Bernard J Fagan (1850-1937) acted, sang, composed, choreographed and directed throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.
As a performer, Fagan was particularly noted for his clog dancing and for minstrelsy, including blackface. As a composer, his songs are noted by historians of music as important contributions to the development of ragtime. In later life, Fagan performed in and directed musical theatre, including an appearance in the first production of Samson Raphaelson’s The Jazz Singer in 1925.
Fagan’s only film appearance was when he performed a soft-shoe shuffle for the abandoned MGM musical The March of Time in 1930. The footage was used three years later in Broadway to Hollywood.
Nelson Ackerman Eddy (1901-67) was one of MGM’s first great musical stars. An operatic baritone, he appeared in fifteen musicals, playing the lead in all but the first three. In eight of them, he was partnered with Jeanette MacDonald.
From a poor background, Eddy was a boy soprano who went on to have various jobs while indulging his love of music. He engaged in amateur productions, was noticed by the press and, by the age of 23, was working for the Philadelphia Civic Opera Company, and also sang with the Savoy Company.
Eddy spent some time in Europe, acquiring voice training, then returned to the USA and concentrated on concert performances. He was appearing in Los Angeles when Hollywood knocked on his door. He signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but the studio did not initially know what to do with him. He made his debut in Handlebars (1933), a musical short, and sang without credit in Broadway to Hollywood. In the same year he appeared as himself in Dancing Lady and Student Tour.
Then MGM struck gold.Just before his option with Metro ran out, he was teamed with MacDonald in Naughty Marietta. The picture made a sizeable profit and an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. This led to their re-teaming in Rose-Marie, Maytime, Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, New Moon, Bitter Sweet and I Married an Angel.
In addition, Eddy starred in Rosalie, Let Freedom Ring, Balalaika and The Chocolate Soldier. He only appeared in a handful of films after leaving MGM, most notably The Phantom of the Opera (1943) at Universal. His last film was Northwest Frontier (1947), made at Republic and partnering him again with his Balalaika co-star, Ilona Massey. He continued to give live performances for the rest of his life, dying after a stroke experienced while on stage.
Not even his best friends would pretend that Nelson Eddy could act; he was stiff, with a very limited range of line readings. But there is always something engaging about his performances, which always seem good-humoured and lacking in self-importance. This is especially the case in his films with Jeanette MacDonald, which constituted the Golden Age of MGM’s operetta cycle.
Claire Violet Dubreyvich (1892-1993) had ideas of becoming a nurse before becoming an actor. One of her earliest films was Thomas Ince’s extraordinary pacifist epic Civilization (1916). By the time she retired in 1961, she had made well over 200 pictures, as well as many television appearances.
In the silent era, Du Brey was rarely the leading player, but was cast in prominent supporting roles. The introduction of sound posed no difficulties for her and she continued to find regular work in character roles. At the same time, she established herself as a Hollywood agent, in partnership with the actor Anna Q Nilsson.
Du Brey was not often given the opportunity to shine, though her playing of Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre (1934) stands out. She played the wife of the coward Bob Ford in Jesse James (1939), and was in Lust for Life (1956).
She appeared in two MGM musicals, separated by over twenty years: Broadway to Hollywood and Les Girls.
Claire Du Brey lived another forty years after retiring, and became one of Hollywood’s first centenarians.
Eva Louise Moynahan (1904-92) only appeared in about ten films before giving up her career so she could, as was normal at the time, ‘devote herself to her family’. But she was able to look back on a career that connected her, albeit without credit, with a few memorable pictures.
Channing had wanted to be a dancer, but an injury put paid to that, and she devoted herself to acting instead. After gaining experience on the stage, she was cast in Working Girls (1931), a minor but engaging picture directed by Dorothy Arzner.
In 1934, Channing appeared in two solid MGM classics, The Thin Man and the musical The Merry Widow. She had previously been in two other of the studio’s musicals: Broadway to Hollywood and Hollywood Party.
John A Alexander (1922-2012) lived to be ninety years old. For just five of those years, he was a film actor.
Alexander made his stage debut aged 7, in a Los Angeles Theatre, in a play starring Ruth Chatterton. In 1931, he acted in Ambassador Bill, faced with the challenge of keeping up with star Will Rogers’s improvisations. By 1939, he had made eleven films, including Strange Interlude (1932), playing Robert Young as a boy. His final appearance was in a musical short called Show Kids (1935), in which he starred, and after which he retired. In later life, he was both a concert pianist and an engineer.
In 1933, Alexander has an uncredited role in Broadway to Hollywood.
Australian-born Mary Jeanette Robison (1858-1942) grew up in London and emigrated to New York in 1877. She went on to become one of the ‘great ladies’ of the American stage and, later in life, pursued a successful screen career.
Robson developed her craft in comedic and character roles on the stage from 1883, and by 1911 had established her own touring company. She made some film appearances in the 1900s, and in 1920 was in John Barrymore’s New-York-made version of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
But in 1927, after being widowed for the second time, Robson moved to Hollywood and devoted herself to film acting. She played the Matron in Chicago (1927) and, in 1933, was nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for playing Apple Annie in Capra’s Lady for a Day. She was Aunt Polly in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938), but her most frequently revived role was as Aunt Elizabeth in Bringing Up Baby (1938).
May Robson acted in three MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Dancing Lady and Reckless.
Fay Templeton (1865-1939) was a singer, songwriters, actor and Broadway star for over forty years. She first appeared on stage aged 3, with her parents, and five years later played Puck at New York’s Grand Opera House.
From 1885, Templeton appeared regularly on Broadway, and also began writing songs. In 1906, George M Cohan cast her in the lead in Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway. Templeton’s final Broadway triumph was as Aunt Minnie in Roberta in 1933.
Templeton appeared in a few short films in the early 1900s, including Edwin S Porter’s Gathering Evidence (1906), but she never had a serious screen career. Her only substantial appearance is in Broadway to Hollywood, which used footage Templeton had filmed for the abandoned musical The March of Time.
Edward Quillan (1907-90) was a kind of cutprice forerunner to Mickey Rooney. As a child, he also performed in vaudeville with his parents. He was still a child when he signed a contract to make comedy shorts for Mack Sennett. He was a leading man throughout the 1930s, and moved down to ‘B’ pictures later. His film career lasted a respectable 58 years.
Quliian’s career took off in 1929, when he starred in The Godless Girl for Cecil B DeMille. He featured prominently in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and was one of Alice Brady’s sons in John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln (1939). He worked again for Ford in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), as treacherous Connie Rivers.
Quillan always worked steadily, making his last feature film in 1979, and also making many television appearances. But his last film role of note was as Sandy in Brigadoon.
He was in two MGM musicals during his 1930s heyday, Broadway to Hollywood and Hollywood Party.
A film career that lasted 88 years. About 285 pictures. The biggest box office draw in the United States in 1939. 1940 and 1941, from age 19 to 21. Ninnian Joseph Yule Jr (1920-2014) was no ordinary film star: he was a phenomenon, utterly unique. He was not, by most accounts, a particularly pleasant person; there are plenty of horror stories about his behaviour and attitudes. But I cannot find that this detracts greatly from his achievements on the screen.
Rooney claimed that he first appeared as part of his parents’ vaudeville act aged 17 months. After they divorced, he went with his mother to Hollywood and made his first film appearance in 1926, and from 1927 to 1934 was the star of over sixty comedy shorts, as a character named Mickey McGuire. He became associated with the name, but was prevented from taking the name as his own, so chose Rooney instead.
Aged 14, Rooney played Puck in Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), one of the film’s brighter spots, a fact all the more remarkable when you know he gave much of his performance with a plaster cast on a broken leg.
He played the younger son in an adaptation of Ah, Wilderness (1935), and then was cast as the older son in a rehash of the plot, 1937’s A Family Affair. His character was named Andy Hardy, and Rooney played him in 13 sequels, most of which put plenty of cash into MGM’s coffers (he was by now contracted to the studio)
Rooney starred opposite Spencer Tracy in Boy’s Town (1938), and went on to receive a special Oscar known as the Academy Juvenile Award. He was later nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for The Human Comedy (1943).
Rooney did not look like a leading man, and when it became impossible for him to continue playing teenagers, his career went into decline. But, in Jeanine Basinger’s words, he “kept on working and growing, the mark of a professional”. Even as late as 1979, he achieved critical recognition, and another Academy nomination, for Coppola’s The Black Stallion. And he regularly took part in successful Broadway productions. He even tried his hand, without great success, as a producer and director.
Mickey Rooney was in twelve MGM musicals, appearing with Judy Garland in seven of them. They were: Broadway to Hollywood, Reckless, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Love Finds Andy Hardy, Babes in Arms, Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway, Thousands Cheer, Girl Crazy, Summer Holiday, Words and Music and The Strip.
Margherita Harrison Evans (1909-81) appeared in around 80 films, well over half of them as a child actor in the 1910s and 20s.
Evans took a six-year break at 15, learning her craft on the stage. She came back in 1930 and was soon typecast as one of Hollywood’s ‘good girls’. In that capacity she lived (and died) in MGM’s Broadway to Hollywood. She also played one of Dickens’s good women, Agnes, in David Copperfield (1935).
Typecasting led to a paucity of challenging roles, which Evans deeply resented. In a well-known interview with Leonard Maltin she said: “I don’t want to be a sort of female George M. Cohan. I want to get me a long jade green cigarette holder, drooping eyelids, and drooling earrings and a personality to match.”
By 1938, Evans had had enough, and gave up screen acting to return to the stage, before retiring completely in 1943. She returned to acting in the 1950s with a number of television appearances.
