- published: 18 Jun 2015
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Louis Calhern (February 19, 1895 - May 12, 1956) was an American stage and screen actor.
Louis Calhern was born Carl Henry Vogt on February 19, 1895 in Brooklyn. His family left New York while he was still a child and moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he grew up. While playing high school football, a stage manager from a touring theatrical stock company spotted him, and hired him as a bit player. Just prior to World War I, Calhern decided to move back to New York to pursue an acting career. He began as a prop boy and bit player with touring companies and burlesque companies. His burgeoning career was interrupted by the war and he served overseas in the military during World War I.
He became a matinee idol by virtue of a play titled Cobra, and soon began to act in films. In the early 30s he was primarily cast as a character actor in Hollywood, while he continued to play leading roles on stage. He reached his peak in the 1950s as a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player. Among his most memorable roles were three that he played in 1950: a singing one as Buffalo Bill in the film version of Annie Get Your Gun, the double-crossing lawyer and sugar-daddy to Marilyn Monroe in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, and his Oscar-nominated role as Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Magnificent Yankee (re-creating his stage role), as well as his portrayal of the title role in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's film Julius Caesar in 1953 (adapted from Shakespeare's play). Prior to this, his best known appearance was as Ambassador Trentino in the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup.
Ray Milland (3 January 1907 – 10 March 1986) was a Welsh actor and director. His screen career ran from 1929 to 1985, and he is best remembered for his Academy Award–winning portrayal of an alcoholic writer in The Lost Weekend (1945), a sophisticated leading man opposite a corrupt John Wayne in Reap the Wild Wind (1942), the murder-plotting husband in Dial M for Murder (1954), and as Oliver Barrett III in Love Story (1970).
Milland was born Alfred Reginald Jones (not Reginald Alfred John Truscott-Jones as has often been stated). His birth was registered in the March Quarter of 1907 in Neath, Wales, and he was the son of Elizabeth Annie (née Truscott) and Alfred Jones. In the 1911 census the family were living at 66 Coronation Road, Mount Pleasant, Neath, Wales. Of his parents, Milland wrote in his 1974 autobiography Wide-Eyed in Babylon, "My father was not a cruel or harsh man. Just a very quiet one. I think he was an incurable romantic and consequently a little afraid of his emotions and perhaps ashamed of them... he had been a young hussar in the Boer War and had been present at the relief of Mafeking. He never held long conversations with anyone, except perhaps with me, possibly because I was the only other male in our family. The household consisted of my mother, a rather flighty and coquettish woman much concerned with propriety and what the neighbours thought.."
Actors: Patrick Williams (composer), Glenn Morshower (actor), Kirstie Alley (actress), Ann-Margret (actress), Patricia Richardson (actress), Robert Greenwald (producer), Griffin Dunne (actor), Titus Welliver (actor), Wallace Shawn (actor), Richard Roxburgh (actor), Patrick Dempsey (actor), Eric Bogosian (actor), Philip K. Kleinbart (producer), Michael Carman (actor), Joyce Eliason (writer),
Plot: A fictional biography of 'Marilyn Monroe' (qv) mixed with series of real events in her life: childhood years, first marriage to 'James Dougherty (I)' (qv), meeting with the photographer Otto Ose, career with XX Century Fox, relationship with her mother, foster parents, life wasters 'Charles Chaplin Jr.' (qv) (Cass) and 'Edward G. Robinson Jr.' (qv) (Eddie G), baseball player 'Joe DiMaggio (I)' (qv), playwright 'Arthur Miller (I)' (qv) and many other people.
Keywords: 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, abortion, acting-class, acting-teacher, actor, actress, adoption