Phillips Tead (1893-1974) was an actor who appeared in over a hundred feature films and around fifty television series in a career lasting fifty-three years.
Tead made his debut in 1914 in The Lost Paradise, made by Famous Players on the East Coast. He then seems to have concentrated on theatrical work, including on Broadway, since his second credit was not until 1920. Tead only worked on a few pictures in the east during the twenties, only travelling to California in 1930, to appear in Lightnin’.
Tead played one of the reporters in The Front Page (1931), but most of his appearances thereafter were uncredited. They included roles in What Price Hollywood? (1932), Horse Feathers (1932), The Thin Man (1934), Anything Goes (1936), The Westerner (1940), This Gun for Hire (1942), Act of Violence (1949) and The Tender Trap (1955).
In the late fifties, Tead found a degree of fame playing Professor Pepperwinkle in the television series Adventures of Superman.
Tead worked on three Metro musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Here Comes the Band (but his scenes were deleted) and The Great Ziegfeld.
Grace Flora Heller (1888-1963) was a prominent actor in provincial theatre, notably Philadelphia, and also worked on Broadway in 1918 and 1946.
Hayle started working in films while in her mid-forties, developing a niche as dignified ladies in more than 120 pictures. Early appearances, usually uncredited, included Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Baby Face (1933), Theodora Goes Wild (1936) and Topper (1937).
She was a customer at The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and, in the same year, played her most well-remembered role, as Madame Napaloni in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). Hayle’s final screen appearance was in the Elvis Presley vehicle Loving You (1957).
Grace Hayle was in seven MGM musicals, starting with The Cat and the Fiddle. Online resources always claim she played a character named Lettuce, but I find it difficult to believe she was not actually Lettice. Her subsequent appearances were in The Great Ziegfeld, Maytime, Sweethearts, Ship Ahoy, I Married and Angel and Athena.
German Hermann Bing (1889-1947) is a Pagliacci-like figure, literally starting out as a circus clown, adding comic eccentricity to dozens of films, and driven by depression to take his own life.
Bing left home at 16 to join the circus, and later worked as a comedian in varietétheaters. He entered the German film industry in the early 1920s, apparently working on the production side, though he may also have acted. By the late thirties he was working with F W Murnau, and travelled with him to the United States to work as assistant director on Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). He can also be seen onscreen in a brief appearance as a tram conductor. He went on to assist on Murnau’s 4 Devils (1928).
Bing stayed on in Hollywood and developed a career as a supporting player, playing German characters with exaggerated accents and a general air of frustrated dignity. In the early 1930s, he also appeared in German-language versions of pictures such as Garbo’s Anna Christie (1930) and Menschen hinter Gittern (1931), a version of The Big House (1930) directed by Paul Fejos.
Herman Bing was often uncredited, but always memorable, and his more than 100 feature films included Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), Ford’s Flesh (1932), Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934) and Barbary Coast (1935) and Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938). He was also the voice of the Ringmaster in Disney’s Dumbo (1941).
His career was hit hard by the war and, by the mid-1940s, Bing was struggling to find work, which contributed to his tragic end.
Herman Bing appeared in eleven MGM musicals, including six with Jeanette MacDonald: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, Rose-Marie, Maytime, Sweethearts and Bitter Sweet. The others were The Night is Young, Here Comes the Band, The Great Ziegfeld, The Great Waltz and Broadway Melody of 1940.
Joseph Bridger Cawthorn (1868-1949) had a long and varied career long before he went anywhere near a film set.
Born into a show business family, he made his stage debut aged three. Later, he worked in minstrel shows and vaudeville, frequently as a dialect comedian (in his case, German). He also crossed the Atlantic and worked for a time in British music halls.
Cawthorn first appeared on Broadway in around 1897/8, with his first confirmed appearance in The Fortune Teller (1898). He sustained a Broadway career for over twenty years, starring in a variety of productions.
Cawthorn moved to Hollywood in 1927 and played Olive Borden’s father in The Secret Studio, the first of around 55 screen appearances. Notable roles included Dr Armand de Fontinac in Love Me Tonight, where his experience in operettas came in useful for a duet with Jeanette MacDonald.
Joseph Cawthorn had featured roles in three MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Naughty Marietta (reunited with MacDonald as her former music teacher) and The Great Ziegfeld (as the protagonist’s father).
Adrienne Dumontier (1878-1957) had a successful career on the French stage prior to the First World War, working at the Comédie-Française. She emigrated to the United States after the war, and by 1922 was active on Broadway.
D’Ambricourt made a few silent films at New York studios, but travelled to Hollywood, along with many others, in 1929, starting out with a featured role in The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929). She went on to play French character roles, often uncredited, in around seventy pictures. These included Design for Living (1933), Peter Ibbetson (1935), History is Made at Night (1937), The Song of Bernadette (1943) and To Have and Have Not (1944).
During the early 1930s, D’Ambricourt also featured prominently in French-language versions of pictures, including MGM’s A Lady’s Morals, released in France with the more sensible title of Jenny Lind.
D’Ambricourt acted in seven Metro musicals, across a 25-year period. She was credited as the concierge in The Cat and the Fiddle, then uncredited in The Merry Widow, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco, Two Girls on Broadway, Million Dollar Mermaid and Les Girls, her final film.
Adrienne D’Ambricourt also terrified generations of French children as the voice of the wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
Songwriter Conrad K Dober (1891-1938) started out as a cinema pianist, first in Harlem, then in Keith vaudeville theatres.
Conrad’s first song was published in 1912, and he found his greatest success during the 1920s, co-writing hits such as ‘Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me’. During this period he wrote regularly for Broadway shows.
From 1929, Conrad worked in Hollywood, contributing songs to musicals by a variety of studios, his biggest hit being ‘The Continental’, written for Astaire and Rogers’s The Gay Divorcee (1934).
Numbers co-written by Con Conrad can be heard in MGM’s Going Hollywood and The Great Ziegfeld.
Mary Thelma Lange (1912-73) travelled from Pennsylvania to New York City as a nineteen-year-old to join the Ziegfeld Follies. She was spotted by a Hollywood scout and invited to go West.
In Hollywood, Lange became a Goldwyn Girl, appearing in Roman Scandals (1933). She went on to play uncredited chorus girls in a dozen or so pictures for Goldwyn and a variety of other studios. For a change of pace, she was a lady in waiting in The Affairs of Cellini (1934).
In 1938, Lange got married and gave up performing to raise a family.
She appeared as chorus girls in three MGM musicals: Going Hollywood, Broadway Melody of 1936 and, back where she started, The Great Ziegfeld.
Merrill Manley Pye (1902-75) was an important member of Cedric Gibbons’s unit at MGM from 1925 until 1968, and one who had a significant impact on the look of the studio’s musicals across most of that period.
Pye had studied architecture, which made him a desirable addition to Gibbon’s team. The respect in which he was held is suggested by his first picture, Edmund Goulding’s Sally, Irene and Mary (1925), where he shares equal credit with Gibbons for Settings.
He was art director, uncredited, on Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) and given associate art director credit for David Copperfield (1935). In 1959, Pye was Oscar-nominated for his art direction on Hitchcock’s masterpiece North by Northwest, responsible for recreating the Mount Rushmore monument on a sound stage.
But it was in musicals that Pye made his real mark. He started out with the art direction of Dancing Lady, where he has been credited with introducing the Moderne style to MGM’s musical pictures: what has been described as “flat mise-en-scenes surfaces, horizontal accents, tonal values distinction, and smooth and curved lines with glossy surfaces”.
Pye went on to be art director (or associate) on Going Hollywood, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Ice Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Swing Fever, Bathing Beauty, Ziegfeld Follies, Rose Marie and The Fastest Guitar Alive.
But Pye also received another type of credit on some pictures: Musical Presentation. IMDb erroneously interprets this as him having a role in the music department, but it was actually a special credit for a role that involved the overall visual design of a musical number. This involved not only the structural design of sets, but also camera movement through the set, incorporating an element of direction.
Pye carried out this function on musical numbers in Born to Dance, A Day at the Races, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, Honolulu, Strike Up the Band, Bitter Sweet, Ziegfeld Girl, Lady Be Good, The Chocolate Soldier, Babes on Broadway, Ship Ahoy!, Panama Hattie, For Me and My Gal, Presenting Lily Mars, Du Barry Was a Lady, Girl Crazy, Broadway Rhythm and Meet the People.
It is notable that Pye’s services in musical presentation were not required on the Freed Unit musicals of the later 1940s and 1950s, where directors like Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli would retain that creative control.
Harold Campbell Adamson (1906-80) co-wrote a musical while at Harvard, where he was spotted by composer Vincent Youmans and invited to write the lyrics for a 1930 Broadway musical called Smiles.
Adamson then partnered with composer Burton Lane, while continuing to write with other composers. He and Lane then went to Hollywood, planning a short visit, but both stayed many years and worked on dozens of films.
As well as Lane, Adamson wrote with many others, including Hoagy Carmichael, Sammy Fain and Jimmy McHugh. He made a return to Broadway in the 1940s, writing lyrics for several shows.
Harold Adamson songs were used in thirteen Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals: Dancing Lady, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, The Great Ziegfeld, Ziegfeld Girl, The Big Store, Thousands Cheer, Two Girls and a Sailor, Bathing Beauty, A Date with Judy, Everything I Have is Yours, Jupiter’s Darling and Seven Hills of Rome.
Scores of young women appeared in the chorus lines of mid-30s’ musicals, but Marjorie Schuyler Fisher (1919-89) was one of the few who went on to have a career. Not a glorious career, but she made over 170 pictures, and starred in some of them.
Bari was given training and a six-month contract with newly-formed Twentieth Century Fox when she was just 16, though she had already been playing bit parts for several years. In 1935, she appeared in at least 26 releases, always in small, uncredited roles.
The first role with any substance given to Bari was Klari the maid in The Baroness and the Butler (1938), acting with William Powell. Thereafter, she was mostly restricted to featured parts in ‘B’ pictures, though frequently with top billing. Typical films included Kit Carson (1940) and Sleepers West (1941), and she played opposite George Sanders in The Falcon Takes Over (1942). Bari’s occasional ‘A’ pictures included Margie (1946) and Has Anyone Seen My Gal (1952).
Bari carried on working, predominantly in television, until 1968.
Two of Lynn Bari’s early chorus girl roles were in Metro musicals: Dancing Lady and The Great Ziegfeld.
