- published: 01 Jan 2013
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Warren William (December 2, 1894 – September 24, 1948) was a Broadway and Hollywood actor, popular during the early 1930s, who was later nicknamed the "king of Pre-Code". He was born Warren William Krech in Aitkin, Minnesota to parents Freeman E. and Frances Krech. He had a certain physical resemblance to John Barrymore. He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. After moving from Broadway to Hollywood in 1931, he reached his peak as a leading man in early 1930s pre-Production Code films. He was a contract player at the Warner Bros. studio and was known for portraying amoral businessmen, lawyers, and other heartless types, including the Sam Spade character (renamed "Ted Shane") in the second filming of The Maltese Falcon, called Satan Met a Lady (1936) with Bette Davis.
He also played sympathetic roles, however, as in Imitation of Life, in which he portrayed Claudette Colbert's love interest. He appeared as her love interest again that year, when he played Julius Caesar to her Cleopatra in Cecil B. DeMille's version of Cleopatra. And he was the swashbucking d'Artagnan in the 1939 version of The Man in the Iron Mask, directed by James Whale.
Verree Teasdale (March 15, 1903 – February 17, 1987) was an American actress born in Spokane, Washington.
A second cousin of Edith Wharton, Teasdale attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and trained as a stage actress at the New York School of Expression. She first appeared on Broadway in 1924 and performed there regularly until 1932.
After co-starring in Somerset Maugham's play The Constant Wife with Ethel Barrymore in 1926-27, she was offered a film contract, and her first film, Syncopation, was released in 1929. Teasdale appeared older than her physical age, which enabled her to play bored society wives, scheming other women and second leads in comedies such as Eddie Cantor's Roman Scandals (1933).
In 1935 she married actor Adolphe Menjou, and they remained together until his death in 1963. Teasdale and Menjou appeared together in two films, the Harold Lloyd vehicle The Milky Way in 1936 and Hal Roach's Turnabout in 1940, and were also co-hosts of a syndicated radio program in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Actors: Ken Carpenter (actor), Warren William (actor), Jerry Fairbanks (producer), Gayne Whitman (writer), Robert Carlisle (director), Robert Carlisle (editor),
Plot: This entry in Paramount's "Unusual Occupatiuons" goes from coast-to-coast in the USA and across the Atlantic to find: A New Englander who turns fishing nets into women's apparel; a Mexican who pursues the lost art of working in sculptures and silhouettes in metal; an old-timer in the American South who converts tobacco pouches into quilts. Then to England to watch a roof thatcher work in an English village and a visit to famous Tussard wax woks in London. And back to Hollywood to the home of actor Warren William who demonstrates his skill at making all sorts of handy gadgets to make life more livable.
Keywords: 1930s, american-apparel, archive-footage, artist, california, cigarette-smoking, commentary, designer, england, episodic-structure