Sunday, July 4, 2021
Today we salute actress Barbara Weeks (Susan Kingsley, 1913-2003). Weeks is often confused with another actress of the same name who appeared in five Broadway plays from 1927 to 1936, was a …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 02:48PM[SHARE]Tonight on TCM at 8PM Eastern, Yankee Doodle Dandy, one of the very best of Hollywood show biz bio-pics, as well as one of the best onscreen snapshots of vaudeville, directed for Warner Brot…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 02:48PM[SHARE]Friday, July 2, 2021
Long time readers of this blog know that its author possesses no shame and will brag on the smallest pretext, Our pride this morning stems from the near certainty that I have appreciated the…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 02:24PM[SHARE]The sad tale of Trent "Junior" Durkin (1915-1935) is normally told in the form of a footnote to Jackie Coogan's life. Today, we'll let Junior be the star. Durkin was the son of an Atlantic C…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:03AM[SHARE]Thursday, July 1, 2021
A brief bow of the head to honor Thomas A. Dorsey, a.k.a. Georgia Tom (1899-1993), not to be confused with the later big band leader Tommy Dorsey. This Dorsey was a minister's son, who grew …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:48AM[SHARE]This may be the only complete biographrical article on multi-talented Jack LeMaire (1911-2011, sometimes rendered "Le Maire") that you will find on the internet. His interesting career broug…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:36AM[SHARE]Virginia Vance (1902-1942) was in nearly 100 comedies between 1922 and 1929, almost all of them, naturally, silent. Born in Chicago, raised in Toronto, Vance was 20 years old when she made h…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:36AM[SHARE]Myron Cohen (1902-1986) performed the sort of act that's largely extinct from the mainstream entertainment landscape nowadays. The closest I can compare him to from his own time is George Je…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:36AM[SHARE]Wednesday, June 30, 2021
As some of you know, I am a huge aficionado of the disaster movies of the 1970s (we have a whole section devoted to the genre), and well, this one seemed rather timely, wot? Heatwave! (1974)…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:42AM[SHARE]The perennial family classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was released on June 30, 1971. A rather dismissive article in The Guardian prompts me to add my voice to the chorus of the …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:42AM[SHARE]Tuesday, June 29, 2021
Richard Lewis (b. 1947) is an extremely funny guy (I've been a fan almost since the beginning) yet I can't help but talk about him in terms of other comedians. He seems primarily influenced …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:36AM[SHARE]Monday, June 28, 2021
Ruth Attaway (1910-1987) enjoyed an amazing career, beginning with her role as Rheba in the original Broadway production of You Can't Take it With You (1936-38) and concluding with the pivot…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 06:36AM[SHARE]Sunday, June 27, 2021
Good news of a kind today " Broadway re-opens with the resumption of Springsteen on Broadway at the St. James Theatre. Normally I write about artists on their birthdays….which makes it pro…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:06PM[SHARE]Billy Curtis (Luigi Curto, 1909-1988) may have the most impressive resume of screen credits of any professional little person of his time. As it happens, I saw him just yesterday in Alfred H…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:54AM[SHARE]Saturday, June 26, 2021
Like her frequent co-stars in the movies Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, June Presser (1920-1984) had a background in vaudeville. Hailing from New Orleans, June formed an act called The Prei…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 12:12PM[SHARE]Friday, June 25, 2021
Sidney Lumet (1924-2011) directed a long list of cherished Hollywood movies, including 12 Angry Men (1957), The Fugitive Kind (1960), A View from the Bridge (1962), Long Day's Journey Into N…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 06:36AM[SHARE]Thursday, June 24, 2021
Big news for fans of Burns and Allen! Writer, producer, actress, and (not incidentally) Gracie Allen impersonator Lauren Milberger has adapted her biographical play The Raconteurs: A Story o…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:54PM[SHARE]Wednesday, June 23, 2021
You may have seen the dance team The Bernard Brothers caper and hoof in such movies as Paris Nights (1951), Gobs and Gals (1952), and Decameron Nights (1953). The senior partner was Maryland…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:32AM[SHARE]A few scattered word about 20th century magician and ventriloquist Stanley Burns (1919-1998). Burns, whose real first name was Schlomo, was a friend and cohort of Yeshiva University Professo…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:32AM[SHARE]Tuesday, June 22, 2021
Spin-off though it may have been we have had over a dozen occasions on which to mention The Bionic Woman (1976-78) so we take the opportunity of its star's D.O.B. to flesh out the portrait s…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:48AM[SHARE]Monday, June 21, 2021
Three cheers today for a very important figure in modern comedy history, the great Joe Flaherty (b. 1941). Among his SCTV cohorts (John Candy, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis, Ma…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:54AM[SHARE]Some little attention today to big bandleader Kay Kyser (James Kern Kyser, 1905-1985), a major pop culture figure of the 1940s whose early retirement in 1950 robbed fans of his ebullient per…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:32AM[SHARE]Today marks the 100th birthday of Jane Russell (Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell, 1921-2011). I have to marvel at the aptness of her screen name (and the fact that it is her given one), for …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:32AM[SHARE]Sunday, June 20, 2021
What a confluence today. The first day of summer alligns with the birthday of Brian Wilson (b. 1942) in the same year that the Beach Boys (est 1961) turned 60 and Mike Love (b. 1941) turned …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:42AM[SHARE]Today being the first day of summer, and a welcome one after over a year of lockdown, I thought I would mark it with a look at the teenage beach party movie craze of the '50s and '60s. Most,…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:42AM[SHARE]Saturday, June 19, 2021
No one knows the birthday of Eulabelle Moore (1909-1964) so we choose Juneteenth for the present post, both for the significance of the day, and the fact that we mention her in another post …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 02:36PM[SHARE]It was widely reported last night that John Paragon (b. 1954), the actor who played the genie Jambi on Peewee's Playhouse, has passed on. The causes given were heart disease and alchohol abu…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:12AM[SHARE]Friday, June 18, 2021
Having done a couple of posts on Paul McCartney, and over two dozen on the Beatles, I am planning a new one that will take into account his work of the last three decades, which I haven't ex…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:12AM[SHARE]Thursday, June 17, 2021
I saw a sad, but not surprising thing on the internet recently " a clip of '80s era comedian Joe Piscopo (b. 1951) performing at some Trump rally organized by My Pillow guy Mike Lindell. Sad…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:03AM[SHARE]But wait! you say. We don't say "Eskimo" anymore, and anyway Eskimos aren't Icelandic! If that was your response, you don't read very carefully and have missed the quotation marks in the tit…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:03AM[SHARE]Wednesday, June 16, 2021
My curiosity about the Pasadena Playhouse has grown over the years, as I constantly stumbled over references to prominent movie star alum in writing about their lives. People I've written ab…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:54AM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
