles socially and never professionally.

Death[link]

Rathbone died of a heart attack in New York City in 1967 at age 75. He is interred in a crypt in the Shrine of Memories Mausoleum at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, USA.

Filmography[link]

References[link]

• Who's Who in the Theatre - "The Dramatic List," edited by John Parker, 10th edition revised, London, 1947, pp. 1183–1184.

External links[link]

Biography portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Basil Rathbone

• Basil Rathbone at the Internet Movie Database
• Basil Rathbone at the Internet Broadway Database
• Biography
• Basil Rathbone at Virtual History
• Basil Rathbone bio on (re)Search my Trash
• Hollywood's South African–born Actors of the 1930s and 1940s (Article by Ross Dix-Peek:http://peek-01.livejournal.com/1525.html)

David Rogers or Dave Rogers may refer to:

• Dave Rogers (footballer) (born 1975), English former footballer
• Dave Rogers (NASCAR), NASCAR crew chief for the #18 Sprint Cup car
• David Dickson Rogers (1845–1915), Canadian politician
• David McGregor Rogers (1772–1824), farmer and political figure in Upper Canada
• David Rogers (racing driver), American racing driver
• David Rogers (politician) (1829–1909), merchant, shipbuilder and politician in Prince Edward Island, Canada
• David Rogers (editor), American television editor, director and producer
• David Rogers (footballer) (1892–?), English football (soccer) player of the 1920s
• David Rogers (singer) (1936–1993), country music singer
• David Clayton Rogers (born 1977), American film producer, writer and actor
• D.V. Rogers (born 1968), performance installation artist

See also[link]

• Dave Rodger (born 1955), New Zealand rower
• Dave Rodgers (born 1963), Italian musician
• David Rodgers, English footballer, see List of Bristol City F.C. players
• David Roger (born 1961), attorney

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