Peggy Ann Garner (February 3, 1932 – October 16, 1984) was an American actress.
A successful child actor, Garner played her first film role in 1938 and won the Academy Juvenile Award for her work in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). Featured roles in such films as Black Widow (1954) did not further her attempts to establish herself in mature film roles, and although she progressed to theatrical work, she made relatively few acting appearances as an adult.
Born in Canton, Ohio, Garner's mother pushed her into the limelight and entered her in talent quests while Garner was still a child. By 1938 she had made her first film appearance, and over the next few years she appeared in several more films, including Jane Eyre (1943) and The Keys of the Kingdom (1944). She reached the height of her success at the age of 13 in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), winning an Academy Juvenile Award largely on the basis of this performance.
Like many child performers, Garner was unable to make a successful transition into adult film roles. She guest-starred steadily in television roles, beginning in the early 1950s and continuing through the 1960s. She was a regular panelist on the NBC series Who Said That?, along with H. V. Kaltenborn and Boris Karloff. After her film career ended, she ventured into stage acting and had some success but also worked as a real estate agent and fleet-car executive between acting jobs in order to support herself. In 1978, she surprised film audiences after a decade away from any feature film when she appeared as the pregnant aunt of the bride 'Candice Ruteledge' in the critically acclaimed ensemble Robert Altman film, "A Wedding", in 1978. Her final screen performance was a small part in a made-for-television feature, "This Year's Blonde", in 1980.
Lon McCallister (born Herbert Alonzo McCallister Jr.) (April 17, 1923 – June 11, 2005) was an American actor.
Born in Los Angeles, he began appearing in movies at the age of 13. The young actor had leads in a number of films; he usually played boyish young men from the country. Growing only to 5'6" he found it difficult to find roles as an adult. He appeared with Edward G. Robinson in 1947's The Red House and in the same year with Shirley Temple in The Story of Seabiscuit.
In 1953, at the age of 30, he retired from acting. Later in life he became a successful real estate manager.
He was actor William Eythe's love interest for many years, until Eythe's death in 1957.
Lon McCallister died from congestive heart failure at the age of 82.
Randolph Scott (January 23, 1898 – March 2, 1987) was an American film actor whose career spanned from 1928 to 1962. As a leading man for all but the first three years of his cinematic career, Scott appeared in a variety of genres, including social dramas, crime dramas, comedies, musicals (albeit in non-singing and non-dancing roles), adventure tales, war films, and even a few horror and fantasy films. However, his most enduring image is that of the tall-in-the-saddle Western hero. Out of his more than 100 film appearances more than 60 were in Westerns; thus, "of all the major stars whose name was associated with the Western, Scott most closely identified with it."
Scott's more than thirty years as a motion picture actor resulted in his working with many acclaimed screen directors, including Henry King, Rouben Mamoulian, Michael Curtiz, John Cromwell, King Vidor, Alan Dwan, Fritz Lang, and Sam Peckinpah. He also worked on multiple occasions with prominent directors: Henry Hathaway (8 times), Ray Enright (7), Edwin R. Marin (7), Andre DeToth (6), and most notably, his seven film collaborations with Budd Boetticher.
Lynn Bari (December 18, 1913 – November 20, 1989), born Margaret Schuyler Fisher, was a movie actress (usually in B-movies) who specialized in playing sultry, statuesque man-killers in over one hundred 20th Century Fox films from the early 1930s through the 1940s.
Bari was born in Roanoke, Virginia. Most of her early films, before getting supporting parts, were uncredited roles usually playing receptionists or chorus girls.
Bari's rare leading roles include China Girl (1942), Hello, Frisco, Hello (1943), and The Spiritualist (1948). In her B movie roles, Lynn was usually cast as a villainess. Examples include Shock and Nocturne, both 1946. An exceptions to this was The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944). Lynn Bari's last film appearance was as the mother of rebellious teenager Patty McCormack in The Young Runaways (1968).
In 1955, Bari appeared in the episode "The Beautiful Miss X" of Rod Cameron's syndicated crime drama City Detective. In 1960, she played female bandit Belle Starr in the episode "Perilous Passage" of the NBC western series Overland Trail starring William Bendix and Doug McClure and with fellow guest star Robert J. Wilke as Cole Younger.
Fred Zinnemann (29 April 1907 – 14 March 1997) was an Austrian-American film director. He won two Academy Awards for directing films (From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons) in many genres, including thrillers, westerns, film noir, and play adaptations. Nineteen actors appearing in Zinnemann's films received Academy Award nominations for their performances: among that number are Frank Sinatra, Audrey Hepburn, Glynis Johns, Paul Scofield, Robert Shaw, Wendy Hiller, Jason Robards, Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda, Gary Cooper and Maximilian Schell.
Zinnemann was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. While growing up in Austria, he wanted to become a musician, but went on to study law. While studying at the University of Vienna, he became drawn to films and eventually became a cameraman. He worked in Germany with several other beginners (Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak also worked with him on the 1929 feature People on Sunday) before going to America to study film.
Zinnemann's penchant for realism and authenticity is evident in his first feature The Wave (1935), shot on location in Mexico with mostly non-professional actors recruited among the locals, which is one of the earliest examples of realism in narrative film. Earlier in the decade, in fact, Zinnemann had worked with documentarian Robert Flaherty, an association he considered "the most important event of my professional life".